“games are just websites that are really difficult”

Written by Martin Thörnkvist | April 29, 2010 | No comments

My favourite tweet today was made by @jonassmith saying: ”Overheard at Nordic Game ‘games are just websites that are really difficult’”.

Funny, and as it turns out it seem to have some bearing. I went to the social gaming seminar with the title “Are social games the new black”, which the panel was sure of. There was a discussion that started with a statement that there is a difference in the way the sales graphs look for product games and social games. Sales in the former start in a rush around the launch with marketing actions and then turns down and if you’re lucky you get a long tail. Whereas the other start slow and grow and grow.

Social game development is about deploying new versions and to constantly iterate. Instead of working on a product for long time and then release a “final product”. That makes up for similarities with web development. Where it is usual to release a beta, get feedback from users and develop from that.

And it goes deeper than that. Jarle Snertingdalen, Funcom, said that  ”social games success comes from web people because they are used to do products that are supposed to being updated continuously”. Meaning that game people have a lot to learn from web developers. Working with iterations needs a different mind set to be successful.

Martin Walfisz from Planeto stated throughout the session that social gaming is here to stay and that eventually all games will have social. Having that said he was fast to make it clear that ”you need to take the social functions seriously and involved it in the beginning of the project, adding it at the end won’t work.”

I can see future cooperations here and it’s clear that the game industry will see a bunch of new guys being experts in a field were the old game business is lacking of knowledge.

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