3 Principles for Successful Facebook Games

Author: Tommy Leung | 01.31.2010 | Category: Internet, Video Games

Excerpted from an exclusive article I wrote for Associated Content:

Online social networks changed the world. King of thee networks is Facebook. Facebook’s user base is greater than the population of the United States and they have overtaken MySpace in popularity. Entire companies have been built on top of Facebook’s platform. Facebook changed the world in the last decade.

The popularity of Facebook Applications has spawned a ton of games that currently flood our Live Feeds. Few days pass without a mention of a quiz result or a lost brown cow. The early days of Facebook Applications allowed for successes like Vampires and Werewolves. Those were Neanderthal apps. Apps can no longer become successful by being incredibly annoying.

The Facebook audience has evolved.

Facebook Applications are only going to get more complex as features become standard. People expect to see their friend’s high scores and how they rank. They expect to be able to interact with their friends. Zynga’s model has become the standard for what a Facebook game can do.

This makes success for new apps more difficult. A couple of guys in their spare time can’t make a game on the scale of FarmVille. Zynga and other large social network game giants can only be defeated at their own game by each other. The little guys trying to break in will need to find a road less traveled.

Continued at Associated Content

Avoiding iPhone Game Obscurity

Author: Tommy Leung | 12.29.2009 | Category: Business, Internet, Marketing, Video Games

There is no shortage of iPhone developers. There is no shortage of iPhone applications. With over 100,000 apps, there is no shortage of extra features. It makes me wonder how I ever lived without my iPhone. I use Google Maps to get around. I share picture perfect moments using the Facebook App. I use the Subway Map app to get around NYC. I use Shazam’s tiny elfin librarians to tell me the name of songs. I use the Chase Mobile App to check account balances.

You name it, there’s an app for that. A year from now, you name it, and there will be apps for that and the ten other things you didn’t think of.

These are all conveniences iPhones owners have enjoyed. I have taken these services for granted. I don’t worry about where anything is anymore, I can find it on Google Maps. All of this convenience is fantastic for the consumer, while those trying to sell apps on the iPhone are finding it harder to stand out.

The most competitive category is Games. There are few categories as popular as the Games section of the App Store. There are more Games than any other category. At over 20,000 strong, avoiding obscurity will be a challenge.

But not only that, you need to have a lasting impression. You may have created the hottest iPhone game to date but, what is going to stop someone from releasing a $.99 clone? How do you ensure a cheaper clone isn’t going to eat away at your sales and market share?

Take the once popular iShoot. It made $800,000 in five months and prompted its creator, Ethan Nicholas, to leave his job at Sun Microsystems. iShoot has since been buried by competitors and copycats. Nicholas says it’s “terrifying” and that iShoot’s success was “pure luck”.

Pure luck is not going to work for a business selling games on the App Store. Relying on luck to run a business is the surest way to the land of businesses-that-were. And I’m not sure all businesses go to heaven.

Luckily, the solution is as old as time: marketing. Why do you buy Tide instead of Acme Brand? They may have exactly the same quality and stain fighting power but, Acme Brand isn’t going to hold a candle to the power of Tide.

There was a time when only a handful of games were on the App Store. The best games sold well in those prehistoric times. Those days are long gone. You can release a game on the App Store tomorrow and it’ll be in the company of a hundred other games. Only a small fraction of all iPhone users are going to know your game came out. People can’t buy what they don’t know about!

This is logical reasoning but, not everyone is on board. In an interview with Wired, Austin Sarner, CEO of Design by a Knife, said this:

“Basically everybody’s on the same level once they submit an iPhone app. Unlike traditional marketing, there’s no ad campaign: A user just sees what he sees in the iPhone store, and the applications kind of have to sell themselves to some extent.”

Sarner’s philosophy is that great content drives App Store success and not “marketing”. Sarner is a developer by profession so this an understandable point of view. Sarner confuses advertising with marketing and doesn’t realize that developing a great product is a fundamental function of marketing.

It is inaccurate that there is no advertising behind iPhone games. EA didn’t come to the party without their advertising muscle. And with hundreds of games being added to the App Store every week, the clutter alone will make you invisible no matter how good your game is.

It is suicide to release an app and hope it will be magically discovered. Only 7% of iPhone users download through iTunes, 62% knew what they wanted, 60% browsed the top lists, and 46% were from word of mouth according to AdMob. The 62% who knew what they wanted heard it somewhere first. It didn’t come to them in a dream.

If you are convinced that making the greatest iPhone game in the world, releasing it to the App Store, and then praying it will sell is a viable strategy, I have two words for you: good luck. You are going to need it.

However, if you want a viable business, there is a better way.

Game developers worldwide will disagree and hate this but, marketing has to be part of the development process from day one. You can’t create a game and then sprinkle some marketing pixie dust as an after thought. That’s the equivalent of wearing a blindfold, spinning around a few times, and then trying to hit a pinata. You have no idea where the target is. You are going to miss.

The development process starts with an audience. You need to target someone. You don’t need to go after the same audience as everyone else, but you need an audience. Who is going to buy your game? You need to make a game for them. You can make a game for yourself, but that’s not a business–it’s a hobby. Doing things in that fashion means it’ll always be a hobby.

Your game needs to be characteristic of your company brand–your company does have a brand right? There is a reason EA has multiple brands. Each brand has its own image and their games reflect that. EA Games caters to a more traditional audience, EA Sports develops games for the sports audience, and EA Play is solely focused on the casual market.

Engage with the community. If your audience is there, you need to be there engaging them: blogs, forums, YouTube videos, LinkedIn groups, Facebook groups, etc. If your audience is there, you need to be there. Being engaged does not mean spamming. Join the conversations and use your company as the name of contact or end each comment noting your company. Don’t be obnoxious. Be informative, helpful, and provide useful discourse.

Marketing your game is a full-time job. People who solely work on the development side find this difficult to swallow. In their world, they are doing the hard work. Their point of view isn’t without merit. Without them, there would be no product at all.

To make things worse, it is difficult to accurately measure the impact marketing has on your business. You may never know how or if someone who interacts with your marketing ends up buying your product. In fact, they might not buy your product at all. They might talk to ten other people about their experience with your company and then one or more within those ten may end up buying. We cannot accurately measure this.

For people who are used to concrete and visible patterns, marketing may as well be voodoo. However, this doesn’t make marketing less important. It does mean marketing requires a different mindset than that of development.

Social medias has allowed us to monitor our audience’s thoughts, concerns, and feelings in real time. This lets us adjust our marketing efforts on the fly if it isn’t working or is having a negative effect. You need to be constantly monitoring your audience. It isn’t just a matter of marketing during a release–you will end up like iShoot. Cultivate your audience and develop a community.

Infinity Ward, the makers of Call of Duty, understands the importance of a strong community. They have a community manager, Robert Bowling, whose sole job is to monitor the Call of Duty audience. Without him, Modern Warfare 2 may not have become the highest grossing entertainment release of all time. The game would have done well no matter what. Call of Duty has a history, the first Modern Warfare was excellent, the hype surrounding Modern Warfare 2 was spectacular, it was a high quality product, and Call of Duty is a known entity–a brand. But, would it have done as well without marketing? Of course, we can never actually measure it but, I’m willing to bet marketing made the difference between one of the highest grossing and the highest grossing.

Reading on Scribd

Author: Tommy Leung | 07.08.2009 | Category: Books, Internet

Image via CrunchBase

I’ve known of Scribd for a while as the Mises Institute has put a great deal of their collection online for free. Even though I have known of Scribd, I have not really read any book available on there in great depth–until now. I had read Malcolm Gladwell’s review of Chris Anderson’s Free and Seth Godin’s rebuttal to Gladwell’s review. I have my own opinions on the idea of Free so this was a topic that I am fairly interested in.

I really did not expect to read this book online for free as I didn’t really expect it to be available online for free. I own Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail and loved that book. It is entirely possible that I will eventually buy Free just to have on my bookshelf as digital books just aren’t the same.

Having discovered Free was available for free I decided to read a few pages–perhaps a few chapters–to get a taste of the book. I generally do that at Barnes & Nobles anyway. I am now 205 pages into this 288 page book. In all likelihood, I will finish reading this book as I have less than a third to go and it is pretty damn interesting.

My intention isn’t really to review the book but, to talk about reading an entire book online on a computer monitor. I have done a lot of reading online but, I have never read a book on a digital screen. The experience so far as been satisfactory. It wasn’t as terrible as I had thought but, also not fantastic. I still prefer to have the physical item.

Scribd is great. When I started reading for the first time I wondered where the bookmark tool was. I didn’t find out until I returned to the book at a later time and discovered that Scribd knew where I had left off and suggested to me that I could start from there. Marvelous.

Their service is definitely something I’ll explore further.

.me

Author: Tommy Leung | 06.23.2009 | Category: Internet

Other people with my name have long since bought up the .com domains with my name. In my neverending effort to make Googling my name show my internet presence first, I have bought tommyleung.me and thomasleung.me.

I’m not super sure what I intend to do with those domains yet. They just point to here now. More options for self-branding!

Social Media Guru?

Author: Tommy Leung | 02.26.2009 | Category: Internet, Marketing

This blog post came from someone I follow on Twitter. It talks about all the people who have started calling themselves “social media gurus” on social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Are they really “gurus”. What makes them a guru?

“Yes, social media is huge when it comes to marketing on the internet but not all so called social media gurus know what they are doing.”

That is probably the truth of the matter too when it comes to social media. The field itself is so new and bleeding edge, what defines your guru status? I thought it was a good read–I did a retweet. Particularly loved this part at the end:

“Marketing in the social web or utilizing social media for marketing purpose is built on one premise which coincides with the age old form of marketing : word of mouth. That is exactly what social media marketing is. Word of mouth marketing but on the web. You do things that makes others talk about you. Whether through meaningful relationship on a one on one basis with your fans or followers or by doing things that gives value to the people on the other end.”

I’m reading Word of Mouth Marketing by Andy Sernovitz right now so that resonates. I also believe it.

90/10 Twitter Rule

Author: Tommy Leung | 02.23.2009 | Category: Internet, Marketing

The Pareto Principle (80/20) is pretty valid for almost everything in the universe and a adaptation of that rule is 90/10 or even 110/5 is just as valid in some cases. The idea being that 80% of all effects come from 20% of the causes.

I find it easier to look at it in business terms: 80% of profits come from 20% of customers. I follow Nabbit on Twitter and Nabbit had a tweet about the 90/10 rule of Twitter. I actually think it applies to a lot of social media, interactive, and word of mouth marketing.

This new age of interactive marketing requires that we give and give a lot. What we receive will be directly porportional to what we give. Those just trying to push things down our throats are not going to get much from us. Web 2.0 brought about online communities and information sharing.

I believe the way to successful interactive marketing is by giving away as much useful information as possible. To be helpful and kind and caring. The greedy evildoers are going to be caught redhanded and their faces plastered all over Google. This is an age where you can’t get away with poor customer service and bad products.

Instead of give me, give me, give me. It’s give, give, give.

Geo Challenge

Author: Tommy Leung | 02.05.2009 | Category: Internet

My latest Facebook addiction is this game: GEO Challenge by PlayFish. They are responsible for other popular Facebook games like Who Has the Biggest Brain and Word Challenge.

The game is basically a set of four mini-games where your knowledge of world geography is tested. I am generally not very good with geography and have learned quite a bit from this game already. The four mini-games is matching flag with country, matching land mass to country, locating cities, and locating landmarks. I do best in landmarks and worst in flags.

If you haven’t tried this game already, I think you should. You’ll at least learn a something from it and it is fun. As of this writing, I have a score in the 18,000’s–some people have scores in the hundreds of thousands.

UPDATE: A few hours after I posted this, my high score is in the 22,000’s. This game is addictive.

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