Name It! and the potential of player-generated content in social games

A couple days ago I mentioned that SGN had launched a new game and that I was going to write about it. Well, today is the the day.

The game, Name It, is a port of Scattergories, the party game where you get a list of ten categories and a letter of the alphabet, and you have to think of a word for each category and starts with that letter, in less than a minute. If I butchered that explanation, check out Wikipedia for a more detailed explanation.

However, unlike Scattergories, new categories can be added to Name It by players. Scattergories has 192 categories, Name It, in its second week since launch, has over a thousand, ranging from lunch meat to porn stars. Of course, when you let anybody add categories, you end up with a lot of crap, which is why Wikipedia has admins. Name It is in desperate need of admins. Categories such as "abcdef", and "!!!" bruise the playing experience. They don't kill it, though, the core gameplay is still fun even if you happen on a bad category.

Putting the management problems aside, allowing players to generate the game content is a Holy Grail of the gaming industry. Content creation is the most labor intensive and costly part of game production. Imagine if World of Warcraft could outsource their content creation to its players. Blizzard, the company behind WoW, would save 10s of millions of dollars a year. I believe that's what Raph Koster's company, Areae is trying to accomplish with Metaplace, an MMOG created by the players.

Social gaming offers a very fertile environment for player-generated games, particularly if you can tap into the desire for players to create content for their friends. The early Facebook app, Quizzes, did this very well, and was extremely popular.

User-generated trivia has also done well on social networks. Thousands of people have created movie trivia quizzes on Flixster's very popular Movies app. Off Facebook, the U.S. version of Cyworld has incorporated the trivia creation engine from the site MightyQuiz.com and seen a marked increase in engagement. I believe strongly that a user-generated trivia app could succeed quite well on Facebook, in fact, it was the last project we were working on at Tenuki before I shut down the company. By we, I should say Brett Harris, an awesome developer who recently started blogging about developing for Facebook and single-handedly built Tenuki Trivia.

SGN is calling Name It a wiki-game, borrowing the moniker from wikis under the premise that the content is user-generated. What really intrigues me is the potential to apply user-generated content to machine learning. Yes, I just went all geeky on you.

I'll explain. Categorization is difficult for computers. Try the example of a chair. Chairs come in countless shapes and sizes and yet you know instantly a chair when you see one. Computers can't. Chairness has to be defined for them. They are provided the schema for a chair and then they apply this schema to objects and determine if the object matches the schema of a chair.

A game like Name It provides the possibility of creating thousands of schema that can be used to teach computer how to recognize countless objects, for free. That's making games useful. If you're interested in this geeky aspect of games, check out the work of Luis von Ahn, creator of the CAPTCHA, among other things.

That's all, folks!

Takeaways from the Interplay Social Gaming Conference

Since I didn't take notes, here are some of the things still rattling around my brain days later:

Channels Panel: Zynga and SGN suggested that they might be working on linking their networks. The basic idea is that they would sell clicks to companies wanting to get their properties in front of the gaming audience and the network that served the game link that was clicked through would get the credit. I know both these companies have greater ambitions than to be ad, *cough*, I mean, game networks, and this detente suggests that they may be differentiating toward different aspects of social gaming. Or not. :)

Platforms Panel: Jessica Alter of Bebo indicated that AOL Instant Messenger would be integrated directly into the Bebo platform. The AOL-Bebo acquisition just closed, but Jessica indicated that this was an immediate priority for the AOL-Bebo team. Despite my general bearishness on real-time games in the near future, I think Bebo may soon offer the best opportunity for real-time games. One immediate beneficiary should by the team leading the QQ Games US division, who already have a close relationship with AOL and would benefit immensely from the social network traffic (that is if people can get over having to download the QQ client).

VC Panel: Jeremy Liew, Lightspeed Venture Partners believes that there is an opportunity for a social games publisher to emerge much in the way that EA did back at the birth of computer games. His thesis rests on the presupposition that a publisher can create/acquire a succession of hit games. It's a risky proposition (especially for a VC) considering that so far, no publisher has seen more than 1-2 hit games in their portfolio, despite hundreds of games being launched on Facebook. Meanwhile, Naval Ravikant, Hitforge felt that Facebook was no place for venture-backed companies, since the revenue wasn't there yet, but it was great for lifestyle businesses. Accel's Ping Li is looking at gaming infrastructure plays, which strikes me as the typical venture approach, i.e. avoiding content risk and focusing on platform plays.

Advertising Panel: Sadly, I missed most of it due to , but there was an indication that branded virtual items were already becoming a big source of revenue.

Virtual Economy Panel: I heard the moderator was amazing, some guy name Bret. Extremely handsome and wow, was he funny. Okay, it was me, I was the moderator. The panel agreed that if you don't THROUGHLY think through your economy before you launch your game, you will be screwed. Siqi Chen, CEO of Serious Business indicated that he believes the slowing growth of Friends For Sale is due to inflation - simply put, it's becoming too expensive for newer players to buy anyone. I think it's a very reasonable assumption, and shows how important economy is to the overall health of a game. Fraud was also a huge issue for all the panelists, Siqi revealed that 3 of his 12 employees did nothing but handle fraud issues. That's 25% of the headcount for all you kids out there making your business plans.

Siqi also made the claim that just being on a panel with him would get us laid. I'm not going to say whether it's true or not, you'll have to judge by the title of this Facebook group.

Developer Analytics and Playfish both offered excellent presentations which I will link to once they get them posted. And I'll possibly comment on them.

Do Gaming Networks Work?: Reach and Engagement Numbers for Zynga and SGN

As anyone who reads this blog knows, back in February Zynga and SGN opened up their game networks to 3rd party developers. For the moment, these networks are essentially link exchanges facilitated through game bars embedded on the 3rd party developer's canvas page.

Fortunately, these embedded game bars resolve to unique addresses. For Zygna, it's zbar.zynga.com, and for SGN, it's sgnbar.com. You'll note the graphs below list zynga.com, not zbar.zynga.com, that's because Compete doesn't provide breakdowns on subdomains. However, according to Quantcast, ~99% of traffic to zynga.com is to the zbar.zygna.com subdomain, so for my purposes, zynga.com is the domain of interest.

First let's look at monthly unique visitors:



When looking at the graph, it's important to note that most 3rd party games didn't come onto the network until March. Keeping that in mind, April is the most telling month, Zynga increased their monthly uniques by 200,000, while SGN, increased by 300,000.

How much of this traffic increase can be attributed to the 3rd party games, and not growth in the game network's core properties? In SGN's case, all of it, their core properties have been in steady decline since December. I suspect, it's helped Zynga, as well, since growth in their core games has flat-lined, as well.

So it's seems that when in comes to acquiring new users, the game network strategy has worked very well for the game networks.

One interesting note, SGN claims 1 million daily active users, which is the aggregate number from all their core game apps. However, if you look at the monthly uniques count, it's around 425,000 for the ENTIRE network, including 3rd party developers. That suggests that there's an immense amount of user overlap between SGN's core game properties. If the Compete data is accurate, then it's unlikely that SGN has more than 400,000 UNIQUE daily active users across their core properties, with the caveat that their flagship game Warbook oddly does not have the gamebar embedded in it, so its visitors are not included in the graph above. However, Warbook has less than 40,000 DAU, most of whom probably play other games in the SGN network and are thus counted.

According to Adonomics, Zynga has about 2 million DAU. However, their monthly unique visitor count is 800,000. Again, suggesting that more than half of that audience plays more than one game and is counts multiple times in Adonomics aggregate number.

Having just pointed out the massive overlap, I'd like to point out that if we DID NOT see at least a 50% overlap of users between games, it would be much more troubling. It would imply that most users do not play more than one game in a game network, and therefore a game network would offer no value. So, clearly the games network strategy is working.

UPDATE: After being reminded by Joe G. of Flixster that Compete only tracks U.S. visitors, it occurred to me that the gap between DAU and monthly unique visitors could be a result of a large number of Zynga and SGN's users being located outside the U.S. That would hardly be surprisingly, since Facebook (which provides the large bulk of the traffic) has an enormous international audience.

With that in mind, now I'm concerned that we might not be seeing the overlap I identified above, which WOULD suggest that game networks are effective at sending users to other games on their network. Right now, I can't answer this definitively one way or the other because of lack of the necessary data. Sigh.

Now that we have the monthly unique visitor count, we can compare SGN and Zynga to destination game sites that do not have social network integration. Which I will have to do tomorrow, as Compete's web server is currently down. Drats.

Now, let's look at pageviews, one of the standard metrics of engagement:


Again, April is the interesting month here, since it's the most recent data and it's the month where both networks had fully launched. In April, Zynga's pageviews increased slightly, but SGN's pageviews took a 25% nosedive. Why? I have no idea. Speculate in the comments.

Finally, my favorite metric, average length of visit. As a measure of engagement, I find this metric to be most accurate when comparing different types of games.



Both SGN and Zynga experienced a severe drop in engagement from March to April. This drop is troubling. Both networks added 20+ games between late February and April and engagement drops. You would think it would be the opposite, that engagement would increase, as users spend time trying out the new games. But they spend less time, suggesting that either they got bored fast of the new games, or they didn't even try the new games. Which I think may have happened, since both networks operate as link exchanges that offer more presence to games that send them traffic. As a result, only games with significant traffic independent of the network got heavy placement on the gamebar. I doubt many small games got a significant boost in traffic from participation in either game network. Looking at three games on the Zynga network: Perfect Warrior, Downman, and PuzzleBee; none show any noticeable bump in growth during the last three months. In fact, PuzzleBee saw a slight decline.

I think that unless Zynga and SGN become much more generous in promoting small non-viral games, both networks will not see any boost in engagement.

The fact is, many of these small games are highly engaging, but lack virality. They need a network to promote them in order to succeed. The 1:1 economics of link exchanges will not solve this problem.

It appears for the moment, that game networks benefit the network, far more than they benefit the independent developers. I hope that will change.

Predictions

My prediction is that we'll see growth plateau quickly for both game networks, topping out by July (barring acquisitions, and expansion into new markets which will mask their stagnation in the maturing Facebook market).

My other prediction is that we're going to see a lot more acquisitions designed to mask stagnant growth.

My other other prediction is that Texas Holdem Poker will dominates all social networks.

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.

SGN v. Zynga Round 3 - SGN buys 1 million active users

I have a suspicion that brand advertisers don't really get the social networking app arena. Why? Because Zynga and SGN have both been buying up apps with lots of dead installs. Dead installs are only useful for two things, cross-promoting your others app via email (against Facebook's TOS), or pitching to advertisers as reach. You know, "reach", how many users engage with your site/app in a given period. For instance, SGN is pitching 50 million installs, though I doubt less than 10% of those user will interact with a SGN game in the next six months. However, advertisers might well read 50 million installs and get excited. It's like politics in Chicago, even corpses count.

Regardless, SGN needed to do something. Their core game apps: WarBook, Jetman, Fight Club, and Street Race have seen massive dropoffs in usage since their peak, losing more than 70% of their traffic - from 700,000 DAU in mid-December to just under 200,000 DAU as of today. It's hard to pitch yourselves as a traffic acquisition method to other game developers if you don't have the traffic.

The recent acquisitions (esgut, Nicknames, Friend Block, Oregon Trail, Free Gifts) have added over 1 million active users to their core userbase. Wow. Did I say dead installs, because that's some LIVE traffic.

However, SGN made some excellent strategic purchases that add more value to their company then just traffic.

The guys as esgut make apps that show a clear understanding of the nature of social networks: Entourage, Superlatives. These apps are about showing off your connections with your friends which is really at the core of social network usage for anyone under the age of 21. Nicknames shares this understanding as well.

Until Friends for Sale! came out, not many people realized the value of linking friendship display and games. SGN clearly does, and I hope with the guys at esgut and Nicknames on their team, we'll see some games coming from them that connect more deeply with friendship values.

However, the brilliant move was acquiring Free Gifts. I'm sure that Shervin (CEO of SGN) is looking to create a virtual goods economy. Free Gifts is Facebook's top gifting app, making it a great launchpad for premium virtual goods integrated into SGN's game network.

Games+friendship+virtual goods. Now we're getting somewhere.

Bunchball raises another 4 million bucks.

Mashable broke this a few days ago, but I missed it amongst the SGN acquisition news (which I have yet to comment on). Anyway, Bunchball raised 4 million in its series B. Seems kinda low, considering Zynga and SGN both raised 10 million in their Series A.

But then again, Bunchball isn't fighting to become the dominant social game network. However, in many ways, Bunchball is much further down the path than either Zynga or SGN. Bunchball has an amazing product, a complete game platform and analytics suite, complete with avatars, currency, leaderboards, etc.

Rather than focusing on attracting eyeballs with hopes to get acquired by EA, Bunchball has sold their services to large media brands like NBC. Check out the customized games site they've created for the Office, it's really impressive.

With a team of 11 developers, I imagine they're profitable, so why the need for more money?
I suspect they're going to push into the social games space in a major way. Their first foray failed: Karma Games and Avatars was the first game launched on Facebook, attained a massive install base and now has only ~4000 active users. That's a fail, if you ask me. However, the social games space is too hot for a company with great technology to not take a second chance. Besides in the current climate I'm sure they got a great valuation.

Recently, they've joined the Zynga network, which suggests they're trying some new approaches to the Facebook market. However, I think as long as they're focused exclusively on real-time games, they're going to be stuck with low daily active user numbers.

Having said that, their games are much more engaging then those of Zynga. The average visit length for Bunchball is 10:40 minutes vs 2:40 minutes for Zynga. (thanks, Compete!) That's the thing about real-time games, they keep users around longer.

It seems to me that the key to the whole enchilada is combine asynchronous with real-time games (like Zynga wisely has done with Scramble). The asynchronous part gives you the virality, and the real-time part promotes longer periods of engagement.

Just my two cents. In any case, good luck to Rajat and his team at Bunchball, they truly are pioneers in the social gaming space, having been at it since 2005, and have taken many arrows in the back. I encourage you to read Rajat's post on the history of Bunchball if you want to see what it's like to enter a market that just isn't ready yet.

As Promised: The Demographic Breakdown of the Top Three Game Developers on Facebook

Note 1: I spoke with Shervin Pishevar, CEO of SGN a few hours ago and he confirmed the numbers for SGN were correct.

Mark Pincus also contacted me to let me know that Zynga had 1.4 million daily active users. One million from the games on Zynga, and an additional 400,000 from the CLZ acquisition. The apps from the CLZ aren't games, so I don't count them, but 1 million DAU seems to put Zynga well ahead of other game developers in terms of reach.

Note 2: My demographic information does not include the 13-17 range. I suspect Developer Analytics can't collect it due to Facebook's privacy policy. Sorry about that, I recognize it's a very interesting demographic, especially for people moving onto the Myspace platform.

Note 3: Regarding overlapping users. According to Developer Analytics, none of these games have more than 20% overlapping users (even within their own network) with the exception of Vampires and Zombies (38% overlap) and Attack! and Triumph (also weirdly 38%). I find this very interesting and surprising, I expected a lot more overlap. I should probably look at the overlap question in a future post.

The Takeaway:

SGN games attract an overwhelmingly male audience. They tend to skew slightly younger as well, with the exception of Pirates which is only ~5% of their total audience. I believe this is due to their content: fighting (Fight Club), medieval strategy (WarBook), and car racing (StreetRace) are all genres that historically have skewed male. Jetman, well...I'll let someone else figure out Jetman.

Zynga also attracts many more men then women, with the exception of Scramble which is the only game among the top three developers dominated by women(63%). I think Zynga's male leaning can also be attributed to content, strategy games skew male. However, card games as a category tends to be more gender-balanced, though not necessarily when it comes to gambling type games like Poker and Blackjack. The age of Zynga players is spread more evenly among the three age segments, but with ~50% in the 22-25 age bracket.

Blake Commagere's Monsters games also have ~50% of their users in the 22-25 age bracket. They also have a fairly even male-female ratio. The outlier being Slayers with an only 23% female audience. I believe Slayers was the last Monsters app to be release with a tagline about slaying those annoying monsters. For the female audience, slaying isn't as fun as infecting? Somehow I think it comes down to the simple fact that infection is primarily a social activity, but slaying is a perceived as a violent activity. If anyone has thoughts on this please leave them in the comments.

Points to ponder:

• Word games appear to have the highest percentage of DAU: Zynga's Scramble (15%) and the Agarwalla's Scrabulous (24%). Both have large female audiences compared to other games. So are women overall more active gamers then men? I have some data gathered from the casual games and virtual worlds industries that answers that question, but it'll have to wait for a future post.
• Why are half of nearly all players of the games listed here in the 22-25 age bracket? Is that Facebook's largest demographic as well? Or is it due to factors that affect most 22-25 Facebookers, e.g. killing boredom at their first real job.

Again, special thanks to the guys over at Developer Analytics for making such a kick-ass product.

Top Ten Games on Facebook with Detailed Demographics

Note: DAU = Daily Active Users (which is the metric this list is based on)

Brief Analysis:
Despite all the recent posturings by Zynga and SGN, neither companies has more than one game in the top ten. That honor goes to Blake Commagere.

Most games, with one exception, have a significantly higher ratio of male players. Does this mean men play more games? Answer: No. It means that no one is making games that appeal to female players - I'll post on that in the future.

Interesting bits:

• Jetman has virtually no users over 26.
• Scrabulous (and Vampires!!!) has an equal male-female ratio.

Come back tomorrow, I'll be posting the demographic breakdown of all the top games from Zynga and SGN.

Special thanks to www.developeranalytics.com for providing the demographic info!