Having worked in the console game industry for years, I know a lot of game designers who were extremely critical of games like Mafia Wars or Sorority Life, where quests are engaged by just clicking through a button, and no real action or gameplay took place. That said, as time passed, we understood the role of the games to be extremely casual diversions and perhaps exactly what the audience wanted. The big question is: if someone made a Mafia Wars where instead of clicking a button, you were able to actually engage in the Mafia gunfight, would the same number of players be able to enjoy it casually? Perhaps the mass audience would be less inclined to play, but the hardcore players would love it more. Maybe if the game had an option to either skip battles or play them, you could hit both audiences.

In any case, check out the game, and be warned that it’s very difficult once you get to level 15 or so, because each click gives you less experience. Do you have what it takes to be a Progress War kingpin?

The graphics are great but the game only has one image!

It’s interesting to see celebrities make their way into social games, and the fact that it is a prominent female dieter just underscores the fact that females are the main demographic for games, with 55% of social gamers being women aged 43 on average.  Will this lead to more celebrity endorsements inside social games, I’d guess that this is definitely the case.  It’s only a matter of time before the Ellen talk show decides to do a feature on how a great number of housewives are playing these games, and certainly that will have advertisers and sponsors clamoring to get their name out.

Soon, big names might make their own games, and we’ll see the Oprah Talk Show City or the Ellen Night Club game.  That didn’t work very well for the console game world, but that didn’t stop companies from trying.  The number of terrible sponsored games is too high to count, but even just thinking about it top-of-head, I remember Shaq-Fu being terrible and the Home Improvement game having nothing to do with the show (and barely anything to do with ‘fun’, as well).

Regardless of my concerns about product aggregators, it’s always a guaranteed sign that a market is becoming overly saturated as soon as you have a product aggregator site. In this case, group shopping appears to have hit a new milestone with the launch of the first aggregator site. If you are always searching for the best deal, you can check out 8coupons.

Criteria

To be clear, I’m looking at services that help me do two things:

• Find out what songs/bands/concerts my friends like.
• Listen to those songs in an easy, comfortable way (preferably a streaming music website)

Without further ado, here’s the list.

Meemix

Meemix is a quick, easy way to find new music that you like.  You sign in, and then tell Meemix about the artist you’d like to listen to, which determines the first artist that will be played in your ’station’.  You then set the ‘pulse’ and ‘atmosphere’ settings  of the music you want to hear, and that determines the type of songs that will pop up next in your ’station’ playlist.   The songs are picked well, and each song has great sharing options to send the song by email, Facebook or Twitter.  My playlist went from Thievery Corporation, to Moby, to Morcheeba, and it hit the perfect vibe that I was looking for.

Each user has a profile who has all their favorite songs listed, as well as thoughts and comments that they leave, akin to Facebook Status updates.  What’s also interesting is that each user can make their stations public, and then users can follow each other’s stations, like Twitter.  I found this to be a great way to find new mixes of music.

While listening through songs, there is a neat little option to “M3EP IT UP”, which allows you to leave a comment about the currently playing album, artist or song.  Those comments are then available to others, and can be responded too.  The site is attempting to create discussion around each song, and while there aren’t many posts yet, the idea could definitely be great if Meemix catches on. Give Meemix a try here.

Grooveshark

Grooveshark is about finding your favorite song or album and playing it back to front.  I’ve been using the service for a few months and can safely say that it rarely fails in helping me find the right song.  It’s pretty straightforward: it’s a large database of songs that are searchable and sortable by title, artist or album name.  The content is user-uploaded, so there is a wide, wide variety of music.  The big question is whether they are going to run into legal problems at any point, but if not, it’s one of the best services around.

The social elements come in that you can just toss your favorite songs into playlists that are immediately shareable to anyone else on the service.  This is pretty standard, but combined with the great breadth of music available at the site and the streaming nature of the site, I’m able to precisely define a set of songs that perfectly fit a mood, and any of my friends can tune in at any time.  Friends must ‘follow’ me to easily access my playlist, but that’s as easy as it is on Twitter.

There are all the standard sharing options for each song, and I regularly post a song to my Facebook, knowing that friends can check it out with one click.  There are customizable backgrounds and user pictures, so the site has a really friendly, dynamic feel.  There is also a “popular” area, where you can see the most popular songs on the whole network, but nothing that lets me look at my friends’ aggregated favorites.  They’ve also recently introduced a ‘radio’ feature that attempts to predict your favorite songs based on what you’re listening to, but I haven’t had as much luck with that as I did with Meemix or Pandora.  Head over to Grooveshark and try it out.

Songkick

Songkick is all about concerts.  It starts innocuously, with a user listing their favorite bands and getting email alerts about upcoming concert dates in their town.  However, that’s where things get social.  Once a concert is complete, the user is prompted to submit photos, reviews, videos and setlists from the concert, and share it with friends.  It’s a great way to connect with other people that attend concerts, and an even better way to meet die-hard fans, who go post-crazy the day after a great concert (Wolfmother anyone?).

The other social elements are the very cool profile page, which has a listing of your activity, your favorite concerts and bands, and whatever photos and videos you want.  It really is a concert-based social network, and is a great way to connect with other fans.  That said, the Facebook Connect option means it’s simple to also connect with your real-world friends and find out where they’re going and what they like.  Go find a rockin’ concert at Songkick now.

Last.fm

Last.fm is one of the first social music services, released in 2002 and acquired by CBS in August 2007 for $280 million USD.  It has over 30 million active users based in more than 200 countries, and probably ranks as the largest service on the list.

When using Last.fm, you browse their lists of artists and songs, and find detailed information about every single element of the music.  There are pages dedicated to the artists, songs, concerts, videos and more, and each one has a plethora of social elements.  You can comment on any page, you can view other users’ favorite, and leave little messages on their shoutboxes.  The songs selection is huge, but somehow their relationship with the major labels means that you usually can only listen to a 30 second clip if you find the song by searching for it.  If a song somehow comes up in your Last.fm radio station, you’ll get to listen to the whole thing, but to listen again, you’ll need to download the song at a price.

One of the coolest features of Last.fm is “scrobbling”.  When you listen to a song, that song is recorded to your user profile, and helps form your overall music profile.  You can download desktop clients that will detect what songs you are playing on your desktop music player, be it WinAmp, VLC, Windows Media Player or any others.  This means that all your music tastes get saved back to Last.fm to determine your musical profile.  One of the great aspects of the music profile is that when you look at another Last.fm user, you can see how compatible you are with that user based on your common music interests.

Last.fm was also released for XBox Live recently, which would mean that you could scrobble the songs you listen to while you play games, which is valuable.  Ideally, you’d be able to also compare your music profiles with other XBox Live users. Get your Scrobble on at Last.fm now.

Pandora Radio

Pandora was one of the first streaming song sites available on the web, and continues to stay strong.  The site is simpler, and has less social elements than some of the others on this list, but when it comes to breadth of music and simplicity, Pandora is king.  You start the service by simply entering a band you like, and it forms a ’station’ from the band.  A playlist is formed, and as songs play, you rank them as positive or negative, and your station is pruned to include music you like.  In pure terms of predicting your tastes, Pandora is hard to beat, probably because it has a huge number of users and also a very unique formula that cross-references over 400 musical traits per song.  As of March 2010, Pandora had 700,000 tracks in its library and 48 million users who listened for 11.6 hours per month on average.

The main social element of Pandora is listening to other users’ stations, and the service doesn’t stray from that formula.  Other than messaging and looking at user profiles, there isn’t as much to do socially here, but then again, this is the point of the site.  If I want a selection of music that a friend of mine is listening to, I can get to it in seconds on Pandora.  There are also a lot of share options, so that I can share songs and radio stations with anybody using Twitter, Facebook or whatever service you like.  Pandora likes to brand this as “gifting” a station, which definitely ties it nicely into the world of social applications, but is more of a rebranding of sharing than anything else.  Pandora certainly isn’t the only team to jump on the social bandwagon, though! Enter into the world of Pandora here.

The game makes great use of the star system, as users attempt to build up to a five star hotel, and has a bunch of luxury upgrades as you progress through the game. When I added a nice gym to the hotel, I got up to three stars, and I could see people using the gym. The animations on the characters is very funny, and one of the oddest elements of the game is getting money when I poke my sleeping guests! I guess these are closer to those crazy specialty Japanese hotels than traditional American ones.

Playfish, who is now owned by gaming giant Electronic Arts, has released this game at a time when various types of simulation games are taking over the social games leaderboard. Social City, by Playdom, has recently gained a staggering 5,600,000 users in just two weeks, and Playfish is certainly hoping their game will be as successful.

Citizen sports has had reasonable success on Facebook, with its sports bracket application amassing 600,000 MAU, and other applications having similar successes.  See the roster of Citizen Sports games here.

Financial details were not disclosed, but you can read about the acquisition here.

• Title: Music Pets
• Genre: Pet Management / Music
• Game Developer: Conduit Labs
• Game Publisher: Conduit Labs
• Released: February 2010

Summary:

Music Pets combines music recommendations with the pet management genre to create a unique, high-production social game.  The great collection of songs and pleasing presentation make the game a fun experience.  It would be great to see more social interaction between pets and there is room for more innovation when it comes to the use of music.

Pros:

Great animation and graphics with lots of color.  Good sound.  Great selection of music.  Unique method of playing music for friends’ pets.

Cons:

Limited social features for a pet management game.  A few presentation bugs.

Full Review:

Gameplay:

The goal of Music Pets is to build up experience for your pet, so that he/she gains levels and then has all the stuff he/she wants: a nicer house, a lot of friends and any music they want.  The key here is the music, since your pet can gain levels the conventional way, through giving gifts and visiting friends, but also by playing music amongst friends.  For instance, when my pet Slinky visited my friend’s pet Slappy, I was prompted to play Slappy’s favorite song as we hung out at his house.  I don’t have to play this song and the other music choices were diverse.  From New York rockers the Yeah Yeah Yeahs to George Strait, Conduit Labs has done a great job of securing tracks that most players would actually care to play.

This is a good thing, because you’ll be playing songs a lot for Pets, as it’s one of the best ways to gain experience and money.  Fortunately, you don’t always have to cut songs short, as you can start a song then continue along in your game without having to stop the song.  That said, if you visit one friend then another in rapid succession, you’re going to need to start a new song from the beginning, thereby cutting your first song short.  Also, the song player at the left side of the screen doesn’t have any progress meters, so you’re going to have to play songs from the beginning over and over.  A nice touch is that when a song ends it fades out, which means the game isn’t too jarring.

As you level up and gain coins, you gain the abilities to change your pet type, your color and build up your house.  This is standard fare, but the fact that you also get access to more music means that a powered up pet has the ability to rock all kinds of tunes, which is a nice long term incentive.  You can also buy gold coins using Facebook Credits, which accelerates the pace at which you can build up your house and pet.  The game uses Facebook Credits as its suggested currency, and the integration is very smooth.

My worry about the game is that it mixes two genres that may seem great at first, but after time passes, players may feel it’s a lot of work to jump into this game and hop over to friends’ places to hear music they’ve heard before.  The system has to be designed such that players can get access to more music early, so that everytime they visit a friends’ house, they can hear new songs and get credit for doing things like listening the whole way through.  Ideas like that will keep the game fresh and keep music listeners enthralled.  Otherwise, they’ll end up muting the sound,  playing their own music in the background, and Music Pets becomes Pet Society with less features.

There were occasional bugs in the game.  Some of the pop up windows would remain overlapped and cause me to be unable to open the ‘play music’ window.  Also, some of the home icons didn’t appear at times.  When I stopped a song, then hit the mute button and unmuted, the song continued playing, which was very strange.

Presentation:

The presentation of Music Pets is a treat.  From the cute, original characters to the great music and sounds, the game is pleasant to watch and hear.  The animations can be a bit laggy on a slower computer, because of the big characters and surprising number of moving pieces, but it’s worth it for the fact that the movement breathes life into the game.  The games’ environments and characters feel lively and interesting, and the fact that you can blast a great tune at any point makes it even better.

One big UI frustration for me was the fact that no matter what area you click on, the big curtain wrapper comes down and takes a few seconds to load up the new area.  Even if it is a submenu, like “music collections”.  I would like to see some of the submenus appear without a loading animation to speed up the pace of my game.

Lasting Appeal:

The game has strong basic lasting appeal in the fact that your character can level up almost indefinitely, and there are many great customization options.

The real lasting appeal comes in the music, though.  Players are able to change their Pet’s music preferences by looking at a list of similar artists, and this has immense appeal even outside a game  context.  By finding new music and learning about similar artists and genres, players really have a great opportunity to engage with the game and come back to see what’s popular.  Looking at the image above, we can see that the selection is quite staggering.  Artists like The Raveonettes and TV on the Radio are big name bands whose songs are immediately known and catchy: they suit the game world well.

The other great factor in lasting appeal is the great selection of characters that you can change to.  From little aliens to rocking robots, you can really expand the way you look in the game.  The trick here, though, is that it costs 10 Facebook Credits to change.  That’s right, you can’t change your body at all unless you cough up a dollar in FB credits.  It’s pretty interesting, and if the game takes off it certainly will be a great way to monetize, but only time will tell.

Most other features are purchasable using in game credits, which can also be purchased using Facebook Credits, but also can be earned through gameplay.

Sociability:

Music Pets, a traditional pet care genre game, has all the standard social elements you’d expect.  You give gifts to your friends’ pets, you feed them to keep their energy up, you visit their houses to gain experience, you play music with them to gain experience and you customize your own pet to show off to your friends.  There isn’t much innovative in the social realm on this game, and perhaps we’ll see more as the game iterates in the future.  I’d like to see more interaction between mine and my friends’ music, for one thing.

MetroGames, an Argentenian social games developer, has just secured a $5 million round of series A funding from social games developer Playdom.  The investment will be used to expand MetroGames existing selection of games and also further development on their games platform.  The release is available here.

John Pleasants, the former EA COO and now Playdom CEO, will join the MetroGames board to help guide them on their path to become a “big player in the social gaming market”.  Playdom has been making big strides lately, having acquired Offbeat Creations and its latest title, Social City, has become the fastest growing title on Facebook, accruing over 5 million users in two weeks.  According to data from late last year, Playdom has 28 million monthly game users with 60% of traffic is from MySpace v. 40% from Facebook, although that has certainly risen recently.

Earlier this month, we wondered about Playdom’s strategy with Offbeat Creations, and certainly this move raises a few more questions about Playdom’s strategy moving forward.  With Offbeat, it seemed as if they wanted the development muscle to help power some of their better titles, and I wonder if that is again the goal with this deal with MetroGames.  MetroGames is mostly known for its standalone site, MetroGames.com, which houses high quality Flash games that can be accessed through a login or by using Facebook Connect.  The titles have various social elements, including leaderboards and the ability to directly challenge other players. The games seem as if they would be also perfect for Facebook.

We’ll keep you posted on how this news develops.

]]> http://www.socialtimes.com/2010/03/games-developer-metrogames-secures-5-million-from-playdom/feed/ 1 http://www.socialtimes.com/2010/03/social-gaming-bootstrapping/ http://www.socialtimes.com/2010/03/social-gaming-bootstrapping/#comments Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:08:16 +0000 Raj Dash http://www.socialtimes.com/?p=3895 If you have or are planning to get into social game development on a tiny budget, you need to get financially creative and learn to bootstrap. The practice of bootstrapping a startup is essentially an act of balancing costs against revenues, and it applies as much to a game development studio as any other business. Do it right, and your business will likely survive long enough for your games to have a chance of success — something that’s a necessity given how many small studios and bedroom entrepreneurs are jumping into the social game development space. Here are a few tips on bootstrapping as relevant to game development.

While the costs of developing online social games is far less than for more traditional computer games, there are still costs. If your budget is small, your time to market might be longer than you’d like, which can make the difference between success and failure. Bootstrapping can make the difference to survival.

Bootstrapping has a simple principle: spend as little as possible and differentiate between needs and wants. Then reinvest most or all earnings back into the business, at least until it is financially self-sufficient. This often means minimizing or deferring salaries and keeping all development and operating costs down. Spend on only the absolute necessities, and hold off until absolutely necesssary. In other words, an extra 30″ monitor might be nice for viewing game graphics, but do you really need it right now? If you need an extra monitor, can you make do with something smaller? Do you really need that fancy chair and powerful sound system? Can you rent/ lease equipment instead of buying, as a business write-off? Get into this frame of mind, of asking “do I need it now?” if you want to bootstrap effectively.

Now, there are all kinds of ways to bootstrap and finance a startup, which we won’t go into here, but there are also design and development practices that can help a startup out of the bootstrapping stage sooner, and on the way to social gaming success. While some of the following tips apply to a game studio at any financial stage, all contribute either directly or indirectly towards monetizing your game at the lowest operating costs.

1. Put thought into your design. These days, it’s far too easy to slap together a game and publish it online, hoping the money will come. The old saying “If you build it, they will come” is not necessarily applicable to game publishing. For example, there are over 500K games on Facebook. A few industry experts at GDC 2010 suggested that most of these games are published by inexperienced developers, and that just a little bit more thought in design can help you stand out. By standing out, you improve the chances of gaining a larger player base and thus increase monetization opportunties. This doesn’t mean you need a slick interface and an excessive number of game levels, just that refining your game experience beyond that of similar games will likely be worth the effort. Start somewhere acceptable, then improve your game over time. Online games have an advantage this way over boxed computer games.
2. Study game player psychology. As the legendary computer gaming veteran Sid Meier said at GDC 2010, you as a developer have to admit that game play is a psychological experience. Study this aspect of game design, and you’ll have an edge on the games that don’t take player psychology into consideration. Evoke player emotions to make for a more engaging and addictive game experience, to draw players back again. Repeat players tend to become more loyally, which increases the chances of clickthrough on ads and conversion to micropayments for virtual goods and services.
3. Leverage social media.
   • Your social game shouldn’t just run on a social network, it should leverage the network to attract new users. Add social features to your game, which allow users to brag about their accomplishments, invite friends, gift them, etc.
   • Use Twitter to generate interest.
   • Use Facebook to build a fanbase, then leverage your following, crowdsource for feedback and ideas.
   • Be active on whatever social networks you think are appropriate, and interact with fans and followers. Post relevant information and ask them to reshare that info with their networks.
4. Crowdsource game beta testing. You need real players to try your game, not just your developers. If you have to pay, Flash Game License apparently leases testers out at about $1/user. However, you can crowdsource for testers on your own, if you’ve built a Facebook fanbase and/or Twitter following. Broadcast a message request game testers, and play on the “exclusive opportunity” angle by limiting the number of tester slots. Motivate people to become testers by offering extra points or virtual goods discounts.
5. Show’em how. Showing video trailers of your game can drum up interest, especially if your studio only has one game. No one knows your brand yet. Use your website and/or Facebook Fan Page to give players tips and tricks, in video and text format. This builds loyalty and, you guessed yet, increases monetization opportunities.
6. Monetize. Use in-game advertising and offer virtual goods and services to earn revenues. You can also use Flash Game License for brand sponsorship opportunities, but at roughly US$5K earnings per sponsorship — according to one GDC 2010 speaker — for a Flash game with 2-3 months development effort, this may not be a viable financial option. Cloning your own game and releasing on multiple Flash game portals under different titles and with slightly different features is a monetization strategy that might work. The key is to use in-game ads and offers, at the least. Use of virtual currency comes when game players feel engaged and addicted.
7. Monitor metrics. Slapping on monetization features and driving traffic isn’t enough. Build in the ability for your team to track your game’s social metrics (and non-social), and then study and analyze.
   • Track your DAU, WAU and MAU (Daily, Weekly and Monthly Active Users). If these are significant, CPM (Cost per Mille) ads on, say, your Facebook app’s main page can generate revenue.
   • Study session durations, and track over time. Are users starting to spend more time per session? Can you reward them for their loyalty?
   • Determine where players are stopping play. Maybe there are bugs or other problems with your game. Taking action to improve the game experience goes a long way towards monetization.
   • Most importantly, track server usage, especially peak usage, because if your game goes popular, you might just have to scale up resources.

Are you a social game developer? If you have any other tips for bootstrapping a new game development studio, feel free to share in the comments.

Image credit:

This isn’t the first time EA has created an advertising-based game on Facebook. Before acquiring Playfish, there were several Facebook applications that were only based on promoting console games. These included EA Sports World and Madden IQ, which had a lot of media surrounding the console titles but no real gameplay to speak of. The applications never really seemed to catch any serious buzz, and most stayed below 10,000 MAU. That said, EA has learned the effectiveness of using social media banner networks like Offerpal or AdParlor, and could drive traffic to the applications if they so desired.

That said, games like these are not meant to be anything but promotions, and it certainly provides a more innovative experience than simply watching a video trailer. You begin to get acquainted with the characters, the art style, the setting and the music, and it certainly generates excitement for the game.

Interesting note was that the game didn’t let me enter when using the Google Chrome browser, and I was stuck at the “verify your age” screen. The age pop-up didn’t appear, and if I was a casual player I certainly why I couldn’t proceed into the game. Of course, I don’t know if too many Google Chrome users would be surprised that a site didn’t work in their browser.