Sunday, March 14, 2010

Social games can learn from virtual worlds

What social games can learn from virtual worlds
Hangout games guy
Decided not to go to the indie game marketing one.

People who invite fewer people over a period of time are more effective.

Importance of retention increasing

How do virtual worlds retain their players
Player investment
-persistence
-creativity
Deep content
Fresh content
Service
Find ways to spend more on service vecause it pays off hugely
Concurrency
- community events, hosted, emergent
- most compelling - find ways for concurrency - fb is now so
asynchronous.
Enough content to allow players to interact - can't make content for
years
- the game is the icebreaker that forms community amongst the players.

Community

Monetization -
Retail -grandma
Subscription - tie to virtual world

Need a diversity of reasons to pay in order to monetize.

Hybrid
Cost of acquisition and scale of social
Long term retention of virtual world.l

Hangout has a mini game that you play when friends are not here


It is a pain to be embedded in facebook - they are planning to move
away from facebook eventually - connect to fb for the social graph but
not be in facebook as soon as the market will support

Amortize customer service across all the none - paying users
100 people paid for by 5 paying users

Sent from my iPhone

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