I am on the Microsoft campus in Mountain View with about 50-100 (its early) tech/marketing leaders - a bunch of real influencers and I get to present on...influence. I mean just look around the room.
Rapleaf pulled the Social Graph Symposium together and invited Ogilvy . They are an interesting part of our Influence Planning model as they not only offer scale but the discipline of email-based CRM. Auren Hoffman – CEO at Rapleaf kicks off the day. First panel is all about social gaming:
- George Garrick - Chairman and CEO at Offerpal
- Bing Gordon - Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
- Danny Shader - CEO at Kwedit
- Rick Thompson - Chairman and Co-founder at Playdom
Highlights:
Generally people see the rise of "social gaming" as really big and placing console gaming into a narrow definition of gaming when we used to see them as the definition.
- Social gaming changes the idea of game sessions. As Bing said, "once you are connected to the server you are always on." think about how you use FourSquare. Its not fair to call that a pure game just because fo the badges but the notion of being "in-session" defies what we would expect in Left4Dead.
- Facebook is conditioning people towards browser-based games. Rick shared about a download game company that he works with where random visitors downloaded 16% of the time while Facebook visitors only downloaded 11% of the time.
- Bing: Will financial reputation scores be merged with online dating? Danny (emphatically): absolutely!
- Consumers would be better served by a "federation" of social graphs vs. the mix of open and "curated" social graphs
- Cost of user acquisition in social games has almost doubled around the world. This changes the fundamentals for developers.Costs so much more to get the needed exposure if you don't have a footprint
- Development of Facebook game apps is stalled due to the financial pressures on acquisition costs
- In-game value has zero value for anyone other than that player (and therefore cannot be exchanged outside of game. Federal laws guide how points can be valued and exchanged for currency which makes global exchange models hard.
Good session. More to come.
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