Archive for February, 2010

Just wanted to share some exciting news — we did over one million mobile downloads of our titles in 2009! I’m very pleased to say that we not only met but exceeded our own goals around distribution.

While we’re extremely pleased with the success of Shake & Spell classic, the titles we launched in Dec 2009 (Shake & Spell 3D and Pet Hero) are built on our new Spark 1.0 mobile platform and represent the foundation of our forward looking vision of the mobile space. I’m personally very proud of these titles, and more importantly, the huge strides we’ve made in developing the underlying Spark platform.

As discovery becomes an ever growing problem in various mobile app stores, our focus on driving alternative, social distribution has become an increasingly valuable investment. A critical component of the success of our titles has been leveraging [potentially] viral distribution channels such as Facebook and Twitter. Clearly the success of social games on the web has largely been a function of their ability to drive social distribution; it’s now becoming clear that mobile will be no different. One of the key lessons we learned in 2009 was around building content that incentivized distribution; while playing with friends does provide incentive to invite them, we’ve discovered that including a distribution mechanism within core game mechanics provides a much stronger incentive, this will be our primary focus going forward. We’re approaching this with a careful and thoughtful approach; we want users to interact with their friends as a way to create an increasingly valuable experience, not to act as our own little spam bots.

While alternative distribution continues to be in the limelight, we understand that driving retention is really the key to building long-term value. Alternative distribution enables discovery, and ultimately is a way to reduce the cost of user acquisition. The question to game developers is: what are you doing with the users once you’ve acquired them? Are you keeping them engaged? This is an area in which we’ve made a significant investment: increasing the number of minutes played per session, increasing the number of sessions / user, and decreasing churn. What’s exciting is that we’ve seen definite validation of the social aspect of games as a key component of mobile gaming; we’re currently seeing a 33% increase in the number of lifetime minutes played for social versus non-social players.

An area that we’ve identified as strategic for quite some time is cross platform; in the long-run, we don’t believe in a single dominant platform. This is validated in our data as we’ve started to see a significantly higher portion of our downloads in the BlackBerry segment. As we’ve always believed, social gaming is about playing with your friends, and all of your friends have different phones. Therefore any kind of truly social experience on the mobile platform has to extend its reach across the top smart phones. As we approach the tipping point around smart phone penetration (as well as all you can eat data plans, etc.), we believe that our investment connecting iPhone, BlackBerry, and (soon) Android will indeed be valuable.

Monetization is an area of critical interest for mobile game developers. Despite the gold rush around the iPhone, we’re continuing to see significant downward price pressure across all mobile apps and platforms. Ads may augment revenue, but they do not represent a large enough source of revenue to subsidize the cost of building most games. It’s hard to imagine how we can sustain both a flight-to-quality and the consumer’s increasing demands for free applications, especially given the current monetization models for mobile apps/games. Here we can learn from our web social gaming cousins; virtual goods (“VG”) provide a much more significant revenue opportunity. Like virality, VG is not something that can be added to a game after the fact; it’s something that requires conscious game design from the ground up. This is where a certain vertical within games may emerge as the dominant model from a revenue standpoint. There are some interesting models out there that go beyond the appointment based gaming paradigm that Farmville has minted. One idea I hear a lot of talk about is the “meta- game” — a suite of games tied together by one community & identity. This is essentially what we’ve created in Spark 1.0 — a community and network of players across a suite of SocialDeck games.

Location is something that’s become hot as of late with the highly competitive FourSquare financing round. I’m excited about a new class of game emerging that truly embraces the unique characteristics of the mobile platform, the most obvious of which is location. We’ve always believed that the right social gaming experience on the mobile phone was one that leveraged the strengths of the platform, instead of a blindly porting from web. Notably, this is why companies like Zynga are winning on the web social platform — they’ve leveraged the strengths of the platform instead of blindly porting from console / destination website etc.

So anyways, that’s the not-so-brief state of the union as we see it. Lots more to come from SocialDeck in 2010 — stay tuned!