This week we had a chance to interview Trip Hawkins, the founder of Electronic Arts and Digital Chocolate about his new NanoStar platform, Nick wrote a report from SXSW about the economics of Facebook Games, we looked at 3 ways social gaming is mimicking the Atari games revolution, we reviewed Gangster City and Friends for Sale and Report: Users Buy More Virtual Goods on New Years and Valentines Day Than Christmas. Read on for more!
Friday Podcast: Trip Hawkins Discusses Facebook Games, NanoStar Castles and Shrek
I had the opportunity to talk with Trip Hawkins, the founder of Electronic Arts and Digital Chocolate, about his new NanoStar card game platform, Facebook games, the importance of story inside of games and more. Click below to hear the interview.
The Economics Of Facebook Games
Last week at SXSW, John Pleasants, CEO of Playdom, spoke about “The Future Of Social Gaming”, but the greatest takeaway was the current economics of Facebook Games. If you are looking to get into the business or are already a player in the space, there were a number of important facts disclosed by Pleasants. What’s clear is that the business is a smaller version of the movie industry with the difference being that games can be improved as users interact with them.
Pixel Art: 12 Awesome Recreations Of Retro Game Heroes On Farmville
At their best, social games are a platform by which people can express their creativity and individuality to their friends in their social graph. When Kotaku posted a sweet recreation of 8-bit Mario on a Farmville farm, the commenters poured in to highlight their own creations. Here, we highlight 12 of these awesome 8-bit art recreations from Farmville.
5 Social Games That Look As Good As Console Games
As the Facebook gaming era moves into a new generation, spurred by the meteoric rise of Farmville, we’re seeing a dramatic rise in visual quality. This echoes the trends of the early 80s, when console gaming came to prominence with the Atari 2600, and bigger developers are making bigger budget games for Facebook. We take a look at 5 social games that look as good as console games.
The 10 Features Every Social Mobile Game Must Include
Industry experts at the recent Game Developers Conference in San Francisco iterated that mobile is the next big platform for social games. If you’re a developer designing for this niche or a player trying to choose, there are certain features that every social game should have. (Consider that nearly half of the apps submitted to Apple for their upcoming iPad device are games.) While they’re not necessarily social games, the potential market exists.
Zynga Game Cards Now Available at 7-Eleven, Best Buy, Gamestop and Target
Zynga announced today that they are releasing their pre-paid game cards to many of the nation’s largest retailers including 7-Eleven, Inc., Best Buy, GameStop and Target. The pre-paid cards allow users to buy in-game currency for Zynga games like Farmville, Mafia Wars and YoVille, and are very useful to players who don’t have credit cards to pay online.
Meteor Games Partners with Hydra to Monetize and Grow User Base
Meteor Games, developers of the Island Paradise Facebook Game hit, have partnered with Hydra in order to acquire new players and better monetize their userbase. Hydra will take care of managing advertising inventory for Meteor Games’ 600,000,000 monthly impressions as well as manage new player acquisition efforts on Facebook.
“It’s like Pokemon for adults”: Digital Chocolate Introduces NanoStar (Updated)
Digital Chocolate, one of the premier iPhone and Facebook games developers, is announcing their newest social gaming platform entitled “Nanostar Social Games”. The platform is based on role-playing card games and CEO Trip Hawkins explains that “It’s like Pokemon for adults.” The real beauty of the platform is that cards can be used in different ways across a variety of different games.
Game Review: Friends for Sale Is Still The Most Social Game
Serious Business’ Friends For Sale is one of those rare games where every action you take relates to your social graph, and thereby lives up to the mantle of a ‘social game’. The game revolves around buying and selling your friends with the goal of owning the most popular people in your social network to maximize profits. We review the game below.
Heyzap Distributes Social Games Anywhere On The Web
Heyzap is a service that allows game developers to take their Facebook games and port them to other networks across the web, thereby increasing their potential userbase. The service works by asking games to connect to an intermediate Heyzap layer that is able to communicate with various social networks and websites. This way, the game becomes portable to various networks with a minimal amount of code change.
3 Ways The Social Gaming Boom Is Imitating The Atari Gaming Boom
Social games are here to stay. There are about 100,000,000 players playing every month on Facebook alone, and Farmville has more unique players (with 80 million) in a month than all the sales of the biggest selling game of all time, Wii Sports (with 60 million). Every gaming pundit on the web is asking the same question: “Where is this industry going to be in five years”? I decided to contemplate the future by analyzing the past, and identifying 3 ways that this social gaming trend is imitating the Atari gaming explosion of the 80′s.
Sony’s Buzz! Game for PS3 Introduces Facebook High Score Publishing
Sony Computer Entertainment is expanding the Playstation 3′s Facebook abilities by adding Facebook Connect to their Buzz! Quiz World game. This will allow players to publish their scores to Facebook from directly within the game.
Report: Users Buy More Virtual Goods on New Years and Valentines Day Than Christmas
According to a report from Social Gold, New Year’s and Valentine’s Day discounts and themed items contribute more to boosts in sales of virtual goods than Christmas-themed items. The New Year’s gifts drove as much as 50% increases in revenues and Valentine’s Day drove as much as 48%. The fact that holiday related themed items and discounts increase sales is somewhat obvious, but the report goes on to look at some other interesting statistics.
GAME: How Well Do You Know Your Twitter Friends?
Twitter For Busy People have created a game that allows you to test how well you know your Twitter friends. It’s a small, simple game but goes a long way to show how Twitter could be used for gaming and entertainment in the future. The game is here. The game only has a few steps. You enter your Twitter name, and the game automatically shows you ten Twitter profile pictures and a list of ten Twitter profile names, and you’re required to match them together.
Top 5 Facebook Game Models That Started Outside Of Facebook
Most Facebook games have models that can be traced back to earlier games that existed before the launch of the Platform. This is nothing new as it has been the pattern of game design since the beginning. By standing on the shoulders of giants and using existing game mechanics that work well, the biggest challenge for social game designers is to port the game to work well in social networks. We take a look at some of these models below.
Game Review: Playfish’s Gangster City Introduces Narrative And Special Effects to Facebook Games
Playfish’s Gangster City game brings an unprecedented level of production, story and gameplay to the Facebook gaming world. There’s no doubt that Gangster City was heavily inspired by games like Mob Wars and Mafia Wars, but the title lives up to the Playfish reputation of innovative, quality titles by adding several new elements to the game, including a cinematic story, voice acting, animated battles and an innovative family structure.
