Follow Simple Lifeforms

• RSS
• Email
• FriendFeed
• Twitter
• MySpace
• Facebook

Archive for the ‘Social Games’ Category

Zynga and the End of the Beginning

Posted by Tadhg | Jan 2, 2010 | Filed under Social Games

Where two years ago everyone was talking about ‘casual’ games, now they’re all talking about ’social’ games. Key developers have recently attracted some very big numbers. This article is not really about Zynga itself, but rather examining what underpins their business model, the likely threats to which it must adapt and how Zynga – as standard bearer of the social game community – will likely fare in the coming year. As Zynga goes, so the rest of the social game market tends to follow.

The first thing to say is that the people running Zynga are both very smart and competitive. They have streaked ahead of all of their competition by applying a relatively simple strategy of picking up on gaming trends, copying them quickly and then maximising every avenue of Facebook to spread their message thoroughly. Zynga currently has 4 times as many monthly active players in their games as their next closest rival. To look at the distribution of players on an Appdata.com chart, you would be forgiven for thinking that there was an error in the metric reportage, such is the disparity.

It’s also important to understand something about ’social games’: Most of them are not social. They tend to be single or multi-player games that use social networks (mostly Facebook) as an easy way to drive player adoption. What the industry is calling ’social games’ are more accurately described as ‘viral games’.

The focus of most viral game developers is maximising trends. Trends rise and fall quickly in response to player boredom, retention is king, and developers spend much of their time reminding players to play, to invite their friends, to post stories from the game to their profiles, and other activity designed essentially to not let the player forget to come and play. Viral gaming relies a lot on ways to grab or nudge players’ attention. Like any third party game publisher they are reliant on the benevolence of their platform holders (primarily Facebook) and the market conditions that their platform has engendered.

This has resulted in predominantly short-term thinking. Viral game development is a battleground of very simple and usually cloned games, interruption marketing tactics, push-to-the-limit tactics to jog players into returning to play, and a lot of scrambling to be on the next trends as fast as possible. Viral game developers, such as Zynga, have little or no commitment to developing deep or rich game experiences because the market has not really rewarded that kind of activity. However that lack of depth is precisely the reason why viral gaming is showing signs of weakness typical in any runaway success.

Zynga this week received investment of $180m from DST, a Russian venture capital firm (which also owns a small share of Facebook itself), and this signals the end of something and the beginning of something else. The big question is this: Is it the beginning of the end? Or is it the end of the beginning?

Read the rest of this article on Gamasutra

[ Read More ]

Crowdsourcing for Social Game Design

Posted by Tadhg | Jun 14, 2009 | Filed under News, Social Games, Spell Souls

Recently we’ve been trying to nail the look and feel of our first social game (Spell Souls), and we had the idea to throw open the normally secretive doors of game development and see what other designers could do.

[ Read More ]

The #socialgames Tag For Social Games on Twitter

Posted by Tadhg | Mar 23, 2009 | Filed under News, Social Games

The hash (#) tag is a way to cut through Twitter’s noise to get to the conversations that you want to hear. We’re promoting the #socialgames tag on Twitter as of today.

Using Twitter’s own search facility or a tool like TweetDeck it is possible to filter out much of the noise and get to what you want. When Battlestar Galactica’s finale was broadcast a few days ago the place to be was on Twitter and watching the #bsg tag for comments and reviews. Similarly, every Friday Twitter now has a sort of party called #followfriday in which users suggest other users that they think everyone should follow.

So the #socialgames tag is to help gather shared links and posts about social games. The tag has also been added to the Tagalus tag dictionary (here). Read on for a simple guide on how to use the tag.

[ Read More ]

8 Types of Social Game

Posted by Tadhg | Mar 20, 2009 | Filed under Personal, Research, Simple Lifeforms, Social Games

This article describes 8 kinds of social game operating today (mostly on Facebook) and provides many examples. We hope it does a better job of explaining what is going on in social games and why we’re so very excited by social games in general.

Social games as an industry is about the conversation. We realised recently that the  conversation about social games is still waiting to be had but it can’t be forced. Social games are still very unfamiliar terrain to most, and so this article is all about grounding that conversation so that it can begin.

We hope you find it useful.

[ Read More ]

Hi5’s Big Mistake

Posted by Tadhg | Feb 12, 2009 | Filed under News, Social Games

The social games space is quickly evolving and spreading its wings. It’s a gathering revolution and what’s interesting to note about it as a space is that the kinds of games that are making their mark are markedly different from more regular casual or video games. As it is a very young sector it could be argued that nobody really knows what they’re doing yet and so mistakes are made.  Hi5, one of the top 10 social networks in the world, has recently got into the space with a dedicated Games offering. It’s very attractive in several ways, but they have made one huge (though not irreversible) mistake: They’ve adopted a closed platform policy.

This is an article about games platforms, open and closed strategies, and why it’s a bad idea to try and manage a social game platform in a closed fashion.

[ Read More ]

Social Games Industry Overview (08/09)

Posted by Alan O'Dea | Jan 26, 2009 | Filed under News, Personal, Research, Social Games

The social game industry is quickly becoming a significant sector of the games industry and is experiencing explosive growth: $75M was invested in the top three social game companies in 2008 and the top twenty games across MySpace and Facebook recorded over 100M Daily Active Users in January 2009 alone. This article is a quick overview of the sector and we hope serves as a fact sheet for those new to it and interested in what all of the fuss is about. 

[ Read More ]

What is a ‘Social Game’?

Posted by Tadhg | Jan 19, 2009 | Filed under Social Games

This is the first in a series of blog articles exploring social games and social gameplay, the ideas behind which form the core of the Simple Lifeforms development strategy and ideals.

In this article, I start at the start, talking about what constitutes a social game and making some reference to existing games which, although they may have a presence on social networks, aren’t really what we would consider social games as such. I introduce the idea that social games are defined by what you do in them rather than where they are distributed, and explain a little of where we think they are going to go.

Enjoy reading it, and please leave feedback.

[ Read More ]