Life at Playfish

Who Has The Biggest Brain? has in six months amassed over 6 million installs, over 200 million game plays and a great set of feedback from our players. And last week we launched our first major new update to the game including our first transactions based service.

We launched a new achievements system, taunts, new brain types and a brand new profile viewing page all accessible to everyone. We also launched a new Pro Player Club for the game which gives you access to new exclusive mini-games, a practice mode, a calendar view of your progress in each category, exclusive taunts and more, all at a $9.99 / year subscription price.

We are excited about the update as it lets us provide our most engaged players with additional depth into the game while at the same time delivering more features for people who want to play the free version of the game. We will continue to update the free to play version of the game and the Pro Player Club with new features, as well as providing additional, more convenient payment options.

We believe the future business model for social games will be primarily transactions driven where consumers play for free supported by advertising but have the option to pay for virtual items and premium features. Given that people currently pay over $50Bn to play video games on other platforms we believe the potential for transactions in social games to be sizable. So we are very excited to have our first transactional model launched in addition to our in-game advertising offering. As always we are eager to hear what you think of the mix and any ideas on how to further improve the game play experience.

Thanks to all of our players who have alreardy sent us some great feedback - keep it coming and hope you enjoy the update! You can try it out on Facebook here!

Like thousands of fellow geeks, we were glued to our screens yesterday for Steve Jobs’ WWDC keynote, in which he unveiled the 3G iPhone and talked about iPhone games and the related App Store. Naturally, we have some thoughts on what it all means for social games, and us as a company.

The 3G iPhone’s combination of usability, fast network access and its large touchscreen have huge potential for casual gaming. Add to that the emotional component of playing to beat your real-world friends instead of just playing games to kill time, and you wonder if there’s a better handheld game platform around!

There are challenges to getting social games onto the iPhone, but they’re more likely to be commercial than technical. Getting something to run fast enough on the handset won’t be an issue, and Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect should make accessing people’s friend lists straightforward. The challenge will be getting the open internet commercial model to translate into an environment (iPhone/iTunes) where an upfront payment model is more standard.

Both browser-based and downloadable social games will be possible on iPhone, although downloadable games will offer the better user experience. However, whether games are browser based or downloadable isn’t so relevant to the consumer - the more significant point is how consumers will pay for games in the future, and thus what the overall user experience will be.

Mobile has traditionally been a pay-per-download environment for games, and anything aside from that (and some limited subscription models) has struggled to take off. However, online games companies like Sulake (Habbo Hotel), Nexon (Maple Story) and others have shown that web-based models using micro transactions supported by advertising can be compelling for consumers, and profitable for game publishers.

As an open internet device, the iPhone should be capable of both models, so it’ll be interesting to see which takes hold over time.

And as for Playfish? We’re already a registered iPhone developer and we’re constantly watching the space. Having built a mobile games company previously, we still believe that mobile is the future mass market entertainment platform. However, rather than growing through the closed digital retail environments of network operators, we believe mobile will be just another access method to the open internet in the future.

Social games are the most engaging form of casual gaming online, and we believe that will translate to mobile - including iPhone - in the long run. It’s just a matter of time…

At Playfish we love to celebrate - and this time we have a good reason! As of today, all three of our social games - Who Has The Biggest Brain?, Word Challenge, and Bowling Buddies - are nestling in the Facebook Top 10 games chart.

Combined, our three titles now attract around 700,000 daily unique players who spend on average over 35 minutes per day playing our games.

We’re hugely proud of our studios for this, so wanted to recognise them for a job well done. The fact that we got there in less than 6 months after launch without any external advertising makes it even more worthy of celebrating.

Here are some other metrics from the month of May which we may as well celebrate at the same time:

1. More than 300 million minutes of monthly player engagement (~10% of YouTube’s monthly engagement!)
2. More than three million monthly unique players
3. We’re now a top-3 game focused company on Facebook by engagement
   

If you’re wondering why we focus on engagement metrics, it’s because we believe engagement is the best way of measuring how much players are enjoying our games and we also believe it’s the best proxy for value for in-game transactions and advertising in the long run.

Anyway, congratulations to our London, Arctic and China studios for an excellent job so far. We’re working hard putting the finishing touches on our next title, so hopefully there will be more to celebrate in the near future!

It feels like only a few days since we launched our second title Word Challenge (mainly because, well, it is), but it’s time to reveal our third title for social networks. It’s called Bowling Buddies, it’s the debut title by our team over at the Playfish Arctic studio, and is available to play now on Facebook!

We chose bowling because it’s one of the most fun ways to socialise with friends. You don’t bowl alone in the real world - you bowl with friends and family - and we wanted to capture those competitive elements for our game too. We are very excited about two innovations in Bowling Buddies: a new kind of control system which makes it very easy to pick up play, and we’ve thrown in some 3D graphics as well!

On the controls side, most bowling games use meters where you click to set the direction, then click again to set the power and spin. We’ve gone for something different - and more natural - in that you bowl with your mouse, by grabbing the ball and, well, just… bowl. We worked a long time on the mechanic to get it right, and then built Bowling Buddies around it. On the graphics side, we’ve added a sprinkle of 3D to the cut-scenes, character art and in-game visuals to make it richer. Although for slower machines you can turn off 3D and still have a game that plays well.

For launch, we wanted to make Bowling Buddies a fun, competitive bowling game where you can customize your character and compete with friends and you network. But we’ve got lots of exciting features in the works for the future, so look out for those and please provide feedback in the game forum as always!

Feel like putting your bowling skills to the test? Head here!

There’s some interesting data over on the 20bits blog, showing how the level of activity in the Facebook developers forum has been declining since the start of this year. There are 27% less active users now than there were in January on the developer forums, spurring fears that developers are abandoning the platform.

Apparently this decline is reflected in activity on the Facebook platform itself – apparently applications launched in early January were on average 1.5 times more successful than apps launched at the end of March.

Both VentureBeat and The Equity Kicker suggest that Facebook’s stricter regulation of applications may be part of the reason, as the site places more restrictions on how applications can interact with users. However, the latter blog points out that “the bull case for Facebook is that their actions have cut out low quality applications and that developer activity will rise again as they start producing better content”.

That’s certainly a view we share. As a games company creating high production-value games for social networks, we see stricter moderation of the platform as a good thing. It will help reduce noise for consumers, and get them to focus on the applications they enjoy using.

Over time, there is clearly an incentive for social networks like Facebook to support the kind of applications which help them achieve their goals – distribution, retention, time spent on the site and monetisation, for example – over applications that ‘game’ the system, and reduce user satisfaction through excessive spam or other questionable features.

We haven’t really seen an impact on our own numbers from Facebook’s recent changes. We just launched a new game, Word Challenge, and reached 100,000 players in less than a week. Meanwhile, our first title, Who Has The Biggest Brain?, is still going strong with more than 2.5 million players.

So, the Facebook platform is maturing, which is a good thing for users and developers should be thinking harder about how to add value to it. Facebook’s approach to building its platform has been very thoughtful to date, and this just seems the next natural step in its evolution.

Besides, if you’ve developed games on traditional platforms, you’ll know that the platform providers are far more restrictive about publishing for their system. By comparison, things are still pretty good on Facebook!

One of the frequent bits of feedback we’ve had on Who Has The Biggest Brain? is people asking if we can include some verbal games, to complement the ones based on numbers and abstract thinking.

So we’re pleased to announce our second social game - a title that focuses entirely on verbal ability. It’s called Word Challenge, and it’s available to play now on Facebook.

The objective is to create words from the letters provided as fast as you can. There are 40,000 to find and we’ve tried to keep the game very fast and arcade-centric, like Who Has The Biggest Brain?

You start every game with two minutes of time to find as many words as possible, but you get bonus time whenever you find a word with four letters or more. When you run out of time you are shown the words that you missed - with the ability to click on them a definition of what the word means. At the end, you get a rating from 20 vocabulary types, ranging from mime to a poet – taking in drill sergeant, circus ringmaster, hermit and rock star along the way.

We’re launching the game with English, Spanish and French dictionaries and will be looking to support more with time. We’ve pushed out the boat when it comes to connected elements too. For example, there are bonus rounds where you have to unscramble your Facebook friends’ names for extra points. And we’ve got competitive elements like weekly, monthly and all-time high-scores between you and your friends.

There’s also something new: a challenge mode, where you go head-to-head against a friend. It’s to settle those arguments about who’s best, without any complaints that one of you got easier or harder words to work from. It’s asynchronous, so you play through, and then your friend receives the challenge, and plays with the same words as you did.

We’re really excited about Word Challenge and hope you’ll enjoy it. All feedback is welcome on the game forums as always!

Want to play? Head here, and don’t forget to tell your friends…

We were interested to read comments yesterday from Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, in which he suggests that “figuring out how to make the game experience more fun than any one of a hundred Facebook applications is going to be a challenge”. Not least because they come hot on the heels of views expressed by EA’s Kathy Vrabeck earlier this month on the impact of social networking - “Many of the games we make in 2020 won’t look like games and maybe won’t even be called games”.

These two separate comments show the dilemma faced by the games industry when it looks at the emerging social games market. Is it a threat to ‘traditional’ gaming, or an opportunity? Social games are certainly providing competition for people’s attention, if not a significant part of their monetary spend yet. But It’s surprising that Kotick sees it as a threat rather than a growth opportunity.

Everyone talks about the successes of the Guitar Hero franchise (14M+ units sold) and the Wii (25M+ units sold) as evidence of successfully broadening the appeal of games. But even these still require a substantial investment in game specific hardware. The games industry has so far only paid lip service to the tens of millions of players who may not buy game specific hardware but who do spend a lot of time hanging out on social networks playing games with friends. And many of the games they play have so far been pretty basic in terms of presentation and design - surely a great opportunity for companies who year in year out produce tens of titles of high production values for other platforms.

Of course, as we have experienced ourselves, getting into social games from traditional games is challenging for lots of reasons. You need to code in Flash, which a lot of game developers frown at. You have to think and operate like an MMO publisher, in the way you’re not just creating games, you’re maintaining and optimizing them over time, too. You have to “design backwards” for social interaction rather than solitary enjoyment. And of course, micro-transactions or advertising driven business models are very different from (and potentially incompatible with) getting people to pay upfront for boxed games.

Still, whether they see it as an opportunity or threat, the ‘traditional’ games industry will react to the social games phenomenon sooner or later. It will be interesting to see what form that reaction will take!

Just as Who Has The Biggest Brain? is approaching the two million installs mark on Facebook, you might have noticed our first steps into in-game advertising, courtesy of Google.

In the US that means short rich media (ie, video) ads, while in other parts of the world it means static images or text. The ads are placed at the end of the game, just before you start another session - an “interstitial” in industry speak. Why? We believe in giving players YouTube-like instant access to game play rather than forcing people to sit through an ad before they can play or having a set of distracting banners around the game. Rich media ads at the end of the game however provide a nice short break before the next intense gaming session to beat your friend’s score. Plus we think they’re pretty cool too!

These are early days - we’re still experimenting and considering different ways of allowing for sponsorship in social games which are both efficient for advertisers and enjoyable from an user-experience standpoint.

Let us know what your thoughts are! And now, back to the lab…

We love the app review system on Facebook. It’s one of those things that makes the social games space so different from traditional video games. Forget cosying up to review sites and journalists to get the all-important reviews to fuel the distribution of your boxed product: on Facebook, you get this from users posting their scores.

What happens when those user reviews are fake, though? There’s a lot of discussion around this issue at the moment – as shown by this post on the allfacebook blog - while Facebook has reiterated that “application developers cannot trade positive reviews or collude with others to post, incentivize, or otherwise ‘game’ the posting of negative or positive reviews”.

There’s also discussion around spam, where a proportion of reviews are actually adverts for external sites. We’ve seen the latter with Who Has The Biggest Brain?, where out of the 100 most recent reviews, around nine are spam, hardly making an impact on its average score (4.5 out of 5 from around 900 user reviews). There are applications out there with high amounts of reviews from mysterious people with only one or two friends on Facebook, but over time those should be easy to detect and root out.

No game review system is perfect – it’s either influenced by relationships, ad-spend or, as in this case, inadequacies in the spam/fraudulent review filters. However, Facebook has been very thoughtful about this area, staying cautious in giving reviews much of a weighting in its system until the feature is more mature. In the meantime, user reviews are giving us great feedback in a quantitative form, complementing the comments we get on the forums.

There’s been speculation in recent weeks that RealNetworks would buy the Scrabulous Facebook application, but the company has actually taken a different approach, launching an official Scrabble by Mattel game on the social network. Due to tangled licensing issues, it’s only available outside the US and Canada, and for the moment it’s in beta.

From our perspective as a social game publisher, this is really interesting, as it’ll provide a good data point on how important brands are for social network games, as opposed to product design and quality.

Brands have always been important in the console and mobile games industries, as they allow consumers to choose something they recognise and trust when faced with a number of titles in the same category. And of course, brands provide more marketing channels for a game when it launches.

This is why some second-rate branded games have managed to be financially successful, especially on new platforms. In fact, the importance of brands has actually helped entrench the market share of large publishers on console and mobile.

We think this might be different on social networks.

Our first game, Who Has The Biggest Brain?, is currently the sixth most popular on Facebook, with more than 250,000 daily unique players. But more than 90% of its distribution is viral, since our new players don’t choose the game from a list - it’s sent to them by their friends. So, assuming they trust those friends, it’s unclear whether a brand or related marketing will have any impact.

In other words: your friend decides to invite you to play a game or not, and you either trust that invitation or not. It shouldn’t really matter if the game is branded - only whether it’s fun enough for you to invite friends.

At least, that’s the argument. But the launch of Scrabble is the first time we’ll be able to make a direct comparison between similar branded and unbranded games, and so get some clues on what kind of companies will be successful in the social games market. The Scrabble by Mattel game currently has more than 2,400 daily active users, compared to nearly 630,000 for Scrabulous - but of course, it’s early days.

We’ll be following the competition with interest!