FB Review » Games

Well what do you know, pigs CAN fly!

Dan — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 16:24:40 +0000

I am going to a break here from reviewing the traditional, complicated, mega games like Mafia Wars, or Farmville and review a great flash based game. The game is called The Flying Pig and the goal is…you guessed to fly a pig. Its similar to other ‘see-how-far’ you can go games, but what sets this one apart is, well – its really fun (and a bit addictive)! The Flying Pig is a cartoonish game which is simple to play. The goal is to get your pig to fly as far as possible without being stopped by any dangerous objects. The game itself is really well made and thought out, I especially like the ‘bean-boost’ which lets your little ham fly even further using some of their ‘gas’. The social integration aspect of the game is also well made, letting you brag about your high score to your friends (BTW, my high score was 1015). The game also lets you challenge friends and compare your score against everyone on facebook to see who’s the best. The one thing that could use a bit of improvement is the audio as it gets pretty repetitive after a while and I had to turn off my speakers after playing for 10 minutes. Overall this game is a lot of fun and is worth checking out for all you bacon lovers!

Half of All Facebook Users Spend Most of Thier Time Playing Games!

Dan — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 08:32:15 +0000

This recent article sheds some light as to what almost 250 million people are doing on Facebook – They are playing games! No wonder Google recently invested $100 Million in Zynga and Disney recently paid $750 million to acquire Playdom. It seems major media conglomerates are starting to take notice that people spend most of thier time on social networks (and facebook in particular) playing games. This has huge implications for the way these companies display their ads. I wouldn’t be surprised if we started seeing more and more in-game advertising in the coming year.

Here is an excerpt from the news on the deal.

But the most interesting thing Pleasants noted was that he recently heard (from his own source, apparently) that half of all users on Facebook now play social games. More impressively, 40% of total usage time on the service is spent on these games. That’s meaningful, of course, because “a huge amount the Internet is on Facebook,” Pleasants stated.

Did you catch that? 40% of usage time! That’s huge! think about it for a second from a marketing point of view. You know that 250 million users spend 40% of their time on Facebook playing games! Now all you have to do is target advertising inside those games and you are all set to make a fortune!

Read the full article on TechCrunch

Facebook Applications and Customer Service

Dan — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 03:39:24 +0000

The recent article on the YoVille monetization debacle has led me to write a follow up article on the state of Facebook applications and customer service offered by their developers. As a result of monetization efforts by developers a key aspect has been overlooked, namely customer service to application users. There are currently two popular monetization methods in addition to traditional advertising such as banners and they are: Incentive based advertising and outright feature purchases.

Incentive based advertising is when a developer provides advertising offers to users and in exchange for clicking on the offers the user is rewards with points or virtual cash. For example clicking on a specific offer will give you extra bonus points which you exchange for items or features within the application that would not be available to other users.

Outright feature purchases is when the developer offers the user to buy the virtual points or items outright using a credit card or a PayPal account.

These two monetization aspects raise a very important question. If someone pays for a service, aren’t they entitled to some kind of customer service when something goes wrong?

In the rush to monetize their applications many developers have overlooked this critical point. In most application (most, but not all) developers provide little or no support. Case in point is Zynga who have recieved very negative feedback from their users when they launched their YoCash program. But Zynga is not alone in this aspect, as it appears that most developers are following in the same pattern. Either that, or they have simply been overwhelmed with requests for support that they simply lack the facilities to accommodate all the users. For example take a medium to high usage application with about 3 million monthly active users. Lets assume that only about 5% of those are paying users. That translates to about 150k paying customers, of those about 10% have some kind of issue (whether it is technical or otherwise). That means a developer need to service about 15k requests per month. If the developer is unable to provide support the result is a terrible backlog of customer service requests, and a lot of unhappy customers.

I believe that Facebook must intervene here and ensure that developers provide adequate customer service facilities. If developers are taking money from Facebook users, some of the responsibility for customer care falls indirectly on Facebook. There are many ways to provide cost effective customer service but since developers are not obligated to do so, they simply ignore this all together. Facebook must realize that it is in its best interest to keep its users happy and that providing customer care facilities should be a requirement to launching an application on Facebook, otherwise alienated users will eventually turn to stand-alone social games with far better customer care then what is provide on Facebook.

The Northwest Trail

Dan — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 11:35:40 +0000

In the spirits of the old classic computer game Oregon Trail, Northwest Trail is created. In this game, you recruit your friends to your wagon and lead them across the Northwest Trail. The game has a small but loyal user base with about 50k monthly active users. However, this game is not as great as I hoped it would be. I had no idea it was even on Facebook until I was invited to join a wagon. Without a second though, I joined the wagon and couldn’t wait to get started. Unfortunately, it is only slightly similar to the Oregon Trail I was used to playing. You can earn money for your wagon, but only the leader can spend the money on food and supplies. If you want to be a leader, then you have to go through the whole process of building a wagon, inviting friends, and hoping they join you. The ways in which you can earn money for your team are less than exciting. You can invite friends to join the wagon, play a few games, add an auction application, or take a survey. There is also the duel feature, in which by challenging someone to a duel you can earn money. However, with the duel feature the friend has to except and be online to participate. Many of us don’t spend that much time online playing games and waiting for other people to join the game, at least not without preplanning. This game was fun for about five minutes and then it was sort of boring. The original Oregon Trail allowed you to play alone and for a decent amount of time, without needed to relay on other people getting into the game. This game is too time consuming and requires a commitment from other friends. In summary, great game idea to build on the original but falls far short in meeting expectations. I would rather play some solo Pathwords.