Facebook policy changes are a tectonic shift for social game developers

Facebook Platform is under going major changes, which I believe are great for the smaller social game developers and everybody who makes quality applications. This great news, because Facebook is cracking down on questionable practices and spam.

Communication features change

On one front Facebook is revamping the communication mediums available for developers. This includes notifications going away, lot of stuff being moved to the inbox, the algorithmic stream change of last week and the new games dashboard to name a few. The best summary of these changes for any developer is the Facebook Platform roadmap.

I was originally concerned that Facebook would totally nerf application growth thru these changes, but after reading thru the changes, the functionality change isn’t really that drastic. The Stream will continue to be the main mass communication tool, and the Inbox based communication together with the new Dashboard are a great replacement for notifications. The game developers will go thru a round of iteration with these new features, but as we saw a year ago with the removal of profile boxes (then the most prominent application virality feature), the developers are quick to adapt.

The second change is much more important.

Facebook’s platform policies have gotten a lot stricter

(CC) Paul Keleher

Most of the blog coverage of yesterday’s Facebook Developer Garage focuses on the above functionality changes and is missing the real beef of what’s going on. The changes in the Facebook Platform Policy are much more important than the functionality changes.

Zynga is the master of viral distribution and many others copy their best practices (one notable exception being Playfish, who is quite reserved on their viral features). If I were to exaggerate, Facebook has taken a long hard look at what Zynga and its copycats do and decided to forbid many of their most successful practices:

Apps can no longer popup “Publish to stream” forms. This is done currently extensively at e.g. level ups, achievements. Now stream publishing can only be prompted after a player specifically clicks on such button.

 

Apps can no longer mislead players by making the default button e.g. a invite friends function. I can’t count how many times I’ve clicked on the friendly looking green button in Cafe World’s login report screen only to end up at the invite friends screen when I just wanted to proceed to the game. This action button now must have a “skip” button next to it in a similar size & style.

 

Apps can no longer gate content or reward players based on the number of friends playing. Mafia Wars and its clones are completely built upon this mechanic with mob size based powerups and limitations built-in. It will be very painful to change these game mechanics as it means that every single players’ in-game standing & resources will change.

 

Apps can no longer incentivize players to e.g. invite or message friends or publish to stream. This has been pretty much the rule already, but Facebook has been somewhat lax in enforcing it. It remains to be seen if this will be used against features such as “Share the wealth” mechanic popularized by Zynga in FarmVille to incentivize posting to the stream (clicking on Get the Special bonus link shown above gives a bonus to you as well as to the player who posted to the stream).

There are more e.g. a rule that forbids Apps from no longer publishing Stream stories that invite a player to a game or include calls to action “e.g. beat her score”.

If Facebook is really serious about enforcing these policies, this will mean a tectonic shift on how games can grow on the platform. Will Facebook enforce these rules against Zynga,  who is apparently contributing $50 million to Facebook’s revenues thru buying Facebook ads?

I’m sure there will be in a grace period during which developers are expected to change their practices and games. How long that period is, is still unclear. Facebook representatives themselves didn’t go into much detail about the policy changes at yesterday’s event.

To be clear: Zynga has operated according to the existing rules of the platform and has been wildly successful. It takes a lot more than just virality to become the TOP1 company on Facebook. The above is not to dig on Zynga – it is just that many of their most copied approaches are being invalidated. And to be honest, if the rules wouldn’t have been changed, we’d most likely would have also adapted many of Zynga’s approaches – that’s how successful they’ve been.

Why is this great news for smaller developers?

(CC) Richkidsunite

These are great changes for smaller developers because

• virality is compounded growth: with a high user base, the forbidden practices were useful to getting higher absolute number of new users into those apps. If these new rules are enforced, the bigger apps’ growth will likely slow down and leave room for smaller players
• game quality matters: with less spam it will take better quality games to succeed. This should also benefit Playfish.
• originality matters: it will be a bit harder to copy a new original game and grow it rapidly. However, the big players have the marketing spend to boost any new game they want
• players will be more in charge: with less spam, new players are likely to react more positively to friend’s inviting them to games
• discoverability improves: the games dashboard should help also new apps surface
• the playing field is more even – if just for a while: everybody needs to find the new best practices

It is good to note that this is just the roadmap for the next few months for the Facebook Platform. There will definitely more changes ahead.

More coverage about Facebook Platform changes

• Inside Facebook’s summary, complete run down of changes and screenshot gallery
• Venturebeat’s summary and liveblog
• TechCrunch’s liveblog
• ReadWriteWeb’s brief summary
• Official announcement from Facebook
• Facebook Platform Roadmap (the best technical & game design resource)
• Facebook’s updated Platform policies
• Video recording of Facebook developer garage

Lean startup mindmaps

I’m a big believer in the customer development and lean startup concepts championed by Steve Blank and Eric Ries. The concepts have definitely been the most valuable concepts I’ve learned while running Everyplay as they provide a much needed framework around the activities any startup faces, articulate the need to get to product/market fit thru making validated learning about customers the unit of progress and provide practical processes that you can apply immediately (e.g. the Five why’s approach).

Steve and Eric have recently given presentations and interviews on these concepts. As mindmaps are my preferred way of brainstorming, making notes and communicating complex ideas, I tried to capture the gist as well as the detail of these presentations in the mindmaps linked to below. Hope you find them useful!

Startup2Startup

Steve and Eric recently gave a a joint presentation at Startup2Startup

• Video on Ustream
• Slides on Slideshare
• Mindmap notes: PDF – Mindmanager

Lean startup on O’Reilly

Eric presented the lean startup concept on O’Reilly’s webcast.

• Video on YouTube
• Slides on Slideshare
• Mindmap notes: PDF – Mindmanager

Mixergy interview with Eric Ries

Mixergy is a great source of entrepreneurial insights with Andrew Warner interviewing serial entrepreneurs, tech guys, marketers and bizdev folks.

• Podcast on Mixergy
• Mindmap notes: PDF – Mindmanager

P.S. Here’s a link to Eric Ries’ latest Lean Startup presentation given at Tokyo (Geeks on a Plane).

Taneli’s blog up

Taneli Tikka is one of the most successful, Finnish serial entrepreneurs. He’s been involved with companies such as IRC-Galleria and Dopplr and is currently active in both Muxlim and RunToShop. Taneli is also an advisor to Everyplay.

Taneli’s blog is now up and I for one have already subscribed. Taneli’s post on VC due diligence is a must read, and I found plenty of great new blogs to follow from his reading list.

He being asked to star on The Bachelor is definitely something ;-).

Bigpoint exits for 70 M€

This is old news from June, but it completely has escaped my attention. Bigpoint, which is one of the largest developers and operators of Free To Play games has been sold to private equity funds GMT Communications Partners and the Peacock Equity Fund (part of the General Electric / NBC Universal family) .

The price tag: a sweet 70 million euros. Bigpoint had at the closing of the deal 23 million registered users (price=3 € / user), but that figure has already risen to 35 million users. They have roughly 100-130k daily average users and are active in at least 17 countries. Some of country operations are directly by Bigpoint, while some are partnerships with local operators. The Finnish site is operated under the label Topkani, in co-operation with Finland’s largest commercial TV channel MTV3.

Bigpoint also announced a co-op with NBC Universal to promote their games thru SCI FI and USA Network websites.

Improving productivity

What a great way to start the week to read Dan Cook’s presentation on productivity (via Andrew Chen’s blog). His presentation summarizes key findings from a number of real-life experiments on productivity. Among them:

• Productivity for knowledge workers drops at around 35 hours / week
• There is always a cost for crunching (we all know this, don’t we?)
• Productivity increases significantly for seating cross-functional teams of 4-8 people together (and closing the door)

I personally believe that in a knowledge-intensive position you are doing well if you are getting four good hours of work per day. The rest of the 8 hour day is spent on interruptions, meetings and communications (internal and external).

What’s your take – how many hours of productive work do you think you get done on the average per day?

Loving Balsamiq Mockups

I’m just loving Balsamiq Mockups. It’s an awesome UI mockup tool that lets you whip up prototypes in a couple of minutes, communicate ideas and iterate rapidly (did I already say I love iterating!).

The full license is $79, and worth every penny. I’ve now done two full featured UI mockups and they’ve proven a great tool to discuss with the team.

If you need to create mockups for a web service or a GUI, your team shouldn’t be without this tool. It’s also available as a plugin for Confluence and JIRA, which makes it even handier for bigger teams. Support is also fantastic at GetSatisfaction.

Okay, now back to getting more mockups done =).

KZero’s virtual worlds radar

KZero, a consultancy for virtual worlds, has updated their virtual worlds radar, which is a great distilled view of the whole virtual worlds landscape. The radards are organized by age demographics and demonstrate how the services have developed, their popularity and even suggest possible gaps in market.

Highly recommended if you are in the virtual worlds’ or MMO business.

SIME Helsinki afterthoughts

SIME came to Helsinki, so of course I had to go and check it out. I had never been into one of the events previously, as I previously wasn’t in the “space” that SIME targets.

The day began with champagne, which was not quite what I would have expected from a business conference. There is definitely a certain vibe to SIME, and those more knowledgeable than me told me that the main event in Stockholm a cross between a party and a conference. Sounds fun!

The day’s program consisted of presentations and panels featuring very interesting and passionate people including digital creative agencies (e.g. Nitro), digital media properties (e.g. Microsoft Marketing), social media destination sites (e.g. Suomi24, Stardoll, Muxlim), startups (RunToShop), investors and a bunch more. It was a fascinating cross-section of entrepreneurs, corporate folks, youngsters with passion and veterans with battle proven skills.

The highlight sessions were definitely the ones with a bit of controversy. Taneli Tikka (RunToShop, also on Everyplay’s advisory board) joined the panelists from Suomi24, MySpace Nordics and Xtract on the stage to get beyond the hype of social media advertising. Aamulehti’s Matti Apunen interviewed Google Finland’s CEO Petri Kokko and got several well deserved laughs from the audience when he tightened the thumbscrews on Petri ;-). To Petri’s credit, he did well under the pressure, but perhaps a bit more straight shooting answers would have been what the audience yearned. The tug of war between newspapers and Google News was one of the topics on the stage, but the match had to be declared unresolved as next session was about to start.

I was personally very impressed by the excellent presentations and panel leadership from SIME’s Chairman Ola Ahlvarsson. This gentleman thoroughly knows how to take his audience and deliver a compelling presentation, as well as gently but firmly lead the panels into interesting discussions. Superb job Ola!.

Networking at SIME was the highpoint personally. It was great meeting old friends like Sam Weintraub (a F-Secure colleague, nowadays at the mysterious Fruugo) and catching up with the movers and shakers in digital media, social media and venture capital.

The hilarious highlight of the event were definitely the outstanding videos created by Radon. Ranging from street interviews of random Finns about the state of the Finnish digital media industry (hilarious) to asking them if they “porn surf” (the responses were outright awesome) to the legendary INTERNOT resistance group fighting for analogue lifestyle. If you haven’t yet checked it out, do it now: Episode 1, Episode 2, Episode 3. INTERNOT! INTERNOT! INTERNOT! ;-)

I gotta hand it to the  Swedish organizing team. SIME Helsinki was a fun, different event and I’d definitely attend again.

Facebook’s social games a flash from the past

Back in the years 1992-1994 I was running a BBS called Starport, which was one most famous BBS for demosceners as it was the World HQ for Future Crew. BBS were a lot like the current SocNets, but just with a few hundred users. You dialed in with your modem, posted on forums, chatted, downloaded and uploaded files, and in general just hang around socially.

One of the big attractions were the multiuser games like Trade Wars or Legend of Red Dragon (LORD). The asynchronous multiplayer action back is almost identical to the current Facebook games like MobWars or Battle of the Bands. Actually, those ancient BBS games were far superior to the simple gameplay mechanics in many SocNet games. Trade Wars was a personal favourite with its Elite-esque sci-fi action.

This started me thinking that it might not be a bad idea to port Trade Wars to the Facebook platform. I know I’d die to play it again.

TechCrunch50 after thoughts

TechCrunch50 is over, and Yammer (“Twitter for enterprises”) won the top prize. This was the first time I was actively following the conference and the livestream provided by UStream was simply outstanding. It was a rare opportunity to watch the demos live and listen to the Q&A with the panels.

If you are ever serious about pitching a product to VCs, you should do yourself favour and watch the video recordings available on the TechCrunch50 site. Nothing beats seeing other entrepreneurs doing it for real.

The Rich media and Games tracks were of most interest personally, and the trends of user generated content, collaborative workspaces, virtual worlds with developer APIs and in-browser experiences were obvious in almost every single presentation.

A few quick observations:

PlayCe has a neat idea with the mirror world model, where the 3D game spaces are built from real world data (satellite maps, GIS data etc). It remains to be seen if real world really makes for compelling game play experiences. The downtown of New York isn’t really designed for fast speed racing or Godzilla boss fights.

Atmosphir‘s “build your own 3D platformer” experience was very much an alpha version with plenty of promise. I was frankly surprised that the panel didn’t point out the obvious parallels to LittleBigPlanet, which is polished beyond perfection and due out this fall.

Bojam is collaborative space for musicians around the world. This was a concept with real legs and obvious potential to be used for live jamming, learning from pro players, composing and much more.

There was almost no Nordic participants apart from Burt from Sweden. This made me think. Would I want Everyplay to launch publicly among 50+ other companies coming out of the closet simultaneously? Obviously the group as a whole gets a lot of press, the networking opportunities are immense and if you do well, you are pretty much guaranteed to get a huge influx of users (this happened to Mint, the winner of TechCrunch40). On the other hand it’s pretty expensive for a Nordic company, the competition for attention is intense, and these events take place once a year.

Would I postpone a launch several months just to do it at TechCrunch or DEMO? Or would I show a hastily done alpha just to get it in time for TechCrunch or DEMO?.

No, I wouldn’t. But if the timing would naturally work out, then yeah, it definitely would be worth it.