GDC: Social games attracting millions of players

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Pet Society, a social game on Facebook and MySpace. Credit: Playfish

Online games, once considered the domain of reclusive teenage boys hunkered in the bedroom or basement, have become massively social.

Simply put, people are playing games with each other over the Internet the way they had for decades using board games. But what defines a social game? What makes the successful ones so viral? And how do companies make money from them?

We canvassed executives, consultants and designers at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco this week for answers. This post covers the rise of social games. We’ll have two other posts soon to address the other questions, on viral characteristics and business models.

So, defining social games: They aren’t just about throwing sheep at your friends on Facebook. They’re bite-size games that people can play with other friends on social networks (often by taking turns making moves). One popular game is Pet Society, developed by Playfish in London. Pet Society lets players acquire virtual pets and homes. The homes are in villages occupied by their friends. Players get points by visiting their friends or playing mini-games with them.

Like many other social games, Pet Society is incredibly simple -- so simple that they ...

... were dismissed by traditional game publishers. Now, publishers are starting to pay attention. That’s because social games attract millions of people each day.

Pet Society is played by 3 million people a day. The average play session lasts 30 minutes. That means each day, people play 1.5 million hours of this relatively simple game. Nearly all of the players either were invited by their friends or joined after seeing that their friends were playing the game -- not because of advertising or marketing, said Kristian Segerstrale, chief executive of Playfish. In other words, the game spreads virally from player to player.

In this environment, social games don’t need a brand. In fact, most of the top Facebook games aren’t established franchises. ‘The kinds of games that succeed are entirely different types of games than gamers are used to,’ Segerstrale said. ‘They’re games that you wish your friends had and could play with you.’ He compares these new types of games to a football -- they’re simple and you can certainly play with it by yourself, but it would be a heck of a lot more fun if you could get your friends to play with you.

That’s allowed companies like Playfish and Zynga to come out of nowhere and dominate the market for social games on Facebook. That’s no small feat considering that there are more than 5,000 games on Facebook.

-- Alex Pham