Playfish’s Kristian Segerstråle talk about how social changes the game

Written by Pelle Sten | April 28, 2010 | 1 comment

Think like a chief financial officer, kill products and be a numbers ninja. That’s three key takeaways from Playfish’s CEO Kristian Segerstråle’s keynote speech at Nordic Game today.

Social networks changes the game. That’s a not very surprising overall image of Segerstråle’s speech. Playfish after all is all about social games. The company’s most successful property is Pet Society which, according to Crunch Base, has about 11 million active users every month. Last year Playfish was acquired by Electronic Arts for 400 million dollars.

It’s all about the barriers to entry. Make it cheaper, more social and more immediate (no more going to the games shop to buy a plastic disc) and you will expand your potential audience significantly. From Play Station 3 via Xbox 360 to Iphone and social gaming.

Kristian Segerstråle underlined the ease of iteration in game development online with the comparison of Fifa Soccer, that had 21 generations from 1993 to 2010, with Playfish’s Pet Society that has gone through hundreds of generations in only two years.

If you don’t have some one in your organisation who loves numbers and finance models you’ll probably not make any more games. You as a game creator don’t have to be that person, but find one.

One key difference between traditional game releases and social games is that you often need a large sum of money for the production of the game. And if you’re lucky you’ll sell loads of games at the release. The sales will slow down considerably when new games gets released. And the initial profits needs to be used to finance your next release.

But it’s cheaper when you work with games as a service, because you don’t have to present a finished game. You can add levels, characters and so on after the game has been released.

But whether or not you make large games or social games you shouldn’t waste money. So you need to learn when to kill products. Kristian Segerstråle told the audience at Nordic Game that Playfish has a kill ratio of 30 percent.

Playfish collects a billion data points every day. And he recommended all game creators to start collecting the data even if they hadn’t found the right rocket scientist to analyse the numbers. It was also important to look at actionable metrics instead of vanity data. It isn’t interesting to know how many people has used your game ever.

One important method that Kristian Segerstråle talked about was the funnel. That’s a model where yo measure a couple of important metrics along a users path. The example he used was a sale. The first path in the funnel might be how many users entered the shop, another how many added an inventory to the shopping basket, the next how many proceeded to the checkout and finally how many actually finished the purchased and gave you some money.

The numbers in the funnel isn’t as important as whether or not you can get them to increase, and by how much.
Kristian Segerstråle also recommended all teams to have a meeting every morning when every one took a short time to look at the data and discuss what could be the reason behind changes in behaviour.

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