Gaming the brand… on Facebook
By Simon Fuller. There’s one activity brands have underutilized on the world’s biggest social network to date, and that’s Facebook branded gaming.
But Canadian social game outfit Backstage Technologies has been busy enough developing titles for Facebook – among other social media platforms – and recently helped put together a FB version of Family Feud based on the hit US TV quiz show. The game has been successful, becoming the only branded title in the top 25 games when ranked by monthly active users.
“At the moment, I don’t think that branded games have much of a presence at all,” says Russell Ovans, CEO at Backstage. “Initially, the brands seemed more interested in protecting their IP and didn’t really get the opportunity. For example, Scrabulous was the first truly successful game on Facebook, but the brand effectively killed it by taking it away from the innovators and creating brand confusion and a user backlash.
“There is a huge opportunity for social versions of branded games, and there is likely to be a surge in the number of brands bringing games to Facebook in the next six month. Given the opportunity, I am surprised at how slowly the brands have been to act – they should be working with experienced social game studios to get the product out there and begin to optimise it for the medium.
“But the implementation has to make sense for the medium in order to capitalise on the brand recognition factor. I think the success of Family Feud is a watershed moment for branded games on Facebook, not only in terms of adoption but more importantly in terms of monetisation.”
But what might be putting brands off bringing their games to the site is FB’s fickleness.
“The platform itself is a moving target, as Facebook works out how comfortable they are with game developers accessing various viral channels,” says Ovans. “Historically, the removal of incentivized invites – rewarding players with virtual currency for each friend invited – hurt our growth. More recently, removal of notifications has hurt our engagement.”
But for brands which want to take the plunge, other social media sites are also fair game.
“We have games on MySpace, hi5, and Tagged, all of which are equally suited to games,” says Ovans. “Each has its strengths and weaknesses regarding the demographics of its user base. hi5 in particular has taken steps to rebrand itself as a social gaming site, but it remains to be seen whether any of these tertiary social networks can scale to the same degree as Facebook.”
