EA Playfish: 'We've Learned How to Take On Zynga'EA has been making huge strides in its digital business, and the social sector - fueled by EA's Playfish division - is certainly a big contributor. In recent weeks, the company has been seeing unprecedented success with The Sims Social, which quickly rose to the #2 spot, overtaking FarmVille, and it's fast approaching Zynga's CityVille for the top spot on Facebook. GM of Playfish London, John Earner, tells IndustryGamers that he'd "bet money" on The Sims Social becoming #1.
CityVille, watch your back!
The Sims Social is now up to more than 51 million monthly active users and nearly 11 million daily active users, which puts it only a couple million behind CityVille, which holds the top spot for now. Earner explained to IndustryGamers that he's never seen growth like this for any social title, and he's provided some food for thought about why the game's been exploding.
"We’ve now proven to the market that we’ve learned what we need to learn to take on Zynga."
"It is growing extremely quickly. I think more interestingly than that and a story that I haven’t heard really read clearly enough yet...is that this game got over 7 million daily active users without any marketing stunts. Again, we were spending a few dollars here and there just to calibrate, but there was no main full spend in the game. No one has seen that kind of growth ever," he said. "I have been at Playfish for over 3 years. I was the product manager on our first hit, Pet Society. I was producer on Restaurant City. So I’ve seen the growth of our early games back when Facebook was a relatively high viral environment. Even in those days and even with FarmVille, the growth wasn’t quite like what we’ve seen this time around."
One of the benefits of being EA is that the company has games on other platforms besides Facebook and The Sims has a strong fanbase to draw on. This is where Zynga just can't compete.
"On top of the 7 and a half million, we then got to where we’re at right now, which is somewhere between 10.5 and 11 million, depending on your counting. And we got that largely through cross promotion of our Sims title, via our other legacy titles, our Pop Cap titles or the broader Sims community. And we’ve begun spending quite a bit of money. But basically, we’ve just hardly burned any of our marketing powder and we’re already sitting about 2 million daily users shy of CityVille," Earner continued.
"Do I think this could be number one? Absolutely, I think this could be number one, given how much of our reserve is left in the bank and given how close we are to CityVille. But I think we’re all pretty humble about it. For example, our growth has definitely slowed down. And the reason is, ultimately, this process of making live games is like filling a bathtub with water. There’s always a drain that’s always sucking water out of the bottom. There’s always a faucet putting water in and it just gets harder and harder to keep that tub full because the users that you acquire are typically less and less valuable over time. The ones who really want to play the game have already been in the game. So over time, it does get harder inevitably."
"But I’m pretty optimistic that we can be the number one game if things continue to go well. I also am totally confident and think that Zynga's going to do a great job and I’m going to try to fight to keep that slot. But I think this game’s got an amazing shot and I would bet money on it."
Striking balance is key
So what exactly happened to propel The Sims Social towards the top so quickly? Well, according to Earner it's a combination of numerous factors, but it begins with finding balance between being true to The Sims and leveraging Facebook.
"In terms of what’s driving that growth, I think it’s a combination of two basic things. I think the first is it’s an extremely well designed social game that did a good job of finding the balance between what works on Facebook as a platform and what has historically worked for a long storied proud franchise of The Sims, which has had over 100 million installs," he said. "It’s really easy to have veered in either direction from that path. It would have been very easy for us to make exactly the game that we knew worked on Facebook and in doing so betrayed what the brand is about and what people who have played The Sims the last decade have come to love. And it would have been equally easy for us to have just literally ported what has made The Sims successful onto Facebook. And I think, on our end, as Playfish, there were temptations to do the former. I think, on EA Play’s end, the guys who made the original Sims games, there’s always been temptation to do the latter. And what made this work is both of us working together, teaching one another about our respective strengths, tempering one another’s weaknesses also and becoming better for it. I think this game fairly well navigates those two spectrums of being a good Facebook game and being a good Sims game."
He continued, "I think we’ve found what is relatively a happy medium. The way that that actually impacts is- what the Facebook side of it delivers is a game that has all the stats that all the great Facebook games like FarmVille and Pet Society have. It’s amazing retention. So the number of people who come back on day two versus the ones who tried on one day, that number is significantly higher than most of our other titles. The amount of outbound virality - feeds, things that people share, - is extremely high. And it’s high because it’s genuinely what people what to share."
Another key to the game's success has been the Sims brand itself, which has brought back in old fans as well as new ones who've heard good things about past games in the franchise.
"How the brand really matters is every time somebody sees one of those feeds or they get an invitation to play The Sims, they see a name that they know and that they trust. Or, if they haven’t played a Sims game themselves, they’ve got a friend who played it, a brother who played it, a billboard that they’ve seen on their commute home. And these things cause them to click the various feeds and invitations at a much higher rate than any other social game. And the end result is, within a couple weeks, you’ve got a game that’s already number two and looking like it’s going to be number one," Earner commented.
"We are seeing strong qualitative evidence that we are attracting former Sims players - folks who played Sims 1 and graduated from college and didn’t have time any more, folks who played Sims 2, but maybe that game had gotten too complex for them. We’re seeing a lot of those people showing up. It’s harder to track in the data because that data doesn’t exist within the social graph in the way that perhaps, saying, did you ever play Pet Society? We know that number cold. We’ve got over half the people who have played another Playfish game to try The Sims. With the brand stuff, it’s a little bit more qualitative. We’re doing consumer research. But yes, it would appear that we’re seeing a heavy dose of people who were from the franchise coming over."
Converting social players into core players
And this may be a great positive for EA overall, as some of the gamers coming into the series may see it as a stepping stone to a full-on PC or console title.
"The thing that we really look forward to seeing is people getting into The Sims via our channel who have not played the franchise games before and then perhaps wanting to see more than a Facebook game can offer and trading up, so to speak. The thing is nobody knows if that will work. It seems like a reasonable thing, and is something we’ll be investigating over the next year... I think an interesting occasion will be - we’re launching an expansion pack to The Sims 3 (by we, I mean EA overall). It’s already been announced. It’s Pets, which is one of the most popular expansion packs for the core franchise. I think it’s going to be a great opportunity to see what kind of uplift they can get from us."
Ultimately, The Sims Social has given EA a ton of confidence in their ability to take on the social market giants. Zynga may be a juggernaut in the field, but EA is showing that it can certainly compete.
"So I think we’re extremely proud. We’re very optimistic. At the same time, we, more than anyone, have learned how to be humble in the last two years. We had to relearn a lot of things. Zynga’s enjoyed great success in a lot of ways, but we have not been sitting on our thumbs. We’ve been learning. We’ve been growing. And the last year has been spent focused on this game and I think we’ve now proven to the market that we’ve learned what we need to learn to take on Zynga," said Earner.
