Developing Social Games on Hi-5

Mike of Hi5 Networks discusses their partnerships with game developers

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/hi5-gdc-2010-interview.mp3

Or listen to it here…

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

Mike: My name is Mike Trigg. I’m the Vice President of Marketing and Biz Dev at Hi5 Networks.

Interviewer: What can Hi5 do for indie game developers?

Mike: Well, Hi5 really is a unique opportunity for indie gamers. A lot of people are developing social games and distribute them on Facebook. The challenge on Facebook is it’s a totally open social platform with tens of thousands of games on it. So, to get your game discovered you need to fight your way through thousands of other developers to get your content out there or spend some money to buy ads. That’s a big challenge for indie gamers, game developers.

What Hi5 offers that community is the chance to partner with us, and we work with game developers, promote their game heavily on Hi5 at no cost to them, share the revenue that the game generates, both through direct payments and through advertising. And then allow the game to integrate into our commerce platform so they can take payments from 60 different payment providers around the world.

Interviewer: What’s the revenue split for developers versus you guys?

Mike: It really varies, depending on what the developer wants to do. So, we work with developers to figure out what they want, how they want to promote their games, and we assess where those games are going to fit, how we think they are going to monetize and how we’re going to promote the game. So, basically, the more promotion the game gets the more favorable rev split Hi5. So, it sort of depends.

Interviewer: Since it’s a closed platform, is it difficult to constantly iterate on your game? How does that work?

Mike: So, let me clarify. We have both an open social platform today that has thousands of applications on it as well, but the game developer program that we’re launching here at GDC is really this preferred partner program for applications and games that we think are going to monetize really well on Hi5. We partner with those companies so that we are aligned in our incentives. We want the game to do well because we share the revenue with that game, that game developer.

Interviewer: What is the game developer program, and how is that relevant to the small game developers or are you looking for bigger ones?

Mike: It’s very relevant for smaller game companies. So, the game developer program is really three key things. First is a bundle of promotion that we give to the game, everything from house ads on Hi5.com to suggestions, recommended games, et cetera. The second is integration to our commerce platform which, again, Hi5 coins are virtual currency for 60 different payment methods around the world.

And then, the third big piece is rev share. Again, it goes with coins revenue as well as with advertising revenue. So, as a small game developer you can participate in the ad revenue that Hi5 generates off of your game rather than giving 100 percent of that to Facebook.

Interviewer: I guess, are there any other interesting stats or things like, are the games that are on Facebook the same games that were yours, or is it a different set?

Mike: Yeah, I think yes and no. So, a lot of the games that have been really successful on Facebook have been what we describe as basically viral games. So, they’re really good at spamming your friends and telling them, “Oh come, do this form with me.” Our focus has been on integrating those games more deeply and getting content more deeply with the core Hi5 experience. So, rather than spamming users to get them to play your games, we integrate that in and hook it into logical touch points within the Hi5 experience.

We just launched a game or feature with Blast Cards with a partner called Detonator. This is an e-card that integrates right into the user comments on the profile page. So, they pay a buck to send this customized card rather than having to go find that, install it, give it permission to access your Facebook account and then manage a separate canvas page, the user can interact with that game right there in the profile page. So, it’s a really different approach.

Interviewer: The top games, do they get enough traffic to make it worthwhile? How does that go?

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. A lot of people aren’t as familiar with us here in the U. S. because we have sites around the world. Asia, South America, Latin America and Europe are really the big regions for us, but we are 50 million monthly. We’re the 14th largest website in the world, so it’s a darn large community.

Another thing that we actually help independent game developers with is translating their games. So, we have some really unique capabilities around language translation localization that for good game content we can help get it into French, Spanish, Portuguese and other languages to really broaden the market for a small game developer who would not have the resources to be able to do that.

Interviewer: How long then does it take? If a developer wants to get started with you guys, how long is it going to take actually to get a game up and running on your site?

Mike: It’s usually very fast, so if developers developed a game for either Facebook platform or open social platform, it’s usually just a matter of just plugging that in. We have a few additional optional APIs that they can integrate, too, for storing achievements and high scores and stuff like that into the Hi5 profile. But it’s usually very quick.

One of the partners that is going to be joining us tomorrow, they integrated their games in an afternoon. These were games that they developed for Facebook. They ported them to Hi5. It was just a matter of testing them and away they went.

Interviewer: So, you guys are supporting a lot of the Facebook API stuff?

Mike: That’s right. We just did an announcement last week where the largest social gaming players have scored both open social and Facebook APIs. Now, the Facebook APIs aren’t public yet. That’s coming so we’re sort of reserving that closed offer for partners that work in our game developer program. Our job is to make it easy as possible if you’re a small developer to get your game on Hi5, so that’s why we rolled that out.

Interviewer: Where do you think social game is going to go in the next year?

Mike: Well, I mean, first of all, as you can tell from this conference, it’s a major topic in gaming just generally. And so, I think some of the big things you’re going to see: one, Facebook made some significant changes to their platform in the way that games are promoted on Facebook. I think that’s had a really detrimental effect on traffic for games, and so I think you’ll see a lot of game developers, as evidenced by this conference tonight, looking at: what are my other alternatives for distribution. Being on Facebook is like being on the web. It doesn’t really give you any more substantial advantage, and so I think that’s one big aspect.

I think another big thing you’re going to see is partly because of that you can’t just make a viral game and have it go to 70 million users. You actually need to make a good game. So, I think you’re going to see fidelity of social games improve, and that’s really the next wave that we hope to catch is to make good games that also have social context to them, not just viral games.

Interviewer: Where can developers go to get started with Hi5?

Mike: Oh, Hi5.com/developer is our site. You can get information about what we’re doing there, apply for the game developer program. Again, we’re going to have a session at GDC tomorrow that folks can listen to. That’s, basically, the process.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.