September 18, 2009

Sebastien de Halleux
Playfish

First thoughts in the morning, checking messages because those people are important to you.

Friends are changing how the world plays games. A new social era for games.

Playfish: Crazy Planets, Restaurant City, Pet Society, many others. No download, no registration, no up front payment. But what makes them social? Designing and creating an experience for friends to play together, then bringing those experience to where they are (Facebook, Google, etc.)

First game, 2007, “Who Has the Biggest Brain”, 100 of their own friends. 1 month later, 100,000 people. A year later, 20 million monthly active users across all Playfish games. 20 months later, 50 million monthly active users. Tangible benefit in distribution. 1 million new users a day.

1 Billion game sessions played in August. Who is playing? A new casual audience, Gen Y 16-34. 50/50 gender. 30/30/30 split among Americas, Europe, Asia. Achieved without spending a single marketing dollar. 200 staff, 4 offices, cashflow positive for majority of existence.

What is the secret formula? People spend $50 B on video games today. Why? Games generate emotions. Joy, Achievement, Fear, Horror, Wonder … but what about social emotions? Friendship, Love, Anger, Pride? Movies make people cry – do games? What about people who matter to you?

Dunbar number, natural limit on group of human beings that can sustain strong links over time. Estimated at 150. You + your friends = strong emotions, maximized within that Dunbar number. Angry at a stranger vs angry at a best friend. Your friends are now accessible! Facebook, Google, Bebo, Myspace – mapped your friend relationship and exposed those mappings.

Design games as objects of social interaction. Design games to encourage interaction. Get people into experience and back out to social. This is not new – friends before gamers. Risk, Pictionary. Evening highlight is not the key strategic moves but the jokes that go around the table with your friends. Game facilitates and creates and encourages those interactions but ultimately is only a channel for the experience.

Millions of friends, every day. Playfish started in Oxford Circus, wanted to experience the physicality of the most trafficked tube station.

Social emotions: Self-expression, competition, collaboration

Shopping for clothes is typically not about actual clothing protection but more about what your friends will think and how you are saying what you are through your clothes. Self-expression, a game that is better with friends. Pet Society. Sandbox game about self expression. WoW = 12 million monthly players, Pet Society has 17 million monthly players. Friends drive distribution. Why do people click that invite button? Game becomes better as you invite your friends in. Is that the end of push marketing? No TV, no billboards, barely any ads at all. Ok, not the end, but friends are a tremendous distribution force.

Emotions drive transactions. Friends talk about trends, fashion industry is built on this. This also happens in Pet Society, in-game trends and people replicating real world trends. $40 for lips couch, selling like hotcakes. But we don’t dictate price, we let users set their own value. Accept those who want tremendous value.

Collaboration. Real or virtual, with friends == running a restaurant is the essence of coordination. Restaurant City. 14 million players, different than the Pet Society players. Cooperation outside the game as well, requests via Facebook for particular ingredients. Ingredient trading very popular, key mechanic in the game. Other items are around self expression. 20,000,000 items sold every day, then get intensely gifted and traded.

Friendly Competition. Leaderboards, high scores, been around with videogames forever. Is it ever friendly? Think about a game of bowling – score matters less than the dynamic of the group, which is what provides the fun. Who Has The Biggest Brain. 20 million people have played this game. Emotions more intense in a group of friends, so when your little sister beats you after a lot of effort it is a bigger impact. Deepening the engagement. Something fun happens with 20 million people taking a standardized test, can map “smartest” areas of the world.

Behind the scenes – services, not products. Experience those games on web, then on iPhone. Let users choose how they want to access our game services. Let people switch devices as much as they want to. Not tied to progress on the hardware front, can address the audience immediately. Also lowers the cost of make mistakes. Encourage the process of making mistakes! Weekly deploy cycle, so ideas can go live very quickly – and then you get a billion data points instantly. Nurture the community via forums, some of the best ideas come from there. That allows the game to evolve – many iterations on weekly cycles.

Canvas page > game client > game server > social graph. 60-second mini MMO architecture. Client is in an unknown environment (canvas). Server extracts lists of friends, messaging. Each of those components, and the links between them, need to scale up immensely. Playfish uses “the cloud”. Entire company runs from laptops, not a single server. No email server, no desk phones. Everything on the cloud. Costs become variable cost, not up-front investment.

Product success = create hits. Start out paying to create game, invest money. Publishing uses marketing to make a sales peak, then eventually it gets displaced. Rinse and repeat. Success = F(P,Q) price, quantity. Price fixed, so pure quantity game.

Service success = nurture hits. Start with smaller investment – quickly. A few months. 20% feature complete, no one likes to release that early without polish. “Polished prototype” concept. You don’t go on holiday then, real work begins. Always release by sendng to friends, then takes an exponential curve, hits an s-curve in steady state. Additional titles contribute directly to bottom line. Success = F(alpha, beta, gamma) alpha = distribution, beta = engagement, gamma = monetization. You can affect all of these over time, they are not fixed. Each week can change features to increase engagement or raise monetization. Powerful stuff. “The secret formula that destroyed Wall Street”.

World changing fast = big opportunity out there. Some dinosaurs have sharp teeth when the world is changing underneath their feet. Mammals are the future of the industry. No one knows how the landscape will transform itself. Seize the opportunity! 4 key lessions.

- Create a new utility (social fun not immersion)
- Eliminate distribution costs (design for viral distribution)
- Reduce development costs (release early, run as service)
- Raise monetization ceiling (micro-trans and advertising). Stop dictating the value to the users, let them define then raise that value.

Less risk = more innovation. Your friends make the game (Quiztastic). Your friends are the game (Crazy Planets).

One last thing. It is a big global opportunity. 300 million monthly active users. Total social pop 500-600 million in the West. 1.5 Billion web users. In a few years they will all be on social networks. How do you address that? It’s about talent. Immediately opened studio in Beijing. Then in Tromso, then San Francisco.

“Fun games for friends” Use friends as powerful force for distribution, engagement, and monetization.