Network Cascades in Casual Social Network Games
With the advent of social networking, a market for “casual” games has opened up in which one of the prominent developers on Facebook, Zynga has situated itself prominently at the top. Most of these games don’t have stories and most of these games involve using mouse clicks to interact with the game environment. But this post won’t be going into the depths of the game play aspect of the games, instead, I will talk about the various methods that companies like Zynga use in their social games to try to create a cascade of users who play their games.
Games that are on social networks try to create an artificial cascade of users by giving users many opportunities to ask friends for in-game bonuses or to post on your profile some sort of achievement that was obtained in the game. This presents a scenario for the player where he or she can post advertising for the game on their own profile, free of charge to the game maker. Of course, the player doesn’t know that this is free publicity and advertising for the game company, but the company is hoping that the friends of the current player will see the post and be swayed to try the game. This sets up a possible positive cascade for the game company. If the player decides to post to their profile, then there is a chance that someone who sees the post on the profile, seeing the positive reaction of the player, is willing to try the game out, which in turn, would potentially continue the postings and cascade.
But a social game company can’t solely rely on the existing user base to snare new players. They use promotions (such as experience boosts or more in game currency) to try to get people who have yet to get their feet wet to play the game. In addition to in game incentives, some game companies use celebrities to bring in users who wouldn’t normally play the game, but would try it out to see what the hype is about.
In the link above, it looks into the amount of Daily Active Users (DAU) and Monthly Active Users (MAU) of a popular Zynga game on Facebook, FarmVille, of when the Lady Gaga inspired promotion of GagaVille caused the DAU and MAU to spike drastically, and then as the hype wore off and the positive cascade turned into a negative cascade, the DAU and MAU reached an equilibrium point.
Companies can use the DAU and MAU data to see if a game is popular or not. As seen in one of the graphs in the article, the popularity of CityVille dropped drastically from greater than 75 million players to around 55 million players. This would be a cause of concern for the game maker and would behoove them to try to start a positive cascade by creating a new promotion (which Zynga is doing by releasing a Michael Jackson themed update to CityVille).