Playfish is a company that has consistently developed successful Facebook applications. While other successful companies such as Zynga and SGN have had both wins and losses, so far all of Playfish’s games have been successful. Combined, Playfish has over 15 million active users every month! They’ve also recently secured $17 million in funding to continue their successful venture into the social gaming scene on Facebook.

How has Playfish consistently developed successful Facebook applications? Let’s take an in-depth look at the games this company has produced in an attempt to figure out just how they’ve done it.

Looking at the Numbers

As of this writing, 5 out of 6 of Playfish’s titles are in the top 30 Facebook applications for the most Monthly Active Users (MAU):

Rank	Application		Monthly Active Users
22		Pet Society	3,409,366
23		Who Has The Biggest Brain?	3,257,457
27		Word Challenge	3,094,550
28		Bowling Buddies	3,048,313
30		Geo Challenge	2,799,507

Their 6th title, Minigolf Party, was just recently released and therefore hasn’t yet built up a large active user base (currently it only has 5,082 MAU), but be sure to keep your eye on this application to see if it will enjoy the same success as the rest of the Playfish titles.

Attaining Success

Playfish launched their first game, Who Has The Biggest Brain?, in January 2008, which became one of the top-10 applications on Facebook in less than 100 days. Perhaps even more impressively, according to Playfish, Who Has The Biggest Brain? generated “…more than 1 million games played per day, with active users playing for around 25-30 minutes per day.”

Their first three titles, Who Has The Biggest Brain?, Word Challenge and Bowling Buddies all attained success on their own, however, their next titles, Pet Society and Geo Challenge, may have benefited from a cross-promotion campaign that Playfish launched in August 2008 (they haven’t started cross-promoting Minigolf Party yet, but it will be interesting to see if it benefits from cross-promotion once they do it).

How did these applications become so successful? There isn’t any magic behind their success, but there is certainly a formula that Playfish seems to follow with all of their games:

Fun, Engaging and Real-time, Interactive Gameplay

This is probably one of the primary reasons Playfish has enjoyed so much success with their games–they’re fun to play! Playfish’s games are also Flash-based which allows the user to interact with them in real-time as they would a traditional video game. This differs from some of the other successful games out there such as Mob Wars, which is a text-based game that requires the browser to refresh the page for interaction to take place. Fun and engaging gameplay is a necessary requirement for success, but it certainly isn’t the only factor that determines a games popularity.

High Production Value

Bret on Social Games has argued that high production value isn’t necessary for success, however, there is no denying that Playfish has some of the best looking games on Facebook. While it may not have contributed heavily to their success, high production value certainly didn’t hurt it.

Social Gameplay

This truly is a key ingredient in creating a successful game on Facebook–a platform that is completely social in nature. Building social game play into your games allows them to spread quickly and become viral. A game that is fun and engaging and built around a viral model is an incredibly powerful combination that can lead to a great deal of success in a short amount of time.

One way that Playfish helps spread the word about their games is to make the invitation process as accessible as possible. In nearly all of their games there are at least 3 links to invite your friends to start playing:

Playfish doesn’t just allow you to invite your friends to play their games, they allow you to challenge and taunt your friends to come and try and beat your high scores. For example, when you set the highest score during a week amongst your friends in Who Has the Biggest Brain? you can send a taunt to your friend:

Social Status

Bret on Social Games discussed how social status and leaderboards can help lead to a successful Facebook game and Playfish is certainly utilizing both of these techniques with their applications. In Bowling Buddies, for example, you’re challenged to attain certain achievements such as scoring more than 100 points in a game, getting 5 strikes in one game, keeping your average speed above 40 km/hr, etc. When you attain one of these achievements, you’re rewarded with “Bowling Bucks”–the virtual currency used in Bowling Buddies–as well as a trophy:

Achievements like this also result in a story about your success being published to your friends’ news feeds:

Playfish also incorporates leaderboards into all of their games. By default you see how you compare to your friends, but you can also choose to see what the standings are for all users of that game. Take a look at the friend leaderboard for Who Has the Biggest Brain?:

You may have noticed that there is an image of an animal associated with each of the players shown on the leaderboard–this is another way that Playfish uses the psychological affect of social status in their games. The animal associated with you is supposed to be a representation of the size of your brain. Do you want your friends to know that you have the mental capacity of a goat?

You may have also noticed that Playfish has built invites into their leaderboards, making it easy to invite your friends and challenge them to see, for example, who really has the biggest brain.

Effective Notifications & Feed Stories

Notifications and feed stories are essential for keeping existing users engaged and for acquiring new users. Playfish’s games generate very well thought out notifications that include clear calls to action:

Feed stories are important because they have the potential to introduce your application to new audiences. Playfish’s games, again, generate appropriate feed stories that serve to intrigue new users:

It’s interesting to note that the first Geo Challenge story includes a call to action–”Try now!”–that the other feed stories seem to lack.

Cross-promotion

While cross-promotion isn’t a necessary requirement for success, if you’ve already built a successsful game, there isn’t any harm in trying to leverage the success of that application to build an audience for your other applications. This seems to be working for Playfish, but not everyone is as successful with cross-promotion as they are.

Sweating the Details

There are few small touches that Playfish adds to their applications that show they are paying attention to the details. One of these touches are splash pages–when you click on a cross-promotion link for one of Playfish’s other games, you’re taken to a well-designed and inviting splash page with a large call to action. Here are two examples from Geo Challenge and Word Challenge:

While this has been discussed in a previous post, it is worth pointing out how Playfish presents their tips for bookmarking their applications and how they highlight how to get started with their applications on the application information page:

Playfish presents a similar tip to bookmark their applications on the loading screen of all their applications.

Playfish uses an arrow like this to point out how to start using their applications.

Monetization

While Playfish still has yet to turn a profit with their games, they’re spending a good deal of time and effort monetizing them. They’re currently doing this in the following ways:

Google AdSense

In all of their games, when you complete the game you’re presented with an advertisement from Google AdSense. They do a great job of integrating the ads into their games in a way that is obvious, yet unobtrusive. In fact, Playfish has added a nice touch to their ads in their new Minigolf game: when your player walks in front of the advertisement, they pause and say “Cool!”:

Virtual Goods

In some of their games, namely Bowling Buddies, Pet Society and Minigolf Party, you can customize your character with new clothing, hair styles, etc. You can earn the points necessary to purchase these goods through gameplay, however, they tend to accumulate very slowly. As an alternative you can buy points using PayPal or TrialPay–a service that allows you to earn points by completing advertising offers.

Minigolf Party allows you to use PayPal or TrailPay to purchase credits for use in the game.

Pet Society also allows you to use PayPal or TrailPay to purchase coins for use in the game.

Subscription Based Services

The other way that Playfish is monetizing their games is through subscription based “Pro” accounts that offer more services, levels, puzzles, etc.

Playfish introduced these types of services for the first time in Who Has the Biggest Brain?, but they have since incorporated it into Word Challenge and Geo Challenge.

Who Has The Biggest Brain? Pro Players Club

Playfish is an accomplished Facebook game developer that has created and followed a formula for success. Perhaps you can use some of the elements of the Playfish formula in your applications. You can learn more about Playfish’s games by looking at some of their application flows in Product Planner that can be used to build your own flows.

Mob Wars is a wildly popular Facebook game that is rumored to make upwards of $1 million per month, making it the most profitable game on Facebook. How did they do it? Let’s take an in-depth look at Mob Wars and how it’s gotten to where it is today.

A Brief History

Mob Wars was developed by David Maestri (a.k.a. Jason Gilbert) and launched in January of 2008. According to statistics collected by Adonomics, Mob Wars has grown at a fairly steady pace from 331 daily active users on January 27, 2008 to 449,057 daily active users on September 27, 2008. That’s a 135,566% increase over a period of just 8 months! (As of this article, there are currently 505,178 daily active users.)

Growth & Retention

Mob Wars has achieved tremendous growth in a fairly short period of time. How did they do this? The entire Mob Wars game is built around a viral invite model—a user invites several friends, each of which will (hopefully) invite several of their friends and so on and so forth resulting in exponential growth.

While the game isn’t impossible to play as a single user, your ability to complete certain tasks and to become successful in the game will be limited.

Prior to Facebook prohibiting incentivized invites, Mob Wars was able to offer users rewards such as (virtual) cash, health and energy for inviting their friends to play. However, even with the removal of incentivized invites, there are still plenty of reasons why users would try to invite as many people as possible to the game: you need a certain mob size to complete some tasks and there is strength in numbers. The question has been raised as to whether or not this means that Mob Wars is using forced invites—another prohibited practice by Facebook.

Getting users to invite their friends and have them install your application is only one small part of the growth equation. If you really want your application to grow you need to keep your users engaged and wanting to come back for more. And guess what? Mob Wars seems to have this part of the equation down pat. According to Developer Analytics:

“…[Mob Wars] has one of the longest average user lifespans we’ve ever seen on Facebook.”

Why does Mob Wars have such a high engagement and retention rate? Bret Terrill of Bret on Social Games has recently written several posts that may give us some insight into why Mob Wars is so successful.

In two of Bret’s more recent articles, he uses lessons from evolutionary psychology to look at Social Status and Leaderboards as reasons behind successful social games. Brett says that:

“Competing for social status is the core activity of all humans, even if we do it in incredibly indirect way.”

He goes on to say that:

“Social games, by their virtue of being embedded in a social environment, offer players the opportunity to compete for social status.”

Mob Wars definitely allows you to compete for social status by recruiting mobsters and building the largest mob possible (currently 500 mobsters plus yourself), attacking and killing other mobs (you can even taunt other mobs by punching them in the face), and by competing for a spot on the leaderboard where you can gain status as “Most Deadly”, “Top Fighter”, “Top Bounty Hunter”, “Top Tycoon” (the richest), “Most Notorious” and “Most Wanted”. The link to this leaderboard is titled “Made Men” and has a description next to it that says:

“Pay your respects to the top mobsters on Mob Wars.”

In another article titled “How to Build a Successful Social Game: Design for Play with Strangers“, Bret argues that:

“If you’re only building for interactions between friends, then you’re not leveraging a significant chunk of the interactions on Facebook.”

Furthermore he states that:

“Mob Wars is the prime example of this…competition is focused on strangers, and cooperation is focused on friends.”

These are some of the reasons that Mob Wars is enjoying such a high level of success, but it is still only part of the equation.

Monetization

What makes Mob Wars stand out from the crowd isn’t how many daily active users it has (many applications have more), rather the amount of money they are reportedly making from these users. How is Mob Wars making money?

Mob Wars uses two different strategies to monetize the game:

1. Banner advertising
2. Cost Per Action (CPA) Offers

The first way that Mob Wars has monetized its game is through banner advertising by placing a banner advertisement at the top of each page in Mob Wars. Advertising isn’t all that profitable unless you have a serious number of page visits. Mob Wars may be successful with advertising because game play often involves visits to many pages by a single user. In fact, according to Developer Analytics:

“…each unique user generates over 60 page impressions per day…”

Combine 60 page impressions per day with over 500,000 daily active users and you’ve got a pretty good formula for generating a descent amount of revenue from banner advertising.

The second, and perhaps most profitable way Mob Wars has monetized its game, is through Cost Per Action (CPA) offers, partnering with companies such as Offerpal Media and Super Rewards. In an Inside Facebook interview, Super Rewards CEO and Co-founder Jason Bailey stated that:

“Developers come in making $100 a day and we can take them up to $1000 a day in short order.”

Mob Wars is reported to be making $22,000 per day and they have done it, in part, by integrating these CPA offers directly into the game without making gameplay dependent upon them. In other words, you don’t have to participate in these offers to play or even be successful in the game, but there are incentives to taking part in these offers.

For example, after completing an offer such as getting a free auto insurance quote or signing up for a free trial of Netflix, you can redeem the “Favor Points” you earn to accept offers from the “Godfather”. These offers include things like cash, more mobsters (hired guns) or full energy.

These two monetization strategies combined with explosive growth and a very high rate of user engagement and retention have made Mob Wars perhaps one of the most profitable games on Facebook today. You might want to think about integrating these strategies into your applications.

You can learn more by taking a look at the Mob Wars application flows in Product Planner.

To get an idea of how developers are using challenges within their applications, there’s no better company to look at than Playfish. Their games such as Bowling Buddies, Word Challenge and Who Has The Biggest Brain? are built around challenges. So, while these games are fun to play for a single user, they’re even more fun when you’re competing against your friends for high scores and bragging rights, which can really fuel the adoption and use of an application.

Let’s take a look at the challenge flows in Product Planner for some of these Playfish applications:

Bowling Buddies

Again, Bowling Buddies is a lot of fun to play on your own, but challenging your friends doesn’t just serve your competitive side, it also allows you to gain “Bowling Bucks” at a faster rate. Single player game play results in 5 Bowling Bucks per game while a challenge allows you to gain 5 additional Bowling Bucks simply for challenging one of your friends and 5 more if you win the match. Challenging a friend to a game of bowling can potentially result in 15 Bowling Bucks compared to a measly 5 if you were to play by yourself.

Word Challenge

The challenge flow for Word Challenge is nearly identical to that of Bowling Buddies, however, there is no monetary system in place for purchasing things. This game mainly appeals to the competitive spirit in you and your friends.

Who Has The Biggest Brain?

Who Has The Biggest Brain? doesn’t have a very direct way to challenge other users (i.e. there is no “Challenge” link). Instead, it allows you to “taunt” your friends with your achievements. You can can send canned taunts such as “Who’s your daddy now!” or write your own. For those people with competitive natures, taunting is probably a very effective way to gain new users and keep existing users coming back for more.

A notable issue with the Playfish challenge flows is that challenges and taunts can only be sent to those friends that are already using the application. If, for example, you want to challenge one of your friends who isn’t currently using an application, you first have to invite them before you can challenge them. In Word Challenge, they’ve made an effort to simplify this by including a list of friends on the challenge screen who aren’t currently using the application, which you can use to send them an invite. However, it could be argued that challenges could be made more effective by allowing the ability to send them directly to users that aren’t currently using the application without first having to invite them. In this way the challenge would act as an invitation to the application as well as a challenge.

While Playfish is well known and has developed several successful applications, it isn’t the only company out there creating challenge-based Facebook applications. Let’s take a look at some of the other applications out there with challenge flows:

Speed Racing

Speed Racing allows you to race your car against other cars, including your friend’s cars. The more races you win, the more points you earn that can be used towards upgrading your car or buying a new car altogether. The makers of Speed Racer have addressed the issue that the Playfish applications have by making challenges serve as invites for those friends who aren’t currently using the application. In fact, when you first sign up, you’re brought to a screen where you’re asked if you’d like to challenge your friends right off the bat. This is a good practice for an application that is built around challenges as long as users don’t feel forced into inviting their friends.

Rock Legends!

Rock Legends! challenge flow comes in the form of battling other local bands (i.e. your friend’s band). The interesting thing here is that even if your friends aren’t currently using the application, they will show up as a band that you can challenge. What is equally interesting is that when you challenge your friend’s band, the notification that they receive makes it seem as if they are already using the application (see step #5 in the flow above). The notification, however, doesn’t really have a call to action for the friend, which may result in the friend ignoring or not really knowing what to do with the notification.

Challenges can be a very effective way to get new users and keep existing users coming back for more. Challenges help users grow a community with their friends and, in turn, help grow a community around your application. They also present calls to action that can be very effective in peaking the interest of new and existing users. If you’re thinking of developing an application around a challenge flow, be sure take a look at the “Challenge” category in Product Planner.

Now that we’ve looked at gifting and challenges, the next post in this series will examine how Facebook applications utilize Notifications to reach new users and keep existing users interested in their applications.