Aquarium Games Fishing for Traffic in International Waters

Aquarium simulation games are another old hat genre for the Facebook game platform, much like the restaurant simulation genre we examined earlier this week. Even with its “been there, done that” status, however, developers seem to be finding traffic for new aquarium games in the international market.

Aquarium games are like pet simulations, but confined to the pet type of fish. Players are usually tasked with attracting fish to a virtual space by using food, cleaning up debris generated in the space, and by decorating the space to make it more alluring to different types of fish. This type of game lends itself to the asynchronous Facebook audience as it doesn’t require quite as much time-management as a farm or restaurant simulation and the ambiance of a virtual aquarium is more soothing, much like the classic screen savers from Microsoft Windows.

Games By Genre: Fish (Aquarium)

The largest aquarium games by monthly active users — CrowdStar’s Happy Aquarium, Happy Elements Ltd’s Chinese language version of My Fishbowl, Zynga’s FishVille, and TallTree Games’ Fish World — all have long histories on Facbeook dating back to fall and winter of 2009. These games found success throughout the first half of 2010, in the days when the Facebook games platform still offered extensive viral channels through which games could attract new users. As an example, Happy Aquarium and FishVille at one point each boasted more than 25 million MAU and 7 million daily active users during their first three months in contrast to their present-day levels.

After the first three months of growth, each of our top tier aquarium games slowed in growth, creating a gradual downward slope. The beginnings of these slopes happen to coincide with the period of time in which Facebook clamped down on viral channels available to developers — spring 2010. While one could argue that the loss of growth in our aquarium games could be connected to the loss of the viral channels, we’re can’t necessarily reach that conclusion as the downward slopes remained gradual throughout spring and summer of 2010 as opposed to showing a sharp drop-off. Moreover, most social games in any genre see growth in three to four months followed by a period of decline as players simply run out of things to do in-game and move on to other titles. Even so, it’s not hard to imagine that once the viral channels were restricted, each developer faced an uphill battle to bring growth back to the games.

The exception here is the Chinese language version of My Fishbowl, which appears to be on a long-term upward trend begun in early April of this year, up 33% in MAU over the last two months. The reasons for this trend are not immediately clear; other international versions of My Fishbowl aren’t performing nearly as well.

In the mid tier of aquarium games, we see the original My Fishbowl still stuck in a decline slope, but we also see a notable newcomer. Akvaryum is a Turkish-language aquarium sim from Peak Games, a developer that’s seen success in the Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) region where other developers tend to struggle. The game launched only in the last two weeks and is already number five out of all fish games with over 500,000 MAU and 100,000 DAU.

Also in this tier is Gaia Online’s Ocean Party, an older aquarium game with an interesting history. It was the developer’s first Facebook game built off of a similar activity in its successful virtual world, Gaia Online. Based on its experiences with Ocean Party, Gaia Online went on to create monster collection and combat game, Monster Galaxy, which is shaping up to be a Facebook success story. Ocean Party hadn’t seen much activity in the last nine months, but a small spike in MAU and DAU in early June hints at signs of life in the otherwise dead-in-the-water game.

At the bottom of our aquarium spectrum are more language variations of My Fishbowl, several decaying clones of Happy Aquarium, and a slew of games that don’t exactly fit the aquarium genre. The two that make our top 10 — ???? (Happy Fish Ponds) and Fish Isle — do actually fit the genre, but like their siblings in tiers one and two, they haven’t seen significant growth of late.

While the Chinese language version of My Fishbowl and Akvaryum’s sudden popularity suggest that there is still an audience for the aquarium genre in the international market, most of these games tell a sad story for aquariums on Facebook. We don’t think it’s going to completely discourage developers from attempting new aquarium games, however. Already we see mobile developer Jirbo actively try to port its successful iOS aquarium sim, Tap Reef, to Facebook; and other developers like HitGrab are seeing success with variations on the “collect fish” theme of aquarium games as applied to the actual sport of fishing in games like FishHunt.

All data in this analysis was compiled with our social game traffic tracking service, AppData. If you believe a game has been left off this list in error, please reach out to us in the comments.

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Gourmet Ranch Keeps Growth Fresh With Fishing Expansion, Royal Wedding Campaign

RockYou studio Playdemic’s Gourmet Ranch is enjoying a growth streak following the release of a fishing gameplay expansion and a themed campaign that launched just ahead of last week’s royal wedding between England’s Prince William and Catherine Middleton. Both monthly active users and daily active users have nearly doubled since mid-April to just over 5 million MAU and 580,000 DAU.

The combination farming and restaurant sim asks players to maintain their own farm/ranch to produce ingredients that they then use in cooking recipes. The completed dishes are then traded with in-game characters or sold to restaurant customers for in-game currency that can be spent on more crops and animals, expansions and decorations. After acquiring Playdemic in January, social game publisher RockYou reinforced Playdemic’s game update schedule around regular releases of new ingredients and recipes.

While the addition of fishing to the game was a no-brainer given the game’s dependence on producing your own ingredients, the royal wedding presented Playdemic with an opportunity to build a themed campaign within Gourmet Ranch that clicked with the core gameplay. Like seasonal campaigns around Christmas or Easter, the goal with the royal wedding campaign is to increase engagement with players, strengthen monetization through the sale of themed items and encourage viral growth as everybody on the Internet seemed to be talking about the wedding.

In the Gourmet Ranch campaign, players could buy royal wedding themed ingredients and decorations. The ingredients went into themed dishes that were part of a quest to prepare a dish to be served at the royal wedding. The new items went live last Tuesday and are still available in-game as of today, but the quest ended on April 29 with the real life event whether users had completed a royal wedding dish or not.

“This [campaign] was hugely successful because [the wedding] was an international event,” Playdemic’s Vice President and General Manager, Paul Gouge tells us. He also credits RockYou’s experience with seasonal events like Halloween or Thanksgiving events in other games with informing Playdemic’s planning and execution phases. As Gourmet Ranch grows, Playdemic plans events farther and farther out for logistics purposes. “We have a calendar with all our annual events [planned out],” he explains. “The royal wedding got added maybe six or eight weeks back.”

Seasonal campaigns and events present social games with an opportunity to increase user engagement and monetization through themed premium items. Like with brand integrations, the challenge comes both from working the items and actions into the game in a way that jibes with the core audience and from the opportunity cost of developing special items and quests. Seasonal campaigns also present social game developers unique challenges in timing, planning and execution across multiple regions and languages.

Take, for example, an Easter campaign that features premium decorations and a find-the-Easter-bunny quest. Easter 2011 fell within a week of the royal wedding and within two weeks of Mother’s Day, presenting a developer with a possible scheduling conflict around executing the campaign. The developer must decide how far in advance of Easter to launch the campaign, when to end it so that it doesn’t drag through the other two holidays, and whether or not to make the campaign available to regions of players that may not celebrate Easter.

To the first point, Gouge jokes that Playdemic “put our finger in the air” to determine the timing of most campaigns, but added that as long as a campaign makes sense for a game, developers should keep it running. To the second point, he cautions developers against spamming users with one too many seasonal campaigns running against each other:

“You have to be careful about players burning out,” Gouge says. “It’s about making sure the user isn’t bombarded with information.”

To the last point, Gouge admits that Playdemic got lucky with the royal wedding first because it was an international event and second because Gourmet Ranch is primarily played by people in the United States and the United Kingdom, two big fans of the event. In the future, however, the developer will have to consider how to plan events that have cultural resonance with other audiences as Playdemic is currently rolling out localization for the game in other European languages.

“I think that’s really pressing with games as we move into international [development],” Gouge muses. He explains that it’s not as easy as just planning region-specific campaigns because some regions may want to celebrate certain holidays from other regions, and no player ever enjoys feeling deprived of the “full” user experience when they see other players posting on forums about an event that wasn’t open across all regions.

Another consideration in seasonal campaigns is allowing users to enjoy maximum engagement with the campaign even past a hard deadline. For the royal wedding in Gourmet Ranch, Playdemic will stop selling the themed ingredients as of today, but will let users to prepare the themed dishes with themed ingredients for another week before the campaign ends completely.

“You have to give them time to use what they’ve bought,” Gouge says. “Most people will buy something and use it within about a week.” Though Gouge avoids specific numbers, he says that certain revenue streams within Gourmet Ranch went up as much as 100% during the royal wedding campaign as users splurged on themed items. Thanks to some “retrofitting” from RockYou, Gourmet Ranch now uses Facebook Credits as the sole means of purchasing the game’s premium and standard in-game currencies. RockYou has been pretty aggressive about getting games under its publishing deals to launch with Credits ahead of Facebook’s mandatory July deadline for integration across all social games.

Seasonal campaigns and events are very much a part of the social game ecosystem as social games are seen as a service rather than the traditional video game role of a packaged product. In a rare case of turnabout, console games could actually learn a lot from social games around planning for seasonal dowloadable content. The key, says Gouge, is making sure that the campaign makes sense for the game.

“Come on,” Gouge jokes. “You can’t imagine a Call of Duty royal wedding expansion pack, can you?”

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