MOTODEV Blog

I’m Jill Ford and I manage Motorola’s relationships with games publishers and usage of games worldwide.  The Social Gaming Summit was a fabulous event with high quality content and the right people in the room for moving business forward. 

As you can see from the photos, the room was packed with standing room only and everyone highly engaged in the discussions.  Many thanks to Charles Hudson, David Sachs, Jeremy Liew and team for hosting such a substantive and valuable event. Some slides have already been posted by speakers such as Justin Smith from Inside Social Games http://www.insidesocialgames.com/2009/06/23/slides-from-presentation-at-social-gaming-summit/  Many additional slides will be available soon.    

Here are some of the major takeaways from the event:  

New Social Gaming Projects from Traditional Publishers

Facebook’s Gareth Davis believes that this is the inflection year for Social Gaming, and finds multi-device gaming to be the most exciting.  He underscored the importance of combining social graph and identity.  Facebook’s Gareth Davis mentioned that there are upcoming unannounced Social Gaming projects from traditional publishers that have impressed him.  He mentioned that these projects show that traditional publishers are building games from the ground up to be social.  

Gaming as a Service

FAST (Fun as a Service Today).   We are moving away from the days of gaming requiring the purchase of a cartridge or disk.  Gamers are concerned less
with collecting physical products and more with collecting experiences and sharing these experiences with their friends.  Embracing the delivery of fun to users through devices consumers already have reduces costs and increases the possibility of viral distribution.  

Connect the Disconnected

Playfish’s Sebastien mentioned that people seemed to spend more money on virtual Christmas trees that on real Christmas trees.   Given our geographic disconnection, a physical Christmas tree can often be shown to only a handful of friends, while the virtual Christmas tree can be shown to all of our friends.  

Facebook’s Gareth Davis quantified the importance of the social graph.  He mentioned that Bejeweled did not do so well on Facebook before it integrated the social graph, but now has 4M monthlies.  

James Liu of Oak Pacific Interactive mentioned that in China, communities are becoming more gaming like, and games are becoming more community like.  

Social games have given John Pleasants of Playdom the chance to have social interaction with people with whom he might not have otherwise had such an opportunity.  People with whom he may not have been close enough to to expect to sit down to have dinner at their homes might regularly share virtual tables with him in social games.
 

The Emotional Connection:

Returning to the Purpose of the Original Game

Original games were created for social interaction.  We are now returning to this in electronic games.  Playfish noted that playing games is about creating emotions.  The fun is no longer in just the game, but in the shared experiences and memories that are created because of the game.  As Sebastien said, it is one thing to be beat by a stranger, entirely another to be beat by your little sister in a game.  John Pleasants called the human reaction to games the third axis.  Whether it is excitement, laughter, surprise, fear, frustration, pride, or some combination of all of these, a great game makes people feel something.  Developers now are having the chance to feel something in return as well. Recognizing that for the first time there is no middleman, Sebastien commented that love and community are now communicated back to developers.  

The Importance of Promotion

There were no two answers exactly the same regarding the question of how important promotion is to creating virality.  With Restaurant City hitting 5 million users in 5 weeks with no cross promotion, Playfish’s Sebastien de Halleux felt that quality was more important than promotion.  John Pleasants of Playdom underscored the importance of promotion and digital distribution.

Mark Pincus of Zynga noted that in the current context of difficult discovery, the funnels are too small, making both quality and promotion important.  This also makes mobile gaming essential.  Accessibility maximizes discovery.   

Social Capital

Mark Pincus noted that there are 3 essentials to a social game: 

1. Must make you feel that you’re playing with your real friends
2. Must give you a way to express yourself and your individuality
3. Must give you an opportunity to invest in the game over time and feel like you own something

That third point significantly resonated with me.  When I’m playing games, I’m taking time away from other things that I could (and sometimes should) be doing.  It makes me feel better to think that time played in the game is an investment, something that I can keep and use later.  I have some friends with different opinions about this.  What do you think?   

According to Mark the same factors that drive Facebook and MySpace will drive Social Games.  He mentioned that with the right level of support from the social gaming community behind this concept of social capital in games, social gaming could be bigger than Social Networking.  What do you think of the idea of taking the concept of social capital to a community level with transferability of social capital across games?  

Anonymity

Mark noted that an essential of a social game is to feel that you’re playing with your real friends.  Another discussion addressed an important flip side to this.  Sometimes people want to play with strangers, and/or want to play anonymously.  

Not all friends are friends to all parts of a person’s life. James Liu of Oak Pacific Interactive mentioned that some people would not want their work friends to know how they are behaving in some games.   Without anonymity, such people would either stifle their game experience so that their work friends could only see them behaving in they way that they want to be perceived by work friends, or they would somehow prevent their work friends from being able to recognize them, either by limiting their networks to not include work friends or by using pseudo-identities to participate in games.  

Sometimes anonymity is desired not because a person doesn’t want to be seen, but because he does not want to see others.  Andrew Sheppard mentioned that while playing Mafia Wars and getting ready to whack a person, he wouldn’t want to a see that person’s profile picture of her with her two young kids.  That mixture of game and reality would create some awkward feelings that are not the emotions that the game was intended to create.  

With 300,000 peak concurrent users and an average of 120 friends per user, Zynga’s Mark Pincus noted that there is almost always a real friend online for Zynga’s social gamers.  Daniel James of Three Rings raised the question is Social Games more about playing with your friends or making friends with the people you play with? What level of anonymity do you think should be available in social games, and how do you think this should be done? How do you think this balances with Mark Pincus’ point about the need for social gamers to feel they are playing with their real friends?  

Customer Acquisition, Retention, and Virality

Virality.  Everyone wants it, but what kind do you want and which kind do you feel is realistic?  That was a great question of the day with a variety of opinions. Calling virality delicate, Wonderhill’s James Currier noted that incentivized virality is becoming less effective over time. Word of mouth is genuine virality according to Three Rings’ Daniel James.  Daniel mentioned that while word of mouth customers convert better, this is extremely difficult to get.   It can also be difficult to scale. 

According to Daniel, Club Penguin had genuine word of mouth virality.  For many companies, Three Rings mentioned that there is more of a playbook for creating automated and manufactured virality.  With the right strategy, linear changes will have the non-linear impact on growth that David King and Siqi Chen showcased in their data review.  As Siqi and Dave discussed, users who stay beyond a certain level (e.g. 3 weeks) tend to stay for the long haul.  For Daniel James of Three Rings, the lifetime value of a customer is $150.  Like SparkPlay, Three Rings is willing to pay $30 for a paying customer, but would be hesitant to pay upfront for a potentially paying customer.  

Greg Tseng from Tagged mentioned that Tagged does all customer acquisition via the address book on the social network.  

Returning users have been crucial to Wonderhill’s business on MySpace.  Wonderhill’s James Currier emphasized the value of delivering different retention events with varying periocity.  This allows users to get rewarded frequently, while not getting bored with the rewards.  Tagged’s suggestion is to give daily and/or multi-hour incentives and/or alerts to users.   

According to RockYou’s, Jia Shen, developers should go beyond using notifications and news feeds to building momentum with these.  A popular person’s newsfeed will scroll down so fast that additions to the newsfeed won’t be easily visible for a long time.  

The talk with David King from (Lil) Green Patch and Siqi Chen from Serious Business mentioned that the shorter a notification is in Facebook, the more likely a user
is to click on it.   They also mentioned that most of their traffic came from super referrers who would refer as many people as possible.  Discussing the impact of uninstallations, Rock You’s Jia Shen said retention on Facebook is easy, users never uninstall the app.  While Daniel James noted that apps don’t need a website, he also mentioned that an app website is helpful for users who are trying to find their way back to your game.   Wigitized games were also mentioned as an alternative for customer acquisition.  

Localization

Andrew Sheppard mentioned that what made hi-5 successful is the focus on localization.  They’ve monetized markets that most don’t think of.   

Monetization

Paypal’s Renata Dionello mentioned that Paypal is testing out a Paypal account with a minimum age requirement of 13 years.   Rob Goldberg from GMG supported
that significant spending is done by those who do not actually possess the wallet.  Rob mentioned that GMG produced a pdf for young people
to give to their parents to help to inform parents and gain their support of the teens’ desired purchases.   

Rob noted that marketing to both teen purchasers and their parent funders is important for reducing friendly fraud. Noting that some publishers have fraud rates as low as 1%, Renata mentioned that fraud may be reduced by noticing if multiple IPs access one account or if a single IP accesses multiple access.
Renata also encouraged developers to be cautious regarding chargebacks.   

Direct payments are growing faster than the advertising portion of Super Reward’s business, according to Adam Caplan.  Letting users play the game for free initially is important, as is reducing the separation between the purchasing and the playing.  The more seamless and integrated the purchasing experience,
the higher the conversion rate will be from interest to transaction.  

Call to Action

Underscoring the importance of an open social gaming platform, Mark Pincus suggested that the social gaming community might have more success with unified requests to Apple and Palm for greater openness than by individually making such requests.   

Upcoming Events

I look forward to seeing you at some of the upcoming events:  

July 21 - 23:  Seattle – Casual Connect Conference http://seattle.casualconnect.org/ 

October 29, 2009:  San Francisco – Virtual Goods Summit http://www.vgsummit.com/2009 

Let me know if you have other Social Gaming events that you would like me to highlight.  

Jill Ford