hi5 Blog

hi5 Wraps Up a Successful Week at GDC (pictures & video)

2010-03-12T21:23:16Z

hi5 concluded a week of high-profile and heavily attended activities at the 2010 Game Developers Conference this week. Our presence at the show kicked off with a mixer event on Tuesday, March 9 to end the first day of the Social & Online Games Summit. The event was attended by over 400 show goers in the North hall lower lobby.

Apart from running out of beer (GDC conference organizers only expected 200 people), the event was a huge success. In addition to a progression of retro video games from different eras, we raffled off some fun prizes, including a Pac-Man joystick USB game, an Atari Flashback2, and DJ Hero.

The reception was a great start to the conference, and demonstrated how much excitement there is in the community around the development of social games.

The festivities continued on Wednesday, with Alex St. John's appearance in a panel at the GamesBeat@GDC conference. The topic of the panel was "Disruptive Game Platforms" and was moderated by Dean Takahashi, Lead Writer at GamesBeat and VentureBeat. Alex's fellow panelists included Jack Buser, U.S. Head of Sony's Home Virtual World, Gareth Davis, Games Platform Manager for Facebook, and Peter Relan, Founder and Chairman of Aurora Feint and CrowdStar. The panel sparked some spirited exchanges, several of which were captured on video.

Alex St. John's remarks prompted several articles in major tech blogs, including:

Them's fightin' words: Hi5 prez calls Zynga games 'mediocre', Games.com
hi5 CTO: Zynga Is Mediocre. It Isn't Social, It Just Discovered An Opening For Spam, TechCrunch
GamesBeat in Pictures: Part 1, VentureBeat
hi5 CEO: Facebook's game strategy is schizophrenic, VentureBeat

For the many meetings during the week, hi5's huge lightbox display in the entrance to the Social & Online Games Summit area was a popular meeting spot to connect with potential partners and press throughout the event.

hi5's GDC run culminated with a dedicated speaking session on Wednesday, March 10 at 4:15. By 4:00, a long line had already formed outside room 122 where Alex St. John was to speak. The room filled to capacity and spilled out into the hallway, where hi5 employees did spontaneous Q&A with those who were unable to get into the session.

For the over 200 people who made it inside, they were treated to an entertaining presentation by Alex St. John, who went through the details of hi5's new Game Developer Program. In addition to Alex's remarks, three early partners in the program spoke about their experiences developing games for hi5 and why they chose to launch their games exclusively on hi5.com. The speakers included:

Matt Wilson, Founder & Director of Development, Detonator Games
Steve Victorino, President & COO, Immortal Games
Dave Long, CEO & Co-founder, Exponential Entertainment

For those who missed it, the full session as well as the Q&A at the end was captured on video, including some shots of the standing-room-only crowd.

Also on Wednesday, hi5 issued a press release announcing the Game Developer Program. The news was the latest in a series of announcements by hi5 leading up to GDC, including the acquisition of Austin-based social developer Big Six and support for a new set of Facebook compatible APIs.

The announcement garnered widespread media coverage, including the following articles:

Social Network Hi5 Gets Its Game On, BusinessWeek
Social network hi5 launches program to court game developers, VentureBeat
hi5 Launches Game Developer Program, DevWebPro
hi5 Launches Game Dev Program To Attract Studios, Exclusive Titles, Gamasutra
hi5 Launches Game Developer Program Offers Special Access to Users and Monetization, Inside Social Games
Hi5 Launches New Game Dev Program, Virtual Goods News

Thanks to everyone from hi5 and all our partners who made this year's GDC a huge success! We'll see you again next year.

Video of hi5's Game Developer Program Session at GDC

2010-03-12T01:14:08Z

hi5 president and CTO, Alex St. John, presented hi5's new Game Developer Program to a standing-room-only audience at the Game Developer Conference (GDC) in San Francisco yesterday. Over 200 social game developers packed the room and spilled into the hallway to learn more about this exciting new program.

For those who weren't able to attend GDC (or for the many who were turned away at the door by Moscone staff and fire marshals), the complete session was captured on video. More information about hi5's Game Developer Program and technology platform is available on our corporate site.

View hi5's Game Developer Program Session at GDC.
View crowd shots.

Highlights from Alex St. John's panel at GamesBeat@GDC

2010-03-10T22:46:22Z

Alex St. John, hi5's president and CTO, joined an esteemed panel today at GamesBeat@GDC on "Disruptive Game Platforms." The session was moderated by Dean Takahashi, Lead Writer at GamesBeat and VentureBeat, and included Jack Buser, U.S. Head of Sony's Home Virtual World, Gareth Davis, Games Platform Manager for Facebook, and Peter Relan, Founder and Chairman of Aurora Feint.

Video highlights of the session are available here.

hi5 at GDC

2010-03-10T08:44:12Z

hi5's presence at the 2010 Game Developers Conference kicked off Tuesday with a hugely popular reception after the Social & Online Games Summit. The event attracted over 400 attendees who played a wide array of popular games from different eras.

Tomorrow is the main event with hi5's session unveiling our new Game Developer Program.

Event details follow:

Getting Your Game on hi5: Announcing hi5's Game Developer Program

Speaker: Alex St. John, President and CTO, hi5

Day/Time/Location: Wednesday 4:15- 5:15 Room 122, North Hall

Description: A huge global audience of over 50 million monthly visitors, a virtual currency supporting over 60 payment methods worldwide, a dedicated game portal, automatic game installs, super-charged viral channels, and collaborative game promotion - just some of the things hi5 offers game developers. hi5 is the largest social media site dedicated to gaming and entertainment. We make money with our partners, not from our partners. hi5 is launching a new Game Developer Program at GDC. Come learn more about how your game can go global in this informative, hands-on session - talk to engineers, marketing and business development all in one place.

All GDC passes are eligible to attend this event.

We encourage you to arrive early, as we anticipate a very crowded session and space is limited.

Parasitic Gaming

2010-03-08T23:53:36Z

[NOTE: This blog post initially appeared on Industry Gamers]

By Alex St. John, hi5 President & CTO

I hate the term "Social Gaming." It seems to suggest that people never played games together online before social networks like Facebook came along and unleashed game developers like Zynga to spam us all into trying multi-player poker. Were it not for the U.S. government's crack down in 2007 on the hugely popular online poker sites, cutting off market millions of online poker fanatics and driving them to Facebook to discover a new outlet for their gambling addictions, we might never have had the epidemic known today as "Social Gaming." What is lost in the hype around Zynga's success is the hundreds of hugely successful multi-player games that preceded them. It doesn't seem to help to point out to people that after Poker, Zynga never actually made another genuinely "social" multi-player game again. The extent of "socializing" in Mafia Wars is spamming strangers to join your gang. Socializing in FarmVille is limited to periodically surveying the barren dying wastelands of all your neighbors' farms. Hence my observation that "Social Games," as that term has come to be defined in Silicon Valley, aren't really "social."

When asked to suggest a better term for them I briefly considered referring to the phenomenon as "viral gaming" until it occurred to me that even this wasn't an especially useful differentiating term. After all, Zynga's games aren't even viral in the sense of spreading through genuine word-of-mouth enthusiasm. I can think of several online game companies whose genuinely "social" online games spread virally online to enormous audiences and revenues without needing help from Facebook OR venture capital. Consider Jagex's RuneScape founded by Andrew Gower in Cambridge England. At its peak RuneScape reached nearly 12 million monthly unique gamers and registered millions of subscribers with its Java-based RPG without the benefit of Facebook, venture capital or any apparent marketing effort whatsoever beyond simply being a hugely popular game. The same occurred for Adventure Quest, which was created by a 21-year-old kid living with his parents in Florida, as well as for Miniclip in London and, of course, the many hugely popular poker sites that cropped up independently in the U.S. before the crackdown.

Is it really a big new event in gaming that all the middle-aged housewives that used to play multiplayer card games and backgammon on Yahoo Games and Pogo.com found their real world friends to play games with a little more easily on Facebook? I don't think so. Yet there is some characteristic of "Social Games" that smacks of a new phenomenon in gaming, but what could it be? After much contemplation I have come to the conclusion that the correct term to apply to the new phenomenon is "Parasitic Gaming."

You see, the reason Zynga made one genuinely social multi-player game on Facebook and never did it again is obvious. What they discovered was that Facebook had presented them with a rare and precious opportunity to acquire Facebook's audience virtually for free by designing minimalist games that prey on the inherent contagion of Facebook's social graph to promote themselves to Facebook's audience and siphon them off to Zynga. Real multi-player social gaming was just an impedance to that effort because people didn't need to spam their friends with invitations when Poker provided a ready supply or immediate online players.

Of course, Facebook subsequently recognized the threat and closed the viral loophole by severely constraining the way Facebook games can spam their users with invitations, requests and notifications. Facebook's crackdown will have two interesting effects on game developers. First, developers will be increasingly forced to buy their audience via advertising, like most other online game publishers on the Internet. Second, gaining user adoption on Facebook will be incredibly difficult for all but the largest game developers, who have the advertising budgets (not to mention their own free advertising on their canvas pages) to block out smaller competitors.

It is fair to say that with Facebook moving aggressively to contain the leak by preventing games from freely spamming their users that the halcyon days of "Social Gaming" (part 1) are nearly at an end, and the online game market will return to business as usual in which great, genuinely "social" games spread virally online without needing help from anybody and lesser titles will rely on buying advertising and doing distribution deals to reach their audiences. Even Zynga, having nearly outgrown its host organism will have to wean itself from dependence on Facebook and learn how to make games that people genuinely want to play and share with their friends voluntarily.

Countdown to GDC!

2010-03-05T21:58:39Z

GDC starts next week, and it promises to be an action packed event. Don't miss these hi5 activities and appearances at the show.

Tuesday, March 9, 5:30-7:30 PM, Moscone Center, North lower lobby
hi5 will be hosting a cocktail reception at the Social & Online Games Summit Mixer. In addition to an open bar and appetizers, the reception will feature an "Evolution of Gaming" experience - spanning from classic arcade games and Atari® consoles to Guitar Hero®. So come grab a drink, do some networking, and play your favorite retro games. Put the "social" in social gaming!

Wednesday, March 10, 11:30 AM - 12:15 PM, Moscone Center, Room 305, South Hall
Alex St. John, hi5 President & CTO will be speaking on a panel on "Disruptive Game Platforms" in the GamesBeat@GDC summit. The session will be moderated by Dean Takahashi, Lead Writer at GamesBeat and VentureBeat. Joining Alex on the panel will be Jack Buser, U.S. Head of Sony's Home Virtual World, Gareth Davis, Games Platform Manager for Facebook, and Peter Relan, Founder and Chairman of Aurora Feint.

Wednesday, March 10, 4:15-5:15 PM, Moscone Center, Room 122, North Hall
Alex St. John and other hi5 executives and partners will unveil the details of hi5's new Game Developer Program. This informative, one-hour session will include hi5 employees across engineering, marketing and business development to answer questions and explain everything you need to know to get your game distributed to hi5's global audience of over 50 million monthly visitors. Any GDC attendee with an Expo pass or higher may attend this free event. Pre-register for this event at our events page.

ThinkEquity Publishes Research Report on hi5

2010-03-05T21:36:41Z

ThinkEquity, a prominent equity research and investment banking firm, issued a new report today on hi5 and the company's strategy in pioneering the social entertainment category. The report, titled "Social Gaming: An Interview With The CEO And The President Of hi5", includes an extensive Q&A with hi5 CEO, Bill Gossman, and president and CTO, Alex St. John. Atul Bagga, Digital Media & Online Gaming Analyst and a leading researcher on the rapidly emerging social gaming space, wrote the report -- the full copy of which is available here.

hi5 Announces Support for Facebook® Compatible APIs

2010-03-04T01:24:59Z

New interfaces minimize integration effort for social game developers

San Francisco, CA; Mar. 2, 2010 -- hi5, the largest social entertainment site focused on gaming, today announced a new set of Facebook® compatible APIs making it easier for social game developers to distribute their games on hi5.com. With the availability of these new interfaces, hi5 will be the largest social site to support both OpenSocial and Facebook compatible APIs, as well as a set of gaming-specific APIs that enable new levels of integration to the social graph for developers.

"As a leading game distribution platform, it's our job to make the process of getting games live on hi5 as easy and seamless as possible for our partners," said Alex St. John, hi5's recently appointed president and CTO. "Now, developers who have designed and developed a social game for Facebook can easily get their game up and running on hi5 with minimal development effort."

hi5's Facebook compatible interfaces, which are currently in use by select partners, support the functionality needed by most social media games to add social elements to their applications, including user authentication, profile pictures, friends, updates and photos. The new APIs also support the JavaScript interfaces necessary to enable user actions such as friend invitations. With this initial set of interfaces, many game developers can take games built for Facebook and run them on hi5 with little or no revisions.

"As a small studio, efficient development is crucial for our business. hi5's Facebook compatible interfaces have allowed us to build applications for both platforms with ease," said Matt Wilson, founder and director of development for Detonator Games. "In fact, we recently brought a game we created for the Facebook Platform onto hi5 with very little modification."

hi5 was among the first social sites to provide support for third-party applications with the launch of its OpenSocial-based developer platform in March 2008. Thousands of developers have built OpenSocial applications that run on hi5, and the company was a founding member of the OpenSocial Foundation along with Google, Yahoo! and MySpace. hi5 will continue to support and advance its OpenSocial interfaces.

This effort is the first of many new technologies we will be announcing over the coming months to make hi5 the leading marketplace for great social media games. Alex St. John will be announcing hi5's much-anticipated new Game Developer Program in a dedicated session at the upcoming Game Developers Conference in San Francisco on March 10 at 4:15 p.m.

About hi5

Founded in 2003, hi5 today is among the top 20 largest web sites in the world and the leading destination site focused on social entertainment and gaming. Combining a robust social platform with premium content and game mechanics, hi5 delivers a fun, expressive, and interactive entertainment experience to millions of users around the world. Available in over 50 languages, the site features localized games, virtual goods and other content that is monetized through hi5 Coins, a global virtual currency supporting over 60 payment methods and 30 currencies worldwide. For more information on hi5, visit http://www.hi5.com.

hi5 and the hi5 logo are trademarks of Hi5 Networks, Inc. All other trademarks referenced are the property of their respective owners

Media Coverage

CNET
Inside Social Games
VentureBeat

hi5 Acquires Social Game Developer Big Six

2010-02-25T23:39:49Z

Deal boosts hi5's leadership in commerce platforms and payment processing

San Francisco, CA; Feb. 24, 2009 -- hi5, the largest social entertainment site focused on gaming, today announced the acquisition of social gaming company Big Six. The Austin-based company was founded by gaming veterans Kevin Gliner, Monty Kerr and Chad Hansing, all of whom will join the hi5 management team, as announced separately today.

The deal enhances hi5's growing leadership in commerce for virtual goods and games. Building on hi5's current commerce platform, which includes a global virtual currency called hi5 Coins, support for over 60 payment methods worldwide, and new advertising-based transactional capabilities - the Big Six acquisition brings significant new technology and software platforms in the areas of payment processing, fraud detection and conversion optimization. In addition to its proprietary commerce platform, Big Six also designed a social gaming platform which will become part of the core hi5 site.

"The Big Six team and technology are a perfect complement to what we have already developed at hi5," said Bill Gossman, CEO of hi5. "Over the last two years, we have made a substantial investment in building out the industry's most robust commerce infrastructure for virtual goods and gaming and this acquisition will considerably augment both our commerce platform and domain expertise."

"We are excited to be joining a company that shares our philosophy and vision for how social gaming will evolve," said Kevin Gliner, co-founder and CEO, Big Six. "This deal is a perfect match because it enables us to accelerate our go-to-market plans by leveraging hi5's huge global audience."

As part of the acquisition, employees of Big Six will relocate from Austin and join the rest of the hi5 team in San Francisco.

About hi5

Media Coverage

VentureBeat
TechCrunch
paidContent
Gamasutra
Industry Gamers
GamesIndustry.biz
San Francisco Business Times
Austin Business Journal
Inside Social Games
Social Gaming Guide
Edge Online
Virtual Good News
Virtual World News

hi5 to Unveil New Game Developer Program at GDC

2010-02-24T21:01:37Z

Alex St. John, hi5's President & CTO and long-time gaming visionary, will unveil the details of hi5's new Game Developer Program at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. This informative, one-hour session will be held on Wednesday, March 10 from 4:15 to 5:15 PM at Moscone Center, Room 122, North Hall. GDC attendees may pre-register for this free event at our events page.

hi5 employees across engineering, marketing and business development will be on-hand to answer questions and explain everything you need to know to get your game distributed to our global audience of over 50 million monthly visitors. hi5's Game Developer Program offers developers:

Free marketing and promotion across the hi5 network for new games launched exclusively on hi5
Revenue share on advertising and commerce using hi5 Coins payment platform supporting over 60 payment methods
A dedicated game portal and game promotional area to facilitate discovery of your game
One-click automatic game installs, so you don't lose users at the installation step
Super-charged social channels which don't artificially cap or limit the ability for your game to go viral.

hi5's new Game Developer Program is a fundamentally different model for social games. We make money with our partners, not from our partners. Come learn more about how your game can go global in this one-hour session.

Note: This event is available to all GDC conference pass holders, except for student passes or audio passes. If you have an Expo pass, a Summit pass, a Conference pass, or an All Access pass, you will be qualified to attend this free event. To pre-register for the event, please visit our events page.

hi5 Vice President of Marketing Speaking at Engage! Expo

2010-02-17T15:45:04Z

hi5's Vice President of Marketing, Michael Trigg, is speaking today at the Engage! Expo conference in New York. The panel session at 3:30 PM, titled "Apps, Games and Goods - What Has Worked, What Hasn't?", will delve into business models for virtual goods and social gaming. Topics covered will include what has worked and how the category will evolve.

Mike's fellow panelists include:

Mihir Shah, Chief Revenue Officer, Offerpal
Brian Balfour, VP Production, Viximo
Adam Caplan, VP of Virtual Currency, Super Rewards

Joe Hyrkin, Entrepreneur in Residence at Trinity Ventures, will moderate the panel. The full agenda is available on the Engage! Expo site.

Love is in the virtual air at hi5!

2010-02-10T20:48:24Z

With Valentines rapidly approaching this Sunday, hi5 has introduced several fun new ways that users can show their love online. These new features, launched this week, are perfect for showing that special someone how you feel.

First, as a special holiday addition to our gift store, hi5 is offering a variety of Valentines-themed Super Gifts™. Available in 10 different designs, Super Gifts go beyond the animation of hi5's standard virtual gifts to include a special skinning of the recipient's home page in Valentines colors. Valentines Super Gifts are priced between 320 and 400 hi5 Coins and are accessible through a "Happy Valentine's Day" banner on the home page.

Second, hi5 this week is introducing BlastCards™, a customizable e-card that users can send to their Valentines sweethearts. Users can upload their favorite photo into a variety of custom frames and send them to their hi5 friends. The BlastCards appear in the recipient's Comments section on their Profile page. As part of the launch, many of the frames feature Valentines themes, but BlastCards are also available for other holidays, birthdays, and flirting as well. BlastCards are priced at either 37 or 75 hi5 Coins, depending on the design, with an introductory free card.

Check out these new premium features today!

Super Gifts

BlastCards

Alex St. John to Speak at AlwaysOn's OnMedia NYC 2010 Conference

2010-01-29T00:36:39Z

hi5's President & CTO, Alex St. John, will be speaking at AlwaysOn's OnMedia NYC 2010 conference on February 2. The two-and-a-half-day event, hosted at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in New York City, brings together hundreds of top executives from the Internet, advertising and entertainment industries.

Alex will join a panel discussion on the topic "Are Virtual Goods and Gaming the Holy Grail of Brand Integration?" moderated by Atul Bagga, a vice president at ThinkEquity and one of the leading analysts on the rapidly emerging virtual goods and social gaming marketplace. Alex's co-panelists will include:

Nir Eyal, CEO, AdNectar
Kevin Xu, COO, IGG
Mitch Davis, CEO, Live Gamer

The panel will kick off at 5:30 PM on Tuesday, February 2 in Ballroom 1. For a full agenda of the conference and registration, please visit the OnMedia NYC 2010 site.

hi5 was honored along with Twitter as an AlwaysOn AO Global 250 Category Winner in the Consumer & Community category last year.

Interview with hi5 President & CTO, Alex St. John, on Industry Gamers

2010-01-28T22:16:15Z

Industry Gamers ran a transcript of an interview today with Alex St. John, hi5's President & CTO. A portion of the article appears here:

Interview: Alex St. John Reminds Us Why Console Gaming Is Dead

Posted January 26, 2010 by David Radd

Alex St. John, who became CEO of social network hi5 late last year, is one of the most famously outspoken personalities in the sphere of online gaming. He's seen the gaming industry grow up, first at Microsoft where he helped push the DirectX technology and later as co-founder of WildTangent, which was on the leading edge of monetizing online PC games primarily through micro-transactions. St. John also famously declared consoles dead in 2008, something that IndustryGamers asked him about in a recent interview among other things (hint: he's not backing down from it.)

For full transcript, go to Industry Gamers site here.

Why Brand IP Doesn't Matter to Online Games

2010-01-21T23:05:37Z

[NOTE: This blog post initially appeared on Industry Gamers]

By Alex St. John, hi5 President & CTO

I'm well aware that making this claim is as close to heresy as declaring game consoles dead by 2012 was back in 2007, but as before my reasons for believing this are based on careful analysis of the facts and tremendous experience with online gaming over many years. The reason why this claim is true is simple and easily understood. The core value proposition of online gaming is fundamentally different from that of the console game world. Console games are sold on the promise of being great entertainment. The typical marketing budget for a console game is roughly 12.5% of its development budget. Those marketing dollars are spent buying the consumer perception that the contents of the box they buy will be a great game AFTER the consumer has plunked down $60 bucks for it. The consumer isn't allowed to find out if the game is really worth the money until they've committed their money to it. In this scenario putting Spider-Man or Harry Potter on the box certainly helps to sell the promise of great entertainment.

The online world, however, harkens back to the days of the game arcade, which didn't demand a major cash outlay on the consumer's part to find out if Pac-Man or Asteroids was truly a great game. It cost a quarter, and if the game didn't deliver the consumer never played it again. Thus, like modern online games the amount of money an arcade game made was in direct proportion to how addictive the actual gameplay mechanic was, NOT on how big its marketing budget or movie-tie-in was.

Online games usually start out as free-to-play, converting the consumer to a purchase after enough free play has been consumed to reasonably assume that the consumer is addicted, at which point, the game may up sell to a premium offer. It thus shouldn't come as a shock to anyone to observe that there are no examples of hit online games based on a Hollywood IP franchise. In fact, the most successful IP-based online games are based on famous games themselves such as Scrabble, Wheel of Fortune and Family Feud.

The analogy is similar to the difference between hit television shows and hit movies. Hit movies are often based on famous IP and have huge marketing budgets because, like boxed games, they rely on the PROMISE of being great entertainment to get consumers to purchase tickets to them. Hit television shows, however, are rarely based on famous IP; they rely on their own content quality to create a successful brand such as Friends, Seinfeld, Sopranos, Lost and many others. A hit television series' primary marketing vehicle is the addictiveness of its own content.

There is only one point in an online game's lifecycle when a brand association may have a measurable impact on its success and that point is when the consumer is surfing an online gaming site looking for games and sees an icon associated with a familiar brand. It may well be the case that a good brand can increase the probability that a consumer will click on that particular game. Although this point has not been proven, it has been repeatedly demonstrated that pictures of pretty girls, cute animals and fake Windows warning dialogs and almost anything animated are far more likely to be clicked than, say, a Spider-Man icon.

There was a time early in WildTangent's history when this debate raged avidly within the company, and finally to settle the point I allowed a deal to rebrand one of our most successful downloadable games with a hugely famous Hollywood movie franchise and launch it side-by-side with the unbranded original on Yahoo Games weeks ahead of the release of a major motion picture based on the IP. The two games were identical except for brand association. The result was that although the branded version of the game got more initial clicks, its conversion rate was 1/3 less than the hit unbranded game. Yahoo, excited to have the branded franchise game even promoted it more actively across their site to no great avail. Why the huge difference? The original unbranded game had been given a strong winter/Xmas theme intended to impart a festive holiday spirit to the player without being an overtly Xmas game. The result was that parents were much more likely to buy it for their children as gifts especially during the holidays. In this case, all things being equal, a well crafted theme trumped a hugely popular children's brand by 3X in sales.