This is an excerpt from a great article by our CEO, Raviv Turner, on the different levels of brand integration in social games:

“Brand integration can occur within various levels of a game. When it comes to brand marketing, social games offer a much deeper level of integration than print, television or radio because of their interactive nature. From labeled in-game items to entire games structured around a household name, an increasing number of brands have entered into partnerships with social game developers—but what roads lead to higher success rates and lasting social impact?”

You can read the full article here:

http://gamingbusinessreview.com/casualsocial/developer/contributed-developer/best-practices-brand-integration-in-social-gaming

Our CEO, Raviv Turner, got to present Trash Tycoon at TechCrunch’s Startup Alley this year. Check out the video below!

Trash Tycoon has of late been enjoying great success in terms of appealing to Moms, more specifically, women from ages 30-50. Our early analytics showed that 65% of our players were female, and of those 30-50 years of age was the biggest chunk, which alone made up for 34% of our total players. Additionally, the moms themselves have been praising the game.

The blog OrganicMommyToday had author, Celeste, saying “I play with my 4 year old and he loves being able to clean up the trash and learning about upcycling, making new and useful products from waste and playing around with the worms in his worm farm and helping them grow.” Furthermore, another mom, blogging at Maria’s Space, says that “Trash Tycoon, is a fun game for the entire family that presents opportunities for real-world impact.”

Of course, our success with Moms is no accident. In our goal to make the world a better place through awesome games, we decided to start with the Green vertical first, following with others like LOHAS, health, eco-tourism, etc., knowing there was a strong demographic correlation around moms and or offline partners in these fields, such as TerraCycle and TreeHugger. Additionally our choice of Facebook as a platform was another choice where we used data and insights decide where we could make a game that would matter and appeal to women in this age group.

This decision is mutually beneficial to us as well, seeing as it provides a direct link for our partners and sponsors to appeal to this massive, spending userbase. Over at the StartGroup blog they discuss how 59% of the 250 million social gamers are adult women. “The same women who … are involved in almost 75% of all electronics purchases…Make up more than 50% of the automotive market…make up 85% of ALL brand purchases in the US.” -Steve Olenski, at StartGroup. Steve goes on to further note how reaching out to them via games, is an increasingly effective tactic for marketers on the lookout. Truly, moms are leading the revolution here, studies show that over 54% of moms with kids that are 10 years or younger are “green,” mothers. So beyond the mutual benefits between us, the moms, and our partners, we’re really also motivated to raise awareness and change behavior throughout our society for the better.

In the end, Guerillapps made the decision to make a game that could be meaningful to moms for a multitude of mutually beneficial reasons, and so far, it seems like we’ve had great success in doing so.

Play Trash Tycoon now!

There is no denying that social networking is no longer “the next big thing,” it’s “THE thing” – with sites like Facebook now home to over 800 million active users and Twitter well over 200 million registrants. The numbers alone mean that it would be a huge mistake to overlook social networks as a viable platform for communicating ideas and inspiring global change, much as it’s a mistake to discount the benefits of online university programs or business networks. But what are the best ways to get communicate through these channels?

Surprisingly, the best one may be to use what the social networking giant has become infamous for: social gaming applications.

Social games spark cultural revolutions

Social gaming has inadvertently sparked cultural revolutions that were unplanned by the game creators, such as the spike in farming loans acquired by the successful upper middle class in Turkey, which was later linked to FarmVille. Playing the detailed farming simulation inspired doctors, lawyers and businessmen to start thinking about where livestock comes from in real life. Thus, the game was able to take an abstract concept and make it real. Would these people have thought to raise livestock if it weren’t for FarmVille? Probably not, and it’s unlikely that Zynga masterminded their game as a plot to get urban dwellers more interested in farming and raising livestock. But that’s the effect it had—an effect that could easily be used to inspired other changes.

Nonprofits and charities should seriously consider using social gaming to generate interest in their causes. The wall that block most charities is a lack of understanding rather than a lack of caring. Everybody knows about poverty, pollution, disease and all of the other problems in the world, but these are just abstract concepts rather than concrete facts with tangible solutions. If charities can make it real and actionable, people will respond accordingly.

Al Gore spoke out about gaming at the 2011 Games for Change Festival, citing social gaming as a mass medium for reaching people in droves. Gore highlighted the fact that games can take overly complex issues and make them into something simple, which people can really understand.

Social media games teach people to be environmentally responsible

The Facebook game Trash Tycoon puts these principles into action by turning the concept of “upcycling” into a fun and competitive entrepreneurial adventure that challenges players to clean up their virtual town while simultaneously turning a profit. The only way to successfully complete both goals is to turn waste into useful products that may then be sold. The game’s interface and graphics are slick and pleasing, and concepts easy to understand. Players compost organic waste, collect vintage clothing and re-purpose paper and glass into new items like paper towels and fish tanks. Players interact with their virtual town through their customized character, much like in FarmVille or Pioneer Trail, and gain levels by completing “missions.” In addition to educating the masses about the real life applications of upcycling, the creators of Trash Tycoon also donate 10% of their profits to CarbonFund.org, which works to reduce waste in the real world. Players of Trash Tycoon will never look at trash the same way again.

Another example is the game Spent. In this game, players experience what it’s like to live in poverty by trying to keep their bank account balanced. Players are forced to choose between paying the rent and paying vet bills, or between going hungry and swallowing their virtual pride to opt for food assistance. Many people are fortunate enough to not fully comprehend what living below the poverty line is like, and the game Spent gives them an opportunity to experience it in a safe atmosphere. Judgments that people tend to make about those in poverty melt away as players realize that it’s hard work to be poor. This understanding gives way to empathy, and that empathy inspires them to give to their fellow man.

Social networking games have the potential to impact the world on a global scale quickly and effectively. It’s a golden opportunity for charities and nonprofits to connect with people from all walks of life, and make the issues real to them.

From Mike Perk at ideate.co.za

The original post can be found here, on Singlebrook’s blog.

With each passing month, social games are growing. Growing in userbase, growing in revenue, but possibly most of all, growing in ambiguity. The term “social game” is pretty vague. Most board games involve far more social interaction than games on Google+ or Facebook! However, since sites like those have become the most pervasive locations for online social interaction, “social game” has come to mean any game played on a social network. With everyone and their mom, kid brother, and next door neighboor on Facebook these days, just who is the “social gamer?”

Statistics and stories from the last few years demographically place the average social gamer as an aged 43 female. (See this Gigaom piece that references a PopCap survey.). However, this assessment is far from set in stone, and new data, research, and surveys are constantly reexamining the social game audience. One is a RockYou survey (shown below) that attempts to frame the social gamer as a younger, more male, and more achievement-oriented player; three things that go against what almost anyone whose studied the demographics before would tell you. What is unfortunate about both studies is that they establish a fairly static precedent of the current social game audience. Now, being aware what a specific community of players is currently attracted to is not at all a negative. Marketing depends on it. However, in that strategy lies the the unpleasant feeling that social games are already being designed specifically for the historic demographic of the social gamers, when instead they could be branching out into untapped demographics.

Another perspective comes from a Tim Rogers piece entitled “who killed videogames? (a ghost story)” on insertcredit.com. His essay discusses the mathematical average of a ghost player that companies talk up, but only exists as a fusion of those who actually purchase in game items and those who enjoy the game for free. Percentage wise, 90-95% are the latter who will never spend anything, and 5-10% who will spend an average of 60$. The average of all the money thus far made by social games divided by the amount of people who play them comes out to $1.70. The person who actually spends $1.70, of course, is Rogers’ ghost.

The numbers behind the mysterious ghost player here are potentially dangerous and misleading. The math, as Rogers points out, is riddled with extremes, outliers, “five-digit numbers,” and “sprawling oceans of zeros.” It’s important for social game companies to understand the reality behind where the money comes from and why. It is also critical to understand why some players actually pay to play, and why some just pick the game up once or twice to get their feet wet.

For instance, take this image from a great VentureBeat piece on whales in social games:

While whales make up only 4% of the spending user, they make up for 60% of the revenue! The minnows, the 79% of spending users, actually only make up 8% of the revenue. Why is this extreme so prevalent amongst social games right now? If only 4% of social gamers are becoming invested enough in social games to regularly pay for the experience, than what can be done better as social game designers to ensure that more of the minnows are willing to invest on the experience? Perhaps we should stop banking on that extreme 4%, stop trying to come up with some miracle data that claims we’re actually appealing to all gamers, and instead make more interesting games that can allow a larger percent of the players to become more immersed in the system for longer durations. Would we rather have 3% of a million users fully invested in our games, or 20% of 200,000?

It’s shocking at first to hear that a goal social game companies aim to get only 3% of their playerbase spending. Regardless, this notion of a tiny percent should serve as a massive red flag to social games developers.  It’s as Tim Rogers says: “[Players] are coming for the cute characters, and staying for the cruel mathematics.” Well maybe cruel math is good enough to get us 3% of players spending a decent chunk of change, but why should social game developers be satisfied with that? What if instead of cruel math, we had compelling, beautiful systems? We’d probably get a lot higher percentage of players paying a more reasonable amount, and we’d all be better off for it.

Well, how do we do this? Tim Rogers himself recently penned a piece for Kotaku setting up some simple mechanical steps in the right direction. However, I’m going to take a step back, and look at a piece I personally find more relevant: Richard Bartle’s “Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDS,” which examines the four archetypes of players he observed in the Multi-User Dungeons of yore and how to balance a game to suit the needs of each. The RockYou survey also tried to split social gamers into four archetypes, with some of the characteristics seeming to descend directly from Bartle. Furthermore, MUD grinding and socializing are in many ways the philosophical ancestors to the social game mechanics of today, so it feels all the more relevant to look back to that genre.

In Bartle’s classification there are Achievers, who he describes as players who “give themselves game related goals and vigorously set out to achieve them.” There are Explorers, who try to find out as much as they can about the world and its systems. There are Socializers, who make the most of communicating in the game and see it as a context for social interaction. Finally, there are the Killers, who prefer to impose directly upon other players. Whether hurting or helping (mostly hurting in modern gaming history), its multiplayer game action that drives the Killer.

In many ways, we can say that the current experiences in Facebook games are balanced towards Achievers and Socializers, with tendencies towards interacting with players and acting upon the world. A few years ago, with Mafia Wars being amongst the top games on Facebook, Killers could be said to have held more of a presence, but it seems much less so today; a notion we’ll consider again later. Anyways, take a glance at this nifty abstract graph Bartle setup:

What social games need is for the scales to tilt a bit in favor of accomadating players acting upon other players (“killers”), and people acting with the world (“explorers”). Bartle suggests some ways to balance a MUD for specific scenarios and most of his general themes are highly relevant to social games. It’s sort of tricky to tilt the graph to the upper-left and bottom-right simultaneously, so for now let’s approach these adjustments one at a time.

For titling to the upper-left I’ve selected some relevant suggestions from Bartle:

• Add more player-on-player commands
• Make communication facilities easy and intuitive
• Increase the connectivity between rooms
• Add more communication facilities
• Raise the rewards for achievement
• Have an extensive level/class system
• Make commands be applicable wherever they might reasonably have meaning
• Have large puzzles, that take over an hour to complete
• Have many commands relating to fights

For tilting towards the bottom-right, I’ve created this subset:

• Make building facilities easy and intuitive
• Maximise the size of the world (ie. add breadth)
• Produce cryptic hints when players appear stuck
• Maximise the effects of commands (ie. add depth)
• Produce amusing responses for amusing commands
• Have lots of small puzzles that can be solved easily
• Allow builders to add completely new commands — [ an aside from me: USER GENERATED CONTENT !!!]

Now some of these, in Bartle’s initial piece, were suggested as opposites, but out of the ones I’ve selected to display here, none are mutually exclusive and should be exempt from the contemplation of the social game designer. Themes clearly arise: allow for more meaningful social interaction (as Rogers points out, right now Skype is a much more meaningful more social experience than Sims Social). LittleBig Planet uses real-time multiplayer, puzzles that require teamwork, and user-generated content to create a brilliant, meaningful, social community around a game that is incredibly simple and casual at heart. Add more depth and breathing room to the systems of a game, while at the same time keeping the commands intuitive and easy to learn. Inputs should be simple and have somewhat predictable initial responses, but the system should be complex enough to allow the players to learn and discover new things as they go. Triple Town, a game on Kindle (and now Facebook too) does a brilliant job with this. There needs to be a balance of smaller goals with larger ones. Nathan Drake, of the Uncharted series, can see the temple with the stolen idol in it miles away, but first he needs to kill the badguy with a gun two feet in front of him. There’s no reason for social games not to employ that same dichotomy of tasks.

Focusing the balance more towards Killers may be the trickiest of all the changes I’m recommending. Bartle often discussed how they were a group that never gained much popularity and tended to isolate themselves. Non-killer players simply did not want to play with them, and in many ways the same is true today. There were a plethora of examples from players in Empires & Allies who wanted the player vs. player mechanics removed. Segregating servers for killers to play on their own (much like how World of Warcraft has with PVP or PVE servers) is a possible solution, but there ought to be a more subtle and effective one out there. We need to rethink how we harness the killing mechanics in this space. Empires & Allies had a very nifty solution to this, which was the ability for a player to pay some in game currency or use some item to enter a temporary neutral state where they could not be attacked. Then if they forgot to renew their neutrality, they might be punished in the same way they might be punished if they let their crops wither in Farmville. To me personally, this seemed like a step in the right direction.

The most important theme to derive from all of these suggestions, however, is that social games need to allow for meaningful decisions to be made.

As a designer at Guerillapps, working on Trash Tycoon, I’m not going to claim this game has all the answers, but I do believe we are taking worthwhile steps forwards, and keeping all of this in mind as we progress. In Trash Tycoon you can decide to sell, store or upcycle various objects. You can sell trash to a landfill, or invest in more dumpsters to store it for future recycling. These choices are inherently interesting and meaningful. The players are not hand-held through any of them, but are given enough information to make an educated, or at the least an experimental, decision. We’ve employed real-time, synchronous multiplayer. With our in-game chat feature we’ve become at least as socially capable as text chatting on Skype, and with the inherent co-operation that goes along with it, we’d like to think we’re building towards something truly meaningful in a multiplayer experience. We have short term goals that take five minutes, and ones that you’ll have at the same time that might take a day or two. We’re building up our achievement and end-game systems constantly, working to make them meaningful and interesting. We’re working on minigames that will provide an outlet for a more micro-level of strategy and fun within the context of our overall structure. All the while, we’re keeping a close eye on our own insights and metrics to see who we have playing, and not only what we can do to make them happier, but what we can do to attract other types of players as well.

Sources:
Bartle
Tim Rogers on Insert Credit
RockYou survey
Venturebeat

[Re-posted from emarketer.com]

OCTOBER 6, 2011

Who’s playing—and who’s paying?

About four in 10 US internet users play social games, according to May 2011 research from Kabam, a publisher of massively multiplayer social games. And for at least some of those gamers, spending on gaming content is on the upswing.

The Kabam survey, conducted by Information Solutions Group, found that there was a demographic and behavioral split in the social gaming population, depending on whether gamers limited themselves to casual games, like Bejeweled Blitz and FarmVille, or also played strategy, role-playing or similar hardcore social games.

Hardcore social gamers were more likely to be male and under age 40, while casual social gamers tended to be women, with more than 40% of this group over age 50. Hardcore gamers reported spending more money on gaming content, and 59% said they planned to spend more on social gaming content in 2011, compared to just 23% of casual social gamers.

The vast majority of social gaming is played on desktop or laptop computers, the survey found, with casual gamers reporting they spend 86% of gaming time playing on a computer and hardcore players spending 59% of their gaming time accessing games via that platform. Smartphones, other mobile phones and tablets accounted for a much smaller share of casual gamers’ time, at 5%, while hardcore social gamers spent 24% of gaming time on one of these mobile devices.

A separate survey, from mobile social network MocoSpace, compared the population of mobile social gamers and those who pay for virtual content, but broken down by ethnicity. A plurality of both groups were black, at 36% and 38%, respectively. While Hispanics represented 31% of players, they accounted for only 21% of virtual goods purchasers. On the other hand, white users made up a disproportionate number of purchasers compared to their 18% share of the mobile social gaming population.

eMarketer estimates virtual goods revenues will reach $653 million in the US this year, up 28% from 2010.

Original article here.

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A note from us:
Here at Guerillapps, we believe it’s extremely important to be aware of the players and audience that will be receiving your game. It’s necessary to understand the people who will be playing your product in order to more effectively create the best game you can for them. Understanding demographics is an essential stepping stone to understanding the whole of the player experience. It’s also relevant to analyzing why your game may be appealing to only certain groups, but not others, and how you might be able to widen its audience.

We will have a full length blog post of our own in the next few days, where we delve deeper into some of the statistics and notions behind the question of who exactly the social gamer of today is, and why.

 
The wave of great press (more of which can be found here), good word of mouth, virality, and most importantly, the enjoyability of the game, have pushed it past 200,000 Monthly Active Users within the first month! The stats don’t end there either, as our analytics have show that we have average game sessions of over 15 minutes, and solid retention of our Daily Active Users.
 

 
The game has also been bombarded from publishers all over the world who want to take the game international, and we are currently working on a few deals in that regard as well.

Today, September 6th, 2011, marks a milestone for our team over here at Guerillapps. Months have been spent talking about, planning and developing our Facebook game, Trash Tycoon. Today is the day that game moves out of public beta, and into it’s official launch.

Working with sponsoring companies like Terracycle, Carbonfund and Treehugger, and with thousands of players already involved in the public beta, Trash Tycoon is primed for what we hope to be a successful game and a positive force towards a greener world. The launch of the game also includes a slew of new content that includes new goals, items, features and bug fixes.

While this marks the official launch of our next major foray into social games, it does not, by any means represent the end of our development. We have tons of content coming down the pipeline for Trash Tycoon! Updates will come weekly or semi-weekly that will include loads of new features, holiday events and items, and new ways for players to interact.

It’s been several months since our company began work on it’s cause integreated social game, and that time has been littered with memorable moments. From our participation in Tech Crunch, to our mention as one of the 8 hottest companies in the gamespace by Gamesbeat, to our mention by Vice-President Al Gore, we’ve had our fair share of milestones along the way. Yet this is to be both our greatest milestone thus far, as well as our greatest challenge. The Guerillapps team will rise to meet it however, in the glorious trash-cleaning fashion that we’ve become known for.

We will continue to provide this game with the support and post-launch content it deserves. We will use analytics to monitor the game closely and make sure we are constantly improving it for the benefit of the players. At the same time we have bettered ourselves and our abilities to offer games as a service, and look forward to lending our creative minds and technologies to our next creative project.

Finally, we’d like to lend a special thanks once again to our sponsors, Terracycle, Carbonfund, and Treehugger.