Five Lessons for Building Successful Social Games

Kristian Segerstrale( CEO of Playfish)

Social network-hosted games – approached as an entirely different and new game platform.

Games paid for by advertising as well as a monetizing model – players buy in-game items.

1. Create, don't port – Facebook top-ten games are entirely new built-from-scratch games, not existing games moved to the platform. Games are intended to be more fun played in a group than alone. Products and strategy should be from-scratch. Think of social networks as an entirely new platform.

The design is not portable, as the model is completely different from existing platforms.

95% of the market is viral, passed from user-to-user. Content has to distribute and promote itself.

2. Design inside-out – try to make objects around which people interact, not on the framework of the game itself. Don't try to draw people into the game, but into the social framework. The depth of the product itself is not as important as the emotional depth of the social gameplay experience.

“who has the biggest brain” - set up as a game-show mechanic with your friends as the audience. Scores are expressed as little cartoon pictures and not just numbers.

“Bumper Stars” -- real-time score ladder. Game contains incentives to encourage viral distribution, although you must be careful not to run afoul of facebook policy.

“Friends for Sale” - very rudimentary looking game, but the metagame is the key here. You can buy and sell friends in a kind of virtual stock-market.

Games with interesting social mechanics trump games with superior game design.

3. Learn from your numbers - Test your intuition with actual numbers. Create processes that can deal with rapid interactive design and be ready to adjust your design to improve your numbers. Basically this is a “because it can be done” argument. It is easy to improve gameplay of social network games on-the-fly, so do it.

Create a culture away from your game itself so you can tweak the focus. Collect all of the data you can and use it to change the character of your game on-the-fly to tune the experience.

4. Listen to your players – Facebook users are very good at providing feedback if you ask for it. They'll bury you in feedback if your game has a non-trivial number of users.

Choose who you listen to. If only a few people dislike something new, it might not be important in the grand scheme of the game.

5. Balance Monetization and Distribution Objectives – Monetizing is linked to distribution. In a viral market, your success is based on how active your players are, how they promote your game, and your moneymaking scheme.

Test often and trust your numbers more than your most vocal players.

Target many different parts of the social spectrum, from hardcore players willing to pay a lot for high-end content to casual players willing to pay a few cents for a minor feature.

Conclusion

Social networks are different from all other game platforms. Assume nothing and learn something new every day.

To see Kristian's blog, head over to blog.playfish.com

Page 3