Posted tagged ‘monetization’

Is Facebook Strangling the Golden Geese?

June 22, 2010

Facebook is in the process of introducing Facebook Credits, its entry into the burgeoning ecommerce/virtual currency area.  Given that Facebook is the prime destination for people playing social games, this is hardly surprising.   However, in so doing, is it in danger of driving away the sources of its fast-rising revenue?   Is Facebook strangling the geese that lay its golden eggs?

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One More: Integrating Design, Virality, and Monetization

March 25, 2010

In a gracious reference to one of my posts, Aki Jarvinen makes a great point about viral design: it can’t be tacked on at the end of creating the gameplay.  Like monetization (my point earlier), virality has to be integrated in, or else what you end up with is a Frankenstein’s monster kind of game, where the discrete parts do not play well together. (more…)

One Winner or Many? How the Business of Social Games May Be Differently Different

March 25, 2010

In a recent Technorati post, “The End of Social Gaming As We Know it?” there’s an interesting quote from Keny Yager at MorrisAnderson: “I think we are still in the wild, wild west of the social media experiment. There is going to be one winner and 100 losers.”

I hear this kind of thing a lot.  The first part is certainly true; the games industry is in a period of fast expansion and evolution — breathtaking even for an industry used to rapid change.  The second part seems to be based on a lot of industry history, where there’s typically been a king-of-the-hill reality: for those games depending on retail sales, the top few make all the money, and the rest go begging.  In MMOs, there was a broader base – at least prior to World of Warcraft, back when crossing the 100K player gap meant you were successful.

But there’s good evidence that social games (as a broad category) are different right down to the structure of the marketplace – they’re not just different as games, they’re differently different, requiring a new way of looking at design, development, production, funding, customer relationships, and overall commercial success.  If you look at social games developers from the point of view of a standard (venture) investor, then there are likely to be one or a few big winners – companies with billion dollar valuations.  But that misses most of the picture, like the proverbial iceberg. (more…)

In Praise of Ethics and Money, Part 2

March 24, 2010

Here’s my thesis: when you allow game design to be separate from monetization design, you divorce design from creative control – and the game experience inevitably suffers.  Oddly, this separation has been the case for so long in our industry that (outside of the scruffy indie crowd) we’ve all sort of accepted this as just the way things are.  Going the other route, making monetization an integral part of design, can lead to scamming your players – or to experiences they see as inherently valuable.

And unfortunately, this separation has led to a sort of ivory-tower entitlement on the part of many designers: “let me design the perfect immersive experience, and I’ll let the mercenaries deal with extracting money from people so we can get paid.”  I believe this is the source of a lot of the squawking now about ethics and monetization – yes, we should behave ethically in all our dealings; but designing gameplay to support monetization is not inherently unethical!  And even more unfortunately, I think it’s led us to largely forget or ignore the possibility of creating experiences for which unethical scamming is entirely unnecessary.

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In Praise of Ethics — and Money, Part 1

March 24, 2010

There were a few topics that bubbled up at this year’s GDC and in follow-up blog posts:

  • The impact of social games as something more than a fad
  • General disdain for Zynga as a game developer, if not as a money-printing machine
  • Game designers having to confront monetization in and as design

The first is exciting; the second is predictable, deserved and unfortunate.  The third is inevitable, and not nearly as unwelcome as many seem to think – I believe this is actually an important victory for game designers.

I’m going to cover this in two posts: ethics first, then monetization-as-design.

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