Smartphone Games Summit: The Changing Face of Distribution – Living with Apple
Live blogging from San Francisco on Friday, September 24, 2010:
Smartphone Games – V The Changing Face of Distribution – Living with Apple
The Changing Face of Distribution — Living with Apple
Jason Citron: AuroraFeint
Foker: Scoreloop
Tracy Chan: NGMOCO
Si Shen: PapayaMobile
How does adding a social layer impact players:
- NGMOCO: The more friends people have, the more engaged they are. The more social your games get, the more often you can pull people back into your games.
- Scoreloop: You can drive monetization, engagement depends on how you weave it into a game. A great game with smart integration of a social layer does improve the overall user experience.
- AuroraFeint: JetCarStunts, added action replays. After they added in asynchronous social mechanic, dramatically increased game play, time to play.
By Geo or demo, who are the people that are most aggressive about playing in a social context?
- Papayamobile: Mainly girls are playing on the PM social network
- NGMOCO: It depends on the game. We want people to find friends where ever they may be. We find the compulsion to react to the social obligations and nuances are dependent on the life cycle within the game.
- AuroraFeint: Since we’re on 30% of iPhone devices, our demo is quite broad. For our Free Game of The Day program — that audience is mainly teenagers, typically male.
Each of you have very complete products, but Apple still came out with Game Center — Why?!
- Aurora Feint: The feedback we’ve received from our devs, people are using GC, because they feel they are suppose to. It’s in Apple’s nature to control the stack. But devs are interested in using OpenFeint side by side with Game Center
- NGMOCO: We’re working with them to see how they can be complimentary
- Scoreloop: As long as Game Center is iPhone only, it’s a very limiting thing.
Do you think Android will do the same thing as Apple did with Game Center?
- Aurora Feint: As we go forward on the mobile phone, having these localized game networks is kinda stupid. You need to have a social layer that goes across all the devices so people can play with all of their friends. It’s like not being able to play Farmville with your friend because you have a Dell, and your friend has a Mac.
Does Facebook keep you up at night?
- Aurora Feint: Yes. We hope by the time FB goes to mobile we’ll have already kicked ass.
- Scoreloop: FB grew to where it was on a single platform, which is infinity easier than doing it on a slew of platforms. It’s one of 15 things that keep me up at night
You all see tens of thousands of developers that want to know how to grow. What do you tell them?
- Scoreloop: How can social elements spurn social activity within a game and thus grow a game. I’d say social
- AF: Devs want to know how do we make awesome games. To the extent that we can help them make their games better, we do.
- PapayaMobile: It’s even harder for people to make good applications and make money. We tell devs to focus on user engagement and think about it deeply not just add leaderboards. We have an offer SDK for Android, that’s similar to Offerpal.
- On Plus: Devs want to know how can we take this game to the masses. Lot of the games are free-to-play but it is the social connection that drives it forward.
What role do you all see for the carriers in helping with distribution ?
- Aurora Feint: Last week we launched OpenFeint on Android, and we partnered with AT&T, Verizon and Google to promote these games. They will play the same role as Apple plays on iPhone. The carriers are going to be able to promote games in bright lights. When we launched last week, our two games reached #1 and #2 paid spot Fruit Ninja and Minisquadron within 24 hours.
- Scoreloop: We have started working with a couple of carriers in Asia. That drives uptake of the game.
What are the strong points – differentiation for each of you?
- PapayaMobile: We are the best on Android.
- NGMOCO: We are game makers and we are building the tools as game makers for game makers
- AF: We are the largest mobile on the planet. 40 million player. We can move 1.5 free downloads in two days.
- Scoreloop: We add virtual currency and virtual goods.
Last month it was that time of year again: Panel Picker Voting for the Annual South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) conference in Austin, TX. Sound familiar? Check out fellow GIT blogger Kristine Gloria’s post about it here: 
We all know someone who shares too much — that girl who tells the whole office about her bad breakup or the guy who insists on going into gory detail about his latest extreme exploits. But most of us know when to draw the line when it comes to lunchtime discussions at the office, chats around the water cooler or meetings with management. It’s a lesson most people learned way back in the days of bologna and bag lunches: different people merit different kinds of discussions. You wouldn’t tell the playground bully the same deep dark secrets you’d spill to your best friend, and you definitely wouldn’t let the teacher in on the stuff you were passing notes about during class. From our first experiences with socialization, we’ve been conditioned to understand the unspoken societal rules that dictate what’s appropriate to share, when it’s appropriate to share it and who it’s appropriate to share it with.
