Zynga has had multiple successful titles on Facebook so far, so it could be almost easy to look at them and take for granted their level of reach. However, more established traditional publishers have not always had comparable success and Zynga’s chief games designer Brian Reynolds thinks there’s a reason why.
“The important thing with social is to understand that the core of it is social,” said Reynolds. “You can’t just go write… Call of Duty and add Facebook functionality. You’ve got to make a game that’s about socializing, make social the core of what you’re inventing, and then build the game around that. Mostly where I see triple-A people or developers trying to get into social and then failing is where they say, ‘We’re just going to take game X and kind of give it a little bit of Facebook plumbing and that’ll be great.’ In some ways, they’re missing the point of what social is all about and why it works.”
Reynolds says that instant accessibility is key to hooking people into social games. “In the old days, again, we were talking about the golden hour – you had to catch the player in the golden hour to get them to love it enough and tell their friends and whatever. These days it’s more like the golden 15 seconds,” he commented. “You can actually watch the little waterfall graph of the longer the bar goes for loading, the more people you lose forever for first time players. That’s part of the whole metric driven thing; we learned that stuff.”
When asked about the size disparity between social and traditional games, Reynolds said, “I don’t think the traditional space is going to go away. I mean, it has shrunk…it shrunk a little last year, and it shrunk a lot the year before. It’s not going to always even be shrinking, but it’s never going to be growing the way social is growing right now. It’s never going to suddenly have hundreds of millions of players on a game or something like that. Those platforms don’t have that potential. It’s going to continue to be a perfectly fine business, but it’s just not going to become a particularly larger business then it already is. It’ll grow at a modest rate is my take on it. Some of these publishers will figure it out and they’ll get into social and they’ll succeed. Some of them will try and they’ll fail. That’s what we see with any new kind of platform, is their success and failure in adopting the platform and figuring it out.”
Source: IndustryGamers {link no longer active}
