Here are some of the latest news and highlights in the social gaming industry that took place this week:
On Tuesday, hi5 team members attended the first-ever Social Developer Summit, hosted
by mediabistro.com and All Facebook founder Nick O'Neill. A wide variety of topics were covered at the event, including scaling social analytics, optimizing the monetization funnel, social in the mobile market, social advertising, and app engagement. Jake Mintz of Bump, an iPhone app that has received over 12.5 million downloads and allows users to exchange contact information by physically 'bumping' their phones, discussed how social interactions drove the downloads of the application, particularly around the World Cup. The main takeaways from their experience in developing a mobile social game was ensuring that the experience was frictionless, and including instant gratification that incentivizes users to share. During the session on optimizing conversion, RockYou's CTO Jia Shen shared the most relevant game mechanics to track that will create a more efficient purchase funnel. According to the Social Times, on average 3-5% of social game players pay with a high end on the 10-15% for high niche social games. To optimize this conversion, Shen instructed developers to design perceived value and then limit access to value, using 'time' as a key element to moderate. Creating this demand will help maximize the percentage of paying users because they will see a social game as valuable. Stay tuned for an more in-depth overview of the highlights and our key takeaways from this event.
As Zynga's social game Ponzi Inc. announced that they would close shop on Facebook,
Gamezebo's Joel Brodie wrote an interesting piece about why he anticipates more social games to start closing shop on Facebook. He stated the following reasons: (1) Until recenetly, it has been relatively easy to create a social game, acquire users for free virally on Facebook, and generate revenue from microtransactions. Facebook has changed the rules on the ability to use notifications on their platform to spread games virally, so there is no more free lunch and developers will have to pay for marketing their games, decreasing their margins of profitability. (2) Consolidation will be another primary reason that independent developers will have an increasingly difficult time driving success for their games on Facebook. Big players such as Zynga, Playdom, and EA will likely purchase the smaller competition, who would otherwise go out of business in the next year anyway, and either provide needed marketing support or cancel their games. To read the full article, visit Gamezebo.com.
The Walt Disney Company announced the acquisition of Tapulous, a start-up company that makes music-based games for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. The acquisition signals Disney's further commitment into the mobile and social game industry. In June, Disney's Steamboat Ventures invested in Playdom, one of the industry's leading social game developers and one of our partners here at hi5.
Social analytics company Kontagent confirmed that they had raised an additional $4.5 million in a round led by Altos Ventures and Maverick Capital, with participation from Larry Braitman, co-founder of FlyCast and Adify. Kontagent is one of the few companies that offers in-depth analytics for Facebook applications, working much as a web tool like Google Analytics would, but with some important additions like the ability to track the contributions of individual users. The company plans to use this additional capital to build out sales and marketing capacities as well as for research and development.
As we announced earlier this week, hi5 is sponsoring Casual Connect Seattle this year, held July 20-22. We invite you to visit our booth #22 at the conference, located in the entrance area of Benaroya Hall on the first floor. Please feel free to swing by and say hello, or contact us to coordinate a time to meet.
On Tuesday, hi5 team members attended the first-ever Social Developer Summit, hostedby mediabistro.com and All Facebook founder Nick O'Neill. A wide variety of topics were covered at the event, including scaling social analytics, optimizing the monetization funnel, social in the mobile market, social advertising, and app engagement. Jake Mintz of Bump, an iPhone app that has received over 12.5 million downloads and allows users to exchange contact information by physically 'bumping' their phones, discussed how social interactions drove the downloads of the application, particularly around the World Cup. The main takeaways from their experience in developing a mobile social game was ensuring that the experience was frictionless, and including instant gratification that incentivizes users to share. During the session on optimizing conversion, RockYou's CTO Jia Shen shared the most relevant game mechanics to track that will create a more efficient purchase funnel. According to the Social Times, on average 3-5% of social game players pay with a high end on the 10-15% for high niche social games. To optimize this conversion, Shen instructed developers to design perceived value and then limit access to value, using 'time' as a key element to moderate. Creating this demand will help maximize the percentage of paying users because they will see a social game as valuable. Stay tuned for an more in-depth overview of the highlights and our key takeaways from this event.
As Zynga's social game Ponzi Inc. announced that they would close shop on Facebook,
Gamezebo's Joel Brodie wrote an interesting piece about why he anticipates more social games to start closing shop on Facebook. He stated the following reasons: (1) Until recenetly, it has been relatively easy to create a social game, acquire users for free virally on Facebook, and generate revenue from microtransactions. Facebook has changed the rules on the ability to use notifications on their platform to spread games virally, so there is no more free lunch and developers will have to pay for marketing their games, decreasing their margins of profitability. (2) Consolidation will be another primary reason that independent developers will have an increasingly difficult time driving success for their games on Facebook. Big players such as Zynga, Playdom, and EA will likely purchase the smaller competition, who would otherwise go out of business in the next year anyway, and either provide needed marketing support or cancel their games. To read the full article, visit Gamezebo.com.The Walt Disney Company announced the acquisition of Tapulous, a start-up company that makes music-based games for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. The acquisition signals Disney's further commitment into the mobile and social game industry. In June, Disney's Steamboat Ventures invested in Playdom, one of the industry's leading social game developers and one of our partners here at hi5.Social analytics company Kontagent confirmed that they had raised an additional $4.5 million in a round led by Altos Ventures and Maverick Capital, with participation from Larry Braitman, co-founder of FlyCast and Adify. Kontagent is one of the few companies that offers in-depth analytics for Facebook applications, working much as a web tool like Google Analytics would, but with some important additions like the ability to track the contributions of individual users. The company plans to use this additional capital to build out sales and marketing capacities as well as for research and development.
As we announced earlier this week, hi5 is sponsoring Casual Connect Seattle this year, held July 20-22. We invite you to visit our booth #22 at the conference, located in the entrance area of Benaroya Hall on the first floor. Please feel free to swing by and say hello, or contact us to coordinate a time to meet.
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