brinking - nabeel hyatt

What's wrong with Facebook games?

Matt Mihaly has a good post up talking about whether casual or hardcore games are more successful on Facebook. And while he took a stab at what types of games are going to work, I thought I'd step back a bit and just see how games are fairing on Facebook overall. Even with the limited stats provided by Facebook, we can start to get a picture of what works and doesn't work on Facebook.

I'll have to admit that the first pass on statistics surprised me. Of the top 100 most active Facebook applications, games do not do statistically better than the average application. Games only have a marginally higher percentage of active daily users (8.57%) than the overall average (8.01%). And if you expand the criteria to include all apps that use game-like mechanics, (such as Superpoke), the average is still in the same range (7.71%). It's a wash.

 

These numbers do not jive with the incredible popularity of games on the general Internet (as I have talked about before), so what's going on here?

Well, digging a little deeper, many of the Facebook games are simple single-player games whose only social mechanic is that they post your score for your friends to see. Jetman and Tower Blox are two such examples. What happens if we just count the games that are specifically multiplayer, and therefore fit the social nature of Facebook better?

Ahh, that's more like it. Multiplayer social games such as Warbook and Scrabulous average 11.4% active daily users, a good 30% higher than the average top Facebook app (8.01%).  I'm sure if we could actually get engagement, attention, and retention metrics we'd see the same trend. This combined with the relatively high percentage of games represented in the top 25 applications (7 games) would suggest that there is simply a lack of quality, socially-focused games on Facebook.

With an average install base of 2.7m users for top Facebook games, this is a massive new distribution channel that makes the curated Xbox Live Arcade look like a backwater. I'll be chatting a bunch more on the topic at GDC in February where I'll be leading a panel discussion on Facebook and the new web of Social Gaming. I've grabbed  TJ Murphy (Warbook/SGN) and Mark Pincus (Texas Hold'Em) and it should be a one stop shop of what works, what doesn't, and the size of the opportunity presented by social online gaming. Should be fun.

Oh, and while you're at it, on Monday we publicly released our first Facebook app (more of a toy than a game really) -- Make Me.

 

 

Neilson's new web metric likely to hurt Google, help Gaming

Today Neilsen/Netratings announced that they are ceasing to use the Page View and will instead be using the Attention metric I've been talking about. When the measurement of the web migrated from hits to pageviews, there were a whole raft of winners and losers in the online world. In many ways we are how we are measured; it effects the way press and public perceive us, and our ability to attract partners, advertisers, and employees.

So, when how we are measured changes, it's hard to underestimate the disruptiveness. As quoted at Read/Write Web, AP gives some insights:

"Ranking top sites by total minutes instead of page views gives Time Warner Inc.'s AOL a boost, largely because time spent on its popular instant-messaging software now gets counted. AOL ranks first in the United States with 25 billion minutes based on May data, ahead of Yahoo's 20 billion. By page views, AOL would have been sixth.

Google, meanwhile, drops to fifth in time spent, primarily because its search engine is focused on giving visitors quick answers and links for going elsewhere. By page views, Google ranks third."

Tomorrow Compete.com will be releasingCompete released their latest Attention 200 listing, and they were nice enough to give me a sneak peak. Comparing that to the list of top page view sites from Comscore and others you can see there are going to be clear winners and losers from this shake up.

Looking at page views versus attention from Compete.com it looks like search (including deeper experiences like general social networking (MySpace, Facebook), games (Pogo, Runescape), and vertical social networks (DeviantArt, Flickr) get a huge boost in this new world of the web.

(thx for the heads up Jason).

 

 

A new way to see the web, and gaming looks good.

The first annual Virtual Worlds conference last week in New York was somewhat.. uhm.. underwhelming. Basically it felt like the entire conference was people who worked for Linden Labs, Electric Sheep, or mid-level brand managers with $20k to spend so they could say "they get" virtual worlds. And don't even get me started on the improper analogies between the beginning of virtual worlds and the beginning of the Internet.

As much as VW07 was all about brands, GDC felt like just the opposite with chatter about their social power and role as a third place. That got me all primed to write about how the one analogy from '96 that will repeat itself is that big brands think they are there, but they just don't get it (anyone remember Pathfinder?).

In the midst of this, I get an email from David Cancel of Compete.com about their big launch of new tools including Attention tracking (for a background on Attention see here, or here). So I convinced him to run a couple of pre-launch images for me so I could make the same point in images instead of text.