Facebook appears to be moving closer to cashing in on the social gaming phenomenon it has created on its platform and, judging by the numbers being quoted at the second annual Social Gaming Summit, that can’t come soon enough.
In a session on Tuesday featuring executives from leading social-gaming publishers, John Pleasants, the new chief executive of Playdom, revealed its Sorority Life game received feedback from users this month asking for cars as virtual goods, with a pink Volkswagen in particular receiving strong support. Playdom came up with the goods and sold $100,000 worth of virtual VWs in two days.
In another example, Sebastien de Halleux, co-founder of Playfish, said its Pet Society game had sold 20m virtual Christmas trees and ornaments, with players using credits they had amassed from playing the game or paying $2 an item.
None of this money found its way into the pocket of Facebook, which is the biggest such gaming platform with more than 200m people using the social network worldwide.
Gareth Davis, its head of social gaming, told me the virtual currency of Facebook credits it uses in its gift shop was being extended to transactions in applications, although this was still at a very early testing stage.
“Developers have been asking for this for a long time. It can reduce the friction,” he said.
“Users are more likely to transact in Facebook, developers see a fall-off when consumers are redirected to a third-party site.”
Those third-party payment providers would be happy to provide their technology to a Facebook or MySpace or Twitter.
Jason Bailey, chief executive of Super Rewards, told me Twitter should come up with technology, called Twitterpay perhaps, which would provide a payment service for game publishers and take a 30 per cent cut for itself on sales, just as Apple does from developers in its iPhone App Store.
“We’ve been doing this for a long time, there’s a lot of time and effort that goes into this, so Twitter’s best bet to make that happen would be to partner with somebody like myself,” he said.
Super Rewards said on Tuesday it had come up with the first way to make money from Twitter games, with its service supporting the Twitter-linked game 140 Mafia - a similar concept to the recent Twitter Spymaster craze.
Another current trend raised at the conference was the growing interest of the traditional video game industry in social gaming. This has seen executives moving to social-gaming publishers, such as Mr Pleasants’ move from Electronic Arts last week, and the console makers and publishers incorporating social networking.
EA has allowed players of its Tiger Woods golf game to post their achievements for friends on Facebook to see, while Facebook Connect is bringing social gaming to the Xbox and Nintendo DSi, as Gareth Davis explains in this audioBoo.
At the conference, he said he was impressed by how “the traditional games industry…is not just thinking about how to make their games social, but they’re thinking about how to make fundamentally social games. A year ago, this really wasn’t on the traditional game industry’s radar, but this year there’s definitely been an inflection point.”
Mark Pincus, founder and chief executive of Zynga, another leading player, said he believed social gaming could be as big as social networking.
A bold statement perhaps, but there were no dissenters in the room.
