Are you at SXSW and have a Facebook profile that’s not up to par? Perhaps you think your profile gives off the right first impression but in reality, you are just turning people away! Whether or not you have a tight profile game, you should come get a free professional makeover today followed up by a discussion about optimizing your online persona.
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Days into SXSW it’s clear that location based services are fighting to take the lead spot as the thousands of Interactive festival attendees are all using the location products. Foursquare and Gowalla are competing for the top spot, but by now it’s clear that Foursquare has become the defacto service despite Gowalla’s strikingly good looks. Whrrl, a service that you probably can’t remember how to spell the first time around, has street teams trying to get users to install their app.
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If you are looking for a job in social games, you better be ready to be guided by metrics and not just your creative genius. That’s what Scott Jennings told a small groups of gaming enthusiasts and curious minds during a conversation led by him and James Au at SXSW 2010. It was in response posed to him by Social Times about what specific skills social game developers need that traditional game developers don’t have.
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This week’s social gaming news included Namco and Konami entering social gaming with Pacman and Frogger, Raj covering a special report on emotions in social games at GDC 2010, OfferPal releasing a report indicating that 30% of gamers can’t afford virtual currency, MySpace and hi5 announcing a big shift to games, and Digital Chocolate releasing NanoTowns and Sony releasing their classic PoxNora on Facebook.  Read on for more!
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Do you remember when gaming just used to be called gaming, instead of being fragmented into a number of terms: casual gaming, social gaming, flash gaming? What do all these terms mean, and why care?

Well if you didn’t already know, this has been an important week in game development. The FGS 2010 Flash Gaming Summit took place on Mon Mar 8, and GDC 2010 Game Developers Conference started the day after and wraps up Sat Mar 13. Both conferences have looked at various aspects of game development, including coding, design, audio, legal and more. Naturally, during conference sessions, these types of gaming get brought up regularly, and if you’re not familiar with them, if might be worthwhile learning the differences. They are in fact distinct terms and loosely defined below: Read the rest of this entry »

Dr Robert Zubek of Zynga gave a fascinating talk, “Engineering Scalable Social Games,” at GDC 2010 Game Developers Conference about how Zynga has scaled up their computing resources to handle an increase number of players as well as increased usage. While the talk was fairly technical, here is the gist.

The primary problem: Social games by their very nature will attract increasingingly more players, and your servers have to be able to cope. A few reasons for growth:
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For this week’s Podcast Friday, I had the opportunity to sit down with Hussein Fazal, the CEO and co-founder of AdParlor.  We discussed AdParlor’s current strategy, their brand new auction feature, Facebook credits and the future of social advertising and media.  The full interview is below.

 

 Interview with Hussein Fazal, CEO and Co-Founder of AdParlor: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This morning, Big Fish Games announced they will be releasing their second Facebook game, entitled My Tribe. The game involves evolving a tribe of people on a remote island. Big Fish is known for its high production value games, and this game is no different: the graphical and general aesthetic quality of the game is very high.
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At GDC this year, Gareth Davis, program manager for games at Facebook, went on record as saying that “pretty soon all games will be social”, and explained that Facebook, with 100 million players per month, is “the biggest game platform in the world”.  Well if all games are trending towards becoming social, I thought it’d be interesting to analyze just how social console games already are.
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When it comes to a giant conference like GDC 2010, there are always great talks to be heard, but a few like XEO Design President Nicole Lazzaro’s discussion, “4 Most Important Emotions for Social Games,” really stand out. This is the kind of talk every social game developer should hear, as should every game player who wants to know why they’re spending so much time adopting stray pink cows, or what have you.
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