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I read a post this morning by Brian Green talking about casual vs. hardcore games on Facebook. I suppose this could have been a comment on his blog but I felt the urge to respond here.

Brian wrote:

I had dinner recently with someone that is doing a startup that wants to do smaller-scale games. He did an AJAX implementation of a social space, but that project had it’s own special challenges. His most recent foray is to make some games for the Facebook platform. His company built two games: one a more casual game that deals with throwing parties, and a hard-core game that has a men-in-tights theme and zero-sum PvP type mechanics. Guess which one did better.

If you said, “Obviously the hardcore one!” you have learned to anticipate my sense of irony. Well, that and it’d be a boring post if I just validated most people’s assumptions.

So, why does the hard-core game beat out the casual game on a pretty broad platform like Facebook?

Well, first, I don’t think that any lessons at all can be drawn from a single game beating another single game. Second, casual games win, flat-out, on Facebook. Maybe that will change but it’s not the case currently. Here are the top 10 games on Facebook right now, in order of active, engaged players (meaning someone who touched the game at least once in the last 24 hours).

1. Scrabulous (casual). Scrabble, online. 569k daily active users
2. Texas HoldEm Poker (casual). 392k daily active users
3. Speed Racer (casual). 289k daily active users
4. fluff(Friends) (casual). 277k daily active users
5. Quizzes (casual). 273k daily active users
6. Jetman (casual). 258k daily active users
7. Mesmo (casual). 250k daily active users
8. Vampires (casual despite the vampire theme). 250k daily active users
9. Mindjolt Games (a collection of casual games via a flash client). 159k daily active users
10. Zombies (reskinning of Vampires. Casual). 154k daily active users

No hardcore games in the top 10. The top hardcore game on Facebook is Warbook, with 104k daily active users.

Now, it’s not quite as clear-cut as the above. The way Facebook measures engagement is way too simplistic and binary. Either you are counted as a daily active user or you’re not. There’s no scalar measurement of HOW engaged you are. I would bet a lot of money that the average active user on Warbook, for instance, spends a lot more time (ie is more engaged) on Warbook than the average Vampires user spends on that app.

It’s completely unsurprising that casual games dominate Facebook, but what’s interesting to watch are the medium-term dynamics surrounding active users vs. users w/ your app installed (some of the apps above have millions of users but daily active user rates ranging from ~3% to ~15% of their total users). The games that initially dominated Facebook (Vampires, Zombies, Slayers, Werewolves…they’re all exactly the same game, reskinned) were extremely light and barely games at all. They’re at least as much a way to just ‘poke’ someone, which says, “I’m thinking about you,” as they are games. Those early, very light games now have very very low engagement rates of 3-4%.

Now look at the top two game apps on Facebook (Scrabulous and Texas HoldEm). Both are big steps up in complexity from the Vampires apps, and have increased levels of engagement. Texas HoldEm has approximately twice the engagement (7%) while Scrabulous has an astounding 25% engagement rate. Typically, the only apps that get engagement that high are very new apps (which naturally have a higher engagement rate), but Scrabulous has held onto a high engagement rate consistently for awhile now. Why? Well, there’s depth there that isn’t there in Vampires. Once you’ve bitten a few people, engaged in a few (basically random) battles, the average user is done. On the other hand, you can actually get better at Scrabulous, and the possibility space is a lot larger. There’s skill involved, just like in Texas HoldEm.

On the other end of the spectrum you have the fairly complicated Warbook. It’s got a high engagement rate (13%) but hasn’t managed to achieve the level of popularity that the more casual apps have, despite doing pretty well. It’s probably a little on the heavy/hardcore side for the platform it’s on, though I’m sure its owners aren’t complaining. I’ve heard it generates hundreds of millions of pageviews a month.

So what’s the right level of depth to offer on Facebook? Will more hardcore games enter into the ranks of the popular Facebook apps or is Warbook (60th most popular app currently) an aberration? I’m sure we’re going to see other hardcore games gaining users on FB but the way in which people interact with FB (less than 20 minutes/day on average, etc) does not lend itself well to traditional hardcore games. Further, good games on FB are as much about communication and/or self-expression as they are about gameplay.

We (Sparkplay) are going to be launching our first Facebook game in a few weeks, and the design process is interesting when compared to what I’m used to working on (MUDs/MMOs). The biggest difference is that we just don’t care about cheating or exploits that are possible by creating multiple accounts nearly as much because as I said above, it’s as much about communicating with your friends and expressing yourself as it is about “winning.” Going to be fun to see what we learn from our first app. No better way to learn than by doing it!