Lucky Numbers

Like any platform there are plusses and minuses. Between us we have 250 years of game development experience working on all consoles, PC, mobile, with Apple, with Microsoft… and I would say working with Facebook is actually quite a breeze. Yes, they make changes and sometimes things are tricky but on the plus side it's fairly transparent. It's a very large platform. You don't have this processes that you have with the consoles or with Apple - we love them all but Facebook is so much easier to deal with.

The platform tax, the 30 per cent, is heavy. I get why they do and it and they can do it, if you're not happy you can move to another platform. But I think they really need to improve it in helping small independent developers to make money. It would be good if they had more ways to drive relevant traffic to the small guys with less means.

Like any rational individual I would much prefer 5 per cent [laughs]. But it's 30 per cent so we deal with that. It's all relative to what the platform gives you back. What I really want for my 30 per cent is for Facebook to be more of a publisher in some ways. I know this is contradictory, but I want them to help me promote my games and drive relevant traffic to me through app discovery and stuff like that. With the new ticker feed and timeline there's a hope that it levels the playing field for people like us with the big guys in the space.

The beauty of social games is that you don't really know how your game is going to be received until you've launched it. Is that the same for any game launch? Probably, but the good thing is that you have very deep analytics and you can do something about it on the fly. Over the next months we're going to be focused on improving internal analytics of the game and also pushing new content. With the type of games we're making we're not looking at the masses. Lucky Space is a hardcore game that is quite complex and it's a bit overwhelming, so it's not for the average Facebook demographic. We'll have to see what the numbers tell us.

Of course they are very interesting, they are pretty much the only public numbers you can get about a game. But on the other side when you look at internal metrics there are so many different stats that we look at. The most important for us is engagement, defined by average time per session, number of sessions per day and per week, number of days played per week. We look at that because we assume if someone spends 25 minutes on their first session in Lucky Space, without doing any more research on numbers we have to assume they have had a good time - especially when we see that 85 per cent of people who have played the first day have come back the second day. And the second session is averaging 18 minutes. This is great engagement already and people are enjoying exploring the product.

So the first generation of Facebook games, the key success factor was how many free users can you get, how can you abuse the system and the platform. The second was more about retention, and the third is more about engagement and monetisation. We need to see that they players are having fun and coming back first - are they playing for long? And then the rest is going to take care of itself.

It's absolutely true. To put it more bluntly in our case - we are targeting North America and Europe because those are the audiences that retain the best and monetise the best. We've had a pretty terrible time, like most developers, in South East Asia - Indonesia, Malaysia, India. These regions only inflate your numbers and they muddy the water on the analytics side because you'll see an influx of 20,000 people, but right away we know most of them won't come back the next day. And most of them are on a pretty terrible connection so they are not going to be able to enjoy the game. And they absolutely do not monetise. So in some ways we're not spending any effort marketing to those countries. There are some companies that are doing a great job of monetising those markets but that's not our goal. But Korea and China and the other Asian countries they do monetise well but you have to make an extra effort to translate and localise your games.