Facebook rebrands the Internet

 Posted by (Visited 50221 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Apr 232010
 

You may have noticed that each post here now has a Facebook “like” button on it. This is part of Facebook’s latest set of “social plug-ins” that were announced at F8. Rather than re-hash what they have done, though, I want to tell you what it means.

Step one: Facebook is going to make the whole Internet a community space. Everywhere you go, you will see what your friends liked on sites. You will know what movies they watched, what CNN articles they read, what YouTube videos they thought were funny. You will see their streams and comments annotating the Internet everywhere you go. And they will be able to reach out and chat to you on the chat bar at the bottom of your browser.

Step two: Facebook is going to be your identity card for the Internet. Facebook has always aimed at being the only login you will need. With this, they have made a strong play to have you just always be logged into Facebook, everywhere on the internet. All the top sites you use will simply expect you to be logged in, and over time we will see that functionality on the site will start to require this identity information. And soon after that, you will have to be on Facebook even if you don’t want to be.

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GDC10: Justin Smith, State of Social Games

 Posted by (Visited 10481 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , ,
Mar 092010
 

Justin Smith, Inside Social Games

Explosive growth. Graph shows doubling every year.
2009: 490m revenues
2010: 835m

Virtual goods in Asia 5bn in 2008, 7bn in 2009,
In the US, 1bn in 2009.

Three big players in US:

1. Zynga, 700-900 employees, a few 100m in revenue, growth 50-70%. 3x more DAU than #2.

2. Playfish, 250+ employees, 75m in revenue, purchased by EA in 11/09

3. Playdom, 300+ employees, 50m in revenue, #1 on MySpace

Other players:
Crowdstar, quick rise to #2 based on DAU
RockYou, largest ad network on FB
Slide, was #1 for a long time by MAU (SuperPoke, etc), but not with games. Shifted to virtual goods model.

Interesting trend: a lot of interest from abroad, esp China. Developers who have been successful elsewhere porting apps to FB. FB is blocked in China. Rekoo (Animal Paradise, Sunshine Ranch), Elex (Happy Harvest), Five Minutes (Happy Farm), wooga (Brain Buddies), and 6waves, which follows more of a publisher model.

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AGDC: Top Ten Social RPG Trends

 Posted by (Visited 11680 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , ,
Sep 172009
 

Steve Meretzsky, Dave Rohrl, both from Playdom. This is a quickly on the fly typed liveblog and I notice my space bar on my laptop is starting to erratically fail!  I stopped when the Q&A portion hit.

One year ago, stuff barely games. Then Mob Wars launched, lots of imitators. This is now called the social RPG. 13 of top 25 on MySpace, less dominant but huge on FB.Shares some dna with MMO, longform game, months to play, level up, build character, but spare presentation, spreadsheet style UI,low production values. Play sessions are usuallya few minutes due to a mechanic of energy depletion that limits your play sessions.

This talk will cover ten trends, and then make some guesses about the next year.

#1.New horizons in virtual goods.

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Facebook & virtual currency

 Posted by (Visited 10242 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
May 202009
 

I wrote a blog post about this yesterday, but alas, I lost it.  CNN has an article about Facebook’s virtual currency plans, which are already moving into alpha.

Facebook is researching the idea of creating a unified currency but is “very early” in the process and has not committed to it, the site said in a statement to CNN.

Currently, applications on the site — which allow users to play games with each other and trade gifts — are powered by currencies made by the application’s developers, not by Facebook.

These developers are making good money on the system, and Facebook is missing out on profits in that area, said Hudson, of the Virtual Goods Summit.

— ‘Virtual currencies’ power social networks, online games – CNN.com.

Now, Facebook already has a virtual currency — credits — which you use to buy gifts. But what is being talked about is opening up an API to their currency system through apps.

For those who haven’t noticed, the open APIs Facebook is creating are allowing access to data such as login from anywhere on the Net. So in effect, this could lead to a fairly standard currency fo any site that accepts Facebook logins.

The real play here, as Information Week notes, is to become a “gold standard” of sorts, similar to the way in which Facebook and LinkedIn are already becoming stronger standards for online identity than OpenID is (the flip side is, of course, than you can now use OpenId to log into Facebook!).

The notion of “customer ownership” starts getting very blurry in a world like this. It won’t be long until you see major MMORPGs allowing you to log in with social networking credentials rather than requiring you to create their own account (we at Metaplace already allow this). And if these currency plans move forward and go far enough, we could see many users just paying their subs or their microtransactions with Facebook credits.

For smaller apps and websites, this can make a great deal of sense. Lots of other players are trying to establish base virtual currencies that work across sites and apps.

YoVille almost at 8m?

 Posted by (Visited 8300 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Apr 012009
 

Virtual Worlds News tallies the latest YoVille numbers and arrives at 7.8 million monthly uniques. This is by summing the MySpace and Facebook usage reported by GigaOM, which likely means that there’s overlap in users. But still — impressive monthly growth given that it was less than a month ago that I wondered if YoVille was bigger than WoW in North America.

While at GDC, I talked with a lot of folks about YoVille, and generally the comment was “but it’s just nto very good!” Unlike WoW’s dominance in the AAA MMORPG space, I do think that YoVille is vulnerable to competitors; the audience has been only lightly exposed to the variety and possibility that exists in VWs, so there’s a lot of potential for other experiences to come in and grab lots of users.

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