Apologies for our second post of the day on social gaming, but the news just keeps on coming in this hot area for the industry.
In fact, the arrival of Twitter and Facebook on the Xbox today is not social gaming in the strictest sense, and the emergence from stealth mode of social game developer CrowdStar is unlikely to frighten Zynga (newly financed as we reported earlier), but both events are worthy of note.
Xbox 360 users turning on their console from today will be able to update their Facebook status with whatever movie, game or entertainment they are enjoying, as well as view their Facebook stream, status updates and photos through the Xbox interface.
They can also post and reply to tweets and view trends and friends’ profiles on Twitter. Nintendo had earlier added Facebook photo uploading from its DSi and Sony has just announced Facebook integration for the PS3.
CrowdStar must be the biggest social gaming company noone has ever heard of. It began talking about its business model today on the back of the success of its breakthrough game Happy Aquarium, currently the fourth most popular app on Facebook with 27m players a month.
Peter Relan, executive chairman, told me the company employed only 20 people and aimed to remain relatively small to increase profitability.
“We are very flat and non-hierarchical – we have no producers or creative directors and if we show that this is a model that is viable then our profit margins will be twice those of everyone else I think,” he said.
“I feel comfortable we can triple in size and both build and mainatain a stable of half a dozen games. I’m confident a sub-100 person company can maintain a set of properties on Facebook that are in the Top Ten.”
Heading for the Top Ten perhaps is its Happy Aquarium follow-up, Happy Pets, which is the third fastest growing game this week.
CrowdStar, with a studio in Silicon Valley and a headquarters in the Irish capital Dublin, was founded last year and began by developing a World War Two game and then a trivia game.
They were mildy successful, but the company struck gold with Happy Aquarium in terms of its popularity and virtual goods sales -profits on the game are more than $1m a month.
The rarest item in the aquarium is a pink turtle that players adopting green turtles need as a mate. Mr Relam says around 5,000 pink turtles are sold a day, but the animals generate even more money by players paying to get to higher levels and complete quests to reach the point where they can buy them.
“We are all learning, there is so much virtual merchandising that we have yet to figure out, but this is one thing – create a very rare item and rather than that being a hot seller, have everything else sell to get to that item.”
