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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.
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
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.
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.
Video highlights of the session are available here.
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.
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, 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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.