The Social Gaming Summit this week was a huge success, attracting over 500 people to a standing-room only venue at the Hotel Nikko in San Francisco. Congratulations and thanks to Charles Hudson and David Sachs for organizing such a great event, and Jeremy Liew at Lightspeed Venture Partners and the other sponsors who made the day possible.Andrew Sheppard, executive producer at hi5, spoke on a panel with Gareth Davis from Facebook, Jason Oberfest from MySpace, and Joe Chen from Xiaonei, which was moderated by Michael Arrington from TechCrunch. The discussion focused on the perspective of the leading global social platforms on the rapidly evolving social gaming category. Some interesting topics of the panel included:
- The rapid convergence of online gaming with social media -- what we refer to as "Social Entertainment."
- The importance of providing a payment platform for game developers (in our case, the hi5 Coins virtual currency), particularly for international monetization.
- The entry of traditional console-based game companies into the social gaming category.
- The desire of many gamers to distinguish between their "real world" identity and their "game identity," as well as the tendency for users to meet new people online through game play.
Overall, hi5's differentiation and focus on social entertainment came through several times -- both in the speakers' remarks, as well as in one-on-one discussions. Justin Smith (from the blogs Inside Facebook and Inside Social Games), who set the context for the conference with some opening remarks, noted hi5's focus on this space, including the introduction of the hi5 Games channel and our virtual currency. Michael Arrington also mentioned hi5's focus on games and micro-payments in his comments.
The opening panel of the day featured a group of leading social gaming companies. The panel included Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga; Sebastian de Halleux, COO and co-founder of Playfish; and John Pleasants, the new CEO of Playdom who was previously at Electronic Arts. Playdom and hi5 announced a partnership in May to distribute Playdom's games through the hi5 Games channel. Discussion on this panel focused on the value users place on self-expression through games, as well as the importance of creating "stored value" for users.
Other interesting panels included one on monetization and payment platforms, featuring speakers from Zong, Super Rewards, Paypal and GMG Entertainment. The strategy from several of the independent game developers in the audience seems to be to plug into a third-party payment platforms or simply use the virtual currency of the social site they distribute on. hi5 launched hi5 Coins, our global virtual currency, in December 2008, and we were the first major social platform to open our virtual currency to third-party developers for collecting in-game micro-payments in May 2009. There was also a panel on customer acquisition and retention for social games, that featured RockYou, WonderHill, Offerpal, and Tagged. Here's the full program from the day.