Tag Archives: Mafia Wars

Casual Games

Quick Hits: Playdom Launches Two Titles; Mafia Woes; “Game Friends” Gains Support

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After being fairly quiet since early August’s launch of (Lil) Farm Life, Playdom launched two games in the last two weeks: TikiFarm (a South Pacific themed farm sim) and Wild Ones (an artillery/strategy game with pets – still in alpha).

wild-ones-logoCrowdStar and Zynga have been greatly accelerating the deployment of games and it’s possible that Playdom’s recent funding and new CFO have positioned it to focus on a similar strategy.

Wild Ones offers similar Worms-Style artillery and strategy like Playfish’s Crazy Planets, with the caveat that it’s a true multiplayer game, linking you with players who aren’t necessarily your friends. Again, it’s still very rough and a lot of iterations are likely as the game is optimized, but It will be interesting to see if they can solve the difficulties of scaling a synchronous game on Facebook, as to date only Zynga Poker seems to have been able to do so. In similar games, churn has dogged Playfish’s Crazy Planets (it has had difficulty maintaining a Sticky Factor above 10%) and German developer Plinga has recently launched Turtle Squad.

Mafia Wars Still Suffering From Technical Issues

The scheduled maintenance on Wednesday the 16th doesn’t seem to have fixed all the problems that started last week for Mafia Wars users since the new roll out of i-frame technology and anti-hacking measures. One industry person noted that trying to solve issues with “tricky JavaScript tricks is a great way to create browser-specific hell.”

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While some have noted a user boycott that resulted from the problems, you can’t escape the fact that if a game doesn’t work, people don’t return. Whatever they’ve done, I had no problems after the initial roll out, but I personally get stuck in unresolved loops and can’t play at all since the maintenance on the 16th. Zynga is scheduling another maintenance period for today.

Game Friends Idea Gains User Support

In less than a week, over 110,000 Facebook Users have joined a petition to better filter their Game Friends vs. their real-life friends. The Facebook group was created by Uwe Philip Kirch and inspired by our proposal that Facebook create a Game Friends capability, which would allow you to expand your circle to people who are interested in a game, but not necessarily someone you would want to share your photos and personal status updates with.

Casual Games

Game Developers Launch Initial Integration of Facebook Credits for Payments

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As originally posted on InsideSocialGames.com.

Will Facebook users feel more comfortable trusting their credit card information with the company instead of social game developers and other payment providers when they go to buy virtual goods? pay-with-facebookIf the answer is yes, we may see a new surge in revenue for developers, and for Facebook.

The question is closer than ever to being answered, too. Facebook is planning to more fully release its virtual currency, Credits, on third-party apps in the coming weeks. In the meantime, here’s a look at which games are already running Credits, and how they’re going about doing it.

Here are the games integrating the credits that have been announced so far, sorted by developer and noting the Daily Active Users (DAU) for each game:

There are two basic implementations seen to date:

  1. Buying in-game currency with “Pay with Facebook” as an alternative payment method along with credit card, pay pal, mobile and offers
  2. Buying in-game items directly with Facebook credits

Most of the developers opted for a simple implementation, just adding Facebook credits as another in a laundry list of purchase options for users:
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Once users select Facebook credits, they are presented with the option of using their existing credits if they have enough. Otherwise they are presented with options to buy with the credit card on file (if there is one), their mobile phone, or to select a new card.

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In general, credits are 10 for $1, but if you buy with your mobile phone, there is a pretty standard (and somewhat sizable) 43% haircut taken to help cover the carrier fees. There are also some subtleties in implementation, such as Playfish only implementing Facebook credits for the purchase of coins, but not Playfish cash.

Crowdstar has been the only one of the developers listed above to do the in-game items directly, with slightly different implementations. Happy Aquarium actually reserves specific items in its store to be purchased only with Facebook Credits – ostensibly now offering item exclusives under three different currencies:

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And more interestingly is Crowdstar’s implementation of credits to crowdstar-happy-island-integrated-creditsbuy upgrade items directly in recently launched Happy Island, as reported in Inside Social Games. For a user who already has Facebook credits, this is an extremely simple purchase process as detailed in these three steps. The only issue so far is that the upgrades don’t appear in the game immediately – in this early stage you seem to need to refresh the game for it to display.

From a developer perspective, there is definitely some trepidation in relying on Facebook solely for purchases. Besides several operational and redundancy considerations, one of the more valuable things for a developer is the direct relationship with the paying user. The larger developers had created user accounts, letting you take currency across games (like Playfish) or at least in saving your credit card info to make it easy for you to pay across different games. The other major benefit from a direct relationship with end users is cashflow: with credit purchases going through the Facebook credit system, developers now have to wait for Facebook to remit the funds to them.

As Zynga has one of the broadest bases of players, and thus assumingly some of the most control to lose, they have been aggressively pushing discounts on buying in-game currencies. Since Thanksgivng, both Mafia Wars and FarmVille have been offering discounts on the respective game currencies, often seen as pop ups touting a special limited time offer to buy one of the usually $10 or more valued bundles. This kind of promotion is fairly typical in retail and in e-commerce, providing incentive to users to increase the size of their average order (from experience, a majority of users only buy the smallest currency bundles, typically around $5). Judging by the frequency of Mafia Wars and FarmVille promotions (indiscriminately hitting both previous buyers and non-buyers), it must be working.

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In addition, this may have been a good pre-emptive strike, to get the Zynga users setting up more direct accounts with Zynga to buy in-game currency and help solidify itself against potential pressure from users to add Facebook credits options to all of its games.

For now, Crowdstar is taking the lead as far as exposure to users and integrating in more detailed ways – as a newer entry among the top developers they have the most to gain from innovating and integrating the Facebook credits into their games. Yet with every potential streamlining of the end-user experience, there are still several things that need to be proven over the next few months.

Summarizing the Pros and Cons of Implementing Facebook Credits

Pros:

  • Easier customer experience, especially when never have to associate dollar amount with the purchase decision (as in the Happy Island example where item purchased with current balance of Facebook credits) – any time you can make a purchase decision less of a consideration it’s a good thing
  • Removes barrier of user having to go get their credit card when already have on file with Facebook (a pretty heavy base of users based on the gift applications)
  • Customers may trust their credit card to Facebook more than to a game developer and that developer’s choice of payment provider(s)
  • Implementation of Facebook credits API eliminates need to get a credit card processor and/or a mobile payments provider

Cons:

  • Still an untested platform, especially in regards to scale; Facebook’s issues with its core platform have been a source of concern for developers already so it’s hard to trust your payment system to them until there is more of a track record
  • Developers may still want an alternative credit card processor so they have redundancy in case the Facebook credits system goes down, or to have protection in case Facebook processing fees get exorbitant
  • Developers may still want to offer alternative payment methods like Pay Pal, prepaid cards and Offers (none of which can currently be used to buy credits) or to cover mobile territories Facebook does not cover
  • If users don’t have credits or a credit card on file, not really much more of a value-add than putting a user through credit card.
  • Ceding a direct paying relationship with end-user to Facebook and having to wait for Facebook to remit funds to you versus receiving directly from end-user
  • Integrating Facebook credits into direct-purchase items ala Happy Island may limit some of the ability to do promotions and manage your virtual economy
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Mafia Wars Gets Whacked: The Woes of Revamping the Infrastructure of a Hit

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Service issues, partially loaded screens and just not enough servers to manage a recently reconfigured game has caused Mafia Wars to take a nose dive in daily active users, dropping it back to levels not seen since August of this year:

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One could say it’s a perfect storm of issues (there was 48 hour of Facebook platform performance issues on the 9th and 10th that didn’t help last week’s roll out), but part of it I believe is an attempt to better improve the infrastructure. Back in early November, Zynga rolled out a performance enhancement on a Friday only to be forced to roll it back by two days later due to browser settings making it difficult for everyone to play the game.

Last Tuesday, the 8th, there were already signs that a new roll out of i-frame technology and anti-hacking measures were causing unintended issues. Somehow this code change was creating a cavalcade of issues, resulting in a product manager chat with users and an emergency bulletin board note to users on Saturday (the thread since removed), summarizing the issues and how they were intending to resolve them:

  • losing mafia/stats starting today – this is because our servers are being overwhelmed. We’re trying to add machines as fast as possible. We’ve stabilized the game for now and look to add more machines this coming week. Your mafias should all be back to normal now.
  • partial page loads – this is also related to the servers being overwhelmed. In the past, the app would have white screened, now it does partial loads. This issue will also be resolved when we add the servers next week.
  • lost items/progress – This was caused when we rolled out our performance upgrade. People who had the app open while we rolled out the upgrade had their accounts screwed up. In order to fix them, we had to revert them to whatever the most recent backup point was. We gave out items to anyone that we had to rollback to make up for the lost progress.

Major platform changes where you have millions of users online engaging with your game is not easy. No matter how good your QA, it’s darn near impossible to recreate a live scenario where as soon as you roll out, millions are hitting your servers. Equally daunting is finding a good time to have your game go off-line for maintenance, especially on a platform like Facebook where there are millions around the globe hitting your game.

For all intents and purposes, the Mafia Wars platform, launched over a year ago, was probably never developed for the sheer number of users it now supports – a number that has doubled in the last six months and would never have been predicted by even the most bullish of those in the social game space at the time Mafia Wars was developed. There are similar issues with Café World, the number two game on Facebook with nearly 10 million daily active users a day that has seen its numbers drop in the last week as well:

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Users continue to complain of poor load times or the sim slowing down PC performance when left in the background. Again, this game was produced with some learnings from FarmVille, but the sim is much more animated than the typical farm.

With FarmVille, Zynga took steps to lessen the load on its servers, reducing animations and smooth effects (the introduction of chicken coops and dairy barns as well as storage is also a keen way to push more of the animated items off the screen). Now as Café World creaks under the load, there are small tweaks in place to simplify the animations (sparkling animation over finished dishes seems a bit less intense, pop-ups around dishes are less animated). It’s no wonder that they have yet to launch basic achievements in the game, fearing the impact of more users on a more robust game.

And that also puts in some interesting questions around other recent games like FishVille and PetVille – after fast growth, both games have tailed off a bit. Surely Zynga can advertise and drive more users, so are they holding off in part to ensure that the games can scale?

While Mafia Wars users may fret, you have to give props to Zynga for focusing on focusing resources explicitly to improve their infrastructure. The fallout from trying to fix Mafia Wars when it already is so hug only underscores the need to build your platform in such a way to make it easily extensible and with the option to add servers quickly on the fly when your estimates of traffic are completely blown away.