SPIL Games' Peter Driessen
On the move to social, HTML growth and why the old casual games model will die
Yes, that's right.
The question is what is a social game? You have different categories, and how I see it is even singleplayer games which startup into your social feature set and where you can play for high scores, comparing features, is a social game for me. So social games which can be very small to very big games like those from Zynga - and they're from different genres, so you can have the farm style of games but also the Wooga style of games, which are much more casual in a sense. I think everything is becoming social, but within these social games are different categories, and I think there will be continuous development in that area. If you talk about, for example, Popcap, their games are social nowadays and have huge success within Facebook.
We're big believers that in a couple of years gaming through a mobile browser will be bigger than through apps
The category will get much broader, while the next genre - and Wooga is a great example of this - will be much more casual and setup a new category. I'm working with some other companies now and have seen some new developments in that field, where they make a mixture of casual and MMO games - MMOs in a lighter form. I really believe that will work well. We haven't seen everything yet, that's for sure.
We won't beat Zynga, we won't be Playdom because we're not a developer of social games. We are much more a company who develops social gaming platforms, and tries the best games around it, and comes up with the best user experience for the audience that comes its way.
A lot of those companies are trying that, and so far we just have to see if that's a successful approach.
I can't speak for these kinds of companies of course, but what we are doing is making these platforms bigger and bigger and building viral elements around it as well. For example, GirlsGoGames.com is big and girls really love those social elements, but also those kinds of target groups are not really allowed in Facebook because they are between eight and thirteen. So we really have something to offer them, and also focus a lot on something which is safe for children. We do a lot of community management and making sure that we do it in the best way possible.
It's mainly an SEO thing, because we bought great domain names in the past. GirlsGoGames is also a name that people look for, especially girls - they look on Google for girls and games. These kinds of names help us to be found tremendously.
Yes, and we're big believers that in a couple of years gaming through a mobile browser will be bigger than through apps. We're taking the first steps there, but not only us - you also see Microsoft and Google and Facebook moving in that direction. Facebook will open up with their HTML5 mobile platform before the end of the year. So the only way to push games within Facebook Mobile is HTML5.
It will take two or three years before it will be bigger than the apps, but it will grow in a very fast way. We've already seen huge developments in that area.
That's always a possibility, but HTML5 is friendlier to use on the phone - with Flash you're faced with more problems. And as well as that when you build in HTML5 you can use it on your PC, on your iPhone and also on the television screen. It enables gameplay on every device, and I think that's the best thing about it.