Inside a Small Developer's Success on Facebook: 5th Planet's Dawn of the Dragons

Not all successful Facebook games have to be simple, quick, or built by an experienced or well-funded developer. There's still room on the platform for independents with original ideas, as proven by a profitable new game called Dawn of the Dragons. We were recently introduced to one of the founders of 5th Planet Games, the company behind Dawn. Robert Winkler created the company with co-founder Steve Pladson last year with the intention of creating a massively multiplayer game -- even though neither had direct experience in the games industry. Soon enough, the MMO morphed into a social game, and took the shape of a Mafia Wars-style text-based game. However, the two had more unusual ideas on where to take the concept. The first step was to hire a professional writer to create a comprehensive back-story for Dawn involving struggling kingdoms, scheming wizards and, of course, dragons. The story makes Dawn stand out from other Facebook games; aside from being fantastically geeky, it also assumes a level of engagement from players -- regularly reading paragraphs of text -- that most developers instinctively shy away from. 5th Planet released Dawn in May. Since then, it has picked up some 86,749 monthly active users and 28,638 daily active users. That means about 33 percent all players return as DAUs, a higher level of engagement than most Facebook games enjoy. (Note that the plateau at the end of the chart below is due to a glitch in Facebook's updates to its public stats.) MAU and DAU are available for any game. However, Winkler was also willing to share stats on monetization with us, which developers rarely announce publicly. Although based on less than two months' worth of data, the stats suggest that Dawn is also making more than the average game: Players who monetize: 2.1 percent Average single transaction: $22.04 for direct pay, $3.12 for offers Average revenue per paying user: $26.24 Paying users who have spent over $25 (whales): 24 percent Paying users who return for a second transaction: 40 percent While monetizing 1-2 percent of users is fairly typical for Facebook games, Dawn's ARPPU is higher than we've seen for most other titles. Since the end of its first month when it ran a promotional campaign with Offerpal (which Winkler credits for helping make the game successful), Dawn has been making well over $1,000 per day for the company, according to Winkler. These stats fit a broader trend that we've talked about recently: in-depth strategy and RPG titles can achieve higher engagement, and make more money per user, than more mass-market titles. Going for a niche audience, in other words, can be a great bet for a small developer. Winkler thinks that Dawn's success is in part attributable to the game's storyline. "We knew that if we wanted to go the traditional RPG route, the story would be important," he says. "We didn't just want to push things together, and make the plot fit the game elements." Beyond the game, Winkler says there's evidence that the story is engaging users on the application's wall, where the company will sometimes post "lore" that's of no real use other than giving insight into the story. "We see the same click-throughs on those that we get on patch notes and other things," says Winkler. Some players have even started writing fan-fiction. Contrary to what one might expect, though, not all of Dawn's players are dedicated fantasy readers or gamers. Winkler, who interacts regularly with fans on the game forums, says that some come into the game without any background in fantasy at all. "Our number one spender, from what we know, isn't into games like this -- they're into farming games," he says. In general, whether users engage with the story or not, the most engaged users and the heaviest spenders tend to be those that interact with others in the game. While that would normally mean real-world friends, Winkler says that some gamers appear to interact mainly with people they met on the game, and that such interactions have the same reinforcing effect on players' engagement as dealing with real-world friends. For now, Winkler considers 5th Planet to already be successful, and is plowing the profits back into expanding the game -- features to come include guilds similar to those found on an MMO -- and advertising. Tomorrow, Offerpal will be detailing the effects of its promotion with 5th Planet at Casual Connect in Seattle.

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Inside a Small Developer's Success on Facebook: 5th Planet's Dawn of the Dragons

Chris Morrison

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Chris Morrison