Slide Turns Popular Facebook App Top Friends into a Game

Screenshot from Slide's Top Friends app

This weekend (or earlier - hard to tell since I don't use Top Friends regularly), Slide added a game element to Top Friends. It's called Ownd. The name might sound familiar, since it's one letter off from the name of a very successful game on Facebook called Owned. Like Owned, Ownd is a game where you call buy and sell friends.

I think gameifying Top Friends is a great move on Slide's part. They've finally jumped on the games bandwagon after sitting on the sidelines for the last year. However, I don't think this signals a major push into social games by Slide. It feels more like an experiment.

And I don't think it will impact the popularity of existing friend exchange games on Facebook, Owned! and Friends For Sale. Ownd will simply makes existing users of Top Friends more engaged.

Looking at Top Friends for the first time in a while, I realized that had recreated the old Facebook profile design. Perhaps that's why Top Friends grew 13% since the redesign, according to Developer Analytics.

I've always thought that Slide's strategy with Top Friends was to create a social network within Facebook under Slide's control so Slide could collect data on users.

Ownd doesn't help with that goal as far as I can see. But Ownd does open up another avenue for monetization. After all, for the moment games do monetization better than anyone, and Slide famously needs help with that. Hey, we might see them end up in social games, after all. :)

Recession-proof? Game Industry Giants THQ and EA Layoff Hundreds

Many, including myself, have touted the fact that games are a recession-proof industry.

Together, THQ and EA have posted hundreds of millions of dollars in losses and laid off over 750 people in the last two weeks.

Doesn't sound very recession-proof.

Meanwhile Zynga is still hiring like mad (check out their open jobs here).

I'm not surprised. I expect social games companies to do better than traditional games companies in the recession.

Here's why:

Traditional games - $30-80 upfront.
Social Games - $0 upfront.

If you don't have a job, which one is more appealing to you?

Recent Fundings in the Social Gaming Industry - November 4

Rockyou. $17 million. From Softbank (Japan) and SK Telecom (Korea). While Rockyou is not a social gaming company, they are a social entertainment company with quite a few gaming properties. Apparently, the fresh cash is for expansion into the Asian markets, most notably the Chinese socnet, Xiaonei, which btw, already has a virtual currency system. Since China already has a robust virtual goods market, it will be interesting to see how Rockyou fares. Oh, and Xiaonei already has clones of the most successful games on Facebook, so don't get too excited.

Playfish. $17 million. Series B. From Accel Partners and Index Ventures. With 10 million monthly actives, 4 of the top ten games on Facebook, and this round of funding, Playfish has cemented their place as the number 2 social gaming company behind Zynga. According to Playfish CEO, Kristian Segerstrale, the cash is to be used to expand into other platforms, notably Myspace. I suspect they'll be launching mobile games sooner than later, Kristian did run a successful mobile games company for six years, after all.

Crispy Gamer. $8.5 million. Series A. From Constellation Ventures. For a Games Review site. Yes, a games review site. That had 1 million uniques AT LAUNCH. I mention this funding because it's further evidence that games are HOT.

My Favorite Commentary on the Virtual Goods Summit

I've been following Adam Martin's commentary over at his blog T-Machine for a long time. He covered the Virtual Goods Summit for Free to Play and his insights are awesome. Unadulterated, opinionated goodness. His posts came a week after the initial burst of coverage, so if you missed them, here they are.

Virtual Goods and Social Networks

Making Virtual Economies Work

Branded and User-Generated Virtual Goods

Here's some choice quotes from the coverage (bolding by me):

Outspark - Susan Choe
At the end of the day the gameplay will keep some of the users, but not all of them. Half the gamers in our ecosystem come because of social interactions; the gameplay is good, but really the events and social activities is what gets them to come back, even in monster-killing games.

Meez - Sean Ryan
we start with the holiday theme. Then look at what the advertisers want to see. Then we look at the upcoming features, and make sure we have compelling items there. A lot of our prod dev driven by trends/fads in the userbase - pop culture influences etc.

Meez - Sean Ryan - what is a VG? We all talk about it like they’re just clothes, but that’s just one third. Another third is world-features (can I levitate, can I glow like a lightbulb), and final third is privileges, access - “can I sit in a special seat in a public space?” etc. [Adam Martin - think this is the future - VGs that open up new activities, as opposed to merely being about status etc.]

I agree with Sean and Adam. When we designed our virtual goods economy at Tenuki, it was based on Legend of Zelda, i.e. acquiring items that unlocked abilities that opened new areas of the world or new functionality. Players could customize those special items, so functional was tied to decorative. (We had the problem of trying to innovate everything we touched - don't make that mistake. Honestly though, basing all our game design decisions on Nintendo games is probably the smartest thing we could have done.)

Why Game Developers Should Vote For Obama

Obama has already invested in the games industry.

According to Gamespot, he's spent $44,465.78 on in-game advertising. Meanwhile, John McCain passed on the chance to advertise in games. Here's the text of the article:

For weeks now, Obama has been running in-game ads in games such as Burnout Paradise for the Xbox 360 across 10 battleground states. The full campaign started on October 6, runs through November 3, and spans a reported 18 games. According to the Obama campaign's pre-general-election filing with the Federal Election Commission, the Democratic challenger paid Massive Incorporated $44,465.78 for online advertising in early October.

Massive has previously said that it also approached Republican presidential candidate John McCain about advertising in games, but the senator from Arizona passed on the offer. As of press time, Massive representatives had not returned GameSpot's request for clarification as to how much of the ad campaign that payment covered.

Honestly, I'm more impressive with Obama's grasp of the startup ecosystem and its importance to the U.S. than a nominal ad spent on games, but hey at least some money is coming our way. :)

Does Facebook Consider Social Games to be "Trivial" and Why?

"Facebook itself fully understood the pain the redesign would cause third parties. It consciously made painful-to-app changes, like pushing apps off of user profile pages and onto a sub-tab called “Boxes” that users have had a hard time finding. The changes, it believes, reward the most meaningful apps while punishing the trivial ones."

- Eric Eldon, Venturebeat

If you agree with Eric, and I do, then here's the question: does Facebook consider social games to be trivial?

As Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga, reminded app developers at the most recent SNAP Summit: the app platform is not a revenue center for Facebook. If we don't align ourselves with Facebook's interests, then it's reasonable to expect more punitive measures.

If social games are trivial or even counterproductive to Facebook's goals, then as a group we should be looking to become independent of Facebook ASAP. Perhaps, this is why Shervin Pishevar, CEO of SGN, believes the future of social gaming lies off of social networks (@ VG Summit).

Here's the problem that social games present to Facebook. For Facebook, the most important thing is the social graph, particularly, an ACCURATE representation of the social graph. For an accuracy, the social graph requires you to only "friend" people with whom you're actually friends. Many games, such as Mob Wars (and its many clones that incentize invites) passively encourage Facebook users to befriend strangers as a consequence of gameplay. Check out the forums on Friends For Sale, Zombies, or Mob Wars and counts the thousands and thousands of friend requests. Anecdotally, these "friends" do not become real friends or even acquaintances as some wish to assert.

Fake friends are a serious dent in Facebook's goal of an accurate social graph. They can attempt to algorithmly address this problem, and I'm sure they do, but I suspect it's easier to remove the problem at its root.

I'd say the fake friend problem is at the core of Facebook's apparent hate of trivial apps. It's a reason why a company would try and suppress features that their userbase clearly enjoy, an action that otherwise makes little sense. I think it's also the primary reason that Facebook created a policy against incentivized invites, rather than their argument that it hurt user experience.

So as game developers if we want to avoid being "trivial" and thus the wrath of Facebook in the future, we should be avoid incentize fake friending.

Zynga has addressed the fake friend problem in their Texas Holdem Poker game, by adding a meta-friend layer called Poker Buddies, where people can friend with whom they enjoy playing poker but do not want to Facebook friend. I'd encourage other developers to take similar measures, if they haven't already, so we don't risk angering the beast.