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OPINION: Skiller talks social gaming

by Tim Green
Thursday, August 25th 2011 at 4:18PM

What the best way for a developer to build a community? Kobi Povolozky, online marketing director of Skiller, has some ideas...

Building a social community for your mobile games

Social media and mobile gaming are all the rage these days. The phenomenal success of games like FarmVille and CityVille has created a new market segment for social gaming.

Gone are the days when games loved being confined to silos. These days, it's all about how you can build a strong social community for your mobile games. In fact, the stronger the support, the greater are the chances of getting a hit

Social communities help broaden and retain the audience of games as well as help in promoting them, using viral social channels such as Twitter feeds and Facebook likes.

So game developers face an interesting dilemma: do they develop a social interface for their games by themselves? If they so, should they write social plugins on all platforms?

Clearly, going it alone is not a feasible approach for most developers.

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Building a social cloud for gaming isn't a trivial task as it involves a number of rather sophisticated components – a multi-player game-play server, a secure authentication service, built-in messaging and community interaction, analytics and last but not the least, monetisation.

There's no one size fits all approach here, which is why most developers are choosing to leave it to the specialist.

Skiller provides a platform that allows mobile gamers across geographical barriers to play and interact with each other. The platform, which supports Android, Windows Phone 7, Symbian and J2ME, is best-suited for skill games, such as checkers, backgammon, reversi, tic tac toe – hence the name.

It promotes social interaction between gamers using several built-in features such as personal messaging, in-game chat, and an active wall board. Gamers can also earn or buy Skiller coins, which can be used for purchasing virtual goods or exchanging them to mobile goods.

This is the key to the Skiller monetisation model. Developers can use the Skiller SDK to build games using a combination of 'virtual Gods', 'freemium' and 'ad-funded'.

And because analytics are so vital to making these concepts work, Skiller has released a 'gamo-graph', which delivers a visual representation of Skiller community statistics and information. This illustrates a user's hourly activity, interaction habits and gender/age distribution.

You can see an example below.

To know more about Skiller click here.

Tags: gaming , communities , connected , skiller , Social

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1 comment

Thanks for the info,

The monetization part you were talking is very interesting to me.
I have been developing for Android Market for some time now and the monetization part always troubled me.
It was common to earn money by the pay per download channel but this channel is almost gone now.
If you want a lot of users in your app, it is better to give it for free (viral distribution rocks!). Now you have a lot of users but still no money.
You could ofcourse integrate advertisements in your game for all those free users, but even if you do it right (and I must tell you, so many developers doing it SO WRONG by irritating the users and eventually lose them), the payout calculation is so magical that you can only guess how much ads you need to show to earn a fair buck.
That leaves you with the channel you described of virtual currency and micro payments. I believe that this is the proper channel for monetization and this is what I am using and I have to tell you, it works!
The problem is that if you don’t want to integrate to all the possible aggregators available you need to use available tools out there.
Currently I am using Google checkout, but it is limited and a little bit buggy.
I don’t know if Skiller SDK is different from Google checkout or other tools that are out there (will need to check it first) but if more developers will use the micro payments the better tools there will be available.

So I warmly recommend you (developers) to try the micropayments, it works!