The Flash Games Summit is current going on, which means lots of good juicy info for those who are into casual/social games. Freetoplay.biz has the full liveblog, but a few of the pros in the casual gaming industry got together to give some tips about what developers should know to make social games.
Some of the more interesting parts:
Sana: What is the quality that a Crowdstar or another company would look for to choose to cross-promote, etc.
Dan: What it isn’t is amazing incredibly high polish art or sound. It’s a polished game experience… getting into game easily and understanding objectives. Production values are part of it, but it’s easy to mispend focus on things that aren’t super important to the end consumer. Make sure that you’re thinking about your end user.
This is a big reason why traditional gamers shrug off these Facebook games, is the difference in production quality. In traditional MMOs and console games, production quality is an immense part of the success of the game. Traditional gamers are trained now to look for graphics, sound, and flashiness as a gauge of who the top players in games are. In social games, this hasn’t been the case. There are profitable top Facebook games out there where any nominal artist or web developer could say “I could do that” and have it be 100% accurate. This means that a lot of these games leave something to be desired for the traditional gamer, and they often don’t make it past the first glance.
Luckily, as more and more people are crowding into the Facebook games space, this is changing. You can see a major shift in the level of production quality on these apps. Look at the difference between MyTown and Social City, as an example. Or an even bigger change in quality from Zoo World to Zoo Paradise. Production quality IS starting to matter.
Some other interesting facts:
- Zynga gathers 5TB per day of transaction data
- Playdom have a couple of people with PhD’s helping to manage their economy
- Existing brands (other than Bejeweled) have had limited success on Facebook
- Teams should be looking at revenue per DAU
- Overall, devs are positive about the Facebook currency, claiming it will reduce a barrier to entry
- 30% retention is a good benchmark (monthly?)
- All the developers were really passionate about community engagement being important to their game’s success
Read the full liveblog here.
Tami Baribeau is the Associate Producer for Metaplace, Inc, currently working on Island Life. She is also the Lead Editor of feminist gaming blog The Border House, and the National Facebook Games Examiner for Examiner.com. She can be reached on Twitter or by email.
