SocialDeck breaks one million mobile downloads in 2009
Posted by anish in company on February 22nd, 2010
Just wanted to share some exciting news — we did over one million mobile downloads of our titles in 2009! I’m very pleased to say that we not only met but exceeded our own goals around distribution.
While we’re extremely pleased with the success of Shake & Spell classic, the titles we launched in Dec 2009 (Shake & Spell 3D and Pet Hero) are built on our new Spark 1.0 mobile platform and represent the foundation of our forward looking vision of the mobile space. I’m personally very proud of these titles, and more importantly, the huge strides we’ve made in developing the underlying Spark platform.
As discovery becomes an ever growing problem in various mobile app stores, our focus on driving alternative, social distribution has become an increasingly valuable investment. A critical component of the success of our titles has been leveraging [potentially] viral distribution channels such as Facebook and Twitter. Clearly the success of social games on the web has largely been a function of their ability to drive social distribution; it’s now becoming clear that mobile will be no different. One of the key lessons we learned in 2009 was around building content that incentivized distribution; while playing with friends does provide incentive to invite them, we’ve discovered that including a distribution mechanism within core game mechanics provides a much stronger incentive, this will be our primary focus going forward. We’re approaching this with a careful and thoughtful approach; we want users to interact with their friends as a way to create an increasingly valuable experience, not to act as our own little spam bots.
While alternative distribution continues to be in the limelight, we understand that driving retention is really the key to building long-term value. Alternative distribution enables discovery, and ultimately is a way to reduce the cost of user acquisition. The question to game developers is: what are you doing with the users once you’ve acquired them? Are you keeping them engaged? This is an area in which we’ve made a significant investment: increasing the number of minutes played per session, increasing the number of sessions / user, and decreasing churn. What’s exciting is that we’ve seen definite validation of the social aspect of games as a key component of mobile gaming; we’re currently seeing a 33% increase in the number of lifetime minutes played for social versus non-social players.
An area that we’ve identified as strategic for quite some time is cross platform; in the long-run, we don’t believe in a single dominant platform. This is validated in our data as we’ve started to see a significantly higher portion of our downloads in the BlackBerry segment. As we’ve always believed, social gaming is about playing with your friends, and all of your friends have different phones. Therefore any kind of truly social experience on the mobile platform has to extend its reach across the top smart phones. As we approach the tipping point around smart phone penetration (as well as all you can eat data plans, etc.), we believe that our investment connecting iPhone, BlackBerry, and (soon) Android will indeed be valuable.
Monetization is an area of critical interest for mobile game developers. Despite the gold rush around the iPhone, we’re continuing to see significant downward price pressure across all mobile apps and platforms. Ads may augment revenue, but they do not represent a large enough source of revenue to subsidize the cost of building most games. It’s hard to imagine how we can sustain both a flight-to-quality and the consumer’s increasing demands for free applications, especially given the current monetization models for mobile apps/games. Here we can learn from our web social gaming cousins; virtual goods (“VG”) provide a much more significant revenue opportunity. Like virality, VG is not something that can be added to a game after the fact; it’s something that requires conscious game design from the ground up. This is where a certain vertical within games may emerge as the dominant model from a revenue standpoint. There are some interesting models out there that go beyond the appointment based gaming paradigm that Farmville has minted. One idea I hear a lot of talk about is the “meta- game” — a suite of games tied together by one community & identity. This is essentially what we’ve created in Spark 1.0 — a community and network of players across a suite of SocialDeck games.
Location is something that’s become hot as of late with the highly competitive FourSquare financing round. I’m excited about a new class of game emerging that truly embraces the unique characteristics of the mobile platform, the most obvious of which is location. We’ve always believed that the right social gaming experience on the mobile phone was one that leveraged the strengths of the platform, instead of a blindly porting from web. Notably, this is why companies like Zynga are winning on the web social platform — they’ve leveraged the strengths of the platform instead of blindly porting from console / destination website etc.
So anyways, that’s the not-so-brief state of the union as we see it. Lots more to come from SocialDeck in 2010 — stay tuned!
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Flying Under The Radar
Posted by admin in company on November 16th, 2009
We’re packing our bags and leaving the unseasonably warm Toronto weather behind to present at the Under The Radar conference this week in sunny San Francisco! Under The Radar’s M.O. is “tracking early stage innovation” in tech and social media development, and we feel very fortunate to have been selected to present our Spark social gaming technology. Past participants in Under The Radar’s conference include powerhouses like Admob, Pandora, and iLike, so we’re obviously thrilled to be included in this year’s group of talent. We’re looking forward to meeting our fellow presenters and are super excited to ‘pitch’ SocialDeck to a roomful of spectators, not to mention a panel of expert judges. Wish us luck!
If you’d like to join in the fun, visit Under The Radar’s blog for more information on how to attend.
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Shake & Spell in USA Today
Posted by anish in company on October 5th, 2009
Shake & Spell was featured in an article in USA Today, err, today. They had a chance to speak with Elizabeth Atkins, one of our fellow shakers! My personal favorite quote:
“I usually play before I even get out of bed,” says Akins, 54, of Louisville, who says a day without Shake & Spell leaves her with feelings of withdrawal. “I play every day.”
Read the article here: http://bit.ly/1Tb0S
Thanks Elizabeth — we feel the same way! Happy shaking!
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SocialDeck in Mobile Marketer
Posted by anish in company on October 5th, 2009
I had the pleasure of chatting with Dustin Rideout recently. Dustin is the Sr. Account Director and Digital Strategist for Tribal DDB Toronto, and is a frequent contributor to Mobile Marketer, one of the industry’s key publications. We discussed the changing dynamics of mobile content and the implications it has for mobile marketers in particular: http://bit.ly/z9wDn
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Announcing financing + release of Shake & Spell for BlackBerry
Posted by anish in company on August 20th, 2009
We’re extremely excited to announce our financing by the BlackBerry Partner’s Fund and the release of Shake & Spell for the BlackBerry. Per our vision, the BlackBerry game is connected to Shake & Spell on iPhone and Facebook, taking us one step closer to “anywhere, anytime, anyone” gaming. Please find the full press release below.
SocialDeck Launches First BlackBerry–iPhone–Facebook Connected Game
Shake & Spell enables real-time game play across leading smartphones and social networks;
can be distributed through viral channelsTORONTO and SAN FRANCISCO – August 20, 2009 – SocialDeck has launched Shake & Spell for the BlackBerry, the first iPhone–Facebook–BlackBerry connected game that lets players on these different platforms compete against each other in real time.
Shake & Spell for the Blackberry is an exciting development in both the mobile and social media markets. It demonstrates how mobile games and social networking platforms such as Facebook can be seamlessly connected so users can engage with one another, regardless of the device, service or platform being used. A Shake & Spell player, for example, can use their Blackberry to compete against a friend that is using the game on their iPhone or Facebook on their desktop computer.
“Shake & Spell was developed on the socialDeck social gaming platform, which lets people connect, communicate, and interact with friends across multiple mobile devices and social networks,” said Anish Acharya, socialDeck co-founder and CEO. “We’re now even closer to a truly ubiquitous and social gaming experience where it’s not about how or where the game is played, but rather with whom.”
Shake & Spell was introduced for the iPhone and Facebook last fall. It currently has over 500,000 users.
Viral Content Discovery and Distribution
Shake & Spell also benefits from a unique feature set in the socialDeck platform that enables and encourages the discovery and distribution of games through viral channels, or via cross-game promotion. Shake & Spell can be shared through Twitter and Facebook feeds, as well as email, SMS, and Facebook invites, making it easy for new users to discover the game.“The top-ranked applications featured in mobile app stores continue to get the lion’s share of downloads,” said Acharya. “The ability to cross-pollinate Shake & Spell between devices and social networking platforms means that the game can now reach new and potentially untapped audiences by driving its discovery regardless of the game’s ranking within a mobile app store.”
The following video clip demonstrates Shake & Spell’s cross-platform game play: http://bit.ly/NqWse
About SocialDeck
SocialDeck was founded in 2008 with the vision of enabling “anywhere, anytime, anyone” gaming. The company has launched several titles for the iPhone, Facebook, and BlackBerry using its social gaming platform technology, which enables simultaneous game play across multiple mobile devices and social networks. SocialDeck’s technology also facilitates viral content discovery, distribution and monetization.SocialDeck raised its first financing round from the BlackBerry Partners Fund in March 2009. The company’s core team splits its time between Toronto and San Francisco. Additional information is available at www.socialdeck.com.
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New platform video
Posted by anish in company on August 13th, 2009
After being berated by friends, family, and investors about the quality of our previous platform demo we’ve recorded a new video, available for your viewing pleasure below.
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Since we last spoke: The two minute update
Posted by anish in company on July 16th, 2009
Wow, it’s been over a year since we last updated our blog! It’s safe to say that in the interim the face of the mobile industry, particularly from a software standpoint, has been vastly reshaped. It’s been encouraging for me to read some of our old blog posts and see validation of those ideas in the marketplace today. Since we last spoke socialDeck has been very, very busy.
We brought our first fully web-mobile connected game to market last September (Line Connect). This was the first application to enable Facebook – iPhone play (http://gigaom.com/2008/10/06/cross-platform-social-gaming-now-on-the-iphone/), and numerous games soon followed suit. With the advent of Facebook connect that number has increased significantly.
We released our flagship game, Shake & Spell [http://bit.ly/10d2hS], in Dec 2008. This has become our key content property, with a very significant user base across iPhone and Facebook (primarily iPhone however). This game had validated many of our hypothesis around alternative distribution, social gaming on mobile devices, and cross-platform game play. It has also driven us to scale our system up to a massive number of concurrent users.
We continue to develop our mobile social gaming platform which acts as the cornerstone of our company from a technology standpoint. We’ve seen a slew of competitors release similar offerings, and we’re excited to keep pushing the state of the art in social gaming for the phone, both from a platform and application standpoint. Our team is growing, the space is super-heated, and we’ve never been more psyched about the opportunity to deliver a kick ass social gaming experience on the phone.
Stay tuned for more news soon ..
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Presenting @ StartupCamp Toronto
Posted by anish in company on April 21st, 2009
We found out today that we’ll be presenting at StartupCamp Toronto, which will be held as a part of the Canadian Innovation Exchange conference. The format will be as follows:
5 Startups will have 5 minutes each to pitch themselves. The audience will then have twice as much time to grill them on everything from their marketing plan to the product itself.
http://www.startupnorth.ca/category/startupcamp/
This will be an exciting opportunity for socialDeck, we’re definitely looking forward to showing off what we have so far.
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Video pitch from the Canadian Innovation Exchange
Posted by anish in company on May 27th, 2008
We recorded a short elevator pitch for VenCorps at the Canadian Innovation Exchange, which was posted on YouTube:
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BlockBust launches on Facebook
Posted by anish in company on May 2nd, 2008
Our first game launched (in alpha) last Tuesday, you can find it here: http://apps.facebook.com/blockbust/
The game is an addictive multi-player puzzle game. I spent a crazy cottage weekend in California this summer playing board games (it was less dorky then it sounds), which was the inspiration for our puzzle game: BlockBust.
We’re spreading strictly by word of mouth right now as we work the kinks out of the system. We’d love to hear your feedback! You can e-mail us , or join the beta testers group: http://www.facebook.com/groups/edit.php?gid=10339704069
Look out for Blackberry & IPhone versions in the very near future.
Incidentally, our pitch at Startup Camp rocked! Lots of positive feedback, lots of questions about the socialDeck as a platform. We’re working hard to ensure that socialDeck will be a viable platform; to that end our API is completely game-agnostic, and we’re building generic client framework packages for each phone and social network. This means that whipping out new games (or enabling others to do so) should be a cinch.
socialDeck Blog
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