Archive for the ‘Blog’ Category

We released our Mixi app “Time Collection”

We have released a Beta version of a Mixi application.
tcgYou can purchase virtual watches, set them as gadgets on your Mixi page and gift them or just collect them all.
We currently have our Xmas watches on sale!
We will continue to release new ones so keep an eye out.
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Testing virtual gifts before Xmas.

Previously I reported on virtual gifts. Facebook virtual gift app
Before Xmas I added some Xmas gifts.
fishxmas
I added them 5 days ago and Xmas hasn’t arrived yet, but a quick report:

・Out of 27 items total, I added 3 Xmas ones.
・For the Xmas items I took some unpopular items and changed them into Xmas colours, and gave them a name like “MerryXmas!”.
・User number hav increased And each item is growing by about 5%.

Results:
Comparing data from 5 days ago,
The top 6 items have grown 1.21 times and the Xmas itrms 2.12 times in usage
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Facebook changes due on the 20th Dec.

We’ve passed the 20th but..,
according to the Facebook Roadmapthere are changes due on Dec 16th. .. which seem to have been altered to the 20th!
Our apps will be affected also, but we can’t test anything until Facebook actually makes the changes….
It would be great to be able to do a β test on a separate server. Usually things just go live pretty quickly..
The outline read more

Development Staff Required (& Interns, Assistants)

Want to join Istpika, a leader in the field of the booming social game development industry?

Istpika’s Futureupdate20091211

We’re currently producing social games for Facebook and the iPhone but we are now working on something a little bigger.

Although we now have considerable knowledge in successful self-promotion and broad scale brand development, there is plenty more we plan to achieve and we plan to achieve results on a large scale.

The social game industry is made up of highly developed products. In 2010, we will release an original Facebook application and join the ranks of the larger social game developers. It’s for the purpose of achieving these goals, that we now have positions open.

Available Positions updated 2009/12/11

* We are accpeting applications from intern, part time, assistants or those looking to be fulltime!

For more details, see the recruit page
Feel free to contact us!

(日本語) Facebook Adsの使い方と成果報告

Sorry, this entry is only available in 日本語.

(日本語) ブロードウェイカフェ韓国版を発売しました。

Sorry, this entry is only available in 日本語.

Zynga’s PetVille and what’s in stall for next year

Zynga has released another new title. Starting off with 22592 MAU.

Just when rival Crowdstar has released Happy Pets, this arrives.
But Petville is not made around the premise that you buy and sell pets in volume.

dance
The flash artwork is top quality.

This article explains things so here’s a brief summary of it.

PetVille Getting Started Guide: How to Make Cash Fast(Games.com)
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(日本語) 位置ゲー+モノポリー案

Sorry, this entry is only available in 日本語.

Virtual gift experiment results

The primary revenue streams of social apps are virtual good micro transactions and advertisments. Basically users can play games for free but there are some paid items. If users want to get them, then they have to pay for them. That’s how social apps make profits.
This is an important theme so there are many large summit and news sites which are specialised in virtual goods.
http://www.virtualgoodsnews.com/
http://www.vgsummit.com/2009/
Some virtual goods are called “virtual gifts” which is a simple service where you can send pictures to friends. There are lots of people paying to just send pictures to other friends.

Facebook also offers virtual gifts and it is an important part of their source of revenue.
Facebook is testing virtual gifts.

Istpika has tested virtual gifts for the last month. Here is our report.
True Happy Aquarium in fishville Island Paradise
truefish

In accordance with the increase of the number of fish apps such as HappyAquarium on Facebook, we made a virtual gift app which you can send pictures of fish with.
Because it was made with GiftCreator (well-known on Facebook as you can make gift apps simply and quickly with), it was not exactly developed by Istpika .
The result is, it’s already got 178,074 MAU since the start on 02/Nov.

The most popular fish is this one.
modestly

Not sure why. I don’t think this fish is anything special.

The title of this fish is “modestly”. Senders can send it casually and they might have sent it “modestly”. This could have been the reason why this fish was the most popular. We titled the fish using adverbs at first . We thought it would sound poetic and cool.
Other titles we used are “fluently” and “selfishly”…
… might have been a bit too much…

Do users use this app considering the gift names?
With gift apps, are titles so important as well as pictures? Do senders care the meaning of the titles when they send them?
To verify the influence of the titles, we made an experiment.

We changed the titles of some of the fish from “poetic message” to “direct message”.
new

The result was:
fishchart

There are apparent changes.
It looks like users declared their love or comfirmed they were alive or dead to each other.

The users use social apps casually so it seems like they prefer simple and direct message not significant message you have to think about what the senders really trying to say (and maybe they want humour in their messages!?)

We expect that not only virtual games but also virtual gifts will be spread out in the world from now and we’ve been focussing on them. In social games, whether you send a cow or an energy pack, it’s all the one similar gifting function. To get more users, we keep trying to gain know-how.

Adverse Selection

We thought this was a great article.

Adverse Selection

Due to differences in the information that buyers and sellers have, the efficient allocation of resources to the buy and sell market mechanism can be put out of kilter. And quality products can disappear from the market. A famous example of this is illustrated by the economist George Akerlof. He explains that care sale yards know best when it comes to whether or not a car has been in an accident or whether or not it will be have one. All the buyer has is the seller’s word, this is the assymetry of information. In this case the buyer will only purchase the vehicle for a lower price than the average between the cost of one thats been in an accident and one that hasn’t. The result is damaged vehicles are sold for more and quality vehicles are taken off the market by their owners. Due to the assymetry of information the used car market becomes flooded with damaged vehicles and quality vehicles decline and adverse selections are made.

Akerlof pointed out that quality assurances and brand chains or franchises peddled by car dealers rectify the information assymetry and they are giving back confidence to the customer. newsweek日本版1175号より

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_selection

We can apply this to iPhone apps that don’t stand out or sell well.
Price wars and apps that are just quick attempts at a few $$ are the norm and it’s difficult for high quality apps to get to the higher positions on the apple Top lists.
Customers rely heavily on those lists. There are various review sites around but their reliability is questionable. Potential buys look at those Top lists and purchase those apps because their on the list and therefor must be good. Review sites use affiliate programs and advertising to gain popularity and so of course review those apps that are in the Top lists or those that will almost definitely make it.
The point being, customers are getting a lot of information about products with questionable reputations.
You could call this, asymmetry of information.

.. I’m sure we’ve all experienced this.
Even though certain products are in the top lists, they live up to their net-wide reviews.

To combat this, we could consider quality assurance.
To examine quality, we first need to establish the “fairness” and “accuracy” ranges.

… As I was considering this, I realised there was such a system already in Facebook.
Living Social
Living Social appeared around spring and in 1 month went to 1,000,000 monthly active users. They cover not only iPhone apps, but cd’s, books and just about everything. It’s easy to operate, you can put it in your Facebook profile and people very quickly began categorising their collections. On a large social network, sharing this kind of info between friends is easy so it went viral very quickly.
livingsocial

living social
At TokyoCamp we sat next to http://www.rainbowapps.com/http://www.rainbowapps.com/. An iPhone dev co.
On their site you can add followers who you find trustworthy information-wise. If you have similar interests, they can become a valuable source.
You could equate it to real friends who always give you great info.

.. can we apply the same theory to social app design ..
No, this is the BASIS of social app design??

Social Appli ideas are in fimilar places maybe.
In society.