Chocolatier Lures in Facebook Gamers With the Sweet Stuff

Most gamers have at least heard of PlayFirst; it's the publisher of Diner Dash, one of the most successful casual game series ever released. But they may not have heard of Chocolatier, another successful franchise from the company. Nevertheless, it is Chocolatier that PlayFirst decided to release as its first game on Facebook. Chocolatier: Sweet Society places the player in San Francisco circa 1882, in a small chocolate shop owned by the Baumeister family (the protagonists throughout the whole Chocolatier series). The goal is to build this initial storefront into a grand salon, making ever more complicated confections and gathering prestige. There are two basic elements to this plan. One is the store, in which chocolate display cases lure in new customers. The cases are kept continually stocked by a second play screen, the factory, in which machines constantly whir, creating new chocolates. Games in Chocolatier's category have introduced the idea of stock to Facebook gaming: a certain resource is constantly running out, and it's the player's job to replenish it. In Chocolatier, the customers seem to be uncontrollably ravenous, buying up even a fairly large amount of chocolates quickly. The sight of their empty, crumb-covered cases gives cause for players to regularly visit their factory floor, spurring on production (running out of chocolates also seems to reduce the prestige score). Luckily, there's a way to do so. Yesterday, PlayFirst added in a feature from the original Chocolatier series: the factory optimizer. What relation this mini-game has to actually making chocolate, we're not sure, but it is pretty fun to fire what look like lozenges and Altoids from a cannon into a rapidly rotating set of orbs, with aim determining the resulting the production increase. Another way to boost stock, sometimes with chocolates beyond your level, is to visit a friend's store and take a hefty "sample". As with other games, this also provides a chance for players to suss out each other's stores and compare decorative ability. It's a good thing that PlayFirst is adding some features from the original game to Chocolatier, because otherwise there's not much beyond the art style to distinguish it from other games we've seen recently. While the split mode of play, between factory floor and store, is fairly original to Facebook, faster-growing games like Baking Life and Fashion World use basically the same concepts. Chocolatier, of course, brings all the social features that are common to Facebook to the table. But the original game series involved a great deal more than the Facebook version, including completing quests and traveling the world in search of special chocolate recipes. As often happens on Facebook, it feels like game-like elements were traded for an insistence on the usual neighbor mechanics -- but at the expense of losing unique features that would otherwise make the game stand out. Hopefully, PlayFirst won't waste any time in applying more of its casual gaming expertise. To be fair, the chocolate theme itself -- what PlayFirst called "lickable art" -- serves as a special feature to rely on. Paired with the romantic setting, it may be enough to bring in players, especially the female target demographic. If the game can eventually lure in more than a couple million players, partnering with a real-world chocolate maker to create cross-promotional, Chocolatier-branded goodies is also an option. But the big question for people who are familiar with PlayFirst, of course, will be when Diner Dash is coming to Facebook. The executives I met with were coy on the subject, but made it fairly obvious that Dash is something they eventually want to put on Facebook. The challenge will be differentiating it from much larger, better known games that took over the concept and drew in million of players last year -- mainly Restaurant City and Cafe World, two games that are now brands in their own right. While PlayFirst seems serious about investing in Chocolatier, the game can also be seen as a dry-run for the much bigger Dash franchise. For now, Chocolatier is doing fairly well, even though PlayFirst hasn't done any advertising. Over the month since it was released, the game has picked up 217,563 monthly active users, according to AppData.

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Chocolatier Lures in Facebook Gamers With the Sweet Stuff

Chris Morrison

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