SGS: OMGPOP CEO Drops Tha' 10 Commandments For Game Distribution & Monetization

Dan Porter, the CEO of OMGPOP was able to "drop some knowledge" about how to monetize and distribute social games throughout the web. He put it in the form of a Notorious B.I.G. classic, and presented us with the 10 commandments for game distribution and monetization. He kicked it off with a few key numbers from OMGPOP. There are 4.5 million registered users on the service, and 2.5m on FB. The game site has 2mm MAUs and has 20 games which have been played over 600 mm times. We've been covering OMGPOP as one of the most talented games makers around, and specifically have theorized that their abilities with real-time multiplayer casual games will make them a powerful force as the Facebook game market evolves into deeper more involved games. The 10 commandments of monetization and distribution 1. A website can be only so big yo After seeing there were "crappy apps on Facebook that were getting more traffic" than OMGPOP.com, the company realized that for distribution, you can only grow a website to a certain point. You need to use other channels for your games. The key is that distribution drives the size of what you can do, and Facebook provided a great new channel.. 2. Casual games only monetize at scale Only a few pennies per user is what you can expect with a simple, casual game. So, obviously, to make money you need to drive a ton of users to the game. This was OMGPOP's entire business, and if you're in the casual game space, distribute as much as you can. 3. Traditional model to date = game portals feed virtual world or MMO because of high long term value = competition for you if you are casual without the same LTV Yes, that was really the title. This is hugely important though, as the battle that OMGPOP saw before was the battle to drive traffic and generate revenue from players. Since MMOs were generating a lot more money per user, they were able to use that money to advertise strongly. MMOs even bough Google Words for casual games, so people searching "fun puzzle games" would get pointed to an MMO that only converted a small percentage of users but at a higher price. This left a company like OMGPOP working really hard to get as many users as possible, but not generating enough revenue to battle with the big MMOs. 4. Game Portals does not equal Distribution The portals weren't good for developers, because the audience was about new content. The games were not about long term value, they were about the newest game played today. Mindjolt and Newgrounds are sites like this, where developers' games get pushed off the front page in a week, and there were no big social features to keep people playing. 5. Thanks Facebook. Everyone now needs games. "2 years ago I went to every non-Facebook site and told them I have these baller games." but everyone said no. But now every site is trying to compete with Facebook and are looking for games. So it's a good time to be making games and distributing. 6. Deals should appeal to normative behaviour in the space. Otherwise pass. Don't try to negotiate with Facebook to get 80% of Facebook Credit revenue. They've set the price, don't spend energy on that side of things. Just take your 70% and think about games. 7. The work pyramid is wrongly inverted. Months to make a business deal to distribute on a social network, and then as soon as the game is launched the social network moves on, the game quietly dies as nobody thinks more about it. Everyone needs to know that the work starts after the game starts. You have to get your partner, for example MySpace, to stick with it and make sure they know its in their best interest to keep pushing the game after launch. 8. Outside of FB - > Go for multiple revenue streams. There are a ton of sites and advertisers are finally reading their "50th article about Facebook" and are realizing that there's tons of money. Diversify your revenue streams for varying advertisers and virtual goods. 9. Beware of spaghetti If you start to develop things for specific partners, you'll end up with spaghetti codebase. This happens a lot when you try to back-code a game to work on various platforms like OpenSocial and MySpace. Think about cool partners like Viximo or HeyZap to help with this. 10. Like all relationships it starts out great. It doesn't work that way, a ton of work comes afterwards. As some games fail, some expectations aren't met, things will get awkward. Make sure to work hard to keep the communication open and honest, yo.

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SGS: OMGPOP CEO Drops Tha' 10 Commandments For Game Distribution & Monetization

Neil Vidyarthi

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