Social Gaming, Virtual Goods Discussed in SF Summit

Social gaming is many things to many people, but to the 500+ attendees today at the Social Gaming Summit in San Francisco, it means primarily one thing: games designed to be played with your friends on social platforms like Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, and Twitter. With games like YoVille, Mobsters, Farm Town and Pet Society, the genres these games tap are wildly diverse — from growing cabbages to whacking under-performing Mafioso.

According to one presenter, there are currently over 4,000 social games available across all social platforms.

At the event today, attended by the sector's major content creators, business owners and entrepreneurs, participants focused on what's been working for them in this budding space — each in their own way returning like clockwork to the holy trinity of player acquisition, retention, and monetization.

Arguably, the emphasis at this year's event was weighted toward discussions of monetization, with some of the more detailed and captivating presentations revolving around data mining and making sense of game and gamer metrics.

While some successful developers stressed that only a culture of creativity could produce the caliber of online game experience worthy of sharing with your friends, others appeared more content to ride the wave of knock-off titles in search of a major league return on investment (enter rapid development cycles, the deployment of virtual goods, direct payments, and the increased presence of targeted ad offers).

In any case, the event was a gathering of social gaming's most avid believers. The only contrarian perspectives were those presented in the last panel of the day (see Jeremy Liew's blog, below) with those pleas received by a polite, if not mostly silent, audience.

Venture capitalist Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners reflected on one of two panels he moderated. Web site Gamasutra covered the day's most significant panel — with CEOs and founders of Playfish, Zynga, and Playdom sparing gently, hoping to differentiate each company's approach to social games. And GigaOM boiled it all down to four major takeaways. For insight into the microscopic detail some are applying to the space, check out Siqi Chen's (the CEO of Serious Business) presentation on metrics for social games.

Show Initiative, the owner of this blog, will delve further in the virtual goods phenomena at the upcoming Virtual Goods Conference slated for September 23 and 24 in San Jose.

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