Gamasutra wrote a piece about several topics within today's social gaming spectrum. One, dealing with Facebook integration in gaming consoles. It's a bit lengthy, but I am telling you, as someone who is very curious to see the merge of gaming with social network capabilities, I suggest reading below:
So, yes: Facebook integration is coming to Xbox 360 and, in a more limited way, to Nintendo DSi, by the end of the year.
But the integration and collaboration between the traditional games industry and the social gaming industry has not seemingly gotten much further in the year since the last Social Games Summit, despite the obvious hopes of last year's speakers.
I think that there are really obvious reasons this isn't currently happening. Tech-oriented, web-trained, fast-paced, hard-nosed Silicon Valley culture is not really that similar to game developer culture. Outside of GDC Austin (operated by Think Services, which also owns Gamasutra) I haven't seen a lot of opportunities for the two industries to mix.
Most crucially, everybody's too damn busy trying to get their jobs done to really spend a lot of time or thought on the issue.
That said, Facebook's Davis is still optimistic that we're just in the run-up period. "I think we're at the beginning and it's going to take a few years. There's a lot to learn as both industries converge, and they're both complementary."
The reason for his optimism? Davis has seen unannounced projects from big companies that work with Facebook Connect. "It's still very early, and I don't think any of these projects are announced, but I'm very impressed." He describes them as "fundamentally social" and "device-based and hooked into a social network," with the "device" in question most likely to be an iPhone or Xbox 360.
Most developers get into games because they're fundamentally interested in the medium. Zynga's Mark Pincus has a different perspective on the function games serve on social networks: "People get fatigued on the news feeds and they want another experience they can share with their friends."
Games have always been used to kill boredom; but with all the statistics the packaged game industry trumpets about being the primary form of entertainment for so many, these days, the mindset that they're just second-string timewasters may be tough to swallow for many developers.
James Liu, COO of Oak Pacific Interactive, one of the biggest social networking companies in China and home to a 400-strong MMO development team made a really interesting observation about the reading material the OPI engineers have by their desks.
"These guys are [engineering] PhDs from top notch schools, but they study economy right now," as well as psychology: the better to understand and motivate user behavior in social networks. That's simply not broadly the case in the game industry as we think of it, right now.
The cultural difference between the extant game industry and the social gaming people does seem to be rooted in pretty deeply in pure terms of organization and process. The Silicon Valley term "engineer" was constantly thrown around; the game industry's "designer" was never really spoken of.
Back to Siqi Chen's obsession with metrics: "Internally I always consider metrics our most important project, probably to our detriment," he says, while Dave King pegs his engineering staff at "60 or 80 percent metrics and analysis, 20-ish percent to other stuff."
His engineers are experts in analysis, too -- they have to understand what the data represents to make the required changes to the games. The granularity that Chen and King showed on stage was extremely impressive.
These include RPG games broken down by level 1-100 showing exactly where users dropped off; multicolored charts showing every quest in the game and how frequently each is completed at a per-level basis; hourly reports on clickthroughs of different variations on promotional copy for the same game.
King's games are simple -- really, really simple -- but the thought that goes into making them sticky and making users pay is conversely rather complicated. In a weird way, it's almost the reverse of the packaged game industry.
As noted above, it's simple to get a lot of users quickly, but they may not be useful -- which is why King wants to figure out why the ones that are playing continue to do so, and make them pay when they reach content they enjoy. His engineers respond instantly with tweaks. He doesn't have a business otherwise.
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