What games work best on Facebook? January 15, 2008
Posted by jeremyliew in asynchronous gaming, casual games, facebook, game design, game mechanics, games, games 2.0, gaming, platforms, social networks.trackback
Three good blog posts recently about games on Facebook.
Brian Green talks to a developer with two games, one casual and one hardcore, and based on that concludes that hardcore games do better:
I suspect the reason is because people still enjoy a good game, even if it has “hardcore” aspects like direct, zero-sum competition. Even though the party game was less confrontational, it probably didn’t include as many engaging elements as the first game. So, more people played and stuck with the game.
What he is really saying though seems to be that good games are better than bad games. Matt Mihaly checks the list of Facebook games with most daily users and finds that the top ten are all casual games, and notes that:
…good games on FB are as much about communication and/or self-expression as they are about gameplay.
I completely agree. As Matt notes in his post, there have been two paths to success for Facebook games. One has been to build lightweight “proto-games” that spread virally on the back of self expression or communicaiton. The other has been to build true games with complex and engaging game dynamics. These games do not grow as rapidly, but they do draw much higher daily engagement rates.
Nabeel Hyatt extends the analysis to compare multiplayer games to singleplayer games on Facebook.
He finds that:
Multiplayer social games such as Warbook and Scrabulous average 11.4% active daily users, a good 30% higher than the average top Facebook app (8.01%). I’m sure if we could actually get engagement, attention, and retention metrics we’d see the same trend. This combined with the relatively high percentage of games represented in the top 25 applications (7 games) would suggest that there is simply a lack of quality, socially-focused games on Facebook.
I wholeheartedly agree with Matt and Nabeel. I think that over the next few months there will be a number of exciting social, multiplayer casual games with good gameplay dynamics built on Facebook and the other social networks as they open up. Teams comprising of experienced game designers and experienced social media/viral marketing experts will be best positioned to create these games. I am actively interested in hearing from such teams.
Jeremy,
Have you heard of AvantGame, by Jane McGonigal?
She has some excellent perspectives on this subject: http://www.avantgame.com and has done some really inspirational work.
In active collaboration with prof. greg niemeyer at uc berkeley, she’s also working on “Organum”: http://studio.berkeley.edu/organum/future/index.htm
Let me know if you see anything of relevance in all this…happy to faciliate ‘hello’s all around.
What he is really saying though seems to be that good games are better than bad games.
It seems obvious, doesn’t it? But, most game developers automatically believe that “casual game” means “better game”, even if the game has poor gameplay. Sometimes game developers need stuff explained to us very slowly.
Since the point of making a game for the person who made the games I mention is to make money, the more popular game is probably the better option to pursue. In this case, the more popular game was the one about medieval knights and swords and zero-sum (one winner requires one loser) game mechanics instead of the one about throwing a party and inviting your friends. Most game developers would assume the former was too geeky with “hardcore” mechanics and that the latter would be the more popular game for a wider number of people. I point out that the knights-and-swords game even attracted a large female audience, something that games of this genre rarely do, in a comment to that post.
The subtle point of the article, aimed at game designers, is that we don’t necessarily need to throw out our development experiences just because we’re dealing with a “casual” audience. A good game will still succeed, and you don’t need to worry about a game having “too hardcore” of a theme like knights and swords and tough gameplay mechanics.
thought this might be relevant also…
http://www.contentsutra.com/entry/419-stats-on-games-on-demand-users-from-indiagames/
Big investment for Zynga — I think people would love to hear any comments you have, being that you’re on a “games” kick as of late with your blog. LSVP was noticably absent from the round.
@ Preetam, I only know Jane by reputation and would love an intro
@ Steve, I think what Mark Pincus is doing with Zynga is fantastic and is absolutely the right approach. Two requirements for building a big company in this space (in my opinion) will be to build a portfolio of games, and to be cross platform; Mark is doing both of these. I believe that the recently announced round was led by previous investors who wanted to increase their levels of ownership.
Agreed with Brian, I still think it’s all about game design and great games with casual appeal are harder to create than hard core sounding ones.
Still, knowning who your friends are opens up a new dimension for game design that we haven’t seen the start of yet. The next year or two should see a very rapid evolution on entirely new types of competitive and cooperative gameplay mechanics designed to be played with friends. Not multiplayer or single player, but something social inbetween. All that ‘game 2.0′ hype originally created around the PS3 may well come into its own, perhaps not on any home console, but rather on social networks.
As a shameless plug, here’s one team you, jeremy, may be interested in. Check out http://www.playfish.com and our first title ‘Who Has The Biggest Brain?’ (http://apps.facebook.com/biggestbrain/).
We’re a fast growing team of industry veterans backed by $3M in seed focused on social games and playing together. Some further comments about social networks as game platforms also and more information at http://blog.playfish.com.
Brian and Kristian, of course the stats would help bear out that “good” games do better than “bad.” But part of the point was something quite different.
Namely that if you take all single-player games on Facebook (both good and bad) and all multiplayer social games on Facebook (both good and bad) the mean was higher for multiplayer social games. And that was with, imho, a relatively low quality level of multiplayer social games. Essentially that the context of the game actually matters, and in this case Facebook will lean (not surprisingly) on more social game mechanics.