How to Launch a New Platform

On Friday, I alluded to the importance of hits to drive the success of a platform. It occurred to me in the shower this morning that VCs undervalue this insight.

If you listen to any VC, or any smart investor, they'll tell you that you don't want to create content. It's too risky. Who knows what people are going to like. They call this content risk.

Instead, they advise building a platform. Let other take on the risk of creating content. The platform builder reaps the benefit of the hits and avoids the losses of the losers. I've always thought this made a lot of sense.

Then it occurred to me, as a platform builder, you're completely reliant on others to create a hit for you. Without that hit, be it an amazing game or a killer app, then no consumer is actually going to want to use your platform.

So in fact, you're not avoiding content risk at all, the downside (not having a hit) is still there. The odds are better if twenty teams are working to create a hit for your platform vs. just your own team. However, it is not guaranteed that any of you will create a hit, so the risk doesn't magically go away because you're a platform.

So as a platform builder you're dependent on attracting great content creators. For a new platform that's not easy. Most people do not want to pour resources into building something for a platform that could easily fail.

To solve this problem, platform builders often have to create a hit themselves to validate the platform. When Nintendo entered the console market, they bundled the NES with Super Mario Bros.

Or you can license a hit from another platform. Atari was initially bundled with Combat and sold decently. Soon after it was bundled with superhit Pacman, licensed from Namco. The version sold and branded for Sears was bundled with Space Invaders, another superhit licensed from Taito. These games had already seen massive success in the arcades.

Or you can acquire hits. This has been the Zynga/SGN approach in building out their social gaming networks.

Or you can offer money, like Kongregate does. Kongregate offers money to developers in the form of contests and publishing deals.

Or you can leverage existing relationships. Boonty uses its existing relationships with casual game developers to encourage them to create games for its new Cafe.com platform.

Once you're an Apple or a Google, all you have to do is announce that you have a new platform and developers flock to you. We should all be so lucky.

I'm sure there's more that didn't occur to me between rinse and repeat, so as always comments are welcome.

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.