Hi5's SocioPath Searches for Facebook's Weak Points

For months, Hi5 president Alex St. John has been calling out (and poking fun at) Facebook in public forums, alleging that the social network is misusing and ignoring its game developers. The talk is no longer just talk: last week, Hi5 finally launched its own game platform, dubbed SocioPath. Those who have followed St. John's speeches on social gaming will already be familiar with what SocioPath offers. On Facebook, developers have for months had acccess to the emails of users. With these email addresses as a starting point, Hi5 wants developers to begin moving away from Facebook and establishing themselves as miniature social networks. Here's what players would see: on first visiting a game, if the player isn't logged into a social network, they can play anonymously, without a sign-in. From that initial touch, SocioPath will try to build a relationship. When the player tries to save, they'll be asked to create a login; later, they'll be asked to integrate email and social services like Twitter and, yes, Facebook. From there, the game can freely encourage players to Tweet, post or send emails to friends. Hi5 itself isn't much of a social network anymore -- the company only has dominant market share in Romania and Thailand, and Facebook is growing fast in the latter. But although St. John is asking developers to put their game on Hi5, he expects viral acquisitions from outside of his social network to drive the vast majority of new traffic. St. John's expectation is that reaching out through all of a player's social connections will be more effective than just using Facebook. Players can be anonymous if they like; they can invite friends that they only know online. This anonymity is a more important component for Hi5 than it might at first appear. "Real identity is a dumb way to do games," says St. John. "The structure of social networks is a barrier." With anonymous play, players who want to play with online friends will build new social graphs composed of other gamers, and thus improve the viral spread games. Meanwhile, players who still want to use their real-life networks can do so. St. John also thinks that social games can do a better job with their own economics (Hi5 eventually hopes to get developers on its monetization platform). "What social games really discovered is that in the online space you can exchange an invite for monetary value," he says. That relationship with non-paying users needs to be perfected, as well as the technique of using non-paying gamers to amuse the paying audience and create new content. At the end of the day, St. John agrees that he's making assumptions about what players want, which can only be born out with time. Real identity has worked outstandingly well on Facebook; will anonymous play with viral hooks do the same job? Will players be open to games off of Facebook, which for many has become the center of the internet? St. John credits his past experience at WildTangent and Microsoft with giving him superior insight into what's likely to happen next in social. History is certainly on his side, if the assumption is that Facebook won't remain the center of a gaming industry forever -- no website has in the past. But Hi5 also doesn't give Facebook credit for its strengths, like steadily reducing the effort required of players to virally share a game. With its most recent changes, Facebook is removing player effort entirely through "discovery stories", which automatically tell a user's friends what they're playing. Discovery stories aren't yet proven to work -- some developers doubt they'll be effective -- but for now Facebook still has an edge in ease of use over any other platform. So St. John's assumptions have to work out for Facebook's importance to recede, as well as another prediction he considers inevitable: that bidding for paid player acquisitions, through performance advertising, will pass the lifetime value of players and ultimately cause a crash in the social gaming market. That scenario is certainly possible over time, but Facebook itself has some say in how much it allows its game market to overheat, through its control of viral channels. For now, Facebook is still the center of the social gaming universe. Whether Hi5 can secure its all-important initial toehold will become evident later this year and into next spring, when the results of SocioPath's first wave of games come in.

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Hi5's SocioPath Searches for Facebook's Weak Points

Chris Morrison

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Chris Morrison