Casual Connect 2013: Growing a Hardcore Game on Facebook

by Leonard Franel, Head of Business Development, Plarium

·         Plarium started with casino games on social networks and casual games, then moved into the hardcore business with Total Domination and Stormfall Age of War.

·         Plarium has 25 employees dedicated to user acquisition and 51 in supporting departments (art, development, business).

·         Perfect Facebook integration with Open Graph, page posts, and strong paid user targeting. Open Graph stories on achievements were the most successful and lead to 75% increase in clickthroughs.

·         CPIs are rising based on platform, genre, and game’s age. It’s important to monetize players better and focus on increasing LTV. Improve monetization through PvP elements, holiday promotions, boosts (troop revivals), and permanent items (immortal guardians, legendary heroes).

Inside Social Apps Conference 2012

The Inside Social Apps is a full-day conference that was recently held in New York. There were 8 sessions total -- 6 of which were panels, one was a fire-side chat with Facebook’s David Fischer, and one was an analytic report about mobile apps. These are the key takeaways from the conference.

There was a pretty good list of game developers and game industry people who were speakers. Among them were Davin Miyoshi (GSN Digital), Doug Scott (ngmoco), John Getze (Kixeye), Mike Lee (Happy Elements),  Robert Winkler (5^th Planet), Wilson Kriegel (OMGPOP/Zynga), Mike Foley (EA), Matthe Cullen (RocketPlay), Mathieu Nouzareth (FreshPlanet), John Spinale (Disney Interactive), Ben Liu (Pocket Gems), and Mike Sego (Gaia Interactive). These guys are all CEOs or VP of Marketing at their respective companies.

Facebook, iOS, Android: Which Platform(s) Hold the Most Opportunity in 2013?

• The #1 driver to install in the iTunes App Store is SEO.
• There are many challenges to changing platforms including the need to hire up and bring new talent, transitioning to new technologies such as Unity over Flash, going free-to-play, and fragmentation of hardware and resolutions on mobile.
• Letterpress only uses GameCenter for its social features. It arrived and quickly died, because it was really difficult to get friends on your platform. Don't put all efforts on one social platform; you need to integrate as many as possible.
• All apps are competing with each other in terms of user mindshare.
• The cost of acquisition is increasing. There is, however, a six month window in 2013 for really cheap paid acquisition.
• Microsoft is going to be a player in the space with Windows 8. Even though the technology might not be the best, history has shown that the best products never win. The most important metrics are ARPU and install base.
• iOS has more valuable users, but Android has higher aggregate users. We need to think internationally since most of the audience exist outside the United States and outside the English language.
• Games will usually kick off any platform ecosystem.
• Advice to game developers: start simple and build your app with a simple architecture. The rule of thumb is that if someone sees it and asks, "What is that?" then remove it from the game. Simplify and reduce the game to its simplest form.
• The four most important tenants of social and mobile development are install (discoverability), play (retention/engagement), share (social/virality), and pay (revenue/monetization).

Social and Mobile Game Product Design and Development

• Your business strategy should be guided by where the users are going. FreshPlanet switched to focus only on mobile development with social components. It was very difficult, but ultimately a wise decision.
• Facebook's audience is mostly only casual, but mobile also has midcore and hardcore gamers. There are more different types of audience on mobile.
• All game design is observing what's going on in the industry, but you also need to bring your own creative process into the mix. Clones don't succeed. Innovation and word of mouth is the key to getting users.
• Kongregate has real-time chat so developers get immediate feedback from their audience and it's great for clan/guild features. Facebook is lacking these features.
• The real development happens post-launch. Developer hope to have a conversation with users for months and years. Developer can't develop in a vacuum.
• 5th Planet has been in midcore genre for two and a half years. There's always room for good games and the platforms will upgrade to support richer experiences such as 3D and synchronous play.
• Zynga is declining, but Wooga and King have been increasing their user base rapidly.
• Flash was the best defacto platform for web games, but now we need AIR to develop for mobile as well. Unity is also becoming a big player in the space.
• Mobile advertising is doing really well. Free-to-play is the way to go due to its very high distribution and its constant stream of revenue from in-app purchases.
• There is a backlash against free-to-play games by gamers, and sometimes rightfully so, since some terribly designed free-to-play games just nickel and dime players. But gamers should think about it as paying for what you want and enjoy the most. This, in turn, will drive game design to build towards what people want and therefore, create a better game.
• UI on mobile is an open space to explore. There must be a better way than virtual joysticks.
• Developers need to build different experiences for tablet, mobile, and desktop.
• Facebook connected users play twice as long and are 8 times more likely to spend money.

The Future of Mobile App Discovery & Marketing

• The rising cost of user acquisition is a sign of industry evolution. Developers need to pay attention to how much they're willing to spend.
• The cost of user acquisition might flush out in the future. Apple wants to control the channel more, but TapJoy wants to help developers with incentivized discovery. Research shows that incentivized discovery has 40% returning engagement compared to organic distribution's 45% returning engagement.
• Small developers should get together and form a cross-promotion network. Gree acts like a large-scale cross-promotional network that helps small developers and do interest targeting.
• People don't know if an app is good or not since ratings are ineffective. 95% of all app ratings are an average of 3.8.
• What are some improvements that the App Store can make? 80% of people don't know what they are looking for since they don't know brands. We need an app search engine for casual users, better and more useful app descriptions, social app discovery, and more relevancy in their searches.
• There are always methods to scoot up the ranks by gaming the system to get higher search results.
• App Store icon and name of the app are very important. A/B test and evaluate all marketing materials during the beta phase to look for the highest click through rate.
• There is a very small real-estate and very small window of time to leave an impression on the user. Results tend to homogenize from a consumer perspective. A lot of developers go for similar art styles, names, characters, and mechanics to attract users.
• We need more app suggestions pushed to users and more categorical search relevancy. Searching "steampunk" only returns games with "steampunk" in the name, but not the entire genre and theme. The charts should also hide the apps that the users already own.
• Charts work for app discovery but is limited. Games crowd out non-gaming apps because they're far more popular.
• The App Store is like the grocery store. There will always be a place for marketing outside the App Store. People consume media in different ways.

Fireside Chat: Facebook's David Fisch

• Facebook wants to help with app discovery, which is currently a big problem like Web 1.0 discovery.
• Facebook really changed discovery. Friends were pushing content to you and friends were the best filters for good apps.
• Facebook wants to create value to mobile developers since mobile devices are inherently social.
• The mobile experience is much more at the moment. What you do in life happens away from your desk.
• Device fragmentation continues to grow. We need cross-device connectivity.
• Most people don't read reviews or look at ratings. We need recommendations based on what we like and what our friends like.
• SongPop has built a social app on mobile and integrated the experiences through Facebook. Logged in users are 25% more engages and also spend more money on the app.
• Facebook is a vertical platform with canvas, but also horizontal with social. Facebook is meant to be complimentary to mobile and a cross-platform social component.

Social Apps for Marketers and Brands: Maximizing Audience Engagement

• A lot has changed in the past year -- OpenGraph, Pinterest, Instagram, SoundCloud, Tumblr, foursquare. There is a re-emphasis on creating good content. The biggest change is that Facebook started rolling out mobile marketing.
• Have business goals before you start planning out your project. Monetization is a big goal this year.
• Developers can't build a small one-off app. They need to be a sustainable business and there needs to be inherent value in the app itself outside of its marketing goal. There is no point in launching an app without some paid media behind it.
• Sweepstakes, coupons, and essay contests have high participation rates, but low sharing rates. The value is to the user and they are less likely to share. Personality quizzes, however, are 5 times more likely to be shared because it allows users to display their personality.
• We need to move out of social media bubble. There are lots of other marketing channels such as e-mail.
• Some successful marketing campaigns -- write about how much you love your mom on Mother's Day, Oscar Meyer taste-imonials with Coupons.com, Washington Redskins using template gallery to build themed pages for their fans, and voting polls on Facebook and Google Plus Hangouts.
• We need templates that a community manager can put together and launch by themselves with zero budget and less than 24 hours.
• The universe of possibilities have increased but the fundamentals of marketing hasn't changed.
• LinkedIn released their API. Capture social interactions and leverage that for personalized pages.

Monetizing Social and Mobile Games

• Kixeye has been in the business of core strategy games. Their games are free-to-play, but they sell "time" and not virtual goods. They sell abilities to repair base or generate units faster.
• Make a fun game first and think about monetization later to fit the game. Monetization solves itself if you create something fun and engaging.
• The first company that innovates and finds a real estate builds the fanbase first.
• Advertisement works well with many genres, but not all.
• Monetization methods include selling impatience, gambling, betting, cosmetic items, virtual goods, premium items, virtual currency, and daily bonuses.
• Sports betting is time-based and based on real-life events, but there are challenges of downtime. You can add casino games to play during downtime.
• Authenticity and passion is what is key to success. It's hard to reach critical mass so leave publishing to publishers. 
• The future of computing is mobile with the proliferation of devices.
• It's always more valuable if you're both the developer and the publisher, because you own the IP, data, and the customers. However, it's very expensive to publish, so partner with a dedicated publisher.
• Games are a hit driven business like the record industry. All media content is hit driven.

Investing in Social and Mobile Games

• Zynga went from $12 to $2. Secondary markets have been flat or going down. Six months ago (Facebook, Zynga, Groupon, etc.) were successful but failed after they went public. The exit scenarios and evaluations for investment have changed in the last year.
• Fundraising is tough for gaming companies. Signia is one of three firms that still look at gaming deals currently.
• Supercell is making $750,000 per day with only 60 people in the company.
• Investors are looking for games with retention, engagement, and longetivity. They are looking for people who are building a business, not just an app. They need high quality free-to-play developers who are making games as a service. The three core skills for a developer to have are discoverability, marketing apparatus (acquisition, community, retention), and monetization.
• With a packaged product, you've already made your money upfront. Now you have to worry about getting people to actually play your game to monetize them.
• Kickstarter and IndieGoGo requires pre-existing fame to be successful. It's not all that interesting to the industry and will not change the ways that traditional funding happens.
• Anyone can make games now such as garage developers, but the challenge is scalability.
• Be wary of the casino space. The major players will spend money and they are ruthless about their space.

Kickstarter Stories

With Double Fine's Kickstarter success, the website has become the go-to place for aspiring game developers to fund their ideas. This panel, held at Polytechnic University and moderated by Katherine Ibister, discusses the pros and cons of the website, as well as the process of raising funding through Kickstarter for game projects.


Introductions

• Michael Astolfi is the game designer of Blindside, an audio adventure with no graphics and played entirely with sound. The game went up on Kickstarter with a pledge of $7,000 and was funded with twice the amount.
• Michael Consoli is the game designer and developer of Against the Wall, a Unity3D game where you navigate up an infinite wall of large bricks. You can extrude bricks from the wall to jump on them and colored bricks come with specific limitations or power ups. The game was funded with $8,400 on Kickstarter.
• Alex Thomas of Stoic is the game designer of The Banner Saga, a viking-based adventure game with role-playing elements, interactive dialog, and turn-based strategy combat. Stoic is made up of former Bioware employees. They formed in January 2012 and pledged for $100,000 on Kickstarter. They overshot their goal with $720,000 in funding.
• Wade Tinney, CEO of Large Animal Games and NY chapter coordinator for IGDA, is about to launch a Kickstarter campaign for Nomsters. Large Animal Games started in 2001 and has developed over 100 games. They typically work with a publishing partner, but they want to develop their own individual IP. Nomsters is an iOS and Android game built in Unity3D by a 5-man team over the last couple of months. The game has a pinball-meets-pool mechanic with various ball-shaped characters.
• Cindy Au, community director for Kickstarter, was also in attendance at the panel. Kickstarter launched in 2009 and has recently been huge for the games community, funding up to $20 million for games. It is a good place to test ideas and find out immediately if there's an audience for your game.
• Jerry Hultin, president of Polytechnic University, provided a keynote before the discussion began. NYC gives angel funds for the right idea and about $100 million of venture money goes into technology. He believes gaming is good for education and sees big markets for it in India and China. Only 2% of India get educated and he wants engineers and game developers to solve that problem. Polytechnic University started building the Game Innovation Lab in 2006 and in the near future, NYU will move all its gaming departments to Brooklyn.

Panel Discussion

• Why choose Kickstarter? For Blindside, the developers started on PC/Mac but wanted to add gyroscopic controls, which requires an expensive license from Unity, so they turned to Kickstarter to get extra funding. Wade wanted freedom from publishers for Nomsters. In general, all panelists agree that Kickstarter allows you to see if you have an audience for your game before you build it. Use backers as a marketing tool and gauge the success of your product. Publishers usually spend money to find that out, but Kickstarter allows you to do it at almost no cost. 
• Are there additional purchasers for the games after release or has everyone who's interested in the game already contributed to the project in Kickstarter? Cthulhu Saves the World was funded on Kickstarter for $6,800 but sold 300,000 copies after launch, so there's a good chance there's an additional audience not involved in the Kickstarter.
• Against the Wall had a playable alpha build when the Kickstarter campaign started. This was to prove to backers that he can make a game, even without industry experience. The game was covered by the press, namely Kotaku, and was able to get funded.
• The Banner Saga's campaign highlighted the fact that the developers were industry professionals and they were able to get more press from that.
• What are some general tips for starting a Kickstarter campaign? Be prepared to talk openly about your project and support the campaign. Constantly updating your backers with news chews up a significant amount of time. Set up your own forums after the campaign has ended so you keep your community talking about the game.
• Do they have fears of product failures and not living up to backer's expectations? Social pressure from backers is very motivating. Also, backers can change their commitment to the project at any time.
• To run a Kickstarter campaign inevitably means putting an unfinished game out to the public. Do they have concerns of people stealing the ideas and beating them to the market? Making the game public is pretty much putting it on the market first. If you come out with the idea first, even in this manner, people would support you. It's not a big worry concerning other game developers stealing your ideas. Most developers already have a road map of games in their pipeline and it's too expensive to shift gears.
• There are instances of Kickstarter projects where the creator backs their own campaign to get through the threshold for funding. Getting covered by the press is extremely important to drive people to the campaign. How do you get press and increase discoverability of your projects? According to the panelists, the community and friends are more important to the virality of the campaign than the press. Also, having zero backers is validation that the game idea is not very good.
• If the project is not funded, you can still talk to your backers. You won't get backer reports like a funded project would, but you still have contact with your dedicated base.
• How do you put a freemium game on Kickstarter if the model is that you pay upfront for the game? The Banner Saga and Nomsters are both freemium games. Nomsters will offer backers a package with in-game currency and no advertisements.
• What are the panelists' favorite Kickstarter rewards? Usually a physical prize or the chance to be in the game. However, when you offer a physical prize, keep in mind that it would eat up a bunch of your funds. The prize that people crave is involvement in the game development process.
• What are common mistakes of Kickstarter campaigns? Overshooting and setting high goals are common mistakes. You have to be realistic about what you need and be patient. You need to frame what the interesting thing about your game is and make sure to tell a story to the audience. Present yourself; you are your greatest asset.

Re:Play 2012: Publisher Revolutions: Free-to-Play Economics

There is a fundamental shift taking place among the traditional value chain of the video game business. Developers, publishers, and retailers find themselves confronted with a changing market, forcing each of them to assume a different role. Joost van Dreunen (NYU Game Center) speaks with Stephen Ju (Credit Suisse), Gui Karyo (Atari), and Jessica Rovello (Arkadium) about major trends in the industry such as the move towards free-to-play and the emergence of social gaming.

Conversation with Joost van Dreunen

• "Companies that continue to rely on the old model as it changes before our eyes, unless they change their ways and invest in the future, those companies will eventually die off. No two ways about it." -- Peter Moore of EA
• "Global market for virtual goods will exceed $100 billion by the end of this decade." -- Trip Hawkins of Digital Chocolate
• There is a shift from the $60 retail box to $0.99 apps and the free-to-play model. The proliferation of Facebook and mobile has caused this trend. The audience is much larger and distribution is much higher on these platforms.
• Looking at a line graph depicting market value, Zynga is doing well above Activision and EA. THQ trails far behind and is about to be delisted.
• Is there a big difference between boxed retail and digital games' profit models? Jess says that the boxed retail model is not necessarily bad, nor are digital games irrevocably better. Digital games are still a very hit-driven industry. Digital distribution is not an amazing end-all panacea. For every one developer who released an app by himself and made $100,000, there are 300 other developers who tried the same thing and failed.
• Revenue models for casual/social games include advertisements and sponsorships, microtransactions, sometimes subscriptions but those are slower and more rare, and sometimes the purchase model.
• The company structure has to change to develop social games. In the case of Arkadium, the company had to shift thinking to a direct-to-consumer basis and build a games-as-service model. They added an analytics department because they needed to look at numbers and react to data at a minute-to-minute level. They added a monetization/revenue team whose job is to balance economies and think of ways to optimize user spending. The culture of the entire company changed to include thinking about numbers and metrics (ARPU, DAU/MAU, etc.)
• Core games business is still a good business, but there's just a bigger barrier of entry for developers.
• Majority of the revenue of a free-to-play game comes from certain players who pay a significant amount of money for items, much more than $60. The amounts they are willing to pay for can be shocking even to social/casual developers.
• Many social/casual games are not so different from gambling. DragonVale is basically two slot machines masked in a world with cute dragons. Many online games have inherent design elements of gambling.
• Getting the most out of a game relies on analytical data. You can make a mediocre game much better with the correct analytics. However, data won't make a bad game good, so it's still important to design a good game first.
• When your company makes a monumental shift from one audience to another, from one distribution platform to another, you must realize that it takes more time and money than you would expect it to. Large companies can often stumble when they make these shifts. "Once you make the decision to go there, you need to go there."
• Arkadium is not a first mover. They don't put all their eggs in one basket or go all in on one market. They see where the market is going first.
• EA and Zynga follow the innovation through acquisition model. EA bought Playfish and pretty much drove it down to the ground. They launched one game, Sims Social, but didn't release enough content afterwards to keep the audience engaged.
• Zynga was able to scale before "Facebook went down." But they also would acquire studios with any successful property such as OMGPop. They need to bring killer apps to their audience to keep them engaged.
• Talent is very important in game design, but sometimes, designers just need to luck out. OMGPop went through 5 iterations of Draw Something before it became a success.
• The difference between the web and mobile is everything. For Draw Something, drawing with the mouse wasn't fun, but with touch, it was intuitive, engaging, and attracted the audience that it has now.
• Angry Birds is a great merchandising and licensing property. It has great character designs in which the aesthetics lent itself easily to merchandising. The birds has simple shapes and were bright and colorful. They were very appealing to kids, who really drive the licensing business. The majority of licensing is in things for kids like shirts, toys, bed sheets, pajamas, etc.
• Merchandising broadens your IP with consumers, but it's hard. It's like buying two lottery tickets instead of one. You need to have IP that is merchandisable.
• There are companies now that specialize in merchandising to very narrow niches. For example, they would make a jacket from Resident Evil and sell it for $1,000. Their revenue model revolves around small volume of sales, but high dollar amount per sale.
• Casual games are aimed at the common denominator. Is it worth moving this to a niche audience? Generally, no. Only a small percentage of the audience (1-8%) monetizes, so you really need a big audience to make money.
• In many cases, games are not reinventing the wheel. Zynga's 'ville games are just SimCity, Draw Something is Pictionary, Words With Friends is Scrabble. It is difficult to bring consumers interesting and exciting ideas, which is a problem that the industry is currently facing.
• Discoverability of your game is everything. An app developer without a contact at Apple to get their game featured at the AppStore is like a retail box developer without a deal with Walmart to have their game on their shelves. There is little chance of success if you're not featured in the AppStore.
• How do you move from games-as-product to games-as-service model? Games-as-service was a model pioneered in Korea by Nexon, mostly as a counterbalance to the piracy in Asia. They treat game content as episodic and it is a more involved process than the traditional model.

Question and Answer

• What do you do with non-paying users? Free users are costly since they take up server space or network capacity. Make them watch a video ad and make the money back from advertisement. The ad model can be difficult because you need a big enough audience to make money. You also need to put ads early in the game rather than later. Users would complain if they suddenly started getting ads after being used to not seeing them. You may also leverage these users for virality.
• Is Kickstarter changing the rules of publishing games? What impact will it have on the development ecosystem? For Kickstarter campaigns to be successful, it needs studios that have a pre-existing install base like Double Fine or games with an avid fanbase like Wasteland. The Kickstarter craze is an interesting phenomenon, but it won't overturn the traditional publisher model. In addition, none of these funded game have come to market yet. Will they actually be good games? Will the developers be able to deliver on their promise? The role of the publisher is to make sure the developers are able to meet the promises to the consumers.
• What are sponsorships? For the Facebook version of Cooking Mama, Ragu approached Arkadium about using the brand for one of its minigames. It made sense for a food-based brand to be incorporated into a food-based game. Good advertisement is not evil.
• Some players, who are completely opposed to ever paying for the game, are not so offended by taking 30 seconds to watch a video ad and getting something out of it.
• Would there be any more cases like thatgamecompany and their three-game deal with Sony? Publishers run on risk-based management. If presented with a unorthodox game idea like Spore, they need an established successful team to counter balance the risk in the game design like Will Wright's team. Publishers like 6waves make deals where they take a percentage cut for games that are already almost finished and they don't have to fund development. To make a publishing deal for development, you need to have a good track record of making money.

ShopTalk Volume 01: Social Meets Mobile

At IGDA roundtable discussion, NY-based game developers discussed various topics related to social games, mobile games, and the cross between the two. There was a verbal NDA among the group, so no specific analytics or company details would be shared here.

• What is a social game? This is a question that many game developers struggled with, but the ultimate consensus is that a social game is a game that lives on Facebook or has Facebook Connect. There are, in fact, many games that are actually more social than what we know as "social games" such as Johann Sebastian Joust or World of Warcraft. But developers and audience understand that we mean Facebook when we talk about social games.
• Are social games actually social? Although you are inviting friends to play and spamming friends with gift requests, there is no actual social connection. In Animal Crossing, you can create a meme that travels to a friend's town. For example, you can teach a citizen to say a bad word and that citizen might go to another town and bring along that bad word with him and spread it across town. This small bit, no matter how inane, represents a part of you and your self expression, and its migration to a friend's world makes the game inherently social.
• Although spamming friends with requests or filling up your wall with posts have no real social connection, it is still 1% social. One percent is indefinitely better than zero percent. 
• There are games where you can get someone's personality through the gameplay such as Draw Something. Some people draw stick figures, while others do elaborate art pieces to represent simple objects.
• Sometimes, just the fact that you're playing the same game as somebody else is social. You are playing alone together or having a shared experience separately. It is like going to a movie theater or studying by yourself at a library. Although there is no interaction between you and others, everyone is having a shared experience. 
• The Last Stand is a isometric 3D shooting game on Facebook. You gather resources and build shelters against the zombie horde. This is not a casual game and is aimed towards the hardcore crowd. Idle Worship is an example of a game in-between the casual and hardcore market.
• Many casual audiences think of games as they do of porn. They are shameful of them and feel guilty to play them. This is attributed to the poor stigma of games. However, many of these people still play games; they just don't want to be associated with the term. The majority don't want to be called a gamer, even though they've put more hours into playing games than their own children. One attendee compares this to people who read trashy romance novels, which by the way, has had a recent resurgence because of Kindles and the ability to hide what their reading from the public.
• Half of Facebook users play a lot of games, while the other half hate games and never want to touch a game.
• What about mobile connectivity with social games? Good idea is to not offer the same exact experiences across both platforms. Mobile app can be a companion to the social game. For example, have a MMO on your computer, but a monster/pet sim on your mobile device. You can level up and train your pet on mobile and its stats would transfer back into your main game.
• Energy as an abstract resource entered social game design as a way to limit play sessions. Generally, 20 minutes or less is a good length of a play session.
• What are the demographic differences between Facebook and mobile? Developers can gather a lot of demographic information from Facebook (gender, age, location, education, etc.), but generally, there is little to no data on mobile devices.
• According to one attendee, the more displayed your microtransaction popups are, the less likely a 18-24 year old male player would purchase. In many cases, they would downright stop playing the game. However, if they go to the store on their own accord without any prompts from the game, they would be likely to buy. On the other hand, 35+ year old females are more likely to purchase if they get those microtransaction screens, especially one at the session start when they open the game. Is it possible to get both demographics in the same game? Should get demographic data and build for your audience.
• Only 20% of people login to Facebook Connect or other networks (OpenFeint, GameCenter, Papaya) on their mobile devices. The real question is, are the 20% also the paying crowd? If they are, then only this 20% matters. It's possible there is a large overlap between the paying users and the logged in users as they are both the most engaged players.
• Facebook considers themselves as "social plumbing." They are the backbone of your social graph.
• Mobile games gets people faster and cheaper. The cost of user acquisition is much lower than on Facebook because there's no Zynga to compete with.
• What about gamification of real-life like Fitocracy? Using mobile device as a pedometer to track your running progress, which in turn gains points and levels up your avatar. It is also a social game where you compare/compete with friends' avatars. 
• There's nothing stopping big production games to be on Facebook. Gaikai (maybe OnLive too) announced that they would be bringing full-fledged production games to Facebook. The technology exists for hardcore games on Facebook, but the perception doesn't. There's a catch-22 where developers don't want to make hardcore games on Facebook because they think the audience isn't there for it, while the audience doesn't know that it exists to be clamoring for it.
• There are now many apps to let you stalk girls, sending you profile information of females in your immediate area. Many of these apps got shut down and sued, deservedly so. But this is also a warning that you need privacy and license agreements in your Mobile game. 100% of games need privacy disclosures, but only 13% of them have them. Facebook games are luckily protected by Facebook's own terms of service, but mobile devices have nothing of the sort.
• How do you handle the permanence of information and cross-platform synchronization? Should data be stored locally so that players can continue their experience even when they lose internet connectivity (on the subway train)? Should they be stored on the server so they can bring their accounts across platforms and also to prevent cheating? One solution is to just offer different experiences online and offline, and make sure to communicate that to the players. For example, when online, you can submit scores to the global leaderboard, but when offline, you can only submit to a local, personal leaderboard.

Winning Pitch Workshop: Part 1: Social Games

Led by veteran game designer Naomi Clark, the Winning Pitch workshop event focused on developing an original social game design and creating the materials needed to communicate it effectively to a real client. The workshop combined lectures and exercises with hands-on creative collaboration and culminated in a pitch session. Naomi Clark gave a presentation on the components that make a social game.


What makes a game a social game? According to the audience, it's monetization, micro-transactions, addictive gameplay, constant rewards for the smallest tasks, social graph, asynchronous play, and leveraging obligations. Social games facilitate social interactions, but are not really social and one can argue that they're anti-social (due to spamming). They are free to play, but sell items. Many of them aren't very much games at all. There are many paradoxes here (social but not social, free but not free, games but not games).


Social games is the genetic marriage of persistent worlds and casual games.


From persistent worlds, it derives...

1. Earning, customizing, and building over months and years
2. Grinding (labor for rewards)
3. Offer rich multiplayer experiences and the ability to play "alone together"

From casual games, it derives...

1. Pick up and play mechanics, Low barrier of entry and easy learning curves
2. No Interface preconceptions, simple controls
3. Rewarding and positive feedback over punishments

Naomi identifies 5 main components of social games.

• Interstitial play patterns and asynchronous mechanics.
• The dominant play behavior is to play during breaks in quick 5-10 minute chunks.
• Persistence and the fact that events happen in between sessions cause retention, or the tendency for players to come back.
• Asynchronous mechanics is often called appointment gaming. Things run in the background and happen while the player is away.
• There are also asynchronous multiplayer games, usually turn-based and harkens back to playing by mail. These are not simultaneous. Real-time asynchronous games exist like Tetris Battle where the player plays against a recording of another player (like racing against a ghost car).
• Asynchronous RTS exist, like Travian and Urban Dead, by expanding timers and encapsulating events (one move can take a few days to complete). This makes them appear to be more turn-like. Real-time expenditure of turns levels the playing field between players. Players can't group together in the middle of the night and attack a defenseless player.
• Siege vs. tower defense games. These have asymmetrical roles as the attackers play in real-time but the defenders can play turn-based. They just set up their defenses beforehand and check back after the attacks.
• Asynchronous Action RPGs put gameplay in ellipsis. Mobsters 2 is like Grand Theft Auto but instead of getting an assassination mission, stealing a car, driving the car to the target location, and shooting a gun at the target, the player can do all this by clicking a button that says "Complete Quest." All of the intermediate steps are skipped over. The player spends resources to complete quests, a trope that has carried over to many of the standard Facebook games.

• Broad audiences with niches.
• Social games target casual audiences by having simple one-click interactions.
• Gameplay reinforces carrot on the stick, providing super rewarding and rarely punishing experiences. There are no traumatizing events to scare away audiences.
• Triple Town, a favorite in the gaming community, was actually considered too confusing by most playtesters, according to creator Daniel Cook. There may be many reasons for its confusion -- the game requires too much planning in the player's part, it isn't rewarding enough compared to other social games, it had a bad tutorial, the game is claustrophobic, the bleed out time is too long and mistakes lead to more mistakes, there's no direct feedback, and it was easy to forget your plans in between play sessions. However, the main reason for its failure was that people didn't understand they needed to plan ahead. Many playtesters played it like they were decorating a space and were confused when some of their plants disappeared into a tree. Dan Cook wanted a casual game, but ended up appealing to a more hardcore crowd.
• Profitable choices vs. more profitable choices. There are no bad choices, just good ones and better ones. The only way to lose at a social game is failure to show up.
• Crossover hits (a hardcasual game) exist such as Empires & Allies. These types of games tend to find a niche and have more dedicated players.

• Persistence and progress.
• Persistence of the world keeps players coming back. Changing the state of the game during holidays and seasons incentivizes players to come back and check on their territory.
• Castleville's persistence, and that of other ville-type game, is the city you've built yourself.
• Bejweled Blitz's persistence, and that of other arcade games, is the high score, though some games reset the high scores every week.
• Draw Something keeps the player's history and data (most used colors, etc.)
• Dreamland, designed by Naomi Clark, is a game where the protagonist enters a maze of her dreams and fights off her greatest fears. The persistence is found in the upgradeable bedroom that players can decorate. The bedroom serves no gameplay purpose other than being the main hub.
• League of Legends, a massively successful team-based competitive game, has persistence in the player's data and match history. Players can level up their accounts which allows them to unlock more heroes, skills, masteries, and runes that increase their stats.
• Triple Town's persistent elements are the score and coins.

• Sociality (other players as context)
• "Alone Together." 70% of time spent in World of Warcraft is played alone. The concept of having people to play "next to" is like playing golf at a driving lane or studying alone in a library where others are doing the same.
• In Castleville, players don't truly cross paths with each other, but they always feel other's presence, whether in the leaderboard or in the footprint of their friend's actions on their own village. There are tacit pacts created for mutual aid, where players agree to send each other gifts back and forth.
• There are some real-time, simultaneous games like Zynga Poker, but these are usually played against strangers. Dungeon Rampage is an example of a real-time game that can be played with friends.
• There are many asynchronous multiplayer games.
• Idle Worship presents a new model of looking at players next to you (the world map).

• Free entry
• All social games follow the freemium model. There are usually soft and hard currencies, and the process of making the player run low on these resources are often called soft and hard chokes.
• In Tiny Tower, players can grind for hard currency, usually by transporting people in the elevator whereby they have a small chance of tipping you a hard currency. Zynga never gives away hard currency as a general company-wide rule so Dream Heights, a direct clone of Tiny Tower by Zynga, does not give away any hard currency. As a result, transporting people in the elevator in Dream Heights gave little reward and therefore is essentially useless, but is left in there purely as a result of a cloned system.
• Frontierville, being another Zynga game, does not give away any hard currency. Comparatively, Tiny Tower makes more money than Frontierville (higher ARPU), so the slow trickle of hard currency may arguably be a better monetization route.
• There is a group of advanced players who try to beat the house. They are complete grinders, focused on optimal play without ever spending money or submitting to viral requests.