Comment by teej | Hacker News Reader

Comment by teej | Hacker News Reader

Here are a few critiques solely from the game & Facebook perspective:

- You've got an iframe app and you have both horizontal and vertical scrollbars (on mac FF at least). Get rid of them, they drive people insane.

- First time experience is pretty horrid. The "tutorial" is 20 click beast that goes through every aspect of the game at once. Make the game learning process a little more progressive. Don't let me do all 50 things at once. Give me one thing to do, and once I've done it, unlock another 2-3 things I can do.

- User interface, as has been stated already, could use some re-work and some polish. That being said, my old app (Warbook) looks terrible and still got pretty big.

- The virtual goods + advertising model is solid in this space right now. Ignore what other people are saying against it, you're pretty close to a great revenue model. Just remember - people buy virtual goods for two reasons: to "speed up" time and to gain social status.

With all that said, I think the game concept is pretty novel. Hopefully other people find it fun.

What sort of virtual goods could they sell in their game?

And how do they prevent people buying virtual goods from feeling as if they're "cheating"? Perhaps it's an old-style complaint, but virtual goods feel against the "purity of the game" -- imagine playing chess online and being able to drop $5 to get an extra move -- sure that "speeds up" time, but it also (to me at least) breaks the game... I'm not sure yet how to design compelling virtual goods that don't kill gameplay but yet remain compelling.

Fortunately, social status remains a powerful motivator, but it seems that for social status to work players have to feel invested in the community, else they won't care what the community thinks (and thus won't buy anything to increase social status).

> What sort of virtual goods could they sell in their game?

The Taxi Mogul game already offers "items" that speed the game up (pay $5 or wait 5 hours). They could also sell faster taxis, better drivers, etc. Really doesn't matter.

> And how do they prevent people buying virtual goods from feeling as if they're "cheating"?

I hear this asked -all the time-. Two things.

(1) It's much less of an issue in games that aren't PvP. "You beat me in one-on-one combat because you paid" is completely different than "You have a higher score/advanced faster than I did because you paid". The "cheating" feeling doesn't go away, but it's much, much less pronounced.

(2) Allow players with time to trade with players with money. The simplest, turnkey solution to this is a dual currency model. Simply put, players with time get credits and players with money get tokens. Players can trade credits and tokens on the free market. This allows market forces to determine the cash value of credits, instead of you pegging a pricepoint to it. I cannot stress how important dual-currency models are for games dealing with virtual goods.

> but it seems that for social status to work players have to feel invested in the community

Absolutely right. Social status virtual goods only work when there's high community interaction and visibility. A lot less people would care about achievements on Xbox 360 if it weren't for Xbox Live.

Agreed on the virtual goods part. By letting people complete offers to get points, I've been getting over $5 CPM.

Sounds interesting. Can you elaborate and provide context?

Most games in this space depend on virtual goods sales for their revenue. You know, "Get the sword of Unknowing and Libidinousness for $0.50" sorta stuff. A surprising number of players are quite happy to shell out their credit cards for such items.

For those who aren't willing to pay real cash, but still want them items, an option is to complete (free) affilate offers. Things like completing surveys, signing up to websites, downloading ringtones, etc. At the moment, those pay publishers quite well, and everyone wins.

We are using Offerpal network for ours, and when someone completes an offer to get a certain number of in-game points, we get the face value of those points in cash. CPM metrics are fairly useless for this sorta things, but eDAU (revenue per 1k daily active users) tend to be very good for games with well-designed transactions model.

This stuff is also fairly useful for anyone selling cheap things on line. If you're selling a thingybob for $5 apiece (website subscriptions, physical items, etc), you can capture cheapskates by having them complete offers. In which case you get an extra $5 from a customer who would've brought you no revenue otherwise.

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