apps

Candy Crush Saga: On the One Hit Wonder in Gaming Apps

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This is a very smart take from James Surowiecki on the one-hit wonder game “Candy Crush Saga,” which is propelling the maker of the gamer, King Digital Entertainment, to file for an IPO:

In its I.P.O. filing, King claims that a “unique and differentiated model” for developing games will enable it to create new hits, and plenty of analysts believe that King has cracked the code of hooking consumers. But that’s unlikely. The world of pop culture contains many more one-hit wonders than hit factories. After all, luck plays a huge role (is there really a good explanation for the hula-hoop frenzy of the fifties?), and, more fundamentally, serial innovation is just tough: studies suggest that most new products fail. In the gaming industry, success has always been highly unpredictable. Parker Brothers, according to a history of the company, found that there was no secret formula: products that tested well often flopped in the marketplace, while “an in-house flop could become the hit of the industry.” It says something that King, which has been making games for a decade, had profits of just $7.8 million in 2012. The company didn’t make eighty times more in 2013 because it had cracked a code; it just caught lightning in a bottle.

If you read King Digital Entertainment’s F-1 carefully, you’ll notice this statement:

Our top three games accounted for 94% of our gross bookings in 2013. This compares to 61% of our gross bookings in 2012. As we continue to launch new games, we anticipate that the concentration of gross bookings across our top games will decline.

Those top three games are Candy Crush Saga, Pet Rescue Saga and Farm Heroes Saga. All of those games sound like a fad, as evidenced by this statement:

Gross bookings in the quarter ended December 31, 2013 slightly declined compared to the quarter ended September 30, 2013. The decline was driven by a decrease in Candy Crush Saga gross bookings, which was mostly offset by an increase in gross bookings across all of our other games. This growth in the other games was driven by a further diversification of our portfolio in the mobile channel as we released more games on that channel in the middle and later part of 2013.

I think, as an individual investor, you’d have to be a fool to buy into this IPO. The word “decline” appears 35 times in the F-1. But you can’t blame the owners for wanting to cash out quickly.

 

Hinge: A Dating App Developed by a Military Contractor

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The Verge reports on one John Kleint, a former military contractor who’s now switched gears and is helping develop a dating app called Hinge:

When Kleint first started working at Hinge, in a DC office not far from his old defense gig, the first challenge was understanding his new data set — tens of thousands of completely harmless Facebook users. On a good day at his old job, nobody got hurt, and now, a good day is when Hinge receives an email from two soul mates who found each other using the service. Hinge doesn’t ask the usual array of questions like “Do you believe in God?” from its users, and instead relies on pre-existing signals to make assumptions about you. Solely by examining your friends and interests, the service can predict your political leaning, your age, your sexual orientation, and your race. Kleint works on the algorithms and machine learning techniques to make it all work.

“There are certain factors that go into a stable long-term relationship, and you can infer some of those factors from your friends,” he says. “There’s no explicit equation. There’s no guessing that likes should have 20 percent weight and attraction should be 30 percent.” Picking matches is especially hard since different people have different tastes. Hinge takes the opposite approach to some dating sites like OkCupid with overt “hot or not” meters and percentage odds of being a a match. And unlike dating services that simply pair you with somebody who’s also obsessed with Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back,Hinge uses that data to learn other things about you. Kleint won’t expose Hinge’s secret sauce, but points to a study by researchers at Cambridge University who created an algorithm that correctly predicts male sexuality 88 percent of the time, and is 95 percent accurate at distinguishing between African Americans and Caucasian Americans, without ever having seen a photo.

The app is in limited release so far: Washington D.C. and New York City, primarily.

Is Your iPhone App Making You Fat?

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Kathy Sierra hasn’t blogged in years(1), but she’s written something new this week about willpower, self-control, and cognitive drain. In particular, she posits that many apps that you use on your phone deplete your cognitive resources, which make it easy for you to succumb to unwanted things (like eating more cookies, etc):

An experiment asked one group of dogs to sit, just sit, nothing else, for a few minutes before being released to play with their favorite treat “puzzle” toy (the ones where the dog has to work at getting the treats out of it). The other group of dogs were allowed to just hang out in their crates before getting the treat puzzle.

You know where this goes: the dogs that had to sit — exercising self-control — gave up on the puzzle much earlier than the dogs that were just hanging out in their crate.The dogs that were NOT burning cognitive resources being obedient had more determination and mental/emotional energy for solving the puzzle. Think about that next time you ask Sparky to be patient. His cognitive resources are easily-depleted too.

Now think about what we’re doing to our users.

If your UX asks the user to make choices, for example, even if those choices are both clear and useful, the act of deciding is a cognitive drain. And not just while they’re deciding… even after we choose, an unconscious cognitive background thread is slowly consuming/leaking resources, “Wasthat the right choice?” 

If your app is confusing and your tech support / FAQ isn’t helpful, you’re drawing down my scarce, precious, cognitive resources. If your app behaves counter-intuitively – even just once – I’ll leak cog resources every time I use it, forever, wondering, “wait, did that do what I expected?”. Or let’s say your app is super easy to use, but designed and tuned for persuasive brain hacks (“nudges”, gamification, behavioral tricks, etc.) to keep me “engaged” for your benefit, not mine (lookin’ at you, Zynga)… you’ve still drained my cognitive resources.

And when I back away from the screen and walk to the kitchen…

 Your app makes me fat.

I am not convinced entirely, but it does raise some good questions about the direction of modern-day distractions and our cognitive load.

Worth reading in entirety here.

Naruatsu Baba Is 35-Year-Old Billionaire With Zombie and Bear Apps

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Bloomberg reports that Naruatsu Baba, the 35-year-old founder of Japanese smartphone game maker Colopl Inc. (3668), has become one of the youngest billionaires in the world as the company’s stock has increased sevenfold since its December initial share sale:

One of its free “Kuma the Bear” games has been recently downloaded more times than apps from Facebook, McDonald’s or Twitter, according to the Google play website. Colopl’s games have been downloaded 10 million times in less than a year, Baba said on his company’s website. That is equal to about 8 percent of Japan’s population.

Bloomberg itself has gamified the billionaire index —just look at the cartoon presentation updated on a daily basis!

Talk about a bubble, huh?

“You” vs. “Me” in Social Apps

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Dustin Curtis begins his latest blog post with a question:

A question that inevitably comes up very early in the process of designing a new app is this: should the interface refer to the user as “your” or “my” when talking about the user’s stuff, as in “my profile” or “your settings”? For a long time, this question ate at my soul. Which is right?

It’s not something I thought about until reading his entry. I like his conclusion:

If we think about interfaces as literal “interfaces” to tasks (like how people are interfaces to their ideas), instead of as tools themselves, it makes sense for the interface to take on a personality, and to become a “you” to the user. Thus, it would make sense for the interface to refer to a user’s stuff as “your stuff,” because the interface is just a medium between the user and what she wants to accomplish or find. In a way, the interface takes on a social characteristic, and becomes a humanoid assistant by utilizing existing functions of the human brain’s social systems.

After thinking about this stuff for a very long time, I’ve settled pretty firmly in the camp of thinking that interfaces should mimic social creatures, that they should have personalities, and that I should be communicating with the interface rather than the interface being an extension of myself. Tools have almost always been physical objects that are manipulated tactually. Interfaces are much more abstract, and much more intelligent; they far more closely resemble social interactions than physical tools.

The answer for me, then, is that you’re having a conversation with the interface. It’s “Your stuff.”

Interesting.