"We iterated rapidly, but because we were so early in development and the idea had emerged from a market-test beauty contest, the games did not have a sound ‘vision’ or solid base experience. We were most concerned about meeting the needs of the Facebook audience, whom we considered to be very different from ourselves, so we lost our internal compass about what we thought was fun — because so many popular games on FB did not seem fun to us, we didn’t trust our own judgement."
~ - Daniel James from Three Rings on their application of MVP to Facebook games. I find this quote interesting because it’s a common problem with social games. Finding people who love to play these types of games who also have the skill set to work on social games isn’t easy. Taking a group of people who weren’t built to create games on Facebook and trying to make Facebook games with them can end up disastrous. There is a constant struggle between making games that the team personally wants to play vs. making games they think the 40+ year old woman would want to play. When it comes down to it though, you have to make a fun game. If your team isn’t able to do that, you have no business trying to make a Facebook game. Facebook games have a stigma of being lightweight and shallow and therefore easy to make. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Creating a testable minimum viable product is tough for social games, especially when you don’t know how to evaluate metrics and you’re competing directly with the major players who launch feature-complete games. How can we apply the idea of “minimum viable product” to online games? - Quora
About Me
I write about games, and other nerdy stuff. I'm a Senior Community Manager at a social game company. I am Lead Editor for a feminist gaming website called The Border House. I write for Games.com and Inside Social Games, among other sites.
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