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.
One of the things I used to do as we were coming into the home stretch on releasing a new RTS game was play test the levels.
It was fun and hard at the same time. I had to put myself in the mindset of pretending to see the level for the first time ever, and try to react as a new player would react to events in the world.
The hard part was trying to take notes and feedback during each play session. Nothing like having to stop ever 2 -3 mins to take notes as a way to ruin your game experience.
Play testing C&C: Generals, I had the idea that if we added code to track the game activities I performed, we could create simple graphs with the information and I wouldn’t have to write any more notes!
Worked like a charm. I could simply play a level and then use the graphs to tune each level based on the graphs.
Some simple patterns emerged. If the graphs showed the simply huge spikes in a repeated pattern of “collect money”, “build lots of tanks”, “attack enemy”, then I knew I was making unsuccessful attempt to crack a base defense or take down an enemy force. From experience, I knew that doing that pattern 2 or 3 times was ok, but when it got to be 4, 5, and 6 attempts, the game would start to get boring so we would use the graphs to go back and tune the level.
That experience taught me the power of using real statistics to help tune game play, rather than simply rely on a sense of “feel”. It’s also one of the reason I enjoy working on Social Games. We can use real stats and numbers to tune and improve the game experience for our players each day if necessary. There’s a sense of real freedom doing things this way. If you’re making a game and haven’t tried it yet, I strongly suggest it.
According to various sources over 10 million people watch “Oprah” each day. Most people definitely consider “Oprah” mainstream.
Compare Oprah’s 10 million viewers with the 20 million people who play Zynga’s “FarmVille” game each day. Or compare it to the 6.5 million people who play Zynga’s “Mafia Wars” each day. (source: developeranalytics.com).
Doesn’t it seem like social games have hit the mainstream?
