Recent News of Interest to Social Gaming geeks

Playfish gets a million dollar bridge loan from Accel Partners. I'm assuming they want to expand faster than they had initially planned. That brings their total funding to 4 million.

Hi5 buys app developer, PixVerse. First I've heard of a socnet buying an app developer. It's interesting, because I assume Hi5 is going to integrate features from PixVerse apps directly into their site. It's a reverse on the old saw I keep hearing about how developing for Facebook is risky because if the feature is any good, Facebook will just copy it. In this case, developing good features led to an acquisition. Maybe, Facebook will acquire Slide. Kidding.

In similar news, a Chinese game development company, Giant, buys a stake in China's biggest social network, 51.com. The article compares it to EA buying a stake in Facebook. With the enormous success of games on Facebook, and the success of QQ Games on the Tencent QQ IM platform, it's a brilliant move for a games company to get access to a social networking platform.
Guaranteed CPMs for Facebook devs! Potentially, $0.40 CPM. Perhaps Packrat should finally start running banners on those hundreds of millions of pageviews they get every month.

Neopets founders creating a casual MMO. The creative muscle behind Neopets in its early years, Adam Powell and Donna Williams, started a company called Meteor Games to build a non-Flash based MMO. Here's the description:

Meteor will likely have a free version to entice gamers and charge $5 to $10 a month for access to the full world. The company will likely also create a virtual goods model where it can charge for certain items. Williams said the world will combine an MMO, casual game play, and social networking.

Yes, not Flash-based. I hope they don't opt for a downloadable client, for their sakes.

Link Fiesta: Articles Worth Reading

I read a crazy amount of good articles yesterday, some old some new, and I'm feeling too lazy to add commentary, so read them and enjoy.

DESIGN
Addictive Mechanisms in MMOs.
http://www.massively.com/2008/04/24/mmo-mmonkey-mmos-as-conditioned-learning-engines-part-1/

Designing Crafting System in MMOs. (courtesy of Jeremy Liew)
http://www.psychochild.org/?p=409

COMMENTARY
Facebook as a Disruptive Platform for Gaming
http://www.gamezebo.com/features/special-editorials/facebook-gaming-s-napster

MONETIZATION
Socialmedia pays out 8 million to App Devs.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/19/socialmedia-pays-out-8-million-to-facebook-app-developers/

My Coverage of Lobby of the Social Gaming Summit

Fortunately, quite a few people covered the sessions, because I spent most of my time in the lobby chatting with other attendees. So I'm going to give you my observations about the conference beyond the sessions. (I've also wrote up some nuggets from the panels that I'll be posting throughout the week so they don't drown in the mass of words of a long post).

Let's talk about those attendees. I noticed a lot of representatives from venture capital floating around, but before you get too excited, it was mostly junior associates sent by their partners to learn about the space. Social Gaming is on everybody's radar, but I suspect a lot of VCs are ready to jump in until they see a platform or infrastructure play. In fact, I know that's true since that what they told me. :)

Most social gaming companies that receive any attention (including from me) are content creators. In the VC world, content risk is a bad thing. Rightfully so, since content creators require hits to succeed. And making hits is really, really hard. I read somewhere recently that in the last few years, around 90 MMOs were produced but failed to launch. Other MMOs that did launch after years of development and millions of dollars spent failed to gain an audience and were shut down. That boils down to ~5 successes (in the US market) out of ~100 attempts. I'd probably be leery about investing in something that had a five percent success rate but required several million dollars and 3+ years to produce. But I digress (so frequently I must have ADD or Alzheimer's).

I spoke a lot of people from outside the gaming world who are looking at social games as the next big opportunity. As well as people from behemoth companies who just wanted to get away from the office for the day - I don't think they were kidding. I recognized a few people for the traditional games industry in the audience, but the crowd was still web-heavy.

Hopefully, somebody is putting together a social gaming track at the next GDC to reach out more to the traditional games industry. If somebody doing so, let me know, I'd like to help out.

In conversations, one of the biggest topics (and one I happen to be thinking a lot about it recently) is the gameification of the web. The basic idea is taking game mechanics and applying to other web properties to increase engagement. I'll be talking more about gameification soon.

Other topics: Twitter as a game. Fear of the traditional games industry entering the space with big budgets and better production values. Payment systems. Mobile as the ultimate gaming platform.

Overall, my impression is that VCs and traditional game developers are still cautious about social games, but more and more web guys are jumping in fast. All hail Ruby on Rails! ;)

Note: Warbook, Friends for Sale, and Packrat are all built on Ruby on Rails.

GDC 08 Wrap-up: Sessions you might have missed

The following are presented without comment. All are worth your time. And all except one includes slides. Enjoy!

1. GDC08: The Social Gaming Panel from the GDC (liveblogged by Virtual Worlds News)

“99% of the games on Facebook are non-viral, meaning that if you just left them alone, they would not grow next week,” Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga Game Network

Slides from the panel (courtesy of Nabeel Hyatt)

2. GDC08: Virtual Greenspans: Running an MMOG Economy

"For most people, the pleasure is in the journey, not the destination. The same is true for gameplay - we want some benefit from our hard work online, and we want to see it, we want it to be measurable." Eyjolfur Gudmundsson, Economics Professor working for CCP (makers of EVE Online)

3. GDC08: MMO Goal Structures as a Panacea

"One of the biggest lessons we've learned so far from that: you need to actually measure what your users are doing. You don't need to reinvent the wheel to increase your user base -- you can use the systems that already work and do more with them." Erik Bethke, CEO of GoPets.

Read Jeremy Liew's excellent notes here.

Erik Bethke's slides here.

4. GDC08: The Power of Free to Play

“I think even the walled gardens will begin to see an impetus to break the subscription barrier down and get more players in there,” said Crook. WoW is letting users get access to characters on the Web, already making it more available." Adrian Crook (Game Designer and Blogger, freetoplay.biz)

Adrian's slides here.

I just relaunched this blog to focus exclusively on social gaming. Before this week, however, I was also writing about entrepreneurship in general. Since you're probably looking to avoid advice on how to be more productive, etc., I've compiled a short list of social gaming related posts (and virtual worlds because there are some interesting overlaps).

So the greatest hits so far:

Puzzle Pirates v. Club Penguin

A Review of Kaneva, a virtual world

Ebays stops trading of virtual goods

Wiicade.com - Trespasser in the Walled Garden

Game Geek - I Like it Long and Hard, so Kill Me.

Starbucks Survey: Ever Heard of Second Life?