Cityville Explained, Part 1 (Social Games)

CityVille Explained, Part 1 [Social Games] - What Games Are
http://whatgamesare.com/2010/12/cityville-explained-part-1-social-games...
CityVille Explained, Part 1 [Social Games]

At the Getting Social event at BAFTA (In London) a few days ago, this was the question that everyone was asking. While TV companies in the UK have dipped their toes into social games, such as Corrie Nation, they have had pretty miserable success rates. And yet here comes CityVille, another Zynga game that looks quite a lot like other developers games, they waltz in, do their thing, and boom! 12 million users in a week. Its not just Zynga. Although clearly the most successful, the other top developers also manage to up-end the natural order of things as most media people understand it (which is to say, brands). At the same time that Ubisoft have managed to scrape together 1.2 million users for their CSI: Crime City title, another game more generically named Crime City (no relation) has acquired 6.4m users, with no brand at all. I decided to write an article about how games like CityVille manage to be successful. This article, which will come in four parts, goes into the specic features and explains what they do, why they work, and what I think they could be doing better. Hopefully it will give you some idea not just of what social games are doing right, but also why players might play games of this type.
What is CityVille?
CityVille is the latest in a series of city-building games on Facebook, and was released about two weeks ago. It is the latest in Zyngas range of light sim-style games (FrontierVille, Caf World and of course FarmVille being the main examples), and very much in the same vein as other titles like Social City, Millionaire City, City of Wonder, or My Empire. It has taken Zynga quite a while to get in on the city-building game theme, but they have taken the time to build out their own game with their own mechanics rather than the more direct copying that they and many developers practised in the very early days. Starting with a couple of streets and buildings, the game guides you through various tasks that you can perform (sowing crops, building bakeries, laying road, etc.) in bite-sized chunks. Rather than throw all of this detail at you at once, the game intersperses it with challenges, things to pick up, collect, friends to visit and so on. It is click-heavy, meaning that to build a building you dont just place it and let it be built. Each click builds a phase of the building, and there may be three or four stages before a building is actually nished. As buildings generate revenue, need supplies, or crops are grown, the game does not automate those actions. Instead you manually collect coins, deliver boxes, pick up prizes, click to plant crops, click to harvest crops, and other actions.
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This activity all proceeds a-pace until you run into timers. You can only collect coins from a building every X minutes, for example, which encourages you to check into the game one or more times a day. And, globally, the game monitors all your actions with an energy statistic that either regenerates over time, or you can buy more of with the games cash. As you do these activities more and more, you earn experience points (or XP), which increase your level. Levels unlock more buildings and rewards, which in turn let you make more stu, increasing your maximum energy. And for a bonus eect, your energy recharges every time that you gain a new level. You can also visit other players cities. This has the eect of immediately giving you energy awards and boosts, as well as oering activities that you can do. You can harvest other players crops for them, which generates mutual awards, such as XP, reputation points and game cash. You can apply to other players to let you set up franchises of your businesses in their cities. You can also send them gifts which cost you nothing (such as free energy). The game continues to guide you with tasks. A task is usually quite simple, involving three or four steps. Steps might be include visit three friends, build a bakery, collect ten strawberries or that kind of thing. You may have several tasks on the go at the same time, as the game monitors whether youre completing steps or not, but not all tasks are immediately available. Instead, the game chains them along, with completion of some tasks opening up other ones. Task completion generates congratulation windows, rewards, and also the opportunity to share your achievement on Facebook. Lastly, you are largely free to lay out your city as you choose. Unlike many classic sim-strategy games (or Restaurant City, arguably the grand-daddy of these types of games), optimal layout doesnt really matter. You dont need to maintain equitable balances of components in certain areas, ecient road networks or anything like that. All of the people wandering around, as well as the plants and trees are purely decorative. This means players are free to create whatever layout they desire, and many do. And thats the basic game design. Most successful social games are much the same, but with variations of theme. So why does this work so well for Zynga, if many of the games are the same?
Visibility
A lot of the talk around Facebook enthuses wildly about the social graph and virality as being great drivers of engagement, but I believe these eects are being wildly over-estimated. They exist, and are a factor, but actually only a small factor in how games spread. How Facebook really works is visibility. The Facebook interface induces a high degree of user blindness. It does not do a great job of exposing new games and applications, and lacks a directory or a Featured in the App Store style of editorial (as Apple does for the iPhone), which means that for most developers there are huge problems in getting their games in front of users eyeballs.
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With all of the free advertising channels on the platform now constrained or dead, this has meant that the Facebook economy has been acquiring an increasingly Darwinian shape. Where it used to be an egalitarian environment in which any developer could strike it big, over the last year it has become top-heavy with larger developers accruing exponential success, and cutting o oxygen to smaller companies by default. And to the winner very much go the spoils. The Facebook economy, like the television economy, is all about dominating and converting attention rather than meritocratic-ally acquiring it, and all of the big developers on the platform have realised this. There are four basic ways that they do this.
App Banners: App banners are immensely important to have on Facebook because they solve the user blindness problem. An app banner presents the player with images that they notice amid Facebooks white, text-heavy interface, but at the same time do not overload them with thousands of available choices. App banners are the core of cross-promotion, so each game from a developer becomes a marketing channel for every other game by that developer as well. A recent trend in app banners has come in the form of Applier, and some others, which oer a way for smaller developers to band together and cross-promote to each other. While useful, and in some cases very much so, third party app banners probably only have a limited shelf life before there are too many of them, or developers start making their own, such that Metcalfes Law will start to work against rather than for them.
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Decanting: The above image is captured from FarmVille, and it shows a form of cross-promotion that I call decanting. Decanting literally means pouring your users from one container into another, like wine. The idea is simple, but extremely powerful. If you are sitting on an ageing 53m monthly active users in FarmVille, as Zynga are, why not show them something else that they can play? Why not oer them rewards or challenges from one game to the next? Each user that does this becomes a more invested customer, more likely not only to play your next game, but to still keep playing and maintaining their existing game. So you not only have their attention, youre keeping it, and the user is unlikely to venture outside your applications sphere to try something from a competitor instead.
Advertising: Often forgotten in the rush to praise social gaming as a new kind of business model is that most of the big players got funded very early, and used that money to develop and advertise their games. Zynga was very much at the forefront of this. When SGN and Playsh were their early competitors, and later Playdom and Crowdstar came along, all of them trusted in the then-viral aspects of their games. Advertising was seen in some quarters as muddy, and Playsh in particular would boast that they had never had to tap much into their investment funds to acquire their users, but instead did it with great gameplay. Zynga took the other view: They advertised like crazy, on Facebook itself, and in other games. The example picture above is take from Soccer Stars Football, and shows that Zynga still advertise in other games to this day. Advertising works for the same reason that app banners work: They show images against the otherwise bare Facebook interface. They are also eminently target-able along many lines, and very easy to experiment with to increase yield. Facebooks advertising solution allows you to target players by age, nationality, likes, dislikes and lots of other factors, and Zynga use this functionality expertly to promote their games, spending a rumoured $50m or more a year on advertising and probably being Facebooks single largest advertiser.
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Publishing: Social games ask users to publish their game activity a lot. The basic form of publishing is the High Scores publish action, where the player brags that they scored more points, attained a new level or acquired an achievement in a game. These kinds of publish action were very eective when they rst came out 18 months ago, and some casual games like Chain RXN exploded in users overnight because of them, but theyve become pretty ineective these days. Users instantly recognise them and ignore them, and recently Facebook has constrained the reach of game-published stories, limiting them only to players who have already installed a game. Games like CityVille have started using publishing as a way to oer gifts and incentives. As you can see in the image above, my published story is bragging about my achievement, but also oering free experience points to other users who click through. A variety of such incentives encourage users to come back into the game to collect their prize, and the hope on the part of the publishing player (me in this case) is that those players will in turn show me reciprocity. This strategy only really works if you have a critical mass of players though. It doesnt acquire fresh users, but rather re-interrupts the attention of cross-promoted, decanted and advertised customers. It also re-acquires lapsed customers. All of which is dependent, like most kinds of marketing, on repeated exposure. The more friends you have playing and publishing, the more you will notice that game, and the more likely you are to re-enter it. Most advertising works on that sort of constant-exposure basis, and social game publishing really is no exception.
Visibility is Geometric
All four parts of the promotion equation feed into each other and produce geometric results. As we know from Metcalfes Law, the value of a network corresponds to the square of the individual members, and so the more users you have, the exponentially further reach you have. In the early days of Facebook many developers practised seedy, spam-laden tactics to acquire users, and Zynga certainly was one of those. But what theyve done with that attention along the way is gured out how to move it around, shift it from game to game, and keep using those opportunities to expand their reach further and further. The result, as with all successful companies on the web, is that theyre now tapping into Metcalfe-style eects. Zynga are able to add a tonne of users very quickly into a game because they have built the channels to do so. Success follows more success, allows exponential expansion if you manipulate it in the right way, and thats why theyre now the company adding 12m users in a week to their new game. Zynga are where they are today because theyve realised that social gaming is actually about building a virtual network of applications inside Facebook through cross promotion,
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and they raced faster than anyone else to do so. The next question is: What are they doing with those customers when they show up? (That concludes the rst part of CityVille Explained. Click here for part two.) (If you are nding value in these articles, show your appreciation with a retweet!)
Excerpted from CityVille Explained, Part 1 [Social Gam es] - What Gam es Are http://whatgamesare.com/2010/12/cityville-explained-part-1-social-games.html
READABILITY An Arc90 Laboratory Experiment http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability
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DAU over MAU

In order to understand whats really going on with a game, you need to look at the daily active users (DAU) as well as the monthly active users (MAU). Tracking services like Appdata provide useful summaries of these statistics, as well as a calculation of one over the other. I nd that the resulting percentage of DAU/MAU is the best underlying number to really know whats going on with a game. Whether big or small, the DAU/MAU percentage tells me whether users are playing a social game as a distraction or an amusement (or even a connection, though thats pretty rare), and so gives me an inkling as to the applications true long term potential. The current percentage for CityVille is extremely high. Thats not unusual in the rst week of a games launch however, because everything is new, users are only discovering it for the rst time, and the MAU gure has not had a full month to build up. A more stable example is FarmVille:
FarmVille has long been a standard-bearer for engagement on big games. These days it hovers around the 30% mark, which is fantastic, whereas many successful games exist around 20%, and some others drift down toward the 10-12%. Social applications that share quizzes and the like commonly only achieve 3-5%. Zynga maintains one of the highest overall rates among the big developers at approximately 23%. Crowdstar has only 11%. Playsh/EA has 18%. Six Waves has 8%
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for its own games and 18% for games it publishes. Disney Playdom has 11%. Digital Chocolate has 16%. RockYou has 8%. Wooga has 18%. You get the picture. Why this is so has three reasons: 1. Quizzes: The reason why Crowdstar in particular has a low percentage is because one of their most popular apps is a quiz engine. The quiz marketing tactic is a perfectly valid one, and it tends to award high MAU numbers, but low DAU. This often gives a skewed impression of how important a company might actually be in the social game space. Zynga has no quiz engine (that Im aware of). 2. Visibility Strategy: This is a bit of a repeat from the rst part of the article, but the prevalence of publishing options in particular creates more hooks for lapsed players to return to a game. The Facebook economy works geometrically and exponentially, and that applies to retention as well as initial interest. 3. Game Activity: How Zynga structures its games, particularly with respect to timeand click-based dynamics, encourages players to remember to come back and play some more. Thats what Im going to talk about mostly in this article.
Context
Late last year, Playsh released two games that they probably shouldnt have. One was Poker Rivals and the other was Gangster City. Each was, in its own way, a better execution of the incumbents in their genre, Zyngas Texas HoldEm and Maa Wars, and yet each has proved to be a failure. The lesson is not that you cant ght Zynga. Crowdstar faced o a challenge from Zynga trying to eat its Happy Aquarium market with FishVille, and while both are well past their heyday, FishVille proved to be the loser. Similarly, PetVille tried to take on Playshs Pet Society, but now has no more than 60% of Pet Societys users. The lesson is that context matters. A hidden, but determining, factor for retention is whether this is the rst time that players have encountered that game type. As most Facebook games fall into the category of amusements on the Engagement Hierarchy, players dont distinguish them. Its therefore important to be the rst one of that type that the average user sees.
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Interestingly, this may have signicant consequences for CityVille. After all, social city-building games have now been around for a while, and although CityVille is doing some things dierently, the game may end up falling into the same trap as FishVille or Gangster City. Its far too early to tell. So lets get on to talking about the game activity.
Click Click!
The core game dynamic of CityVille is click-to-do. Click to build, click to collect, click to plant, click to harvest, click to deliver supplies. Its reminiscent of the PC game Black and White in that although you are ostensibly the manager of the city, you actually do a lot of manual labour. So much clicking is oddly compelling. The player doesnt actually have to click to do everything (collected items will self-collect if left on the ground for example) but theres a nice feeling that comes from such activity. Its interactive, and that in turn makes the game mildly immersive by making the player feel like they are doing something, even if that something is essentially just sweeping up. Click activity on this scale also has a downside, which is that it doesnt scale well. My current city in CityVille is only a couple of streets in size, but when I do expand it out signicantly, I think I might nd the extent of such manual maintenance becomes boring.
Dual Timers
Timers prevent endless clicking. As I described in the previous post, social games like CityVille employ two kinds of timer: Specic timers on buildings or crops, and general timers in the form of energy. Timers are deliberately staggered. Planting strawberries takes 5 minutes for them to grow, a cottage generates coins once per hour, and corn takes 24 hours to grow. So you can see why these activities encourage repeated visits. With FarmVille (which uses the same system) there are many apocryphal stories of players getting up in the middle of the night to harvest their virtual beetroot. In fact this sort of timed game dynamic goes at least as far back as the Excel-in-space game Planetarion.
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Energy works another way. It is a limit on the amount of click actions that you can take in a short space of time. Some clicks, but not all, dock the player a point of energy. Collection docks energy, for example, but supplying doesnt. Constructing a building docks energy, but clearing dead crops is free. Energy is resupplied on its own timer at a rate of one point every ve minutes, or replenished if the player attains a level. Timers used in this dual fashion are incredibly eective. What they do is to deliberately set up a conict whereby players have to wait to do everything they want, but in the mean time can do some of the things that they want. Rather than use one global timer, as Planetarion did, the use of multiple timers creates the sensation that there is always something to do while waiting. The mix of the two is highly compelling. While players enjoy the click activity (see above), timers essentially introduce delayed gratication, and then CityVille oers premium ways to circumvent some (but not all) of that delay. One of the foundations of monetisation in CityVille is buying more energy, for example. This gets you more activity and more clicks. (Ill talk more about money in the last part of this article).
Pellets
The sheer number of rewards in CityVille is intriguing. There are two kinds of reward in the game, lets call them pellets and unlocks. Pellets are basically any object that appears on the ground when you collect from a building or harvest from your crops. They include: XP stars: Experience points, which go toward increasing your level. Coins: The more disposable of the games two currencies
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Energy Bolts: A free energy point. These drop about once every ve to ten clicks Reputation Hearts: When you help friends, you receive reputation hearts Goods: When you harvest crops. Sets: Sometimes a cake or a jewel or some other trinket appears. These items belong to sets, and if you gather complete sets then you gain special awards The trick with pellets seems to be that the fundamentals required for the game economy to function (coins, experience and goods in CityVille) need to be constantly available. The game might occasionally reward an extra drop of one of these pellets as a part of a regular click action, but the player expects a baseline for their hard work. Otherwise the game feels unfair. The other kinds of pellet thus become delights. A delight is a reward of happy circumstance and the perception of luck. In a TED talk by Tom Chateld, he describes seven ways that games reward the brain, and he talks about how the perception of randomness and actual randomness are two dierent things. Often when players are close to completing a set, for example, they start to feel as though the game is denying them the last piece unfairly. So games (perhaps CityVille is one of them) increase the likelihood that the last couple of items in the set will drop. Delightful pellets make a game like CityVille feel like more than just a box of functions. Theyre trying to add a little layer of thauma into the game by saying This is more than just a dry simulation. Have a cake!. Delightful pellets make the game seem more charming, and they become compelling in their own right.
Unlocks
Unlocks are a more long-term kind of reward. An unlock opens up new areas of the game permanently for the player, allowing them to do new things that they could never do before, and altering their game experience. Unlocks extend the game dynamic, or in some cases add whole new dynamics, and extension is one the core ways to prevent games (especially amusements) from becoming boring. CityVille has, broadly speaking, three kinds of unlock: Levels, gates and task trees. Levels: Levels are a global monitor of how well the player is doing in the game. As the player earns XP from his activities, this goes toward attaining his next level. When he attains his next level, the game replenishes his energy, increases
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his maximum energy, gives him 1 game cash (the much harder-to-earn game currency), and unlocks new parts of the game. Unlocks might include new kinds of building, new crops or new whole areas that you can access (such as shipping).
Gates: Gates are specic parts of the game that will not permit you to progress unless you complete either a social action or you spend game cash. In the example picture, I have maximised the available population in my town and am required to build some community buildings. One of those community buildings is a police station, and to complete the building I must sta it. Stang the building requires game cash (which basically means I need to buy some with my credit card) or inviting my friends to sta my station for me. Gating used to be a policy violation in Facebook games because the games used them as compulsory viral mechanisms, but these days games like CityVille use gating as an optional thing to do rather than basing the entire game around it. Task Trees: Task trees give new goals to the player to complete, but space them out. As I described in the rst part of the article, CityVille gives goals to the player in a steady fashion, monitoring a few at a time and requiring that they complete them before moving on to the next. The use of task trees creates quests in the game, such as a quest to set up a bakery or collect 20 cakes, and they ensure a steady supply of medium term rewards. Task trees are a signicant part of reinforcing to the player that there is always something to do, or some new delight around the corner. They contribute signicantly
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to making sure that the game does not feel sterile.
Daily Bonus
Lastly, there is the daily bonus.
The daily bonus is a simple reward for showing up. In early social games, daily bonuses were either at awards or lucky draws. More recently, they have become chaining mechanisms. CityVille shows not only todays reward, but if you come back every day it shows you that the potential reward increases. Its a bit crude, perhaps, but players get the point. Anything that brings them back increases the chance that they will play that day, which in turn opens up all the other possibilities.
Open Loops
The closest analogy that I can think of for how retention works is waiting tables. A waitress is commonly juggling many tasks at once. There are orders to collect, orders to serve, drinks to rell, spills to clean, bills to serve, tips to collect and many other miscellaneous tasks in a live restaurant. All of which combine to create a constant ow of activity and a phenomenon called the open loop. As humans, much of how our memory and attention works comes from whether we have left something open or closed. We are compelled to try and close what is open, to neatly nish o, collect the bill and receive a tip as a waitress does. Such accomplishment is of innate pleasure to us. Open loops exist in all our lives. Writing this blog post is an open loop that I must
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close. Buying Christmas presents is an open loop not yet completed. Checking my inbox closes a habitually open loop. Sending that email I meant to send yesterday closes a loop. Splitting this article into a series creates an open loop in some of my readers minds too. Maybe even yours. Games tap into our need to close loops. Social games like CityVille are expert at doing so because what they create is a never-ending series of open loops. No matter how quickly you play or how much money you spend, there is always something to do, some gate to unlock, some task tree to complete, some daily bonus to claim, some new set to gather, some crop to harvest or some level to attain. It never really ends, and it overlaps various loops over one another such that even if you have run out of cash or coins, there is always something to do but not for extended sessions. The loops that the game creates in your mind cannot be closed until you come back later. In the mean time, have a cake! (That concludes the second part of CityVille Explained. Click here to read the next part.)
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Prompts
CityVille asks you to invite friends, share your latest accomplishment, or ask your friends to send help so that you can complete a task. In one ten minute session of CityVille that I played yesterday evening, the game prompted me with a question three times, and that is not unusual.
CityVille is constructed to routinely prompt users to take an action. The actions are in the form of a response to a question. Although there may appear to be many variations, there are actually only four types of question that it asks: 1. 2. 3. 4. Would you like to tell your friends what you have done? (as in the image above) Would you like to ask your friends for help? Would you like to send a friend a gift? Would you like to grant a friends request for help?
The game asks these questions mostly in relation to specic events. However because
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of the way that the games activities, timers and open loops work, those events happen very frequently. Here are some examples: When you attain a level When you run out of energy When you build a building that needs employees When you leave the game open in a browser window for ve minutes When a particular task needs friends to complete There are also prompts that it asks only at certain points during the game. The following image is from FrontierVille because I missed the chance to screen-grab the one that CityVille asked, but the same function is in CityVille: This is a cross-promotion prompt. At the start of the game it asks a lot of these sorts of questions, but they tend to trail o into the more routine questions by the time youve reached level 5 or so. Other kinds of prompt include gameplay tutorials, guides, reminders and game crashes. The purpose of a prompt is to get the player to either broadcast to all of their friends, or send a request directly to another friend. There are fairly stringent rules over prompts and how they can be used: They have to clearly ask the player to share or invite friends, for example. The reason is to prevent developer abuses. (See Channels below for more).
Suggestions
Suggestions are buttons, links and tabs in the game that remind the player that they can interact with other players or Facebook friends if they choose. Perhaps the most obvious of these is the friend bar at the bottom of the game:
This bar allows you to travel to your friends cities, and also to send them gifts. If you
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click on any of their images, you will see a Gift button. Suggestions centre around giving gifts. Most of them are free to the giver (you can give someone energy without it costing any of yours), and they generate publishable stories that the player can share, to let the receiver know that they have received a gift. The result is an attempt at generating reciprocity. The goal of the gift economy in CityVille is to make players realise that they can actually progress much faster in the game, at no cost, if they give as many gifts to each other as possible. An economyof-favours emerges, and everyone wins.
Visitation
One of the most interesting social dynamics in the game is the ability to set up businesses in other players cities. It requires their approval of course, but the general idea is that you can apply to set up a franchise of one of your businesses, and this generates pellets for both of you: Your friend can treat it as a rental opportunity and simply collect coins and experience points from it, like any other building. And you can visit it to do likewise. Another kind of visit is the performing of game activity in another friends city. When you visit, you can harvest or collect on behalf of a friend, and they in turn can choose to accept your help: This is an example of accepting help. If I choose to say yes, both of these friends images will move around my city, harvesting crops and generating resources. Helping friends out in this fashion costs the helper energy, but it also generates coins, XP and, most importantly, reputation points.
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Reputation points are like a social form of level (represented by the heart icon on the right of this image). Reputation acts as a secondary requirement on some game activities, just like levelling does, but its primary purpose is to do with XP and coin generation. The more reputation you have, the more XP that someone who hires you will get, and the more you will get also.
In a similar vein, players can send requests to each other to become neighbors. Neighbors can more easily nd and send gifts to each other. Also, some city buildings and tasks require that a player has a specic number of neighbors. Neighbors thus become another kind of gating mechanism.
Channels
The objective of all social activity in the game is to generate publishing actions. Publishing, as Ive already mentioned several times in the article, is the act of getting the player to spread the word about CityVille out onto Facebook. Simple publishing is the act of broadcasting your game high scores onto the platform, but there are more sophisticated channels that can be better used to gather attention. Specically, CityVille wants players to generate one of these four kinds of action: 1. 2. 3. 4. A Wall-publish A Cross-Wall Publish A Notication Request An Email
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Wall Publishing: Wall publishing is the most straightforward social action to understand. As I wrote in the rst part of this article, wall publishing most commonly takes the form of high scores announcements, or high scores with incentives. All wall publishing is governed by a specic policy to which a developer must adhere: A game must clearly ask the player whether they want to share a game activity, and then must proceed to a second Facebook screen (see above) that once again asks if the player wants to go ahead and publish this story to their wall. Only then will the story actually be published. Unsurprisingly, this creates a lot of fall-o. Moreover, a recent change in the policy by Facebook has restricted the visibility of wall publishing such that only players who have already installed the game can see stories published from the game. This change was brought about because Facebook noticed that many of their non-gaming users really disliked these kinds of stories cluttering up their walls, while gaming users disliked stories from games that they were not already playing.
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Cross-Wall Publishing: Cross-wall publishing, on other hand, is where the game publishes on a friends wall rather than your own. It has the same restrictions as regular wall publishing, but has the advantage that it generates a notication to the player who owns the wall (so theyre more likely to notice it). CityVille uses cross-wall publishing to tell players when a friend has visited their town. The friend still has to choose to actually publish the story, but as you can see from the screen-grab above, the result is a game story that is more relevant to me than a general achievement publish would be. Notication Requests: When Facebook introduced their rst major redesign of users home pages from a narrow to a wide format, they included a feature called notications. Notications tell you if a friend has commented on a status update, posted on your wall, tagged you in a photo, or other similar activities. Social game developers, including Zynga, abused notications utterly. If you had ever installed Maa Wars, for example, you would receive notications from the game every day asking you to come back and play, oering bonuses, inducements and so on. Notication spam became a huge irritant for users, and so eventually Facebook turned o the channel for developers. More recently, Facebook appear to have partially relented. While games are still not permitted to advertise directly to players through the notication channel, requests from players to other users are permitted (see above). This includes users who have not installed the game. Requests have always been a feature of Facebook, but since they started appearing in the notication stream they have become much more visible than before.
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Email: Last but not least, email from the game is a valid channel. Email has been available to developers for about a year, but it is often under-used. The hazard with email is that players often consider it to be more personal and private than, say, notications. So the use of email needs to veer away from spam and more toward relevant communications. CityVille is currently using email as a way to spread requests, not for large scale advertising. This makes it more useful to read (Although on a personal note I think I will soon add a lter to my Gmail to junk those mails).
Permissions
Some of the restrictions around how you can publish, or when, can be overcome by extended permissions. In order to email players, for example, the developer must get their permission to do so rst. In order for the developer to access their social graph information, likewise. Other permissions are more added-value types. Players can give you permission to automate the process of wall-publishing, for example, to reduce it to just one step rather than two. There are several ways to ask for permission. Some games try to make a mini-game out of it by inviting players to complete several steps in a social bar at the top of the game to get a prize, like this (taken from Pet Society):
Others, like CityVille, bundle their permission question in as a part of the install question when the player rst enters the application:
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And some do both. The mandatory method is more eective of course, although there is the possibility that if you ask too much of the player at installation then they might get put o.
Selshly Social
To understand the social dynamics of CityVille, realise that they are selsh. In each case, the dynamics exist to tantalise a player with a tangible reward. If you visit your friend, you get a prize. If you send them a free gift that costs you nothing, they might send you one back. If you set up a bakery in their town, you will both gain from that. If you harvest their crops for them, you will gain reputation points. Its all incentive-driven. One of the ironies around social games is that they arent particularly social. They dont encourage deep social interaction because such interaction is useless to the developer. Social games are not trying to be connections or meaningful experiences for players. That is a wholly dierent kind of game, and not one that they can easily become given the environment in which these games are played. Instead, they are built as amusements. Socialising in amusements is more akin to having spare Poker chips at the table that you give to someone else, and maybe theyll give you some back later. It is reciprocal trade, assistance for incentive, not charity. While this does not preclude the possibility that some players will engage in acts of charity for personal reasons, the social dynamics are not created with that in mind. They are built to work with self-interest. (That concludes the third part of the CityVille Explained article. The nal part is available here. If you are nding value in these articles, show your appreciation with a retweet!)
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CityVille Explained, Final Part [Social Games] - What Games Are
http://whatgamesare.com/2010/12/cityville-explained-final-part-social-g...
The Bottom Line

Nobody knows exactly how much prot Zynga makes from their games. There is only guesswork, analysis of second hand information, anecdotal stories, correlations from other companies and data points around the web. The general consensus seems to be that the answer is: A Lot. The most common executive-summary pieces of knowledge or social games go something like this: The average game makes $0.25 per MAU per month in revenue Another way of saying that is that the average game makes $0.03 per DAU per day Somewhere between 1% and 3% of users pay in any given month Somewhere around 20% of users of a game will pay once over the course of their lifetime of play A small (0.1% or less) percentage of users will become heavy users (the unfortunately named whales) Whales will spend a lot (> $100) Players will spend as much on intangibles (gifts, objects of status, virtual Christmas trees) as on tangibles (gameplay benets). ARPU is low (lots of players never pay at all) but sustainable over the long term, unlike retail Obviously this is all hazy. But it tells a story, and that story is that games-as-a-service is both a real opportunity, and one that is reliant on both visibility and retention (as already discussed in the rst two parts of this article). The longer and louder a game booms, the more paying customers you will nd. And the more whales you will nd also. This means that a social game needs something to sell. In CityVilles case, that something is game cash.
A Tale of Two Currencies

CityVille, like many online games, has two virtual currencies. There are actually ve
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dierent number quantities that the player earns (reputation, goods, experience points, coins and cash) but only the last two are currencies. Reputation and experience go toward accumulating social and game levels, while goods are for resupplying existing buildings. Game coins and game cash, on the other hand, are used to buy stu. So why have two currencies and not one? The simple answer is that a dual system allows Zynga to separate high revenue actions from low revenue actions more easily, so that one can spiral with ination while leaving the other untouched. In many early massive multiplayer games, ination was a noticeable problem for game economies. What tended to happen in games with only one currency is that they either served the early part of the game, or the late part, but not both. Suppose a game allowed a player to buy magic swords for 100 gold pieces. To an early-stage player that could either be really expensive or relatively good value, depending on how dicult or easy it was to earn 100 gold pieces. The problem is that the late-stage player already has been using those gold earning opportunities for weeks or months, which means that if 100 gold pieces is hard to earn then he is satised. If its easy to earn, however, he is falling down in gold. So what? So if gold is hard to earn, this creates a disincentive for new players to join, because it will take a long time for them to get anywhere. Conversely, if gold is easy to earn, then the early-stage player is happy, but the late-stage player has nothing to really aim for. So they will hit their maximum mastery quickly and then leave through boredom. The solution, adopted by many games, is to have two currencies. CityVille sets it thus: You have an easily-earned currency (coins) that you collect from most actions, and hard-to-earn currency (cash) for high value transactions. You get coins for harvesting crops, collecting taxes from buildings, trading with your train, and some bonus actions. Coins are plentiful, and you use them to buy buildings, plant new crops and other day-to-day activities. They are perfect as a resource for the
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early-stage player to worry about, but by the time you reach level 10 or so the typical player will not worry about so much about coins any more. Cash, on the other hand, is almost impossible to nd. The game only awards you one point of cash every time you gain enough experience points to earn a level. This means that the denominations of cash are very small (you spend it in ones and twos) and you spend it quite carefully. Many of the transactions associated with cash involve using it as a way to shortcut key tasks. In the example image above, I need to either ask two of my friends to send chocolate, or spend two of my hard-earned cash, to complete a mission. To ask for that chocolate, however, involves a publishing action on my Facebook wall. What cash is essentially oering is trade-os. Cash is an option that you can use to avoid social embarrassment or to skip forward in time. It is not generally used to purchase objects (although there are a few exceptions). Cash buys you progress, not stu. The other thing about cash is that the manner in which you earn it obscure. Because the cash only increases when you gain a level, it is easy to miss. It appears, on the surface at least, that the only real way to accumulate cash is to get out your credit card.
Payment and Pricing

There are three general routes to payment. The rst is this button: Simple to understand, the Add Coins & Cash button takes the player to this dialog:
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Notice that Zynga are actually oering both coins and cash for sale. Cash is clearly the more prominent of the two, but its interesting given how easy it is to accumulate coins in the game. Perhaps it works, theres no information to tell. Also notice that the pricing is based on packs of cash, not an exchange. It is also US-style, where they add taxes on at the point of sale rather than including it in the price, as the EU does with VAT. Subbing 12% o the value of each (which is what the tax appears to be), what Zynga are actually charging for cash is: 15 cash for $2 40 cash for $5 75 cash for $9 170 cash for $19 465 cash for $49 1000 cash for $99 The top transaction values cash at $0.13 a piece. The bottom transaction values it at just under $0.10 however, with the rest forming a sliding scale clearly showing that more dollars spent is more advantageous. In all likelihood, very few players actually buy that $99 pack. Pricing psychology often works in such a way that a very highly priced item helps to set the tone for the value of all other items (in consumers minds), leading them to choose the mid-range item. It is likely that the $2 pack is not the most popular for the same reason. It seems poor value, even though in reality its only marginally less so. Most players will likely transact at the $9 price, because that seems to be a good range. The surprising thing about the pricing here is that there is no $999 pack oering 12,500 cash. It would probably get only a microscopic number of transactions, but it might move more average customers from $9 to $19.
Oer Walls
An oer is an available discount, membership or survey that the player can ll in, in exchange for which they receive some cash. Oers were very popular among social game developers eighteen months ago, but they started to attracted heavy criticism for
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resurrecting the bad old days of lead-generation marketing (which had been tried and proved not to work well because it attracts poor quality leads). What really caused a storm for oers was, however, ScamVille. Techcrunch ran a series of impassioned articles investigating exactly what was going on with FarmVilles oer walls, and discovered that it was a hotbed of mobile phone scams, spam email sites and all the other sleaze that sits on the underbelly of the Internet. This led to oer walls being pulled from a raft of games, and then returned slowly in a more controlled and managed fashion. It also led (anecdotally) to a drop in their eectiveness. At the same time, Facebook began to push hard to get their major developers including Zynga to adopt Facebook Credits as their primary source of payment. Although credits took a larger percentage for processing transactions than other vendors solutions did (30% as opposed to 10%), Facebooks argument was that they would be more trusted, and so yield more transactions. (Again, anecdotally, this seems to be true). Facebook Credits do not include an oers wall. CityVille still uses oer walls, but currently only as alternative payment providers:
The oer wall is located behind the Earn City Cash tab. And heres what it displays:
The oer wall is provided by a third party company named Tapjoy (formerly Oerpal). Currently, it only contains alternative payment methods that the Facebook Credits system doesnt cover well, but the typical use of such systems is to run surveys, oers and Netix subscriptions. (It is also possible that those options are displayed in other
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geographical territories than the UK.) Quite whether this system is really that eective for CityVille is debatable. It feels very much like a legacy system these days compares to the clean ease of use that Facebook Credits brings, and will probably end up being deprecated at some point in the medium future.
Payment Cards
Finally, there are payment cards. In many supermarkets across Britain and the US (and beyond), there are cards for sale that you can redeem for credit in social games on Facebook. These cards are targeted at consumers who might not have credit cards, similar to credit-based mobile phones.
They work pretty simply. You buy the card, redeem it in CityVille or one of Zyngas other games, and you receive cash to that value. Payment cards are a relatively recent innovation, rst introduced by Playdom, and adopted by some of the other major developers this year. They are highly accessible, and their continued widespread availability would suggest that they are working. To be fair though, payment cards are very much a late-stage innovation for companies that have already achieved considerable scale. They require production and shipping and more traditional bricks-and-mortar retail concerns like that, which is generally pretty expensive.
Final Comments
Ive been through CityVille with a toothcomb and examined how the application is
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structured. Ive talked about the importance of visibility, retention, open loops, social aspects, reciprocal trade and now the payos. The remaining question is: Is it perfect? Since I started writing this article last Saturday, CityVille has leapt up the charts to become the 5th largest game on Facebook (according to Appdata) with 26m MAU and 11m DAU. It is likely not nished growing yet, and will probably settle somewhere around 40m MAU before the growth pattern becomes more gentle. Equally impressive in that is that the game, which is still labelled as a Beta, has only crashed a few times for me and never seems to have issues with connecting to it. Will it stay popular? Undoubtedly so. I think that the game will not achieve FarmVille levels of success because although it has huge visibility, the gameplay of CityVille is still quite a lot like FarmVille and FrontierVille, and so context will play against it to an extent. I expect that the game will actually settle into a prole broadly similar to that of Caf World, which is no mean feat. For all that success, however, there are some comments to be made on it, in terms of things that it could be doing better: Energy: The energy mechanism is archaic. In the old days of social games, energy was really the only system that prevented players from burning through a game very quickly, but with CityVille already deploying many timers, it seems overly punishing on players to have them watch their crops die in the elds just for a lack of energy. The thinking here is clearly to get players to buy more energy, but that creates nothing but negative feelings. My suggestion here would be to either abandon energy altogether, or to signicantly relax it in some fashion. Cruft: The game does not need so many payment options. The Tapjoy inclusion in particular smacks very much of an unwillingness to clean house. While there are always metric arguments to be made for that extra percentage or two of revenue that may result from such things in the shorter or medium term, design cruft tends to obscure larger issues. The hazard of a metrics-only focus is that it tends to devalue cruft concerns, leading to a companys products becoming formulaic and stale. MySpace was cool until it became overrun with cruft, and Yahoo likewise, and its hard to decide to be elegant in design because there is often be no immediate reward for doing so. Automation: Harvesting and collection behaviours work very well in a game like FarmVille where they are natural, but the lack of automation for manual labour in
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larger play areas (such as a city will become) is a net negative. CityVille will need to include some degree of automation of collection and harvesting features eventually if the game is to scale its experience. Perhaps these options already exist at later levels, but if they do I have not seen them yet. $999: The game should have a massively priced pack of cash. Just to see what happens. Cash: It would be nicer if the game was not tying cash transactions to social embarrassment. In particular, creating tasks that are obliging either wall publishing or paying cash cannot instil anything other than a negative feeling toward the game. Time-skipping or individual requests/invites are ok, but forcing players to either out themselves in public or pay up is not the sort of thing that sits well with the charm and thauma that the game is aiming for. Next Game: I think Zynga needs to strike out with its next game. Farms, poker, maas, restaurants, cities and sh are all well and good, but they are also pretty run of the mill now. Zyngas history has long been to wait for other companies to nd trends and then to make their own versions, but the period of time that it is taking them to developing those versions is growing. FarmVille arrived into the market mere weeks after FarmTown, but thats not a pattern on which Zynga can rely indenitely. They are already late to the city-sim genre, and its only their existing scale thats making that work for them. I wouldnt want to base a 5-year strategy for the company on that sort of tactic because it is inherently unstable.
CityVille and You

CityVille is a genuinely interesting case of what happens when a social game developer that has all massive resources at its command puts its mind to the task of making a big game. Its Zyngas major eort for the latter half of this year, and it has to be said that the execution in all areas is mostly excellent. The game is charming, engaging, socially connected, technically extraordinary on the back end, and just very very impressive. No doubt many developers are casting envious eyes upon it and asking how could they get in on some of that action, and will be spinning up their plans to make a city simulation as we speak. This is a massive mistake, but theyre going to do it anyway. I was motivated to write it this article by what I consider to be was a lot of ignorance on the part of would-be developers as to what the levers of power in social gaming
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really are. Clearly there are many, from Metcalfes law eects on visibility, to open loop game design. Some of these you can easily clone, but lets be honest: Unless you have $50m for advertising and ve games to cross promote, youre not going to really be able to play in the same pen as Zynga. Zynga are in a position similar to Facebook and Google, where they have become such a dominant incumbent with so many invested users that they have created a buer around themselves. Hearing a social game company talk about how they are going to spend $300k on development, making their own cheap knock-o games, and then become The Next Zynga is like listening to small startups convincing themselves that they just need to make a better search engine to take down Google. These people are fooling themselves, and usually doing so with no-brainers. Instead, the secrets to success are: Be Radical: Radically innovate a new kind of game. This is always an opportunity for those brave enough to try. Treasure Madness, Farm Town, Restaurant City, Bejewelled Blitz, Happy Aquarium and many others were all major innovations in their time, and even though Zynga has copied most of them, the original games didnt just die o. If you make something radical, it can work really well and it may become a stepping stone to something bigger. Get Bought: The next option is to build a great game and, if Zynga or someone else comes a-calling, join them. The original developers of YoVille and Warstorm were both acquired by Zynga, and their founders and investors have presumably done quite well out of it. Zynga, being huge and independent as they are, can aord to make acquisitions like this just to see what might happen. Stay Small: While the Zynga strategy rewards the mainstream amusement-level engagement handsomely, it has no interest in niche ideas that are thought to only have a loyal but small audience. Facebook may not be the best venue in which to try such ideas, but deep engagement with games is possible if you approach it right. Vikings of Thule has been plugging away with a little card game for a couple of years and has a raft of loyal users who come back to play it regularly. It will never be a huge hit, but its perfect for a tiny team that just wants to make a game. Be The Platform: You dont have to be on Facebook. BigPoint arent, and its worked out very well for them. By not being on Facebook, but instead using Facebook Connect or similar features, you are likely to not get quite the hoard of users that a Zynga game can generate so quickly. On the other hand, you have much more ownership over the
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customer and they are in a less distractible state than when inside the Facebook interface. Both of these can be very strong advantages. They certainly have been for Moshi Monsters.
Final Final Comments

This brings an end to the article. I hope you have found it very engaging. The topics covered in this article touch on some of the foundations of whats going into the What Games Are book. The book aims to discuss the subject of games in a grounded but broad way, encompassing not just social games, but casual, so-called hardcore, the motivations of game playing and the art of game creation. Its a fascinating subject to many of us, and I hope that youll choose to subscribe to this blog to hear more and discuss. Thanks for reading. (If you are nding value in these articles, show your appreciation with a retweet!)
Excerpted from CityVille Explained, Final Part [Social Gam es] - What Gam es Are http://whatgamesare.com/2010/12/cityville-explained-nal-part-social-games.html
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Cityville Explained, Part 1 (Social Games)

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Cityville Explained, Part 1 (Social Games)

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CityVille Explained, Part 1 [Social Games] - What Games Are