While at GDC I did an interview with Gary Gannon of GameBreakr, and it’s now up on the site as two video clips. They were posted up with Justin.tv, and I can’t figure out how to embed them here… topics discussed include why core gamers should be excited about social games, where do AAA MMOs sit, and trends at GDC like 3d displays. But the link lets you watch them both back to back — it’s about 20 minutes worth of me blathering on.
Edit: here’s the vids!
Scalable Social Games, Robert Zubek of Zynga (liveblog)
Social games interesting from an engineering point of view sinc ethey live at the intersection of games and web. We spend time thinking about making games fun, making players want to come back. We know those engineering challenges, but the web introduces its own set, especially around users arriving somewhat unpredictably, effects where huge populations come in suddenly. SNSes are a great example of this, with spreading network effects and unpredictable traffi fluctuations.
At Zynga we have 65m daily players, 225m monthly. And usage can vary drastically — Roller Coaster Kingdom gained 1m DAUs in one weekend going from 700k to 1.7m. Another example, Fishville grow from 0 to 6m DAUs in one week. Huge scalability challenges. And finally, Farmville grew 25m DAUs in five months. The cliff is not as steep but the order of magnitude difference adds its own challenge.
Talk outline: Introducing game developers to best practices for web development. Maybe you come from consoles or mobile or whatever, the web world introduces its own set of challenges and also a whole set of solutions that are already developed that we steal, or, uh, learn from. 🙂 If you are alreayd an experiened web developer, you may know this stuff already.
Liveblog of talk on Sporadic Play, Bryan Cash & Jeremy Gibson
Sporadic play describes a game where mechanics intentionally limit how often a player interacts with a persistent game world. We’ll talk about history with it, why it is a good thing, design concepts, and a bit about the future.
HISTORY… IN REVERSE
Most obvious place to start — Facebook. Look at the top 20 games here. Farmville is #1 and uses sporadic play. Mafia Wars, Petville, YoVille, 16 of the top 20 are sporadic play games. If you add up the MAU, you get 332m people, which is kinda BS, but just in the top 20.
It has also been around in console and traditional PC games. Animal Crossing, a game where as time went on in real life, events like Christmas happened in the game too. Seasons, real time, limiting what you can do based on the real time of the real. Another one was Kingdom of Loathing in 2002, a web game, limited number of things you can do based on action points.
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.
Dan Terdiman at CNet engages in some handwringing over the fact that kids worlds and social games are taking over the hype that used to belong to virtual worlds.
But to someone who cut his virtual world teeth on more immersive, 3D environments like There and Second Life, these never-ending announcements of new companies trying to jump on the social gaming bandwagon have left me with one nagging question: Where is the innovation?
The innovation lies in making something that matters to ordinary people.
Now, I am a virtual world person, obviously. I don’t see much distinction between the game worlds and the non-game ones like Second Life. I have been working with them since the text muds, for over 15 years, which doesn’t exactly put me in the true old dino category where Richard Bartle and Randy Farmer reside, but I think it is fair to say that I have been closely identified with the space for a long long time now.
And I think that they aren’t over, but the form that they have taken is.
