Why You Should Consider A Publisher For Your Facebook Game

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http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/gdco-6-waves.mp3

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

Josh: Hi, my name is Josh Burns. I’m the Senior Product Manager for 6waves U. S. office. 6waves is the largest global publisher of Facebook games. We’re really the only large company involved in the Facebook gaming space that is exclusively focused on publishing games.

Interviewer: When you talk about publishing games, what is the benefit of “publishing” a game because it seems like in Facebook developers can just go in and directly post their game?

Josh: Yeah. So, it’s definitely sure that you can put your game on Facebook. You can put it up there. Users can start playing it. You can have viral channels and do some acquisition that way.

In the old days, which actually isn’t that long ago, for every one user that played your game, you might get 10 new users. But those days, unfortunately, are long gone. So, the biggest challenge is really user acquisition. That’s where we can help out developers.

We have a network of about 60 million monthly players across all the games and viral applications. We do not develop any games, but the partner games that we publish and then the viral applications are sort of simple ways that we engage users who might not be engaged with any gaming content.

So, these are applications where you can send someone a heart or send your buddy a drink on Facebook, and we can engage the users and grow the network through those viral apps. In terms of distribution, we have a cross cell bar on top of all our games in our network where new users are seeing for discovery new games that’s targeted based on their demographics and the language on Facebook.

We also will buy Facebook advertising and do other online-offline promotion to basically drive traffic to the game, and then we all also provide localization services so we are a global company. Our network is about 30 percent North America, 30 percent Asia, and then a lot of the rest is sort of Europe and then some other emerging markets, like Latin America.

For example, some of our games you can play in up to nine different languages. We provide the translation, the in-game text. And then, we also have a payment, an API that you can pay into, and then you get access to a lot of the paying methods, including offers, credit card payments, PayPal, Facebook credits, some prepaid offerings from Asia, TurkPay, very regional payments.

Interviewer: You mentioned that initially one person could play and it would spread to 10 of their friends, and those days are gone.

Josh: Yeah.

Interviewer: Do you feel there’s still opportunity on the Facebook platform, and were do you feel that opportunity is?

Josh: Yeah, definitely. I think definitely there’s still opportunity. It’s definitely much more challenging. It’s become very crowded. So, you can partner with a company like us who can help you really grow and get your content out there because if you do have a high quality game but not a lot of money or the resources to really market and drive users to your game, it’s very challenging.

If you can’t grow it fast enough, if your game is successful but you can’t grow it fast enough, somebody could copy it and then grow to scale fast enough where you’re sort of, unfortunately, rendered irrelevant if there’s another similar title on the platform that has millions of users.

So, definitely opportunity, I think. We look for really unique content. We’re not interested in games that are the same as everything else. The reality is people like fairly… The style of games on Facebook, usually they’re much more casual in terms of complexity but something that’s unique.

Interviewer: Can you talk about… Some of the more well known games are farm themes, restaurant themes, stuff like that. Can you talk about what you mean by unique? Are you talking about still targeting the same audience but different themes? Can you also talk about some of the success stories you guys have had in terms of games that you published that have taken off?

Josh: Yeah. I can actually cover both those things. I think one of the benefits of our model, because we’re not developing games which obviously can be very expensive, is that we can take more risk in terms of the games we publish. So, we really look for unique content.

I think, too, an example of one is Mall World. It’s a game about fashion and sort of owning a store and interacting with your friends through that theme. It’s a game where there’s no male characters.

It was fairly unique at the time because you have a lot of the top games are sort of mass marketed and trying to appeal to everyone, whereas Mall World, obviously there are males who play the game. But it’s a very female focused game that we started publishing right from the start. It now has about, I think, 4.5 million monthly players, and now there’s about five or six mall fashion oriented games on Facebook.

So, I think that’s one example. I think the other one I’ll point to is a game called Kingdoms of Camelot. It’s definitely a much more complex game than a lot of the stuff you see on Facebook. Obviously, we’re very focused on younger males. Again, it’s an extremely successful game. It monetizes extremely well. I think it probably has 3 to 4 million monthly players, I believe. Again, now there’s a lot of copy cats. So, that’s a very niche game.

Interviewer: What’s the cost? If people want to go through publishing through you, what is the cost that they’re going to have to pay to get that distribution?

Josh: To partner with us, we work on a rev share basis, revenue share basis. There’s no fees. There’s no upfront costs. The standard relationship is 60 percent for the publisher and 40 percent for the developer. The way we look at it is if we can grow your users more than twice that what you can do on your own, even though we take a share of the dollars, you still in the end are coming out ahead. And we definitely can grow and would grow your game to levels much beyond twice that.

Interviewer: Can you talk about areas then that you guys are looking at? Is there any specific demographic or themes that you’re now looking at given the changes in the space?

Josh: I think we really open to looking at anything. We probably look at 8 to 10 games a week that people come to us with. So, we see a lot of really interesting and unique content. We’re not necessarily focused on any specific demographic. What we are finding is the game that is focused on targeting a specific demographic, those tend to monetize much better and are more successful. But we’re not looking, let’s say, for anything specific.

Interviewer: Are there best practices or are things you’ve seen in successful games that you guys have promoted? Are there any things that developers should keep in mind as they develop games and get something ready?

Josh: I think, especially for those new to the platform, you really have to make sure that you are building in mechanics for virality, for people to share moments in a game with their friends, making them relevant in what they’re sharing, make them want to share it. Engagement in mechanics that gets people to come back daily, at least, once a day, if not multiple times a day.

Making monetization again relevant and compelling, so that people want to engage and actually spending money in the game. I think another thing that people overlook is potentially Facebook is worldwide. It has 100 million users around the world.

On the platform, if 200 million are playing games, these people are everywhere. A lot of people are focused, just think sort of English speaking countries, if you’re, say, based in North America. There’s a lot of opportunity among users all around the world, so making sure that your game content can be fairly universal or that you have content that will appeal to people from all over the world. And then, thinking about localization and building your game to be able to support the ability to sort of localize the text and what not.

Interviewer: Where can developers find out more information about your company and potentially submitting a game to get published?

Josh: Definitely. We take requests all the time. You can go to 6waves.com. That’s the number 6waves.com. From there there’s an email that you can email our business development guys and just basically send along your game and some background, maybe, on yourself and your company.

And then, someone will get back to you. We’ll basically take an initial look. Our team will take an initial look at your game, if it’s something that there’s a playable… We definitely want to see a playable version. If it’s already out and live, that’s even easier. But we want to really play the game and if you have some metrics that you can share as well, that’s extremely valuable, too.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.