Gareth Davis, platform manager at Facebook, gave a talk today at the Casual Connect game conference in Seattle about how to design the best social games.
The talk is based on watching thousands of social games come and go in the past few years. If game companies pay attention to the advice, they just might have a chance to challenge the social game industry’s leader, Zynga.
Davis said that there are 200 million monthly active users on Facebook and that the average length per game session is 55 minutes. Facebook is trying to move those players over to mobile platforms such as Android or the iPhone. Zynga has more than 266 million monthly active users on Facebook, but it’s in Facebook’s interest to diversify that and encourage more game companies to make social games.
“My belief is that you can do good social design by taking the collective learnings of people on the platform,” Davis said.
Here are Davis’ tips on how to create the best social games.
「私の信条は、プラットフォーム上の人々の集団的学習をする事によって、良いソーシャルデザインをすることができるということです」Davidは述べた。
これらは、最高のソーシャルゲームの作成の仕方におけるDavidの助言である。
「私は確信しています。そのプラットフォーム上にいる人々についてのまとまった知識を得れば、あなたたちは優れたソーシャルデザインが出来るのです。」とDavis氏は話した。
以下に、最高のソーシャルゲームの創り方に関するDavis氏のティップスを見てみよう。
1. Start with social from the ground up. Don’t adapt games from older ways of building games. That means it must be easy for gamers to share what they can achieve in the game with their friends. Those players have to be engaged long enough so they can interact with their friends and help the game spread.
2. Optimize for social discovery and distribution. Discovery is a huge problem, but Facebook itself has a lot of different ways to spread news about games, from the news feed to email messages.
2.ソーシャルの発見および流通のために最適化しよう。発見されることは大きな課題だが、Facebook自身は、ニュースフィードからメールメッセージまで、ゲームに関する情報を広く伝える様々な方法を持っている。
3. Focus on engagement. If they don’t come back, it doesn’t matter.
4. Make sure you take advantage of retail-level merchandising of virtual goods. Virtual goods are the primary means of making money in free-to-play social games. Users play for free but pay real money for virtual goods. Merchandising means you should offer discounts or sales to users on a regular basis. And you should target certain virtual goods toward “whales,” or social gamers who will pay lots of money to climb to the top of the leaderboards in a game.
4.仮想的商品の小売レベルでの販売についてはあなたたちの方がアドバンテージを持っていることを確認しよう。仮想的商品は、プレイ無料のソーシャルゲームから利益を生み出す第一の手段である。ユーザーは無料でプレイするが、仮想的商品には現実の金銭を支払う。販売とは、あなたたちがユーザーに対して値下げやセールを定期的に提供すべきだということだ。そしていくらかの仮想的商品を "鯨たち"、つまりゲーム内のリーダーボードの頂点に上り詰めるために大金を費やすであろうソーシャルゲーマーたちに向けるべきである。
5. Use analytics for business intelligence. Good analytics allows for insight into the way customers think and lets you figure out what to sell to them.
6. Use interactive development with a/b testing. A/B testing is where you test two different ideas and se which one will be more popular with users. It’s a scientific approach to game development and is a critical part of the feedback cycle in social games.
7. Deploy globally on multiple platforms. Game developers should strive to reach a worldwide audience and support multiple ways to reach an audience. Developers can, for instance, create HTML5 games that are cross-platform titles, but they can also create native apps, or those that take advantage of a particular platform. By pursuing gamers in all markets, social game developers can hit the biggest audience.
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ありがとうございます！