What Social Games Can Learn From Arcade Games

A little context: I wrote this article around the summer of 2014 while working at Social Point — maintaining Facebook games and prototyping new mobile ideas. The article was nearly finished, needing only a final grammar check before publishing. That check never happened, so it sat unpublished. In Christmas 2018 I came across it again, did the grammar check, and published it here. You'll find some interesting thoughts about Social Networks and social games VS Arcades and arcade games, written with the perspective of that time.

I've worked in the games industry since 1991 — creating arcade games, console games and, in the last three years, free-to-play games for Facebook and mobiles. During this period I learned a wealth of new concepts. Some of them are quite familiar and remind me of classic arcade concepts.

Share the score or achievements, invite friends to play, ask for help from friends, improve monetization... Do they sound familiar? They are currently associated with F2P games but, for me, they are also related to arcade games. In this article I'll explain why I think they belong to both worlds.

Arcade Venue

The arcade venue was more than just a place to play video games — it was the teenagers' meeting point. A place to find friends and make new ones. People spent most of their spare time there, talking, sharing experiences, laughing, gossiping and flirting. Of course they also played games — sometimes alone, sometimes with friends watching and waiting their turn.

All these behaviours are very similar to what people do now on a social network: interacting with friends, meeting new ones, sharing experiences, gossiping, and playing games. We can say that arcades were the 80s and 90s social networks — or that social networks are the 21st century arcades.

Games

I always liked to classify arcade games by longevity: Rookies (new games pushing for glory), Milky Cows (the ones that really make money), Old Glories (waiting for nostalgic players), and Failures (new games nobody plays).

A player's first reaction after a good Rookie experience was to tell friends and bring them over. They'd stay beside the cabinet helping others — explaining obstacles, boss weak spots, shortcuts. This is what I call the Arcade Social Play technique. It was later adapted into a monetization strategy for social games: "Ask Friends for Lives" or the "Continue Play?" prompt when a player is about to fail a paid level.

An important sharing mechanism in arcades was the Score Board. After a new high score, players called friends to show it off. In social games we constantly share achievements (level-ups, high scores, overtaking friends on a map) because of the human need to show off. Developers use this to generate virality.

Analytics

Social games are often criticised for their "analytics-driven" development — collecting massive amounts of data to improve the game in a permanent loop. But this is not new. We did the same on arcade games.

We beta-tested cabinets by placing them in arcades, visiting daily and talking to players. We also had quantitative feedback: a tool that automatically collected player data into the game memory, accessible via a secret "book-keeping" menu. We tracked: cabinet-on time vs active-play time, number of games played, credits spent, game length, the point where players quit — and much more.

So when people claim analytics-driven development is a "video games disease" or that social games aren't made for fun... it just makes me laugh.

The Future

Platform

Arcades went out when sixth-generation consoles (PS2, Xbox, GameCube, Dreamcast) entered homes. These devices offered top-notch graphics at a fair price and let players play for hours without paying per credit. Meanwhile Facebook, at the time of writing, was reducing support for video games and users were shifting to mobile. The same two forces — platform quality and habit change — that killed arcades were repeating themselves.

Games

Just as arcade developers tried to fight back with motion-sensing cabinets and spectacular hardware, social games were adapting to mobile: shorter game loops, push notifications, cross-platform play. Technological advances were improving smartphone performance, and genres previously restricted to consoles were finding their way to mobile.

Audience

Arcade audiences were mainly mid-core and hardcore. Social games started by targeting very casual players and were moving toward mid-core as smartphones improved. Year by year, mobile audiences will become more hardcore — and players currently on consoles will eventually migrate to mobile.

Conclusion

Video games are currently in a mature stage. History repeats itself and the shadow of past gaming scenarios is present today. Social games have existed from the very beginning — arcade games were authentic social games, and current social games are the 21st century arcade games.

One key difference is magnitude. In the arcade era, each venue was its own small ecosystem. In the social network era, the ecosystem has billions of users — changing how developers build games and how players interact with each other.

For sure there are more differences, but the purpose of this article is to highlight the similarities — which, in my opinion, are the most important ones.

Thanks for reading. Comments are welcome.