Quick background, in case you didn’t already know: Facebook is rolling out some updates, one of which will prevent you from seeing app spam from games you aren’t playing. That’s right, your wall will no longer be cluttered with notifications that Susie’s bloody Farmville azaleas are doing well.
This is a positive development for the vast majority of people who use Facebook for the main reason people got on it in the first place, which is to keep up with the lives of their family and friends, not to see that channel turned into a spamfest. Facebook appears to have listened to their users and done what is in their best interests, for once.
But oh, OH! the weeping and the wailing and the gnashing of teeth and the rending of garments and the piling of ashes atop heads among the developer blogs. Let me provide you with a couple samples:
Here are some notes on how this will impact my games. As soon as these changes will go live, our new mini-game, AquaDreams, won’t be able to show how cool it is by allowing new users to experience the game in news feed before they install it. Yes, AquaDreams is playable in news feed without installing an app. We’ve spent over a month designing news feed experience for new players to make sure they’ll love to play in news feed, will install the app after “trial in news feed” and will share the mini-game so other players could play in news feed too. Cause it’s cool. But now, as only existing players of the game will be able to see mini-game in news feed, so it doesn’t make sense to develop this feature… Also, until Facebook will actually roll out all the changes, we are freezing development of our second news feed mini-game called “Gem Temple” and will relocate developers to other projects. THANK YOU, FACEBOOK. –Anatoly Ropotov at Dip Inside
Cry me a river. If your game actually were cool…but I’ll get to that in a minute. It’s also worth noting that Ropotov brings this up in the context of discussing whether “virality is dead” on Facebook.
In the comments, a guy says:
Virality on facebook is dead – period…
If you don;t play games on facebook, you have no way of discovering them anymore via any channel (except the ridiculous one liner installs notifications that will drive 0 installs)
Inside Facebook provides a fairly objective discussion of the changes and how they’ll impact users and developers.
In the first comment, a guy named Rick gripes:
This kills game developers on FB.
Virality on FB exists no more – the only way to grow your game is through ads. Congrats FB for killing your most succesful app market.
There are similar comments from other developers.
GAMEPOCALYPSE 2010
So, has there actually been a measurable impact on Facebook “games”?
- Inside Social Games provides a chart of the top 25 Facebook games in June. All of them have lost losers since the past month. Zynga still dominates the top 10, but their net losses for most of their games are in the millions. The games with the smallest losses include Zynga’s Texas Hold’em Poker, and Popcap’s Bejeweled Blitz, to which I’ll come back later.
- Digital Chocolate CEO Trip Hawkins observes in Gamasutra that this will raise the bar to entry significantly, potentially locking out small companies without venture funding.
- Joel Brodie on Gamezebo focuses mainly on the positives for developers — the improvements Facebook has made to its APIs and its plans to grow its internal game teams. But he also reiterates the same complaint that the changes are going to force developers “back to the drawing board” for virality.
- Gamepro‘s Dave Rudden provides a handy graph showing Zynga’s losses over the past few months, and discusses rumors that Zynga may launch their own gaming platform.
So, to summarize, the gist is: OMG EVERYONE PANIC IT IS THE END OF GAMING!!!1!!! on Facebook.
What is Viral Marketing?
Despite only becoming a buzzword in the past decade, and despite experts acting as if it was invented with the internet, viral marketing has been around for a long time. We used to call it “word-of-mouth advertising.” It’s “viral” in the sense that it spreads from the source (the marketer) to the first viewer to the people to whom the first viewer talks about it, to the people to whom they talk about it, and so on, much in the same way a virus spreads.
Modern-day “viral marketing” is a focused attempt to get this to happen, generally by providing a piece of content that is startling, funny or mysterious and can easily be passed from person to person, via email or other forms of online communication.
In this sense, it’s different from simple word-of-mouth marketing because instead of people merely passing on the story of the product you must use or the thing you must see, it allows them to actually pass the discussion-worthy content itself around.
Dual Quality Bars
Old-fashioned word of mouth advertising was basically a bonus for having a great product. (That’s not to say that the “shock value” word of mouth advertising is an invention of the internet — it’s been around at least since P.T. Barnum.)
Viral marketing is actually harder to succeed at, because there are two quality bars that must be met — the viral content itself must meet a high quality bar (or at least a high cleverness/shock value bar) if people are going to be compelled to pass it around.
Having high-quality viral content and a low-quality product will get you the “viral” half, but not the “marketing” half. The eternal question about viral marketing is whether it actually works as marketing: does it actually get people to buy the product, or does it merely increase brand recognition and buzz? It’s hard to get reliable data, but I suspect (and know from the few cases in which I have access to numbers) that viral marketing can cause a significant jump in sales when the marketing is clever and the product is good, and is marketed to the right audience. If the product is crap, it may get a small bump, but not a large or lasting one.
So:
Quality product = (word-of-mouth) marketing success
Quality viral content = viral success
Quality viral content + quality product = viral marketing success
But as you can see, the distinction between “viral marketing” and “word-of-mouth” marketing is a slim one. Basically, if you have a high-quality product that people can get a hold of in the first place, you’ll get “viral” marketing in the sense of word of mouth. I have yet to see an ad for Wellness cat food, for example, but when I got my kitten I knew to buy it because numerous cat-owning friends swore by it, and numerous cat-owner blogs endorsed it. On the other hand, while I think Burger King’s “Subservient Chicken” campaign was extremely clever, no amount of cleverness will make me eat that sh*t. That’s probably a bad example of viral marketing failure because most Americans don’t feel the way I feel about fast food, but tellingly, while I know I’ve seen unsuccessful campaigns where the campaign itself wasn’t bad, the product was, none of them have stuck in my mind.
Most Facebook Games Aren’t Viruses, They’re Drugs
When’s the last time someone came to you in person, or via email, and said, “OMG, Farmville is so much fun, you MUST PLAY IT!”
I believe it may have happened to some people, and I believe it’s likely to have happened when their friends had just started playing a Zynga game, but I hang around and correspond with game people, both casual gamers and core gamers, and I have never had any of them recommend Farmville to me.
Lots of them play Zynga games.
None of them have ever expressed any desire for me to do so.
I spend my work days amid a swirl of “Have you gotten Fallout: New Vegas yet?” and “How long until Bioshock: Ultimate?” and “Why haven’t we done a Mystery Case Files-style game for the Xbox?” and “Have you gotten to the roof level in Plants vs. Zombies?”
Excitement, anticipation, appreciation, humor, joy. The desire to share something that has made you happy with others. These are the things that drive the word-of-mouth marketing I experience every day with my peers.
I’ve asked people at work and with whom I socialize whether they play or have played Farmville. The answer is yes, more often than not.
Dismissive shrugs, embarrassed glances at the floor, or most often, apathy. “Yeah, I tried it. I was addicted for a little bit. But I got bored.”
I tried Petville. It was kind of fun at the beginning — designing my pet, seeing the animations. And by “the beginning,” I mean the first 5 minutes. After that, it was a chore: something I felt I had to do, something I kept doing in hope that eventually something cool would happen. It never did. After a while, I realized that I was deriving less enjoyment from Petville than I get from cleaning my apartment. When I clean my apartment, I at least get satisfaction out of it. I have a clean apartment. My life is better.
Petville was the same mundane chores, without any meaningful reward.
Most Facebook games aren’t viral. They’re drugs. They’re the meth of the game world. You have fun at the beginning, but quickly you’re addicted. You need a fix, but you’re not really having fun. The game spam drives your friends away (or at least makes them hide your posts — I’ve defriended people who game-spam without posting good content). Your wall gets meth-face. (And you hit up your friends, via invites and gift requests, for help. And in your desperation, you may fall prey to unscrupulous schemes. Here‘s a good summary of why Zynga games suck, and may not even qualify as games.
It’s telling that among the Facebook games in the chart linked above that lost the least users, two of them (poker and Bejeweled) were simply Facebook adaptations of pre-existing, popular games. The only Facebook game I’ve ever had recommended to me is Facebook Scrabble.
Facebook is an interesting new game platform, but unfortunately, the first games to succeed financially in a big way were Zynga-style games that aren’t interested in fun or good game design, merely in ways to use the basics of behavioral psychology to addict users and get money out of them. They’re not using the medium to its best potential.
But just because something succeeds, it doesn’t mean it did its thing in the best possible way. Hopefully, Facebook’s restrictions will raise the bar to entry — in quality.
Automatic Wall Posts Aren’t Viral Marketing, They’re Spam
We’re all familiar with spam bots, and infected “zombie” computers, right? With what happens when your email account gets hacked by spammers?
How are the automatic wall posts you have to continually opt out of with games like Petville any different, other than the slim distinction that you can opt out? When I see the auto-posts that my friends have started playing Treasure Isle, it’s not because they are playing the game and think it’s amazing and want to tell me about it.
It’s because the game did it automatically.
If they think the game is amazing and want to share, they’ll do so. Via email, in conversation, or with an actual, voluntarily written Facebook post. If your game is worth playing, I’ll hear about it from other people who are playing it. I’ll read glowing reviews. People will eagerly anticipate what its creators will do next.
So speaking as someone who has done viral marketing — actual viral marketing — my response to Facebook game devs whining about how not being able to force their users — a la infected “zombie” computers sending out spam — to spam their friends about their game, is
Shut the f*ck up.
If Facebook’s restrictions on how egregiously you can spam people who haven’t even opted in to playing your game are going to make it impossible for it to succeed, it deserves to fail.
Make a great game that works smoothly and is fun. Interact directly with your users and respond actively to their concerns and issues. Use traditional marketing channels wisely. Come up with creative marketing ideas and content that you, as a user, not a dev, would happily share with your friends and family.
If you do all that, and no one plays your game, I’ll have sympathy for you. Until then, I don’t want to hear it.
