Not ashamed of your product on day one?
Then maybe you should be ashamed of launching it way too late
This bunch of legendary figures in the social gaming entrepreneur space seem to be gathered around a kitchen table, but as at least one of them has a PhD in Neuroscience, don’t expect this discussion to be too ‘domestic’.
Women 2.0 and Shirley Lin hosted a panel of four founders & CEOs from social gaming start-ups on April 15th, 2010.
The sold-out crowd listened to startup veterans share best practices, tips, tricks, and even pitfalls of designing and implementing social gaming with a user base experiencing exponential growth.
Rebecca Weeks Watson, VP of Business Development at gWallet, moderated the panel.
Sue Zann Toh, Co-Founder & CFO, told war stories from The Broth’s early days of fixing bugs and keeping servers running.
Barn Buddy, which launched before FarmVille, has grown to 1.7M active daily users amid stiff competition.
Ms. Toh reminded attendees that you can compete with the “big guys” even if your start-up is small by launching early and developing from there.
Mari Baker, President & CEO of PlayFirst, followed up by demonstrating that the players who enter the market first aren’t necessarily the ones that win the end.
“Does anybody remember Netscape or Excite?” she asked a giggling crowd.
One of her tips was to check out the worst performing games for problems to avoid.
Ms. Baker added that having a great product is the biggest key to going viral.
Amy Jo Kim, Co-Founder & CEO, successfully built Shuffle Brain, after years of working on social games for companies like Electronic Arts, Viacom, Yahoo, and LimeLife.
Putting her PhD in Behavioral Neuroscience to good use, Shuffle Brain builds games that exercise the brain to prevent dementia.
Shuffle Brain explored a few monetization models but finally settled on merging with a subscription game site aimed at 50 to 70 year-old users.
Nevertheless, she believes earned and purchased currency models are the most promising ways to monetize social games this year.
With “the free to play/virtual goods [model] you monetize your most avid players the most.”
Blake Commagere agreed that dual-currency models have brought the best monetization opportunities to his games.
Blake created some of the most popular social games on FaceBook including Causes, Zombies, and Vampires.
“Ads…paid for your servers and kept you from starving.”
By acclimating users to purchasing in your game using earned currency, the up-sell to purchasing $1 digital goods is easier.
The entire panel agreed that social games require a different work structure than traditional game titles.
Ms. Baker reminded us that in social games you will spend more “man hours after launch than before.”
Ms. Toh agreed that, “the real work starts after launch.” Mr. Commagere added that if “you’re not embarrassed by your product on day one, then you launched too late.”
I was so impressed by the example Amy mentioned here, she says: “I know for myself I can’t buy the clothes that I might lust after, these days, you know, a lot of people have tightened their belts, but I can get it on Facebook, and I can get my Avatar dressed up really fine.”
Amy has an amazing understanding of social gaming business model, but I wonder if social gaming has reached its peak already or there are further developments and additions in the future?
I was glad to find an answer on http://www.chinasocialgames.com/?p=580
According to the site: “The growth market in vertical social games is a worldwide trend that will require still greater innovation on the part of Chinese and foreign developers alike. But the rewards could be rich: if developers are able to deliver, even the more closed Chinese social networks may open up their platforms—and valuable users—to third party developers.”
Those future developments may make social gaming industry even more common, I wonder if any statistics can tell if game players have different age, education and social rank?
According to this article: http://mashable.com/2010/02/17/social-gaming-survey/ - Casual game-maker Popcap Games (famous for Plants vs. Zombies and Bejeweled) commissioned Information Services Group to perform a survey of people who play social games online. It found that the average social gamer is a 43-year-old woman, despite long-standing social stereotypes about people who play games.
The article adds further: The survey found that 55% of social gamers are female and 45% are male. Females are more avid gamers, too; 38% of females said they play multiple times a day, but just 29% males said the same. Women are more likely to play with people they know (68% vs. 56% for males), and men are more likely to play with strangers (41% vs. 33%) than women are.
I also found this article: http://friskymongoose.com/social-gamers-are-younger-in-the-united-kingdom-says-popcap/ which states that: As has been confirmed elsewhere, the majority of social gamers (albeit a slight majority) are women, with 54% of the total US gamers being women, and 58% of those in the UK.
However, where the numbers become more interesting is when discussing the average age of a social gamer in both regions. In the United States, 46% of social gamers are over 50 years old; in the UK, that figure is only 23%, meaning that gamers in the United Kingdom are adopting social games at a much younger age.
The actual average age of a social gamer in the United States is 48 years old, while in the UK, the average is 38 years old.
With more people spending more time playing online games these days, would this have a negative effects on how people interact with others in the real world? If so, what would these effects be?
They speak about launching your product as soon as possible. I’m wondering whether it is really a good idea to take it literally, does anyone back it up for startups from other fields of business?
I have found an interesting article on that:
http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html
“Launching too slowly has probably killed a hundred times more startups than launching too fast…”
Although I wouldn’t easily disagree on what they had to say, as they were specifically referring to online social games, most likely since it’s where they’re coming from.
You are probably right there Rob, in the end, it is them that were in these situations and have ‘field’ experience about launching online products.
Surely, online gaming – and social gaming being part of it – is a huge market which will expand in incoming years. I was wondering, whether in the future those social games would become as complicated and graphically advanced as usual PC and console games? Where would be the border between let’s say social game and MMORPGs (like World of Warcraft for example)? Surely the latter do have a lot of social aspects in them, would it be enough to call those a social game?
I know what you mean Greg, and I think if it becomes a reality (graphically enhanced and complicated games as online games), this will surely be a whole new dimension in online social gaming. But what I’m really concerned with is the consumerist attitude (emphasized by the first speaker in the video) being taken advantage of, and at certain levels, being reinforced upon players of these social online games. I think this is something that people should be aware of, especially since a lot of these online games are geared towards children.
True, a lot of these games can be a real ‘time consumers’ in people’s lives. Not a problem as long as we talk about grown up people that can afford to spend some of their time in virtual world.
Although, children involvement is a completely different story. It was an issue with standard games, with online games, it might become an issues with social games as well. Games’ developers need to think about a solution, defending youngest users from possible risks from playing online social games.
Not really an issue about time, Greg, but more on having such aspirations mentioned in the video, having consumerist attitudes that have cultural implications as well. Yes, some do have only “virtual money” involved, but some online social games do venture into getting paid real money for virtual items in their social games. And this is not only limited to adults, but children as well.
this is one study that looks into this “phenomenon”: http://prod.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a915545742~db=all~jumptype=rss
Sure, real cash involvement might be an issue as well. Still, for me the time consumption is the biggest risk, it all starts from here. We will see if there are any measures taken to make sure risks of online gaming are reduced to absolute minimum.