This handy infographic looks back at the year 2012 in casual gaming

by Joe Osborne, Posted Jan 2nd 2013 4:30PM

In the year two thousand ... and 12. (Moving right along.) You know, looking back ... 2012 was kind of a crazy year in games. That's especially so in casual games on all platforms. The folks at Dungeon Rampage creator Rebel Entertainment have gathered a handy dandy infographic that touches on all the landmarks moments of last year in the world of casual games, many of which cross path with not only the gaming world at large, but the pop culture world on the whole.

Remember when Atari started making social and mobile games? Or how about that time when Words With Friends became a board game? Other notables from the year in which the world was supposed to end include when the Angry Birds series reached 1 billion downloads, Zynga saw its first insider trading lawsuit and Amazon--of all companies--released social games. A crazy year indeed.

What was your favorite moment in casual gaming from 2012? What do you expect to see in 2013? Sound off in the comments. Add Comment.

Click the image below for full size.

Tags: casual games, casual games 2012, casual gaming, casual gaming 2012, rebel entertainment, social games, social games 2012, social gaming, social gaming 2012

View the original article here

Casual Connect 2012: Live-blogging Zynga’s lecture on hiring and retaining talent

We’re at Casual Connect and waiting for Zynga’s 3 PM lecture on how to hire and retain talent in the competitive social games industry.

The lecture is being given by Chief People Officer Colleen McCreary.

3:00 PM – Chris Early of Ubisoft just took the stage and is introducting Colleen.

3:01 PM – McCreary just took the stage. She’s been with the company for just over three-and-a-half years.

3:02 PM — McCreary is sharing a growth chart of Zynga: In January 2008, the company only had 11 employees. Today they have 2,846 employees with over 40 percent devoted to engineering. The company also has over 20 locations world wide.

3:05 PM — McCreary says one of Zynga’s advantages is that it operates in a studio model that allows people to work on different products and not get bored working on just one thing at a time. She says a piece of advice she received (and believes in) is that a company should spend at least 20 percent of its time focusing on its people/talent. She also says a lot of companies out there talk about how talent is their most important asset, but then they don’t focus on their people.

3:07 PM — What makes Zynga Special? McCreary says it’s the company’s core values. These include “Build games you and your friends love to play,” “surprise and delight our players” and “Zynga First” (making decisions for the greater good).

3:12 PM — Something that Zynga does is create job architectures to help people plan out their career path within the company. This is something McCreary feels many companies aren’t doing with the current workforce coming out of college.

3:17 PM — McCreary is addressing the “Zynga First” rule. She says this can best be summed up by staff asking themselves, “How can I step up and help the company?”

3:19 PM — “The best way to get something out of your work force is to instill the intrinsic belief that you’re doing something great.”

3:20 PM — Addressing the concept of being a “missionary” or “mercenary” company. “Depending on what time you’ve looked at us, we’ve been on either side.” McCreary says this si something Zynga’s still struggling with, because there are elements that make both sides great.

3:21 PM — A great indicator that someone is the right person to bring into your company is they’ll always say “yes” to requests because it means they keep their mind open.

3:25 PM — Here are McCreary’s checklist items for HR personnel:

Keep egos in check.Make sure people have control of their work/life/happiness balance.Hire people willing to take risks to keep on pushing the envelope forward.Treat interviews like an iceberg: All of the stuff beneath the surface (like personality, work ethic, etc.) are what you can’t see but are the most important parts of a person you’re interviewing.3:26 PM — That’s it. McCreary just thanked us all for listening and left the stage.

View the original article here

Stay tuned for Inside Network’s Casual Connect coverage

Tomorrow through Thursday, social and mobile game developers from around the world will be attending Casual Connect 2012 in downtown Seattle and Inside Network will be on hand to cover the show.

From left to right, Inside Network managing editor AJ Glasser, Inside Mobile Apps staff writer Kathleen De Vere and Inside Social Games lead writer Mike Thompson will be at the show throughout the week.

This year’s Casual Connect is covering a wide variety of topics, but many of the sessions are focused on the convergence of social and mobile games and are being led by industry veterans from companies like Zynga, 6waves and King.com.

We’ll be attending panels, meeting with developers see and generally looking around to see what’s in the works for social and mobile titles. If you happen to see us on the show floor or at one of the industry parties, don’t hesitate to come up and introduce yourself.

View the original article here

Guest post: Vostu’s insights on retention patterns in social vs. casual games

casual, Design, Educational, facebook, Featured, Guest post, Metrics, monetization, Sim, Social Games, Sports

[Editor's Note: The following article comes from Vostu co-founder and Chief Scientist Mario Schlosser and Chief Researcher Neil Molino. It compares retention patterns between Vostu's city-building sim, MegaCity, and its recently-released real time soccer sim, Gol Mania.]

In Vostu’s experience, what makes a successful traditional social game (defined here as games with common social features like quests and gifting) is building a highly dedicated and engaged long-term userbase that plays up into very high levels in the game. Game play in high levels becomes complex and extremely social. (High-level users exchange a lot more gifts than low-level ones, for example.) These games lose a lot of users early on, but those who stay (at least in a good game) are there for long periods of time and are highly engaged with the game. And, hopefully, they’re paying users.

In contrast, casual games (defined here as games that are social but rely less heavily on traditional social features like quests and gifting) have a tougher time engaging a long-term audience. Gameplay in high levels tends to be the same straightforward, simple activity that it was in lower levels. That means it is harder to continuously engage users in casual games when they reach high levels. This game type does have its advantages, however, as it is easier for users to re-engage with a casual game after a lapse.

From our perspective, social games are soap operas while casual games are sitcoms. The retention characteristics for a traditional social game like MegaCity, our city-building simulation, are very different than those we see in a casual game like Gol Mania, our real-time soccer game. But some of these differences clearly point to opportunities for casual games to learn from social games and vice versa.

We’ll quantify a number of key differences between MegaCity and Gol Mania below. First, at a very basic level, we see the amount of minutes that users play per day shows a divergence between the two games. When we drill into this and break down the userbase of the two games by level, we see that this divergence really stems from the fact that (a) social games have a higher portion of high-level dedicated users and (b) these high-level dedicated users actually play longer each day than their analogous users in casual games. The chart below shows the percentage of users who play x minutes or less per day. “Social game” stands for Vostu’s MegaCity, and “Casual game” is Vostu’s Gol Mania. For example, in Gol Mania, 80 percent of users play 30 minutes or less per day, while in MegaCity, just 60 percent play 30 minutes or less per day.

In the graph below, we see that low-level users show very similar time played per day for both games. Note that it normally doesn’t make sense to compare levels across games, as level 10 in a poker game is bound to be different than level 10 in a cafe game. In our case, however, we can calculate our games’ level curves in a way that an average user levels up every 1-1.5 days regardless of which type of game they are playing. This is interesting: in a user’s early days, casual vs. social games don’t differ.

Mid-level users start to show differences in the duration of play per day:

This difference becomes even more extreme as we progress to very high levels. Hard-core users in MegaCity are highly engaged. A full 50 percent plays more than 30 minutes per day. That’s not the case for long-standing fans of Gol Mania, which are less engaged.

As we can see, the main difference between the two games in minutes played per day is that MegaCity enjoys a larger portion of high-level users and that these users play more minutes per day than those we find in Gol Mania.

Similarly, we see that as a whole, the games show a different distribution of their users’ “login intensity.” We define this term as the fraction of distinct days since registration that the user actually played the game. For example, if you played eight out of 10 days since you joined, your login intensity would be 80 percent.

The left skew for MegaCity is apparent. As a whole, its userbase logs in more frequently; in fact, nearly one in five MegaCity users has logged in more than 80 percent of the days since registering. We can attribute some of this behavior to the fact that MegaCity does a better job pulling users into higher levels. We can also say, however, that the game’s age plays a significant role, as MegaCity is old enough to have accumulated a lot of high level users whereas Gol Mania is comparatively young.

So we’ll look at login intensity by level below, across both games:

In terms of login intensity, casual and social games actually turn out to be pretty similar once you normalize correctly for game age, etc. While active users log into both games at about the same rate, they play casual games less intensely once they’re logged in, however. This behavior is very clearly a function of the fact that casual games are less social than social games.

The chart below illustrates the point. It shows the percentage of game sessions that started with the user entering the game through a “social” channel, like clicking on a news feed story or accepting a gift.

There are a number of powerful observations in this chart. First, casual games and social games work very similarly when it comes to viral acquisition. In early levels, users are about equally likely to enter the game because of some viral channel like a canvas app ticker story.

But social games exhibit a higher virality via in-game activity. At higher levels, users in a social game are a lot more likely to get back into the game because of some viral activity like an in-game gift request. This is because viral activities like exchanging gifts to build stuff are the bread-and-butter of the high level user experience. That type of gameplay also explains some of the differences we’ve seen in previous charts: viral mechanics like gifting lead to more intense engagement for higher levels in social games.

In contrast, there is no high-level gameplay loop at work in casual games. We’ve recently begun experimenting with this by adding more personalization to Gol Mania. For example, we introduced in-game “private rooms,” where users can directly challenge their friends to an immediate real-time match. In a period of a few days, roughly 7 percent of active users invite their friends to Gol Mania, whereas 17 percent of those users who enter a private room invite their friends to a match. So, there are ways of making casual game more social — and therefore more viral.

To us, this represents an opportunity for casual games. An important share of a social game’s everyday traffic is users who had left the game “waking up” from a lapse in daily play and returning. If casual games could recreate the viral “wake up call,” they could potentially enjoy an even larger audience of high level users.

That may be easier said than done, however, as social games naturally encourage users to return — or suffer consequences like withering crops or expired storyline quests. Here, casual games gain the upper hand as users suffer fewer consequences for a lapse in gameplay, meaning there’s less of a barrier to returning. The chart below is a bit complicated: it shows the probability that a user returns to the game after being gone, depending on how long the user has been away from the game. While it is true that the longer a user is away, the less likely they are to return (the lines both slope down), an extended break does not decrease the probability as rapidly in a casual game as in a social game:

In casual games, crops don’t wither, quests don’t expire and the gameplay is more or less the same as it was when the user left. No matter how long a user is gone, it’s just as easy to return to the game as it was when the user was playing daily. The effect is powerful. Casual games get a lot more out of waking-up users than social games.

Moreover, once a user wakes up in a casual game, they are more likely to play more frequently. We believe this is because a casual game feels new and more self-contained each time a user plays. The graph below shows the login intensity for users who wake up and return to a game:

Social and casual games need to learn from each other. Social games need to make it less burdensome for users to return: ease users back into the game instead of showing them the one hundred feature launches they missed while they were gone. Casual games need long-term investment opportunities for the user.

For Vostu, it makes sense to keep a portfolio of both social and casual games. Our casual games have a higher chance of getting users back into our portfolio and also bridge the gap between big social game launches. We think of them as the sitcoms you flip to during the commercial breaks in your prime time soap opera. Having the soap opera, though, is necessary to really build a longer-term, engaged and paying audience.

View the original article here

Google+ Adds Casual Single-Player Games from LabPixies

Google+ Games got a bit bigger recently with the addition of Flood-It! and Sudoku Puzzles, two casual titles from Google’s LabPixies, which was acquired last year.

The two games are unique additions to the platform on account of how solitary they are. Though both Flood-It! and Sudoku Puzzles ask players to invite friends to play, the only actual “social” feature included in the games is a leaderboard displayed below the game. Flood-It! is a puzzle game where players click a series of six colors, trying to “flood” adjacent squares on the board in 25 moves or less. Sudoku Puzzles is a Japanese logic puzzle game where players try to fill in missing numbers inside a grid to achieve a configuration where each column, row, and sub-grids contain all digits from 1 to 9.

While puzzle games haven’t gotten much traction on Facebook without the addition of social features, it could be that the “unobtrusive” route Google+ is taking with Games would make the platform a better home for singleplayer games like Flood-It! and Sudoku. With all Games activity (notifications, requests, etc.) currently confined to the Games tab, players already have to be heading toward the platform to play games, rather than attracted to them by games stories like “So-and-so passed your score on Game X.” If players don’t need to leverage the social graph to find the games — why should the games make use of a player’s social graph at all?

View the original article here

Casual Connect Seattle 2009 coverage

I couldn’t make Social Games Summit 2009 and I’m totally bummed I missing out on Casual Connect Seattle 2009 too (it has an superb line-up of speakers in the social games track). So once again, I’m left observing the event from afar. Like I did for the Social Games Summit, I’m collecting misc tidbits and blog posting about social games from the event into this blog entry. I will update the entry as more stuff comes thru as the Casual Connect is still going on (until the 23rd of July).

Jessica Tams and the team behind the events do a fantastic job on also sharing the information post the event. All slides and audio recordings will be available free of charge (like they are here for the previous events). Jessica is absolutely right that the value of the Casual Games Association is measured by how much they can do for the industry as a whole and sharing information is key part on expanding the industry.

@gamersvu_abi Playfish/Zynga/Playdom say social games $1.5B industry in 3 years@mikesego: “love is the most important metric” says @sebdeh from Playfish… best answer of the conference@tadej Zynga: games services rather than products. Number of returning players (not play time) correlates with monetization.@katelollar: There are more than 55 million unique [game] players on Facebook every month@amyjokim: why have >1 currencies in a virtual economy? CONTROL. Too risky to have only 1 currency@noahkagan @ what women want panel, #casualconnectwomen focused on collection, keeping active and socializing. 1 knew exact point count on king.com@amyjokim offer your players LOTS of diff ways to spend money (and diff price pts)@danielleleslie Q: How can game monetization models offer scalable engagement and attract branded dollars? A: Anu from Offerpal: Soon, fb app user will watch movie trailer, listen to music clip, etc. in return for virtual currency.@NPDFrazier: Tom Prata – three pillars of successful games: 1) accessibility 2) sense of newness 3) consumer reaction@bonder Trend 1 Virtual Worlds – YoVille, Pet Society@bonder Trend 2 – Customization & Personalization – Farm Town, Sorority Life@bonder Trend 3 – Collections & Wish Lists – Mafia Wars@bonder Trend 4 – Simulations – Farm Town, Farmville, Barn Buddy, Restaurant City (Realtime sim)@bonder Trend 5 – Narrative – Hammerfall, Bloodlines@bonder Trend 6 – Interesting Missions – Street Racing, Mafia Wars, Mobsters 2, Hero World, Sorority Life (mini games)@bonder Trend 7 – Gift Invites – Green Patch, Farm Town, Farmville, Mafia Wars, YoVille, Sorority Wars etc (it works!)@bonder Trend 8 – Donations – Mouse Hunt@bonder Trend 9 – Virtual Items – Mafia Wars, Street Racing, Vampire Wars, Pet Society – lots of opps to innovate here &gift invites@bonder Trend 10 – Friends – Crazy Planets, Mafia Wars@bonder Trend 11 – Social Games and iPhone – Word Fu (Twitter, email, FB Connect), Drop 7@bonder Trend 12 – Using Social Net Data – Photo Grab@hirson tips for fb game success – pt 1 1. Make it fun 2.make it social 3. Think Service, not product 4. Measure everything@hirson tips for fb games success pt 2 – 5. Design for sharing 6. Build your footprint 7. Tailor monetization mix. 8. No spam.@hirson last tips for fb games. 9 use fb resources (verified game and dev garage) and 10. Be a good citizen.@mikesego Over 9.7 million users played a farm sim game (Farmville, Farm Town, Barn Buddy) yesterday on Facebook@mikesego At Gareth’s talk – More people play games on Facebook than any other site on the web. True.@jewlish Wii Mii’s came from Japanese wooden Kokeshi dolls.@NicoleLazzaro Instead of modeling breeds Nintendogs modeled the most important relationship: btwn the owner and dog.@NicoleLazzaro Nintendo keynote: In 2.5 yrs console and handheld market increased by 30 million players.@jmwhite2: 300 new games released per day on the iPhone – 20% of all apps are games – dean takahashi

From 2009-07-22

@albertsupdates: “3 min user experiences are too long, 90 seconds (engagement cycles) is more optimal (on iphone)”@albertsupdates Episodic content the future of iPhone games — are there parallels on Facebook?@Jeff Shervin’s stats: Saturday peak days for installs, 25K to $40K daily installs for top paid games (= $250K/day for a $10 game) @GameAddict Interesting numbers about ipod touch making up 30% – 50% of game sales from the panel sales@katelollar 25% of all iPhone games are updated each month @Jeff Bart shares a couple of updated stats on Tapulous: 15M users after a year, half a billion Tap Tap Revenge games played @Jeff AppStore: 68,000 apps, 1.5 billion downloads, 20% of apps = games. Bart points out that apps’ installed base is typically 40/50% iPod Touch@GameAddict Dave Roberts of Popcap: “13% of the market is paying for 65% of the games sales.” 13% = 14 – 24 y.o. Males @gamesdotcom 13% of the population (14-34 men) drives the retail game business. Casual games are after the other 87% brodiegames Day 2 #casualconnect. Enjoyed Arthur’s (@LastDayOfWork) talk. Takeaway: brand building around innovation can win vs high output/low quality.@GameAddict 300 game submissions for mochi coins since yesterday’s announcement by Mochi Media.@johnhcook: Is advertising dead as a business model for games? “No it just sucks right now,” says RealNetworks’ Dan Prigg@johnhcook MSFT’s Hegenderfer at#casualconnect: No Zune phone coming.albertsupdates FB Game Templates Poke/WallApps > MobGames > FarmeGames — What is the next template? Are template going to keep working?johnhcook Hegenderfer of MSFT’s Windows Mobile on app stores: “Anyone who thinks Apple is going to run this thing is sadly mistaken.”albertsupdates “v1.0 of marketplace launching nxt week”-steve/group manager, windows mobile| does anyone care? or is it a greenfield?@lisaopolion Trends in casual online game – Thibaut from Gametap, “casual could become the #1 game genre within 6 mos”gamesdotcom Metaboli.com is learning what casual game portals always knew. The audience plays a HELL of a lot! Casual most played@albertsupdates: “Apple iTunes/Appstore is the new carrier deck” -still sucks w/o strong alternative (social) distributionKontagent Mindjolt is #7 app: aggregation of games w/ a social wrapper.Whos next to ship something similar from casual game pubs?albertsupdates Thought: 5 stages of game distribution/evolution: box>downloads>flash>social>social/mobile; Can all survive/prosper?@GameAddict: Greg Ballard , CEO Glu Mobile: “there are too many games in the App store and may follow the Atari disaster.

From 2009-07-23

@albertsupdates Focus on 2 Numbers – “Avg. Revenue Per User,” and “Avg. Revenue Per PAYING User@RealTweeter Is wellness gaming the next big casual games trend@dwlt NPD: “33% upgrade from free to paid games on iPhone”@georgebray NPD: Gamers spend avg $7 on iPhone games in last 3 months@Kontagent: IMO: 3 metrics: 1. ARPU, 2. Churn & also 3. (v)CAC: (viral) Customer Acqusition Costs@Kontagent 2 years it took Zynga to get to ~$100M+ from $0; How many years does it take traditional co’s to build a MMO?albertsupdates EngagedConf is now going to be hosted next to toyfair – Why? Because VirtualWorlds+BrandedToys = BigTime; Webkins=#1 toyElaineChase Casual mmos as loss leaders when used as marketing for a bigger property = tough market place for making them a businessalbertsupdates “MTV has been the most prolific publisher of casual MMOs of anyone in the industry” – Ralph Kosterdwlt Koster – Casual & VWs should learn from AAA industry and avoid becoming too enamored with techgeorgebray NPD: 25% of online game players use a console. 59% of gamers use a console, 39% on PC and 35% use game websitesGameAddict NPD: The most notable changes are increase in women console gamers and decrease amount willing to pay for microtransactionsjmwhite2 NPD session – more people playing online educational games than online shooters. (26 pc vs 23 pc).GameAddict NPD: Card/puzzle/arcade/word games are dominating the casual space with 56% of the market for online gaming.GameAddict NPD: $701 mill in Retail PC, $740 mill in subscriptions, and $425 mill in PC Digitial dl’s in 2008.GameAddict NPD Video games sector is the ony category of entertainment to grow in 08', 33% of entertainment dollars towards gamingGameAddict NPD: Kids lesiure time. Video Gaming and computer use have increased but only by 1 or 2 percent in 2 years@GameAddict 90% of the revenue comes from virtual goods at QQGameAddict 6 million users on the casual side of QQ. (me: I totally wish more devs looked at asia for advice and tips. They’re on fire.)@albertsupdates Game industry has always been highly fragmented, any market leader (i.e EA) has less than 20% marketsharealbertsupdates Game Publishers Focused on “Launch” and “Pushing Users Over $50 Barrier” vs. Social: Virality opt.&commnity buildingElaineChase “When NEuropean business does’t know if they can do something they say “no, we can’t” US defaults to “sure, we can do that”albertsupdates Mobile Games 1.0 = BizDev Competitive Advantage; Mobile 2.0 = Content; Mobile Games 3.0 = Social Distribution IMOchriscummings01 Think about this: Tencent in China has 6M simultaneous players at peak; in Q1’09 did $360M gross rev (90% from virtual goods)ElaineChase Swoopo has a ridiculously brillant & evil buisness model based on the premise that humans as a group act stupidlygetgambit The ideal competitive model = users who win want to keep playing, and users who lose want to keep playing (until they win)MargaretWallace Nuff said: (Tim) Chang: VC’s are devil-avoid us at all cost. Make it so they call you and want to invest in you.lisaopolion Tim Chang “Content is king, but distribution will be God”GameAddict Chang: Casual 3.0 will be 3d, streaming gaming, cloud gaming (same game on different devices), virtual currency exchange.GameAddict Chang is using the analogy of dance clubs as game business models. Velvet ropped areas easy to see and people pay to get inchriscummings01 “Pitching a VC today? No faster track to the recycle bin than anchoring your business model to advertising.” – Tim Chang@chriscummings01 “From a VC perspective, survival is the new growth.” – Tim Chang, Norwest

From 2009-07-22

From 2009-07-23 and later

Explore posts in the same categories: event This entry was posted on July 22, 2009 at 10:05 and is filed under event. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: casualgames, conference, socialgames

You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.

View the original article here

Casual Fridays: Strategy in Various Flavours

Welcome to Casual Fridays!  This is your fun Friday post where you get reviews of flash games, mobiles games and anything else that’s quick, and fun around the net.  We’re moving to a bi-weekly format so that I can make sure to get them out in time, but that might mean there’s going to be a few more games on the review table rather than the standard two or three per post.  There are a sea of games out there, we’re hoping to provide you with a life raft to find the games you want to play.

Today’s games are a hodge podge collection of games that are all strategy flavoured in some way.  I’m a huge fan of Strategy games in general, I think I’m one of the few people that has fond memories of Aerobiz Supersonic.  There’s just something about trying to figure out what’s the best course of action at a given time and hoping that it works out.  It’s kind of like real life, but with orcs … or million dollar planes that I don’t actually have to own.  The games this week are King’s Guard, Rebuild, and Flagstaff: Chapter One.

Remember Bejewelled?  Yeah.  You know that game that really made matching threes popular?  You know how there are a million and one other games that have tried to do something with the match three game and have failed?  King’s Guard is not one of the ones that fall into the “failed copy of Bejewelled” pile.  King’s Guard is a RTS that uses the Match Three idea to fuel how you deal with the waves of creatures that come and attack you.

You have three heroes, and typically the woman is the magic user, and they each attack the waves of monsters that are attacking your castle.  They attempt to have a story which makes little sense since you’re trying to drive out a hoard of evil creatures by defending?  It really doesn’t matter all that much, the fun part is what when the waves of monsters come you get to make your matches for various effects.  When you match the colors of the heroes, the result is that the hero in question gets healed.  If you match colors that aren’t for your heroes, they will level up the troops that you can get in the game.  If match four or more, the Heroes get special ability tiles or you get a tile that represents a troop that you can put up to support your various heroes.

What I think they do really well is that even if you’re not able to see the colors on the screen, they did make each tile a different shape as well.  This is not as easy as the colors when it comes time to frantically search about to find the tiles you need to heal your warrior hero.  The support troops also come in the standard three flavors (ranged, melee and special) and the idea that matching just three will level them up is pretty simplistically clever.

The music and sound effects can get pretty monotonous after a while, but thankfully they do have the options on the screen to mute one or the other as you feel the need to.  The monsters that attack you, while they do increase in number, aren’t incredibly varied.  However, if you really just enjoy playing something like Bejewelled it really isn’t all that important.  They just act like an interesting timer.

Random Value Judgement Rating: -> 0 * v !  Five various magical attacks.  I think there might be an arrow in there too.

I’ve got a small secret to share.  Beyond loving strategy games, I also love horror games.  I don’t know why.  I can’t stand horror movies, I’m not interested in them at all.  However, you give me a the genre in a novel, an RPG, or a Video Game and I’m there.  Which is why I love Rebuild a lot.  Probably the most out of all the games I’m reviewing this week, and for the past little bit, because it’s a horror strategy game.  You play survivors in a city doing their best to keep back the zombie hoards.

The first thing that you’ll notice when playing the game is that the random name generator produces names of actual cities.  I’ve come acrossWarsaw, New York, Calgary (yes the Can Con makes me happy) which is always a really nice touch.  The other nice element is that along with picking the size of the board you’re playing on and the difficulty of the game, you get to pick the gender of your leader.  No large images flashing a disparate image of what the “male” and “female” leaders look like.  Just a name that changes depending on what you pick.  Now, what might have been nice is to include a non-binary option, or just remove the Gender all together and have it spit out a random name, and by random I really mean random). I mention this not to say that the game does something badly, but what they’ve done well and how they might take what they’ve done better than other games and push it further.

The game is great.  You have to balance the food that you grow, and scavenge from the outside against the people that you have living inside your complex.  You’ve got to keep them happy and defended from outside attacks, but you need more survivors in order to make sure that you can grow.  The start of the game is really a great position for a horror game.  You’ve got too many people, and a limited amount of resources before you run out.  It forces you to grow right away, or at least scavenge on a consistent basis in order to even maintain your current level.  

Even the types of survivors that you have makes sense.  You have the soldiers, the builders, the scavengers, the leaders, and the people who don’t have any discernible skills what so ever.  It’s great!  I know I would be nearly useless in a zombie apocalypse, at least until I learn something, and that’s exactly how the “no skill” people work.  However, another thing that’s great about the game is that the icons for the survivors don’t change depending upon  Another great thing about the game is that the iconography doesn’t change regardless of the gender of the survivors.

The game is a great challenge with a couple different endings.  I would recommend it greatly to anyone really.  Zombie survival at it’s finest.

Random Value Judgement Rating: [] [] [] [] []  Five food containers, good for one survivor for five days, or five survivors for one day

From the interesting mechanic, to the most amazing game ever, to one that’s pretty graphically cute.  Flagstaff: Chapter One is a really cute strategy dungeon crawl.  You get four heroes, again the women are the magic users but they’re wearing clothes (It’s always so sad that there is a bar that you can walk over if your women characters are wearing clothing), and they are hired by the King to go clear out the dungeon of walking about skeletons.

I mean the dialogue is trying to be funny, and it kind of isn’t.  The game isn’t all that difficult, the levels come really quickly and it doesn’t take you too long to realize which powers are the ones to go for.  However, the game play is pretty solid.  There are no weird D&D esque rules that tell you that you can’t move and attack, or attack and move, or move, attack, and then move again.  The dungeons aren’t that big, and the monsters are just as cute as the heroes.

In the end, this game is a lovely little diversion with a save feature, so you can go back to it when you feel like you’ve got twenty minutes you’d like to use in destroying skeletons, and possessed guards, and whatever other monsters I didn’t get to see because my twenty minutes was up.

Random Value Judgement Rating: X X X X X Five fallen Skeletons

So I’m going to put out a question.  What’s your favorite strategy game?  What do you like about them?  What do you hate about them?  Let us know in the comments below.

Also, if you’ve got a game you’d like to get reviewed for Casual Fridays, or if you’ve got any comments, questions or anything about these reviews just leave a comment below, or email koipond at borderhouseblog dot com

Related posts:

Casual Fridays: The Balloons EditionCasual Fridays: Evolving Platform EditionCasual Fridays: Roll the BonesCasual Fridays – Just as long as they aren’t called Skynet …Casual Fridays 03 – Planes, Planes and Planes

View the original article here

Highlights This Week From the Inside Network Job Board: NaturalMotion, Meteor Games, Casual Collective, & More

The Inside Network Job Board is dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities in the Facebook Platform and social gaming ecosystem.

Here are this week’s highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at NaturalMotion, Meteor Games, Casual Collective, W3i,Badgeville, and Bulbstorm.

Listings on the Inside Network Job Board are distributed to readers of Inside Facebook and Inside Social Games through regular posts and widgets on the sites. Your open positions are being seen by the leading developers, product managers, marketers, designers, and executives in the Facebook Platform and social gaming industry today.

View the original article here

Casual Connect Seattle 2009 coverage

I couldn’t make Social Games Summit 2009 and I’m totally bummed I missing out on Casual Connect Seattle 2009 too (it has an superb line-up of speakers in the social games track). So once again, I’m left observing the event from afar. Like I did for the Social Games Summit, I’m collecting misc tidbits and blog posting about social games from the event into this blog entry. I will update the entry as more stuff comes thru as the Casual Connect is still going on (until the 23rd of July).

Jessica Tams and the team behind the events do a fantastic job on also sharing the information post the event. All slides and audio recordings will be available free of charge (like they are here for the previous events). Jessica is absolutely right that the value of the Casual Games Association is measured by how much they can do for the industry as a whole and sharing information is key part on expanding the industry.

@gamersvu_abi Playfish/Zynga/Playdom say social games $1.5B industry in 3 years@mikesego: “love is the most important metric” says @sebdeh from Playfish… best answer of the conference@tadej Zynga: games services rather than products. Number of returning players (not play time) correlates with monetization.@katelollar: There are more than 55 million unique [game] players on Facebook every month@amyjokim: why have >1 currencies in a virtual economy? CONTROL. Too risky to have only 1 currency@noahkagan @ what women want panel, #casualconnectwomen focused on collection, keeping active and socializing. 1 knew exact point count on king.com@amyjokim offer your players LOTS of diff ways to spend money (and diff price pts)@danielleleslie Q: How can game monetization models offer scalable engagement and attract branded dollars? A: Anu from Offerpal: Soon, fb app user will watch movie trailer, listen to music clip, etc. in return for virtual currency.@NPDFrazier: Tom Prata – three pillars of successful games: 1) accessibility 2) sense of newness 3) consumer reaction@bonder Trend 1 Virtual Worlds – YoVille, Pet Society@bonder Trend 2 – Customization & Personalization – Farm Town, Sorority Life@bonder Trend 3 – Collections & Wish Lists – Mafia Wars@bonder Trend 4 – Simulations – Farm Town, Farmville, Barn Buddy, Restaurant City (Realtime sim)@bonder Trend 5 – Narrative – Hammerfall, Bloodlines@bonder Trend 6 – Interesting Missions – Street Racing, Mafia Wars, Mobsters 2, Hero World, Sorority Life (mini games)@bonder Trend 7 – Gift Invites – Green Patch, Farm Town, Farmville, Mafia Wars, YoVille, Sorority Wars etc (it works!)@bonder Trend 8 – Donations – Mouse Hunt@bonder Trend 9 – Virtual Items – Mafia Wars, Street Racing, Vampire Wars, Pet Society – lots of opps to innovate here &gift invites@bonder Trend 10 – Friends – Crazy Planets, Mafia Wars@bonder Trend 11 – Social Games and iPhone – Word Fu (Twitter, email, FB Connect), Drop 7@bonder Trend 12 – Using Social Net Data – Photo Grab@hirson tips for fb game success – pt 1 1. Make it fun 2.make it social 3. Think Service, not product 4. Measure everything@hirson tips for fb games success pt 2 – 5. Design for sharing 6. Build your footprint 7. Tailor monetization mix. 8. No spam.@hirson last tips for fb games. 9 use fb resources (verified game and dev garage) and 10. Be a good citizen.@mikesego Over 9.7 million users played a farm sim game (Farmville, Farm Town, Barn Buddy) yesterday on Facebook@mikesego At Gareth’s talk – More people play games on Facebook than any other site on the web. True.@jewlish Wii Mii’s came from Japanese wooden Kokeshi dolls.@NicoleLazzaro Instead of modeling breeds Nintendogs modeled the most important relationship: btwn the owner and dog.@NicoleLazzaro Nintendo keynote: In 2.5 yrs console and handheld market increased by 30 million players.@jmwhite2: 300 new games released per day on the iPhone – 20% of all apps are games – dean takahashi

From 2009-07-22

@albertsupdates: “3 min user experiences are too long, 90 seconds (engagement cycles) is more optimal (on iphone)”@albertsupdates Episodic content the future of iPhone games — are there parallels on Facebook?@Jeff Shervin’s stats: Saturday peak days for installs, 25K to $40K daily installs for top paid games (= $250K/day for a $10 game) @GameAddict Interesting numbers about ipod touch making up 30% – 50% of game sales from the panel sales@katelollar 25% of all iPhone games are updated each month @Jeff Bart shares a couple of updated stats on Tapulous: 15M users after a year, half a billion Tap Tap Revenge games played @Jeff AppStore: 68,000 apps, 1.5 billion downloads, 20% of apps = games. Bart points out that apps’ installed base is typically 40/50% iPod Touch@GameAddict Dave Roberts of Popcap: “13% of the market is paying for 65% of the games sales.” 13% = 14 – 24 y.o. Males @gamesdotcom 13% of the population (14-34 men) drives the retail game business. Casual games are after the other 87% brodiegames Day 2 #casualconnect. Enjoyed Arthur’s (@LastDayOfWork) talk. Takeaway: brand building around innovation can win vs high output/low quality.@GameAddict 300 game submissions for mochi coins since yesterday’s announcement by Mochi Media.@johnhcook: Is advertising dead as a business model for games? “No it just sucks right now,” says RealNetworks’ Dan Prigg@johnhcook MSFT’s Hegenderfer at#casualconnect: No Zune phone coming.albertsupdates FB Game Templates Poke/WallApps > MobGames > FarmeGames — What is the next template? Are template going to keep working?johnhcook Hegenderfer of MSFT’s Windows Mobile on app stores: “Anyone who thinks Apple is going to run this thing is sadly mistaken.”albertsupdates “v1.0 of marketplace launching nxt week”-steve/group manager, windows mobile| does anyone care? or is it a greenfield?@lisaopolion Trends in casual online game – Thibaut from Gametap, “casual could become the #1 game genre within 6 mos”gamesdotcom Metaboli.com is learning what casual game portals always knew. The audience plays a HELL of a lot! Casual most played@albertsupdates: “Apple iTunes/Appstore is the new carrier deck” -still sucks w/o strong alternative (social) distributionKontagent Mindjolt is #7 app: aggregation of games w/ a social wrapper.Whos next to ship something similar from casual game pubs?albertsupdates Thought: 5 stages of game distribution/evolution: box>downloads>flash>social>social/mobile; Can all survive/prosper?@GameAddict: Greg Ballard , CEO Glu Mobile: “there are too many games in the App store and may follow the Atari disaster.

From 2009-07-23

@albertsupdates Focus on 2 Numbers – “Avg. Revenue Per User,” and “Avg. Revenue Per PAYING User@RealTweeter Is wellness gaming the next big casual games trend@dwlt NPD: “33% upgrade from free to paid games on iPhone”@georgebray NPD: Gamers spend avg $7 on iPhone games in last 3 months@Kontagent: IMO: 3 metrics: 1. ARPU, 2. Churn & also 3. (v)CAC: (viral) Customer Acqusition Costs@Kontagent 2 years it took Zynga to get to ~$100M+ from $0; How many years does it take traditional co’s to build a MMO?albertsupdates EngagedConf is now going to be hosted next to toyfair – Why? Because VirtualWorlds+BrandedToys = BigTime; Webkins=#1 toyElaineChase Casual mmos as loss leaders when used as marketing for a bigger property = tough market place for making them a businessalbertsupdates “MTV has been the most prolific publisher of casual MMOs of anyone in the industry” – Ralph Kosterdwlt Koster – Casual & VWs should learn from AAA industry and avoid becoming too enamored with techgeorgebray NPD: 25% of online game players use a console. 59% of gamers use a console, 39% on PC and 35% use game websitesGameAddict NPD: The most notable changes are increase in women console gamers and decrease amount willing to pay for microtransactionsjmwhite2 NPD session – more people playing online educational games than online shooters. (26 pc vs 23 pc).GameAddict NPD: Card/puzzle/arcade/word games are dominating the casual space with 56% of the market for online gaming.GameAddict NPD: $701 mill in Retail PC, $740 mill in subscriptions, and $425 mill in PC Digitial dl’s in 2008.GameAddict NPD Video games sector is the ony category of entertainment to grow in 08', 33% of entertainment dollars towards gamingGameAddict NPD: Kids lesiure time. Video Gaming and computer use have increased but only by 1 or 2 percent in 2 years@GameAddict 90% of the revenue comes from virtual goods at QQGameAddict 6 million users on the casual side of QQ. (me: I totally wish more devs looked at asia for advice and tips. They’re on fire.)@albertsupdates Game industry has always been highly fragmented, any market leader (i.e EA) has less than 20% marketsharealbertsupdates Game Publishers Focused on “Launch” and “Pushing Users Over $50 Barrier” vs. Social: Virality opt.&commnity buildingElaineChase “When NEuropean business does’t know if they can do something they say “no, we can’t” US defaults to “sure, we can do that”albertsupdates Mobile Games 1.0 = BizDev Competitive Advantage; Mobile 2.0 = Content; Mobile Games 3.0 = Social Distribution IMOchriscummings01 Think about this: Tencent in China has 6M simultaneous players at peak; in Q1’09 did $360M gross rev (90% from virtual goods)ElaineChase Swoopo has a ridiculously brillant & evil buisness model based on the premise that humans as a group act stupidlygetgambit The ideal competitive model = users who win want to keep playing, and users who lose want to keep playing (until they win)MargaretWallace Nuff said: (Tim) Chang: VC’s are devil-avoid us at all cost. Make it so they call you and want to invest in you.lisaopolion Tim Chang “Content is king, but distribution will be God”GameAddict Chang: Casual 3.0 will be 3d, streaming gaming, cloud gaming (same game on different devices), virtual currency exchange.GameAddict Chang is using the analogy of dance clubs as game business models. Velvet ropped areas easy to see and people pay to get inchriscummings01 “Pitching a VC today? No faster track to the recycle bin than anchoring your business model to advertising.” – Tim Chang@chriscummings01 “From a VC perspective, survival is the new growth.” – Tim Chang, Norwest

From 2009-07-22

From 2009-07-23 and later

Explore posts in the same categories: event This entry was posted on July 22, 2009 at 10:05 and is filed under event. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: casualgames, conference, socialgames

You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.

View the original article here

Casual Fridays: Roll the Bones

Welcome to Casual Fridays!  This is your fun Friday post where you get reviews of flash games, mobiles games and anything else that’s quick, and fun around the net.  We’re moving to a bi-weekly format so that I can make sure to get them out in time, but that might mean there’s going to be a few more games on the review table rather than the standard two or three per post.  There are a sea of games out there, we’re hoping to provide you with a life raft to find the games you want to play.

This week, we’re looking at that old chestnut called dice and why on earth would someone want to make a flash game that was just all about the dice?  Find out when we look at Zilch, Lock ‘n’ Roll and Brain Bones and we’ll see if anyone can get where I got the title from.  If you guess, I’ve got a big bag of Kudos for you.  They’re delicious.

Personally, I love dice games.  Yes they are random, yes they are risky but it doesn’t pretend to be anything else.  Zilch, also known as Dice 10000, is a really fun, addictive game that will suck a lot of time away.  The premise of this game is that you roll a set of six, six sided dice, and depending on what you roll you score points differently.  I can give you the run down of what the scoring system is but you can find the scoring system at the Dice 10000 Wiki page and that’s not really what I want to talk about.  First of all, I like this game because it’s got a really nice interface when it comes to the dice.  They look like a bunch of old wooden dice you would have found in an old Yahtzee set, or the kind you get in a box of Settlers of Catan.  I love how the interface was created with that torn paper look, to the point where the computer opponent has the clean edge and you have the edge with all the perforations.

Like most versions, it’s got the dice on the screen that can be selected, as well as the quick options which allows you to just mass select any point totals you see.  They really helps when you’ve never played the game before.  There are three levels of difficulty when you need to play by yourself, there is a hotseat two player version, and a ‘play online’ version where you can play other people who have logged into the game.  I love those options, but with any type of unknown online play I recommend caution as with anything else.

There are even things for those who like achievements.  There are 120 different achievements which range from losing badly to long win streaks without a single zilch.

Random Value Judgement Rating: [1] [1] [1] [1] [1] [1] – 8000 points!  Yay highest score possible on a single roll!

Brain Bones is a lovely little puzzle game that uses dice.  Here you get a set of 5 dice and you need to turn them into two pairs and a die that’s going to be left out.  These combinations are important because that die that’s left out will get discarded and you can only discard 4 out of the 6 numbers on the dice.  Once you discard enough of one number, the game is over.  The pairs that you made?  Well they’ll get added together and scored.  The first time you make a pair it will cost you 100 points, and once you make the 5th combination that pair will finally start to get you points.  It rewards you for clever play, by making the same combinations again and again, but there will be times when you get stuck with a set of five dice that you don’t want at all.

The game takes about 10 to 15 minutes to play, maybe longer because I like to keep pressing the “Play This Combination” button to get new dice pretty quickly, and you’ll find yourself playing it again and again.  You’ll think that you’ve got it made and that nothing can get in your way, and then you’ll get that set of dice that no matter how long you sit down and try to figure out a way to make it work, it won’t and you’ll be down another 100 or 200 points.

The look is cute, quick and clean.  Seriously, the skulls are pretty cute.  I have filled the whole scoring page with skulls just because I thought they were cute.

Random Value Judgement Rating: 8E 8E 8E 8E 8E – 5 Skulls, for -100 points each!  Time to make more combinations!

Another puzzle game that uses dice, I first came across this game at the Android Market and was amused enough to check it out on my phone.  Another random dice and combination game, but this one focuses more on where you place the dice.  Also, they are only numbered from 1 to 4 despite your mind thinking that they’re a cube.  I guess it’s harder to do this if you were using tetrahedrons but I digress.

Before I get into the game I will point out that there will be people who can’t play this game.  There is no way to distinguish the colours on the dice other than by colour.  That means for those folks who are colour blind this game might frustrate you more than anything else.  Especially considering that colour combinations are a big part of how the game is scored.

Out of all of them this is my least favourite dice, or should I say dice-ish, game.  If things go badly, they will go badly rather quickly since you only get four rolls if you can’t manage to clear any of the dice that are on the screen.  That’s maddingly frustrating, even though you do get a wild card ‘joker’ if you manage to score enough points which can help clear the board.

Random Value Judgement Rating: 1, 2, 3, 4, j – the 4 numbers you get to play with and the joker.

Thanks for reading checking out these dice games.  I hope you feel that they’re worth their time in the limelight, it’s their universal dream.  Remember to leave any requests for reviews in the comments section or email me at koipond at borderhouseblog dot com!

Related posts:

Casual Fridays – Just as long as they aren’t called Skynet …Casual Fridays: I Love Jumping RobotsCasual Fridays: Evolving Platform EditionCasual Fridays: The Balloons EditionCasual Fridays 03 – Planes, Planes and Planes

View the original article here