Ask HN: The state of social games | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: The state of social games

9 pointscoryl7 comments

Hi HN,

I wanted to ask your opinion about the state of social games today. I've been thinking about what I want to do for the rest of my life, and I found the answer could be games. So I'm aligning myself to learn the domain via choice of where I work (social analytics company), my pet projects, what I read/watch/learn, etc.

Upon starting my adventure, I came across videos such as Mark Pincus' Stanford talk, Siqi Chen's presentation, and a bunch more. They talk about the importance of analytics, testing, and metrics driven decision making.

Thinking about it, I realized that these companies are actually marketing optimizations; they don't optimize for game experience first. Never in the history of game development has anyone built a game around analytic performance, because the goal of games were to immerse the player in an experience, not to rapidly grow a userbase. Maybe thats why I don't find social games like Farmville to be very fun (I guess I'm a hardcore gamer), but 80 million casual players can't be wrong.

Do social games today suck? Rather than optimizing for distribution, can you optimize for user experience? If you were to start a game company, what could you do differently than the big players today?

I think that's right. If social games are going to continue to exist, and I think they are, there's going to be an arms race which focuses on quality.

People may have got sucked into Farmville by the viral aspect of the game, but having been fooled once they've developed an immunity to straight-out viral games. (Also, so has the platform -- games are no longer allowed to publish more than one message to your friends' newsfeeds.) So future games will have to focus on having a gameplay experience which makes people actually want to play them.

Of course, writing a really good game isn't easy. And if you're capable of writing a really good game, why not sell it for ten bucks on iPhone/Android/MacOSAppStore/whatever instead of giving it away for free and trying to shoehorn in enough ads to cover costs?

Price points on apps is still something evolving. From what I've seen, its extremely difficult to get users to buy apps past a certain price range (99 cents?). And if you can't get massive adoption, its not really a "social" game, is it?

It's still a social game if people can play it with their friends who also have it. You don't need 60% market penetration for that, you just need it to be sufficiently good that people say "Hey, this game is awesome, you should get it too!"

I suppose so, but mobile games and games on Facebook are a different breed, the distribution mechanisms are very different.

Don't accidentally overlook one of the most important aspects of social games: The most stimulating part of the game for many people is how it fosters more interactions with those you already know. Many people despite having many friends on occasion still feel lonely and disconnected from those they know personally. Social games help overcome that by creating a habitual fabric of interaction between the player and the people they know. This ultimately fosters interactions outside the game, possibly in via instant messaging or conversation over a coffee.

A good social game optimizes for social interactions outside the game as well as gameplay inside the game.

Hardcore games permit escapism, whereas social games permit connectivism.

Examples of features that I've see work well and conversations they fostered in real life:

-- feeding fish "Hey did you remember to feed my fish as well?"

-- stealing crops "Stop stealing my crops!"

-- giving bath to your avatar "dude, your creature is filthy, there are bugs flying around him and everything. give him a bath once in a while"

I don't think the player experience and distribution are mutually exclusive - bad games just don't spread and marketing can't ultimately change that. If a game is popular it's because on some level people are having a net positive experience - I don't see the fun in building a farm, but I bet those people wouldn't see the fun in Transport Tycoon either which I played the crap out of.

I would expect Zynga etc work extensively with optimizing the player's experience since the longer you play my game, the more opportunities I have to x.

I work all day on in-game analytics, coincidentally I've had some success using analytics to improve my games:

http://playtomic.com/blog/post/10-an-update-on-trickochet

While not strictly on the state of social games, Sebastian Deterding's (@dingstweets) presentation "Pawned. Gamification and its Discontents" has some very prescient thoughts on how to make a great game, as well as why so many social add-ons to non-game systems simply suck. A good reflection on why many social games in themselves suck.

Enjoy: http://www.slideshare.net/dings/pawned-gamification-and-its-...

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