Ekalavya Bhattacharya

Since I’ve finally gotten into the whole Social Gaming scheme of things…here is a basic learning.

Build a Social Game on economics.
Think through how you are going to monetize a particular element (maybe now, maybe in the future) before you add it into the game.

But something even more important that that is:
Make sure you build something which makes the user want to pay.
This is THE most important thing while building a game.

Let me cite a recent example.
Recently started playing this game called ‘Millionaire City’ on Facebook. There’s nothing great about this game and its similar to the dozens of games already out there on Facebook. The only reason I was playing this was because everyone in office was playing this game. And by everyone I mean - I had 34 neighbours in this game - 33 of them were my office colleagues.

Another rule - people will play social games if they see people around them playing it.

Now the problem is that its been a month since I’ve been playing and not once has the game made me want to shell out real money on this game. I think there must be half a dozen guys ahead of me in the game but its still not made me want to spend real money.

This is where a game gets it wrong. Whats happened now is that 4 out of the 6 above me have slowly lost interest and left the game. Why? They got bored. Since none of them had paid any money either…of course there was no question of getting a return on their investment.

You have to make the user want to pay. You have to give an unfair advantage to guys who end up paying real cash. Be it in the form of visual vanity - where they get to beautify their farm/city/aquarium or economic value - something which allows a user to earn and grow faster.

Anyways got weeks of experimentation lined up at my end. Also am looking at hiring one guy for my team at Zapak. So if you are interested, to drop me a line.