Spil Games Introduces Social Feed To Its 130M+ Users

Based on Spil Game’s current usage statistics, the new Activity Feed will debut with over:

• 420,000 daily postings of achievements
• 150 high scores published every minute
• Close to 500,000 new friend requests made every day
• And, over 200,000 comments are left each day

I had a chance to interview Spil Games’ CEO Peter Driessen about their latest endeavor.

1) What significant event marked the shift in Spil’s strategy?

As players in the casual gaming market since 2004, we had a great recipe that was working very well e.g., strong local domains names, 3 highly targeted & well positioned gaming platforms (girls, teens, families), fully localized content, and simple and easy access to our games.

But, we weren’t engaging socially with our 130 million users.

So we improved user experience through a panel of social features (create a profile, avatar,  get awards, high scores, post comments, invite friends …).  This marked our strategy to shift to a social gaming platform.  This has already lead to improved consumer loyalty.

The Activity Feed announcement is the latest move in this shift.  It is the glue that is bringing all the above social features together.

2) It says 130M users – is that all on the destination site or partner sites that have spil games? In other words is it 130M users playing its various games or all coming to the site? I’m guessing its the former.

Our 130 million monthly visitors represents the total number of players on our own social gaming sites (e.g. www.girlsgogames.com) + the gaming applications we supply to social networks (e.g., Hyves, Facebook, VZ Networks) and finally our Chinese and Japanese portals.

3) What are your users’ behaviors like? Is it like myyearbook where they care about dating and want to meet new people/friends or is it general?

It depends on the target group.  At the end of the day,  Spil Games is about having a community of people that like to play games, share and communicate with other like-minded people around the world.

We know that sharing awards and seeing the high scores and achievements of others will particularly appeal to teens. They love to compete, show off their successes, and connect with peers in a safe gaming community.

Spil’s female demographic is more drawn to puzzles and time-management games.  Female behavior on our network of games is generally driven by the fact that these particular gamers are looking for a quick and easy, entertaining experience that does not require a high barrier to entry.

The Activity Feed allows them to display their accomplishments to friends—a key component of their favorite games.  Additionally, the feed shows players the most popular games in Spil’s network, minimizing their search efforts to save them time.

We also have a platform dedicated to girls.  They especially love to connect with others and share their creativity. Since the launch of our new social features last year, they’ve left 10 million comments on the sites, created more than one million avatars, and saved almost five million in-game creations to their profiles.  We will bring the Activity Feed to our girls platform in the near future.  Additionally GirlsgoGames offers girls a supportive space to experiment with caretaking, beauty, career, personal development, and self-expression through play. It’s also an environment where parents can trust their daughters are safe.

4) Will you be opening up to 3rd party devs?  Will you offer their own currency?    is it gonna be like a hi5 strategy or something else?

Developers can absolutely work with us.

First of all they can tap into our APIs, meaning they connect a game with our social features.  This makes their games  stickier, more social, more viral, more competitive and easier to monetize.

From there we offer game developers localization, community management, and most importantly we market their games to our 130 million unique visitors.