I appreciate the clarity and logical discussion Andrew Chen brings to the issue of “offers” on Facebook.

Read more on his blog here.

I really appreciate how easy it is to connect my blog to Twitter, Facebook, etc.

All good fun and makes me realize how simple it is to expose your life to the public eye (and google search crawlers).

I’ve been saying for years that anonymous net usage would come to an inflection point as more and more people are directly connected with family, friends and other real people.

Here we go!

What do you think?

Post here or hit me on twitter at “mark_skaggs”.

Had a wide ranging conversation with a very smart friend this morning about FarmVille, speaking at conferences, and different leadership styles.

During the conversation, he shared how early game developers used to complain that mistakes by retailers ruined the opportunities for their games to become hits.

Because of FarmVille and my experience making hit PC games for Westwood/EA, an instant set of connections flashed through my mind.

“Selling games at retail is like a glacially slow version of selling games on the internet.”

The thought process unrolled:

1. Selling at retail is a glacially slow versus using the internet.

2. The slowness and “physical-ness” of selling at retail creates it’s own set of problems (shelf space, inventory, cost of goods).

3. Debugging the problems with your product at retail are exacerbated by the problems created by selling at retail. (Do players not like the game or did the retailer forget to put it on the shelf?).

Now about selling social games online.

1. “Instant on”: player sees and clicks a link to your game on Facebook and starts playing instantly with no obligations.

2. If the player likes your game, they keep playing. If not, they quit playing. We know how  as game makers how many people are playing the game each day.

3. Without looking at any personal information, we can know when people stop playing the game and can make daily adjustment to add fun, remove boring parts and fix bugs.

4. When a player spends money in your game, it shows up in your bank account that day.

Seems obvious to me. Hope other people see it too:

Don’t waste another minute selling games at retail.

Seriously…stop it. Right now.

Do you see it too or am I off track?

A few minutes ago, a friend typed a chat message to me on Facebook. The last time I saw this friend was 6 months ago at the Game Developer’s Conference.

Before that, I can’t remember the last time I spoke with him. Has it been years?

When we chatted on Facebook, it was like we were still back making games at Westwood in Irvine, CA. He asked about my two oldest sons (he never met my youngest son and daughter) and we talked about blogs and game making.

Trying to think about how we would have talked without Facebook. Fail.

Facebook is like a magic box from a 1950’s B movie, allowing you to connect with friends across time and space.

It’s TIVO for friendships, but better because it does “time shifting” and “geo shifting”.

Powerful stuff.

What do you think?