Possible Funding for the creators of Friends For Sale clone, Owned.

With Serious Business, getting a $4 million dollar round on the strength of their game, Friends For Sale, it seemed someone should look into their clone, Owned!, a game whose userbase of 600,000+ DAU equals Friends For Sale.

Unlike Serious Business, whose CEO, Siqi Chen is a popular speaker at tech events out here in the Bay Area, coolapps, the makers of Owned keep a extremely low profile.

Turns out that coolapps is a subsidiary of Insider Guides, Inc, the parent company of myyearbook.com, a social networking site for high schools that gets ~3 million unique visitors a month.

This is a similar relationship SGN had to its parent company, Freewebs.com, a free website creator, before spinning off and becoming a standalone company.

With the social gaming space still white hot, I wouldn't be surprised if we saw coolapps being spun off from its parent company as well. At ~600,000 DAU, coolapps has the same amount of traffic as SGN had back in December when it was peaking (well before SGN's recent acquisitions that provided the recent boost in users).

One advantage that coolapps has over many other game developers is that their games are featured prominently (upper left quadrant of the homepage - it doesn't get more prominent than that) of myyearbook.com, providing them with exclusive access to an audience of 3 million users monthly.

A current audience of 600,000 DAU and exclusive access to a userbase of 3 million other users, I imagine that could be worth a few million in funding, my guess ~6-8.

How to Scale a Facebook Game to 300 million pageviews a month

While tracking down a presentation that Friends for Sale did, I ran across this excellent interview they did about scaling their backend at highscalability.com. It's fairly technical, but worth the read for anyone planning to handle 600,000 users a day (as I'm sure you all are).

Sample question from the interview:

What is your in/out bandwidth usage?

We used around 3 terabytes of bandwidth last month. This month should
be at least 5TB or so. This number is just for a few icons and
XHTML/CSS.

Yep, I just added 600,000 users = ~3 terabytes of bandwidth to my assumptions list in my budget projection, too. :)

Friends For Sale: Designing a Game for the Platform v. the Channel

First, what is Friends for Sale?

Here's the description from the developer:

Buy and sell your friends as pets! You can make your pets poke, send gifts, or just show off for you. Make money as a shrewd pets investor or as a hot commodity! Friends for Sale is the bees knees!

Why you should care?

As of today, it has more daily active users (668,080) than Texas Holdem Poker and almost has as many daily active users as Scrabulous. If it is a game, then it's the second most popular game on Facebook.

So Bret, is it a game?

Here's the four key components of a game as defined by Wikipedia (feel free to dispute): goal, rules, challenge, interactivity. Let's break it down.

1. Goal: to have the highest worth among your friends.
2. Rules: you can only buy friends if you have enough money.
3. Challenge: To increase your worth you have to invest in the right friends
4. Interactivity: Other people can buy your friends from you and vice-versa.

And finally, my criterion: is it fun? Answer: ask the 668,080 people currently playing.

So yes, it is a game. In fact, I think it's an example of the new breed of social games emerging that will actually incorporate the social graph into their gameplay and not simply use the social graph as a distribution channel.

Platform v. Channel

In many ways, I think game developers are treating social networks as a channel for games rather than as a platform for games. Most games on Facebook only use the social graph to acquire users (i.e. Invite 40 Friends and get a Chuck Norris themed Jetman!). Sell your Friends! could not exist without the social graph.

A channel is just a way to distribute something. As a channel, Facebook is amazing, allowing any developer with a good game to *potentially* reach million of users. However, the vast majority of games don't. Roughly thirty games out of ~2000 games listed in the games sections of the app have reached one million installs (which, by the way, is more than I expected).

A platform has unique features that can be leveraged. Take the Nintendo Wii for example, it's unique feature is its motion sensing controller. Making a game for Facebook that doesn't leveraging the social graph (Facebook's unique feature) is like making a game for the Wii that doesn't leverage its motion-sensing controllers.

Just something to think about. There's a ton to say about *how* to design a game to take advantage of the social graph, but it'll have to wait until after my fever breaks.

Meanwhile, two predictions: Sell Your Friends! will soon be the most popular game on Facebook (as measured by DAU) and it's going to be copied endlessly.