The Games Developer Conference (GDC) has come and gone. Which top 5 game trends, as Charlie Sheen would say, are the #winners at GDC? And what game trends didn't make the cut? Click READ MORE to find out.
Through its EA Partners initiative Electronic Arts has teamed up with a number of indepdent developers to release some highly successful console and PC games. And now the company is hoping to do the same thing for mobile and social games.
I dropped by Hi5's office last week before the madness that is called the Game Developer's Conference to meet with Alex St. John and get a sneak peak of their new monetization platform, SocioPay, and new features to their distribution channel, SocioPath. Though I still think the names and logos are gimmicky (sorry, call me a brand purist), the new features are legitimate. Hi5 claims that SocioPay can increase the revenues of social game developers by 200 - 300%. If it works as designed, SocioPay could be a huge revenue generator for social game companies.
Kim-Mai Cutler at Inside Mobile Apps has written an interesting piece that Facebook and Apple are on a collision course over payments. Facebook and Apple look like they are making moves out of each other's playbook. Both have announced that they will take a 30% cut of sales (virtual items and subscriptions) from apps distributed on their platforms. Where it gets interesting is where their platforms converge.
The Facebook paradox is that the larger Facebook the more dependent social game companies become on Facebook. Enter Viximo, a company that offers a platform to distribute social games on social networks beyond Facebook. We talked with CEO Dale Strang about their product and partnerships, the challenges and opportunities of growing your social game beyond Facebook, and the future of social games.
Playfish, the developer behind Facebook games like Restaurant City and Country Story, has just launched a Facebook version of the world famous board game Monopoly.
Gamification last week, Inside Social Apps this week. No wonder we don't get anything done! As always, Inside Social Apps was a good conference for social games. Though if you didn't know it's impossible for any small games company to make it on Facebook, that the next big thing is mobile social on the iPhone, and the next big thing after that is Android, then you probably being too slow to be in our fast-paced industry to begin with. Personally, I try to skip the panels and talk to the people in the street, or the hallway, in this case. My notes on the conference are below the fold.
The goose is in the noose! In a move that everyone could have seen coming from a million miles away, Facebook has announced that starting July 1, every Facebook game will be required to use Facebook Credits as its virtual currency. On Facebook's blog, Deborah Liu writes that Facebook over the next five months will work with its gaming partners to integrate Facebook Credits into their game apps. Facebook will take 30% of the cut on each sale, which is compable to the amount Apple takes through the App Store.