Social Game Lingo 2011

When you're making social games you hear a lot of terms and acronyms, trouble is, there is no guide posted anywhere. The way I would often handle encounters with unfamiliar terms was either to ask, ooking foolish, or nod smartly and ask a more knowledgable friend some time later. Well, no more! Here is a short but handy list of social game terms and there meanings:

• K factor (virality)
• Conversion (user flow beginning to end: visits/registered/active/paying)
• MAU / DAU (Month Active Users / Daily Active Users: player retention)
• ARPU / ARPPU (Average Revenue Per User: monitization)
• AB Testing (behavioral testing sets)

Wise words: Making art that ships

A friend sent me an article posted on Tadhg Kelly's blog "What Games Are." The article, entittled Art is the Best Business had a lot of gems but the last section really struck me and I wanted to share it.

So here are the three things to take on board to kick ass, change the world, and sell a lot of games:

1. Figure out where your audience is at. Understand what they already know and what they need in order to be able to access your work.
2. Develop an idea that uses that, but deliberately confounds or otherwise up-ends what existing ideas are already doing.
3. Share it, tell everyone you’ve made it, and give the gift to all. Ship, distribute and tell your marketing story.

Sounds hard, doesn’t it? Well it is. But better that than a sobering realisation that you didn’t water your business down enough to be just like everyone else.

Check out the full article, it's worth a read.