Developing Successful Social Games on Facebook

Blake talks about building hit social games on Facebook like Zombies, Vampires, and Werewolves

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/agdc-blake-zombies-vampires-interview.mp3

Or listen to it here…

Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at Austin Game Developers Conference and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Blake: Hi, my name is Blake Commagere and I’m an indie game developer. I’ve been building games on the Facebook platform for pretty much since it started, actually.

Interviewer: Nice. And what games did you do? In fact, I think you were one of the original social games out there.

Blake: Yeah, I think… I may not have been the first game because people had taken games that, you know, existing flash games and said, “Hey, I can now put this game on Facebook”, but they didn’t create a game for the platform that had social functionality. It was just like, here you can play Tetris now, just like you could on Kongregate but now here on Facebook.

So, the first games that I think everybody may be familiar with are the zombies and vampires and werewolfs and that sort of games, the entire horror genre. But actually, even before I did that, which was about a month after the platform launched, even before I did that, I was one of the lead developers of Causes on Facebook. That, while not a game, definitely had several game-like features. There’s leader boards. You have progress bars and money raised and several things that, you know, as any game designer can look at and say, “Oh, this is a game” even though technically it’s fund raising for non-profits and not just a strict game, it definitely has plenty of those type of components.

Interviewer: So, you worked on the Causes game or Causes app, and then what inspired you to make these other types of games, and what did you learn from that that you can actually take to make your games killer because they just blew up. Every one was even… It became like a viral mean.

Blake: Yeah. I think, obviously, by the time I started developing my games I was very familiar with the limits and capabilities of the platform so I had a good understanding of, hey here’s all the things I can do. My inspiration probably comes as no surprise to anyone is that I’m a huge horror fan.

Interviewer: Sure.

Blake: Love horror movies. I’m the obnoxious friend that tries to get you to go see every one, no matter how bad it may be. And so actually, I love horror and just for whatever reason had a moment of clarity where I was like: this would be so fun to have a zombie application and largely made it in such a way – zombies were very natural. I thought it was an excuse to have something that’s going to be viral and reach out to people.

Of course, the geek community loves zombies. They’re funny. They’re scary. So, I knew it would resonate with my friends, especially. And just, yeah, starting building it, and I guess it took me about a week and a half.

Interviewer: So, you released it and you had that killer viral loop. How did you come up with that viral loop, and did you even know it was called a viral loop then?

Blake: Yeah, actually, my experience in viral marketing started, let’s see, back in 2002 at Plaxo. I had an opportunity to work with some phenomenally talented people. I’m not sure if everybody is aware of this, but Plaxo benefited from some very talented people that came from Napster originally. I mean, both Napster and Plaxo pioneered several viral loop techniques. So, I definitely had the benefit having worked with these people that are just experts in the industry.

I learned a ton, so when it came time to start applying that to my own products like, obviously, Causes had a very specific viral loop, very compelling and, you know, beyond just the actual functionality of it, the copy, the text of these invitations and that sort of thing, very designed to press certain buttons in people. And the one in Causes, of course, is like hey we want to try and make it touch someone. And be like, hey, this is personal to inspire them to do this.

With the zombie one I’m OK, I’m looking to entertain people. I’m looking to make them laugh, so I’m going to make it a ‘little bit humorous, a little tongue in cheek and kind of go for that angle, the whole thing. You’ll find it funny. You’ll want to pass it on to your friends, and they’ll get a kick out of it.

And it’s a double-edged sword because humor absolutely can be very viral, but it travels very fast and it’s consumed very fast so you can imagine… If you passed along something funny, but you’re not going to pass along the same funny thing 800 times, right? You’ll do it once, so you need to constantly create new content. And creating new, humorous content at a rate faster than people can consume it is… You have teams of writers doing that for shows that only exist for an hour, not it right?

Interviewer: So, you released it. What happened? I mean, did it just blow up in the first day or two days, or when did you realize it was going to be this huge thing and it’s going to be like a cultural mean.

Blake: Yeah, I think the first day. This was after, because I released it, I believe, the end of June. And at this point Facebook had already said, “Whoa, you’re only allowed to do 10 invitations per user”, and there were already articles and people saying no more viraling on Facebook, that sort of thing.

I made a compelling message that was entertaining and, you know, designed that into game play so that it’d be a little like, hey the user gets a cookie. They want more. They want more. They want more. They’re going to keep coming back and doing it. So, I made that, I think, it was the 27th of June. I turned it live and I was limited to 10 people.

Interviewer: Sure.

Blake: So, I did a couple of my friends think this is going to be awesome. They’re going to love it a lot. I got up the next morning to check it because I wanted to see how many of my 10 buddies had converted. At that point it was already 200 people.

Interviewer: Nice.

Blake: And I was just like, whoa. That’s definitely going to be on my Friends list, right? By the end of that day it was over a thousand, and I think it was seven days, maybe, six days, it had hit a million active users. At that point I was obviously… I think the moment I realized, holy crap, this is taking off is when my server went down for the first time.

Interviewer: How did you deal with scaling because that probably would have been a surprise, maybe, I don’t know?

Blake: Yeah, so I dealt with scaling at previous companies so again this is stuff I had done in some capacity, just never as a one man show. So, I’m, oh crud, I’ve got to take care of this piece of the puzzle, this one, this one and that one. I built it using LapStack which there are right and wrong ways to scale.

Interviewer: Exactly.

Blake: I mean, the first things I started doing were just like, oh crud, I need to change this architecture so it can support growth and that sort of thing because, you know, the first iteration I was just like, just get something functional and working. So, I benefited from past experience, largely and scaling then…

Interviewer: How did you deal with monetization? Did you just put ads up? Where you thinking of turning it into a business because at that time it still wasn’t clear that social games could actually make so much money?

Blake: Yeah, so I put ads up on it and didn’t really do anything else in that world because frankly the ads didn’t make an amazing amount of money. They made enough money to keep it running and to do it as a full time job. That was really awesome. I get to make games for a living, and I can make ends meet and, you know, I’m not part of a giant machine. And so, I never actually really, really focused on trying to make revenue. I had several people ask me, like yeah, but how much money is it making? Not very much.

Interviewer: While you were developing this, were you adding new content then every day, every week? How did you keep it going because you had a huge hit for a reasonable time and even when the virtual economies were kicking in social games? Did you start trying to do that? Did you start adding new game mechanics? What happened after you released it?

Blake: Yeah, so shortly after release I had users just clammering. It was great, actually. I had users largely dictating the upcoming feature set because they were so passionate about games and they said, oh, I’d love to be able to do this. Obviously, I couldn’t do everything people asked and there was plenty of things that I’m like, well you’re asking for this but I know you don’t want it because if I implemented it that will definitely not be fun.

You have to be careful. I think a common joke that people run with this is that if people did game design like they do web design you would distill your game down to nothing but a big red win button that the user has to press only once and be done with your game forever. So, obviously, you can’t give everybody exactly what they always ask for because, you know, inevitably, I want this to be easier. I want it to be less. I want it to be… And so, what I ended up doing just learning to rely on user feedback, and I’ve always been a gamer so I tried to draw from my own experience which, being a gamer your whole life it’s not the same as being a game designer.

Interviewer: Sure.

Blake: So, I had a lot to learn and I just kind of stumbled my way through, talking to friends, meeting people that were in the traditional gaming industry that were very generous with their time explaining things. I read every crazy thing I could get my fingers on to try and, you know, get better at it because I obviously recognized: well, crap, this is not a game like…

You’ve played games that you’re so addicted to and so obsessed with, and I’m like, wow, I want to make something that good. And I know I don’t have that skill set yet, so I tried to improve constantly on that. And it meant, of course, releasing features fairly frequently. I probably was doing pushes, you know, architectural changes to support that and then adding new feature sets, at least, weekly.

Interviewer: And so, where do you think now social games are going, and are you still going to try to work on your current hits that you’ve had or what’s going to happen?

Blake: Well, I think there’s still a lot of opportunities. It’s such a new… It is only a two-year-old space, maybe, slightly older, I guess. I think you will see certain trends like higher production values coming in and you see games like – I think the Play Fish games are very well designed. Obviously, their production quality is much higher than most games that are on this platform, and I think that’s a trend that will continue.

I think it’s going to be amazing when Flash starts supporting hardware acceleration. I spent some time talking with some friends about that the other day, and that’s going to be a game changer for what you can do in Flash. There will always be a sweet spot. OK, how will it take to develop something versus, you know, you can’t do a four year dev cycle on Facebook. Obviously, that would be crazy. But I think there is room for pushing that out, having these higher production values.

At the same time, there is always going to be room, in my opinion, for small indie games to be breakthrough hits because, if anything, if we’ve learned anything from the Wii, it’s that you don’t have to have as many pixels per square inch to build a successful and fun game.

So, just like Hollywood has: hey, yes, two guys can make a movie that’s very creative like Primer and, you know, has a huge indie breakthrough success. That doesn’t preclude an industry from also having transformers, too, right? Which is not going to win any awards for its writing but, you know, it’s big fun and it resonates with an audience in a different way. I think having one doesn’t mean the other isn’t ever going to be successful or not have room for it. I think there will always be room for both of these kind of things.

I think there will be a trend toward higher production values, and I think indie game developers, obviously, are never going to have a 10 million dollar budget to build a game. But you don’t need a 10 million dollar budget to build a fun, successful game that, you know, connects with people.

Interviewer: Any last words then for social game developers out there?

Blake: I think this space is amazing fun. It’s, at the same time, probably what you may see is things that you also see in the traditional gaming industry more and more, so working on games is fun that tends to attract some very talented people which provides the opportunity to work with wildly talented people. The same, on the other hand, your competitors are going to be wildly talented, too.

So, it’s an intensely competitive space but very fun and I intend to do it as long as I can and as long as there’s enough of a market that someone like me can make games in that space.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.