Playfish Experiments with New Subscription Pricing Model

In January of this year, Playfish, a UK-based social games company launched their first game, Who's Got the Biggest Brain?. It rapidly grew, becoming one of the most successful on Facebook, currently played by over 280,000 players daily.

Three weeks ago they introduced a Pro Player's Club. For an annual fee of 9.99 dollars, members of the Pro Players' club get access to special features, such as additional mini-games, a performance graph, and no advertising.

Two weeks ago, I was on a panel with Kristian Segrestale, CEO of Playfish, and I asked him about the Pro Player club. He said that it was too early to gauge the success of the Pro Player Club, and that Playfish was looking at it as an experiment.

Playfish's Pro Player Club is the first attempt of a social games company to monetize via a subscription service (that I'm aware of). I doubt it'll be the last. Runescape, the immensely popular Shockwave-based free MMO has for years relied on a free-to-play model monetized by offering premium feature to subscribers.

Another Interesting Monetization Experiment

A few months ago, Zynga introduced an interesting monetization experiment, selling power packs to players of Triumph, their Civilization-lite game. For five dollars, you could get additional resources for use in the game. I'm not sure how successful it was, I have not seen it expanded to other Zynga games.

Oh, and One More Thing about Playfish

Playfish is now cross-promoting their games via a bar on the top of their games. Another smart move that was inevitable, and something that Zynga and SGN have been doing for months.

And since I wrote this post two weeks ago and forgot about it, I should mention that Playfish also released a new game called Pet Society which I'll talk about soonish.

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.

Pokey Paws its Way into the Social Gaming Chart

Takeaways:

Continued growth. Total daily active users for the top ten games grew by 4% in the last two weeks.

Friends For Sale got its mojo back. It added 78,000+ users in two weeks, pretty good for a game that's been around for 6+ months, and had been struggling recently to hold on to its userbase(recently down 240,000 users from its peak of 800,000). Meanwhile, Owned! lost 50,000+ users, so the gap between the two similar gaps is closing. Siqi, whatever you did is working!

Playfish is still the company to beat. They showed massive growth over the last two weeks, gaining 170,000 users across their three apps.

But the big news is the appearance of Pokey! on the charts. To be fair, Pokey! could have been included in the last Social Gaming Chart, but I didn't feel it was a game. Ah, the vagaries of what constitutes a game. Since I put out that chart, I've spoken to a few people (mostly at the Social Gaming Summit) who felt it was a game. I played "Pokey!" again, and noted their leaderboard where people compete to get bones. *sigh* Maybe a leaderboard is all you need to be a game.

Anyway, the discussion of what makes a game a game is a rathole that I'm trying to avoid crawling in. In the meantime, I'm going to follow the lead of Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart who says:

"I know it when I see it."

He was talking about obscene pornography...which if you a game developer, I'm sure it's something you're already familiar with.

I meant the Supreme Court ruling, of course.

Kristian Segerstrale, CEO of Playfish talks about the Iphone as a gaming platform

Kristian and I have been exchanging emails and I've been bugging him to write about the differences between developing mobile games and developing social games.

He decided to talk about doing both at the same time for the Iphone. Check out his post over on the Playfish blog.

He believes mobile is the future of mass-market games and I agree. The really interesting stuff is going to start happening when people discover how to combine mobile with social games.

They are a few companies working on that, and Playfish is in an excellent position to crack that nut. Other contenders: Mytopia (saw their demo recently, and I was very impressed. They've accomplished what we were trying to do at Tenuki, so naturally I think they'll be huge), and Cellufun (they don't have a presence on the socnets yet, but they have some multiplayer titles with game mechanics similar to the first wave of social games on Facebook).

Playfish Dominates the Social Gaming Top Ten

Today, I'm introducing The Social Gaming Chart, a biweekly compilation of the top ten games on the social networks. For now, I'm only covering games on Facebook. Once we see significant traction and easily available metrics for the other socnets, I'll start including them.

The Social Gaming Chart

Note: data was compiled on Thursday, June 5, 2008.

My Take

The social games space is growing. Since I compiled the first social gaming chart just over three months ago, the amount of daily active users of the top ten Facebook games has increased from 2,740,002 to 4,628,872. That's an increase of 69% in three months.

The social games space is changing rapidly. Only three games that were in the top ten three months ago remain: Scrabulous, Texas Holdem Poker, and Speed Racing. All three have fallen in rank, but only Scrabulous lost users. Texas Holdem Poker and Speed Racing gained users. Meanwhile, new companies and game types have replaced and surpassed the old crowd.

The company to watch. Playfish is proving that a company can consistently crank out hit social games. So far, they've released three games (Who's Got the Biggest Brain, Word Challenge, and Bowling Buddies) and each game has reached the top ten. Without cross-promotion!

They've discovered a winning formula: integrate a friends-oriented leaderboard into well-designed single-player flash game based on a proven casual game concept. However, as I suggested in a previous post, I think that games based on this formula will have a shorter shelf-life than games that have direct interaction with your friends(such as Scrabulous and Texas Holdem). Simple single-player games tend to get boring quick. Having said that, people play solitaire for their entire lives, so who knows. But then again, you don't play solitaire with friends.

Regardless, I think Playfish will continue to be successful, pumping out a string of hit games based on this formula. No other company is consistently creating polished, high-quality, flash games for the Facebook audience. I'm interested to see when they'll start releasing multiplayer games, which have more difficult technical requirements. But I doubt they're in any rush.