Social Gaming: a New Frontier

Yesterday I attended a Casual Connect panel on social gaming titled A Perilous Journey: Negotiating the Chasm Between Casual and Social Games. The title was a bit dramatic compared to the panel. However, the panel was quite enlightening. The panelists were Garrett Link of GameHouse, Derrick Morton of Flowplay, and John David (JD) of PopCap and the moderator was David Nixon of Oberon.

The topics ranged from how each participant got into the casual space to metrics and revenue. Each panelist brought a different feel to the discussion. When asked about bringing Bejeweled to Facebook, JD noted that originally Bejeweled was intended to be a relaxing stress-free game. But by adding a social element to it they felt like they needed to make it more competitive, thus adding a one minute time limit to the game. Uno, from GameHouse was an easy game to bring to Facebook because it was already one of the most popular games in the world. It seemed like a natural selection.

The panelists also discussed brand awareness and how they chose the games to incorporate into a social platform. Here’s an excerpt of Garrett and JD discussing brand awareness among their leading social games, Uno and Bejeweled Blitz, both on Facebook.

How to maintain traffic growth and usability was another topic discussed. Uno has seen rapid growth since day one, but especially since the ability to invite friends to play has been active. (It started as just being randomly grouped with three other people around the world). When the traffic spikes get too high for the servers to handle, the GameHouse folks have to adjust quickly. But that’s something they’ve been able to accommodate and definitely something they’re grateful for. The Bejeweled Blitz team saw steady traffic increases for the first couple of months then a sudden stall in uptake. They attributed this to Facebook’s update that let users opt out of posting their game scores into their friends’ feeds. To combat this, they introduced star medals which would be posted in the users feed as they got better at the one minute game. This dramatically increased traffic from then on. JD’s advice for studios wanting to get onto the social platform is to be sure to stay ahead of what Facebook, or whatever social site you’re utilizing, is doing. Don’t get caught unprepared.

As the panel wrapped up, Nixon asked one final fun question: if there was one game out there that you would want to either see on a social platform or NEVER see (because it could be the end of your game) what would it be?

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