Heyzap(YC W09) Launches Platform to Take Facebook Games to Entire Web | Hacker News Reader

Heyzap(YC W09) Launches Platform to Take Facebook Games to Entire Web

games.venturebeat.com

49 pointsdwynings7 comments

Given that Facebook has >300M users, how necessary is this? Are there really many people who want to play social games but not join the largest social network in the world?

Edit: The thought occurred that Facebook may be blocked in China, and it appears that it is (or at least was for awhile? My hits were all for one instance of them blocking it, but I couldn't find anything about whether it stayed blocked). So that could be part of the reason for doing this.

There is a massive audience for games outside of Facebook.

Several sites on the internet number below or around Alexa 1,000 catering to these players - ArmorGames.com, AddictingGames.com (MTV), Kongregate.com, MiniClip.com etc.

For as many users as Facebook has it's still only 1/4 of the internet.

I bet that a pretty high percentage of some of those sites' userbases have Facebook accounts.

But that's true that it's only 1/4 of the Internet.

I don't think there is a lot of crossover, I've published a few casual games that promoted things like Twitter and Facebook apps, and the conversion rate from portals to twitter and fb has been horribly low every time.

One game of mine that did about 1.2 million plays on portals peaked at I think 400 users on the Facebook version, which was promoted within the portal version.

Recently King.com launched a big facebook app called Funflow, which they linked to from over 100 games in ditribution and several large, many-millions-of-plays new releases. They've probably had close to 100 million plays across their games this year, yet their fb app hasn't quite hit 1 million users.

http://www.appdata.com/facebook/apps/index/id/212391322553

You have to understand that there is a difference between real Facebook users and older users who just made accounts so they could feel that they were participating in social networking. Real Facebook users have tons of personal information on their accounts. They are more reluctant to use Connect to login to other websites for the same reason that people don't use their real names when making user names. Older Facebook users don't have the type of network to actual get much use out of Facebook. They actually think Facebook is a place to meet people, a notion a real user would consider completely ridiculous. Older users don't view Facebook as an online portrait of their offline lives and are more likely to use Connect.

Here's a data point for you: not ten minutes ago, I went to try a games site, it asked me for my Facebook login, and I bailed. That's probably the tenth time I've done that in the last few years (I'm a very occasional FB user and just can't be bothered). Admittedly, I'm far from any of the demographics Heyzap would be targeting, but still, it's a data point.

Sweet!

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