The Most Beautiful Game on Facebook - Let's See How It Does

Following my post yesterday disputing the worth of high production value, I wanted to talk about the most beautiful game I've yet to see on Facebook. It's Lucky Strike Bowling (in beta) by Large Animal Games.

If high production values make a difference, then Lucky Strike Bowling should be a megahit. Gorgeous graphics, as polished as a bowling lanes. The lighting effects are amazing. Sound effects, top-notch. It looks 100x better than Playfish's Bowling Buddies (though I think Bowling Buddies is more fun to play).

The gameplay is not innovative, it follows the standards for a bowling game, which make it perfect for my purposes.

Basically, I'm proposing that if Lucky Strike Bowling doesn't acquire a million monthly users (my threshold for a hit on Facebook), then high production values aren't worth it.

Sure, it's hardly a scientific study, and surely not even a valid one, but it's a fun one.

I'm putting Large Animal on the spot here. They can handle it. They're an award-winning company that's been designing casual games since 2001.

My interest in Large Animal Games is not simply because they've made a beautiful game. Large Animal Games is the first casual games company I'm aware of that has made a major push into the social gaming space, on their way to releasing the third game on Facebook soon.

Their first foray was Bumper Stars, a game that was much discussed at Casual Connect, the casual game developers conference. For many in the casual games industry, it showed that a casual games company could succeed on Facebook. Though, success is a relative term, as Bumper Stars currently has ~87,000 monthly active users, which is just an okay showing by Facebook standards. It barely puts them in the top 500 applications on Facebook.

I've heard Large Animal Games CEO, Wade Tinney speak about the social gaming space. He understands the nuances of the new platforms. With established casual games companies moving into the social gaming space, it will be interesting to see how Large Animal fares being at the vanguard. If they fail, it certainly won't be out of ignorance.

The first people to develop games for Facebook were not game designers, they were internet guys seizing a new opportunity. Now that game designers are moving in for realz, the established players in the social gaming space will be seeing serious competition.

Who's the most Engaging?: Top Gaming Sites Ranked by Average Time Spent

Yesterday, I compiled a list of socnets courtesy of Compete.com new Ranked Lists Feature. Today, it's something nearer and dearer to our hearts: gaming sites. Some of these sites you may not be familiar with, so I added a brief description.

If you don't see a site listed, it's because it didn't make it into Compete's top 200 sites by total time spent.

Game Sites Listed by Average Time Spent (May 2008)
1. Pogo.com: 819.77 (casual games + social networking features. Part of EA)
2. Gaiaonline: 318.45 (forums + avatars + games + social networking features)
3. Neopets: 198.66 (games + avatars + virtual world -kinda. Part of MTVnetworks)
4. King.com: 169.91 (skill games)
5. Worldwinner: 168.25 (skill games)
6. Popcap.com: 120.72 (casual games)
7. Millsberry.com: 115.46 (casual games, virtual world - kinda. Part of General Mills)
8. Gamehouse.com: 102.80 (casual games)
9. BigFishgames: 94.79 (casual games)
10. Shockwave.com: 82.66 (casual games. Part of MTVnetworks)
11. Iwon: 55.51 (casual games + sweepstakes. Part of IAC)
12. Club Penguin: 54.51 (kids virtual world. Part of Disney)
13. Funbrain.com: 45.35 (kids educational games)
14. Miniclip: 42.55 (Flash games)
15. Webkinz: 42.38 (kids virtual world)
16. Addicting Games: 29.91 (Flash games)
17. Ign.com: 17.03 (hard-core games news. Part of Fox)

Looking at this list, the first thing I thought of is a quote from Andrew Pedersen, GM of Pogo.com in a presentation he gave at Casual Connect last year, which is from memory some I'm probably mangling it.

Games are the honey, but community is the glue.

The top three sites on this list have extremely deep community features. However, it looks like money can be nearly as powerful of a draw since skill gaming sites are 4 and 5, so I'll coin a new aphorism.

Game are the honey, but they're not paying me enough at this stupid job, so I better earn some money on your site, dammit!

Not as catchy.

I will also note the absence of hard-core games, that's not due to any lack of addictiveness on their part, in fact, hard-core game are generally more addictive, but they are accessed through a downloadable client and not through a web browser.

Also, it's interesting to note that Fox doesn't have more of a present in casual games. Perhaps, they might be a potential acquirer down the line.

Top Ten Games on Facebook with Detailed Demographics

Note: DAU = Daily Active Users (which is the metric this list is based on)

Brief Analysis:
Despite all the recent posturings by Zynga and SGN, neither companies has more than one game in the top ten. That honor goes to Blake Commagere.

Most games, with one exception, have a significantly higher ratio of male players. Does this mean men play more games? Answer: No. It means that no one is making games that appeal to female players - I'll post on that in the future.

Interesting bits:

• Jetman has virtually no users over 26.
• Scrabulous (and Vampires!!!) has an equal male-female ratio.

Come back tomorrow, I'll be posting the demographic breakdown of all the top games from Zynga and SGN.

Special thanks to www.developeranalytics.com for providing the demographic info!

Track the Release of New Games via GigaGamez

For what John and I are doing, it helps to keep abreast of game industry trends. Generally, I rely on Gamasutra and GameDaily Biz News to keep me up-to-date. Often times, I find the amount of information that provide me to be a little much.

So I really appreciate GigaGamez summarizing the new game releases coming out for the quarter in one or two digestible articles. At the moment they don't appear to be covering new casual game releases, which is fine, because there is at least one casual game a day being released, and since they are mostly clones of existing titles, I don't think it's important to track.

When it comes to casual games, it is more informative to track the best sellers, and game-sales-charts.com does an amazing job at that.

Anyway, props to Jason McMaster over at GigaGamez and James C. Smith over at game-sales-charts.com for consolidating this info for lazy bastards like me.