Dyteq.com Corporate blog: Socialmedia. -marketing, -gaming, Flash, Flex and more

The social gaming application that we are currently running / developing is built with the intention to be put on all kinds of websites. It was already available on Kongregate, Facebook and Hyves (three completely different websites).

A logical next step is putting it on Myspace. Myspace is maybe not the “Social giant” it used to be (Facebook took the lead many months ago) but with over a hundred million users it still offers an interesting market.

Since the application itself runs on Adobe Flash and is developed for cross-site implementation, the development process of the Myspace version was limited to site specific features: Sending invites, updating status… all the things that make a social game “social” and that differ from site to site.

During development we found out why Myspace is not longer the largest social website…

Myspace is a frustratingly conservative website. All the features that social gaming rely on are prohibited:

• It is not allowed to get extra points for inviting friends
• It is not allowed to receive points when accepting an game invite
• Chat is only allowed for users that are 18 years or older
• It is not allowed to give away prizes or anything of value
• …

Now, to understand why this is too much you should know that the singe reason “Social gaming” exists is because of its “virality”. Social games are not popular because they have good game play or great concepts. Social games are popular because they are viral and use the underlying platform (Facebook) to spread easily to users that are not initially interested in games.

When Facebook moved the “game invitation” feature to a separate page, away from the regular social updates, all social game developers experienced a decrease in new user counts (especially Zynga suffered a huge cutback).

Because Social gaming relies heavily on friends that “spread the word”, Myspace is not allowing it’s social platform to reach full potential. With the current limitations no developer would choose Myspace as the primary platform.

On Facebook, if the game is not great by itself, the correct mix of social features will get it going anyway. But not on Myspace, where you cannot lure players with prizes or bonuses. And when games are not generating any profit, they will not be developed further and you end up with a lot of sub-par games.

Take a look at the games of all the big names (Zynga, Playdom etc). Their Myspace version is always half-finished and contain messages like “this feature is currently not available” .

Besides that, all Myspace applications are manually checked and approved before they are made publicly available. I love that. It guarantees quality and helps in building trust with the players. However, Myspace takes this approval way too far. We had to re-publish the game 5x before it was accepted. Every time, the review came up with new reasons not to allow us.

But we managed to get it on there… without many of the social features that make the game popular on Facebook.

Feel free to suggest me new ways of reaching the Myspace users!

Zynga, by far the largest game-developer on Facebook, just showed (again) how not to treat your customers.

Their popular game “street racing” is closing down within 5 short days. Street racer players have been spending a lot of real money on the game for quite some time.

What ever reason Zynga may have to close the game down, a reasonable company would offer its customers credit. Or at least an explanation.

Not Zynga though. They just put up a ridiculous banner that says ” if you like street racing. try out FrontierVille “.

FrontierVille is not even by far anything like street racer. Does this mean Zynga know absolutely nothing about it’s customers? Nothing at all? Come on, the players are not some sort of cattle you can just herd over to some other game.

I hope for both the Street racer players and Zynga’s reputation that somebody higher up will intervene with what is going on here. This just gives the entire business a bad name.

After 7 years of collage, I’ve finally managed to graduate. The last 3 years I’ve been busy working and building my companies so it took a little longer. But now it’s done.

I graduated on the subject of “Social Gaming & Texas Hold’em Poker” and wrote a paper on the success of Zynga, Facebook and social gaming.

In short, social gaming is not popular because of quality games. Social games thank their millions of players to the viral-like features of inviting friends to play.

The challenge for the developer is to make a game that encourages the player to invite friends, usually by giving away bonus points or items for doing so.

This goes against my nature of wanting to develop quality games for niche markets and it calls for a more “business like” approach to development.

Implementing the “social” features has already gotten our own Poker game on facebook a couple of thousand players.

There are enough examples of games on Facebook that take the social features “over the top”. A game takes time to build up momentum. It seems that a lot of developers don’t have the patience and seem to want to force the player to spread the game around. Especially the game “social city” takes the “social” features over the top, asking the player to post on Facebook after every action or activity.

I can’t help but wonder where these games get their revenue from (if any): They are advertised everywhere and there are limited options for spending money in-game. Anybody?

Remember the days when we’d just draw our sprites in Flash, add some Actionscript to the frames and slap that thing up on Newgrounds?

Eventhough millions of people played those games, they never got me any money. I did get a job as game developer once, a few years back. But that is about it…

Now, trying to monetize casual game development, there is so much to take into account. The user has to be willing to spend money on it, there are no bugs allowed, there’s tons of platforms to choose from and everybody wants your money. Advertise that thing on Facebook? Sure, just pay 50c for every visitor.

How much easier it was back with Macromedia Flash 5.

I’m not complain though, I love doing all this stuff and I am confident investors will follow through. I was just browsing some old creations on Newgrounds from 2005 (still getting new players   ) and felt like typing this up.

Casual / “social”  gaming developer Zynga just got a whooping $147million dollar investment by some Japanese mobile phone service provider.

Looks like the “social” buzz is still worth that much to some people. Have they ever even played any of these Social games?

Social games are only really popoluair because they use the unique ability of the social networks to get spammed around. None of the social games I’ve seen has any new to bring on the matter of concept or gameplay.

Working on this for over a year now. Check it out here:

www.ministakes.com

There appears to be a worm circulating the internet, hacking into wordpress blogs that are not up-to-date. I have one of the earliest versions of wordpress running, so I decided to upgrade. Now, I kinda forgot to backup the theme files (and some other) so thats why everything looks weird right now…

Check out this little thing. It is a countdown widget to the Lowlands festival in Holland. It also parses the lowlands RSS feed.

Stuff has been pretty slow the last year or two. Just working hard at my job as a project manager and trying to get my graduation finished (Just a little 3 year delay… ).

A month or 2 ago I suddenly decided that this was not the way forward. I realized that my job pretty much sucks. The job is too easy, not challenging and not as much into web/tech as I would like. So I decided to quit.

And the timing could not be better. I’ve been working on my graduation in my spare time since October 2008, almost a full year and it’s almost finished now. I honestly believe that I can make a living out of this project and I will be going at it 100%, starting January. Though as long as it’s not paying the bills I will be doing freelance Flash / Web jobs.

It is a pretty tough decision to make, quitting your job in a recession. But I feel like now is my time. And I am going for it.

Just a quick note for when you are using Flash CS4 and your flvplayback component does not show on stage:

Be sure the constructor function of you as3 class does not have a return.

So instead of

class MyClass extends MovieClip {

public functionMyClass():void{
// stuff
return
}
}

you should use:

public class MyClass extends MovieClip{

public function MyClass(){
//stuff
}

}

A though one to figure out: Setting the Alpha (transparancy) value for a textfield:


import flash.display.BlendMode;
[...]

textfield.text = 'Some text';
textfield.blendMode = BlendMode.LAYER;
textfield.alpha = 0.5;

You can also add textFormatting if you like…