Where's the Social Gaming Chart? And why I, and many others, focus on Facebook too much

I decided to make the Social Gaming Chart a monthly feature. Mainly, because not enough interesting things were happening biweekly (and because I forgot to compile the data on Thursday, mea culpa.)

I often feel that games on Facebook get an undue amount of attention by bloggers. I thought about why I spent so much time covering it, while giving interesting developments in the wider web the short shrift. And I realized, it's because there is a leaderboard.

Duh. Any game designer could have told me that had I thought to ask. This is not an essay about the power of a leaderboard, so all I'll say about it is that Playfish's current design model is based around adding a leaderboard to a single-player casual game and look how well they're doing.

Of course, the reason that they're a leaderboard available at all is because Facebook releases the data on all its applications, giving us a reliable and (relatively) unfiltered view of individual successes in context of their peers. Apples to Apples.

On the larger web, we have to rely on data gathered secondhand by Hitwise, Comscore, Compete, Quantcast, and Alexa. None completely reliable, often challenged by companies (who then refuse to share their internal numbers), smaller sites are overlooked, and so we can can only paint an opaque picture. And worse for those companies, we don't have a reliable leaderboard, so bloggers talk about them less.

One of my favorite conference speakers, and I am hardly alone, is Daniel James, CEO of Three Rings. Because he shares his data. Entire business plans are built on the data he shares. If more online game companies were more forthcoming about their traffic, then they'd get a lot more ink and goodwill. Though I doubt blogger goodwill is worth much, and I doubt you can amortize it. (Yes, a financial statements joke. First and last hopefully.)

So kids, if you want to raise your profile as an industry be liberal with your data. I'll be happy to publish it.

Here's a list of charts from other branches of the games industry:
Casual Downloadable games - http://www.casualcharts.com/
PC/Console Games - http://www.vgchartz.com/
Mobile Games - coming soon. Story here. http://www.cellular-news.com/story/31439.php
MMOS - nothing. (http://www.mmogchart.com/)
Virtual Worlds - Kzero is using Alexa data which is the most unreliable of all sources, IMHO.
Flash games - Hey Jameson, Mochi should totally do this. You guys have the data.
Social games (off Facebook) - nothing worthwhile
Casual Games portal - nothing (data aggregated with parent company data)
Casual MMOs - nothing
Other online games - nothing

Let me know if I forgot anything.

Final note: Going to be at Casual Connect all week if anyone wants to chat. bret_terrill at yahoo dot com.

Social Gaming Chart: Bored, yet?

Wow, this chart going to get boring soon, same ten games, slightly difference order.

That in itself is interesting. Apparently, no new game that has been released in the last few weeks has gotten enough traction to reach the top of the charts.

The big boys, SGN and Zynga, have been extremely quiet. Neither have released any new games that have entered my radar (on Facebook, at least). Sorry, except one. SGN did release a game similar to the party game Scattergories that I think has interesting possibilities (probably post about it soon).

Meanwhile, (Lil) Green Patch has risen to be the third most popular game on Facebook. And I'm still not completely convinced its a game. I suspect they are retaining users better since that added an arcade of Flash games to their app. Included is the game Bloons which has been shown to be crazy popular in just about every place it pops up.

Mob Wars also saw pretty amazing growth. 14% in 2 weeks. I predict that Mob Wars will reach #3 sooner than later. However, I don't see Friends For Sale! or Owned leaving the top slots any time soon.

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.

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.