Infinity Ventures Summit 2009 FALL I attended the IVS (InfinityVentures Summit 2009 FALL) and these are my thoughts.
This is my 2nd time attending the IVS. To tell the truth I realised for the first time that this is the IT industry. This time it was held over 2 days in Myazaki-ken’s Seagaia Resort.
「InfinityVenturesSummit is a conference/party for the leaders of the IT industry.
With Japan as a focus, IT industry captains or leaders all mix it up, exchange ideas, network with VC companies and report on recent findings or results. At night there’s a party where people can network. Similar to the GDC and Japan’s CEDEC for the game industry.
In a few words, it has a great atmosphere to it. It’s not just a networking event, people are exchanging ideas, sales results and know how. If there are areas your company needs assistance with, there is usually someone around who can point you in the right direction. This all adds up to a real co-operative spirit.
Right from the start I felt like this was a great industry. In the game industry achieving these kind of sales and dealing with kick backs etc are common. Being subcontracted was the norm.
This time I was looking forward to the announcement of how Mixi has officially begun it’s social app API and the results of such. Facebook has gathered over 350 million MAU users and the top developers for the platform have easily gathered 1 million users, amazing growth. Istpika is of course a social game & social app developer so attending IVS is a no brainer.
We aren’t able to report all of the results but here is a summary of Facebook’s main sessions Facebook: Think Global, Act Local.
Speakers
- Facebook Global Dev Manager, Javier Olivan
- RockYou! CTO, Jia Shen
- Japan SNS leader Gree, Tanaka Yoshikazu
- Social IT leader from Japan’s Cookpad, Sano
- 5 minutes、developed a farm game. Season
- Plurk、Taiwan’s Twitter maybe.Alvin Woon
- PlayFish VP and China GMのAra Mack Growen
The moderator was IVP’s Tanaka.
To begin with Tanaka tried hard with Gree and Facebook to get them to cough something up which was quite funny. Anyway, the Facebook presentations:
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One thing that interests me is that people will take this as, “Facebook will take off in Japan”.
Although Facebook is still in it’s infancy in Japan, foreign friends and those Japanese friends who often travel abroad use Facebook for communication often.
Javier was saying, “If there are personal benefits, that’s good. We want to provide this to everyone and to get done what’s required to achieve this goal. “
Either way, will it reach number one? in user numbers also? What are the associated problems?
Can the number 1 social network facebook be number 1 in Japan also? These are the kind of questions likely to be asked in the near future. I’d ask people to avoid such commentary.
When Facebook opened up their social API’s Playfish jumped right in with games and sent system requests firing at Facebook. Facebook listened to all of those and Playfish displayed their co-operative intent to not only work for the user, but the social network system as a whole.
Facebook has also made many changes to benefit the Japanese community, I look forward to the day when Japan really starts to get into it.
Recently I was able to chat and exchange cards with Rekoo CEO, Patrick!
I explained this to him, Playing with insects everyday at home which put a smile on his face.
Patrick mentioned in his presentation that when he was on the bus from the Narita airport he spied someone playing Sunshine Farm on their phone and when he asked them how it was, they couldn’t reply in words but just gave him a big smile. They love it.
Patrick went on to explain that Sunshine Farm was developed in China but is now the number 1 app in Japan. They did it even with a difference in culture so Japanese app developers can do the opposite.
Social games aren’t played alone for entertainment like console games, but rather with friends with communication the core. I used to be a part of the games industry, now I’m in the social game industry. I realised that games were often based on the “tag game” principle, so the game’s win and lose rule format is not what counts but rather the communication with the other players. Monster Hunter was a hit because everyone got together and played as a team. Social games have just taken that part of gaming and run with it.
Just before the conference, Playfish was bought by EA this news came out. EA also made huge layoffs and replaced those with Playfish the world number 2 social game company. What does this mean?
At times social games are compared to console games. These kind of comments cheap , low quality are often made. We don’t need that kind of standard for tag-type games.
Patrick also mentioned, “users can communicate even without words.”
So social games are communication that’s working towards a global kind of peace. We believe in this at Istpika!
p.s.
One more important point.
I remember back to when I played at game centers and got my 3 character name in the high score leaderboards. I remember continuing to use the same name and feeling left out when I wasn’t listed! Those were the social parts of gaming back then. Being the first to clear Dragin Quest 3 and telling my mates was being social, being socially reqarded.
Now that I make social games I realise I played console games for self satisfaction!
His handle was KID, I was CHA. He was a bit of a brat but we were mates at game centers.
