What Games Are

The Games Industry's Age Problem [Trends]

I was at an event hosted by NESTA in which Ian Livingstone and Alex Hope presented a top-line summary for a report talking about the problems of education in the UK. Specifically what they talked about was how to train young people with better sets of skills to equip them for digital industries like games or visual effects.

The thing I noticed more than anything else, however, was that (at 37 years old) I was one of the youngest people there. In a room of luminaries from the digital industries in the UK, all I could see was a mass of bald heads and grey hair. Where were the young companies and the new generation?

Nowhere that I could see. I think that might be a problem.

Surfing At The Back Of The Wave [Resonance]

The business mind relies on numbers. Numbers are proof, numbers indicate whether something is real, and so numbers help to guide strategy. What people coming into the games business from the outside often do is try to treat it like a normal business. They want to measure trends, take baby steps, and only take chances when they are sure that they are onto something.

In the process they miss the wave. Resonance is not static. It is a waveform, and by the time the business person has settled himself with what the market is, how it works and what it needs to do, the opportunity has often passed by.

The Complete 'CityVille Explained' [Social Games]

All this week I've been posting parts of an article talking about the newest Zynga sensation, CityVille, and explaining how it works. With the article now completed, here are all four posts:

• Part 1, about what CityVille is and why visibility matters
• Part 2, about the gameplay and how it drives retention with open loops
• Part 3, about the social features and the idea of reciprocal trade
• Part 4, about the financial side, how the game makes money, as well as some final thoughts

 

CityVille Explained, Final Part [Social Games]

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Nearly there. When I started writing this article last Saturday, I don’t think I expected it to be 8,500 words long. It turns out that when you really dig into how the dynamics of a game work, you keep overturning new stones that you hadn’t realised were even there. For the final part of this article, there are two things that I want to cover:

1. Money: How does the financial model work?
2. Comments: What works in CityVille? What doesn’t?

 

CityVille Explained, Part 3 [Social Games]

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In the first part of this article, I talked about the Zynga phenomenon and proposed to answer the question of how Zynga keeps doing what it does so well. I first described what CityVille is, and then made the case that visibility through advertising, cross-promotion and free marketing sources is the secret to making social games splash.

In the second part, I talked about retention, and how context matters. I then explained how the game dynamics of CityVille (and other games of its type) create constant activity. I talked about how timers create a never-ending sequence of overlapping open loops, and reward the player constantly through pellets and unlocks that keep them engaged.

Now let’s move on to the social features. I already touched on publishing as an example of how social features increase visibility, and how they are used for unlocking gates. But they also play a key part in building retention in the game.

There are three kinds of social activity in CityVille: prompts, suggestions and visitations.

CityVille Explained, Part 2 [Social Games]

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In the first part of this article, I explained what CityVille is, why visibility of a Facebook game matters much more than social interaction factors, and explained how visibility is generated inside Facebook. Now let’s talk about how CityVille keeps users engaged.

Most social games are considered amusements for the majority of players, so successful social game developers focus on delivering that kind of engagement. They are obsessed with retention, a commonly-used term to describe whether players return to a game or bounce from it, and the period of weeks or months that the average retained customer spends in the game before boredom finally sets in. Understanding retention is essential to achieving sustainable growth and revenue in a social game like CityVille.

But what are the levers of retention?

CityVille Explained, Part 1 [Social Games]

Check out this graph from Appdata:

I know what many of you are thinking: How does Zynga keep doing this?