As Google gears up its social push, attracting the right games to its platform will be critical. So the search giant will welcome the endorsement of Playfish, and with it, parent company Electronic Arts, for its plans in Google Me.
I met Sebastien de Halleux, co-founder of Playfish and now also VP for strategic partnerships at EA Interactive, in London on Friday. Nine months after its $300m-plus acquisition by EA, Playfish is growing faster than it can hire, and Mr de Halleux remains effervescent about the potential for taking console franchises such as Fifa Soccer onto the web.
But he wasn’t so thrilled about Facebook’s current attitude towards games developers, and welcomed the prospect of a stiffer competitor in the form of Google.Google and EA/Playfish have been working together for a while, putting games like Scrabble and Who Has The Biggest Brain onto iGoogle, its personalised homepage.
If you’d missed that, you might be forgiven. The games are pretty buried in the iGoogle menus, unless you know what you’re looking for. Part of Mr de Halleux’s explanation for Google’s gaming plans is that it’s poor at dealing with what he calls “low intent” experiences.
“On Facebook, you don’t search for a game, it comes to you,” he says, as people see their friends playing or are invited to join. “Not everyone will want to keep their social graph on Facebook, so we have integrated the social graph from Buzz and Gmail. What is missing is discoverability. That is the big bet that Google is making right now.”
While Playfish is confident that people will come to Google to play games, “we are not certain they will search for it”.
But Google’s assumptions about friend connections through Buzz and Gmail are pretty rough. Watching as people play games together could be a better way to learn about which of those contacts really are friends.
“The same algorithms that crunch preferences for ads could weight the social graph by interest,” he says. “This is a level of skill set that Google clearly possesses that Facebook might not.”
And the sooner it puts that to work, the better, as far as Playfish is concerned.
Mr de Halleux has been concerned by changes to the Facebook platform in recent months – not only limiting developers’ ability to communicate with its users, which prompted Zynga’s (now resolved) spat with Facebook in the spring, but also more subtle changes, such as how games are bookmarked.
“For a developer, our biggest problem is not creating great content, it’s creating visibility,” he says. “There’s no URL, there’s no directory. Facebook said they don’t want non-gamers to be spammed, so they tried to push most developers to use email. We don’t like to email when your next hand of Scrabble is up… Maybe that is an opportunity for someone to provide a nice alternative.”
Mr de Halleux cited figures from AppData that show some of Playfish’s rivals losing significant chunks of their traffic on Facebook in recent months, which he attributes to these changes. He says Playfish itself has kept growing, but only because of a steady stream of new games, such as Fifa Superstars, Pirates Ahoy and My Empire.
“After those changes there was an inflection. We didn’t like that – we don’t want anyone to decline at a stage where the industry should be growing.”
He says Facebook should be nurturing one of the most popular activities on its site. But its slowness of providing its own payment system shows that Facebook’s priorities have been elsewhere, he says, such as attracting brand advertisers.
“It creates unnecessary friction and tensions,” he says. “That creates opportunities for Google and Microsoft to create something different. Consumers like choice… The scale that Facebook has reached prevents smaller competitors from doing this.”
If Google and Facebook really are at war, it’s worth remembering that Facebook’s predicted $1bn sales this year are still some way off the $24bn Google turned over in 2009. Talking to ad agencies, it’s not even clear that advertising money spent on Facebook is coming at the expense of search budgets.
Still, even if search and social advertising aren’t on a collision course quite yet, Google is playing the long game here.
