The New Gamer

Thursday Sep 2, 2010 by Victoria Song - Research Associate, Harvard Business School

With the entrance of Facebook Places last week, it is now clear that the core “check-in” feature in all the recent geo-location services has become commoditized. The check-in services that will manage to stay afloat in this tough competition are those which can differentiate themselves through deals, rewards, partnerships and most importantly through fun and engaging user experiences. Based on this, SCVNGR is well positioned to stay at the top. Its new partnerships with the Patriots, Celtics, AT&T, Zipcar, etc. (though we still don’t know their user stats) and its goal of “building a game layer on top of the world” demonstrate the type of vision that vanilla check-in services such as Foursquare and Gowalla lack. But you can’t get the valuable deals, rewards, and other partnerships without a strong user-base and you can’t get the user-base without providing something fun and different.

Enter FarmVille, which provides the type of fun (and addicting) user experience that check-in apps could learn a lot from. It’s incredible that Zynga games have more than 230 million unique users per month—that’s half of the world’s Facebook users each month. According to games manufacturer PopCap, roughly a quarter of the people in the US and UK play social games regularly. And surprisingly, more than half of them are women. FarmVille, Zynga’s most popular game has about 30 million active users every day. The company is rumored to bring in as much as $450 million this year. When I first learned of these user stats, I wondered who these FarmVille users were and, “Do I know any closeted Farmville gamers…?” But then I started thinking about the ‘games’ that I play with—MyTown, Foursquare, SCVNGR, Tabu (a ‘Taboo mobile app’), and loyalty programs. It got me thinking– what if there was a gaming platform that allowed people to play games against others for rewards such as free products or services? These could be simple, couple minute-long games themed around the type of company that’s sponsoring the game (sports, music, food, etc). There could be two versions: 1) games played at home online, and 2) geo-location based games played on one’s mobile phone for time-sensitive deals that are within proximity to users interested in the deal. These games could be the shorter versions of the fun addicting kinds that Zynga, Playdom, Big Fish, etc. make or it could be short quizzes about facts relevant to the company sponsoring the game. And when a user wins, the reward can be pushed out to Twitter and Facebook without needing to share one’s check-in location which would attract users interested in fun rewards but who decline to be located.

I casually ‘pitched’ the idea to a respectable consumer-tech focused VC who immediately commented that he didn’t think the people who like to play games were the same people who like to win rewards/deals or shop period. While the overlap in traditional ‘gamers’ and shoppers may not be huge, I do think that stats such as “half of the people playing social games are women” suggest that we should re-evaluate the potential market size in question. Perhaps the traditional gamer stereotype, ie: Warcraft, Counter-strike, Grand-Theft Auto, etc. gamers do not overlap with those who enjoy rewards/deals on their favorite products. But I strongly believe that today, we’re seeing a new kind of gamer. I’d consider myself a gamer (well both in the traditional sense of the term –I love Super Smash Bros– and today’s sense of the term).  All in all, the definition of what a gamer is has changed—a lot of us are all to some extent gamers.

Are you a gamer?

Victoria Song is a Research Associate with the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School.  You can find this post as well as additional content on her blog called The Thoughtiverse of Victoria Song.  You can also follow Victoria (@victoriaesong) on Twitter by clicking here.

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