Blake Commagere
Facebook: Is the Cake a Lie?

Blake.commagere@gmail.com

Facebook strategies you can employ (including completely ignore Facebook!). Indy developer, doing FB games for a while now.

Dev solely on FB? Completely / mostly ignore? Assume HTML or Flash based (console devs may have a different take – this is PC oriented).

FB is still rapidly evolving, including the Terms of Service and API. Several large companies in the space that have no qualms about cloning your game. An aggressive instance of “borrowing”, can be copyright infringement – know the space and these competitors.

Quick evolution: Started like a baby, grew up to be a tree. No way you could have see that coming. Now it’s like dinosaurs with lazers. So fast and furious in evolution that it constantly looks different. Platform is rapidly evolving so even “experts” can’t tell you. Those opportunities when your game launches will not be what it is now.

FB pushes every Tuesday night. Major nightmare if you push on Tuesdays as well. 30 major API changes that required a patch/release from dev. TOS policy changes = 9. In 2 years. Rate is at least slowing down, was every few days. Usually get a month or so of warning, but sometimes get almost none. This can be a particular problem if design/balance depends on FB mechanics. For example: benefit for inviting your friends is no longer allowed. Newsfeed has had 5 major re-architecturings. This was a complete PITA, lots of work just to keep it from breaking.

Competitors! Farm Town, new group on FB, had some success. Then came FarmVille! Shameless cloning is prevalent. Zynga, but they are just 1 of 10, some are even more shameless.

Dev on FB only if you need no more than 3 months to develop, you can do short cycles to keep the game running. Hope you enjoy filing and fighting copyright lawsuits. Also, you should be bat-shit insane. This is not for everybody!! But it can be extremely fun…

Ignoring FB – tempting because people are just going on and on about it sometimes! Would be nice to be able to do… So what impact has it had on HW/SW sales? Or users that no longer game on PCs/consoles now that they can game on FB? Ok, just on raw sales after FB launched overall sales have been great in the industry, they may do the same again this year. So it’s not going to destroy the console market. Important graph of users that no longer game on other platforms from FB… approximately zero, this is a stupid argument. It’s just different – Blair Witch vs Transformers 2. Sometimes you just want to see giant robots. You get some fun games, but nothing that will satisfy the hardcore.

Can you be your own platform? 3rd party devs do the work for you! TweetCraft. So you can ignore FB fine in its entirety if you already have your own platform. Basically, if you’re Blizzard. It’s good to be the King.

You could “mostly” ignore it. Ignore as much as possible for the least amount of work. If you have a traditional PC game, the next Crysis, your FB strategy is this. Design and balance have no reliance on FB as a platform. Use the integration points (newsfeeds) as a marketing channel. You won’t get infinite free users, so don’t assume your marketing budget will change. Which is just an illusion anyways even for the people who appear to have it, they spend a ton to get that.

Launch > 9 months away, don’t even bother with FB yet. You’ll waste dev cycles. Avoid client to Facebook solutions, if FB changes their entire API you don’t want to have to do a client patch. Proxy the integration through your own servers. But then be prepared to patch those servers weekly.

Third party integration solutions now cropping up. Consistent API and let them deal with the server patches. Cryptic is using www.raptr.com for Champions. Rumors that Steam will be doing the same. This can make it almost as easy as just ignoring FB altogether.

Why is cloning so prevalent on FB? Short dev cycles make it easier, they are wars of attrition so you can starve people out whether you are right or wrong. Not a nice strategy, but an effective one.