“I’m highly confident that we’re going to be growing in to a top-10 developer of social games very, very soon,” Hulett says. About half of the GameHouse division’s roughly 300 employees are now devoted to social games, and the unit turned profitable a year ago as it got out of underperforming lines of business and refocused on social games. The Facebook Credits experiment reflects just how driven GameHouse is in social games, Hulett says, and also showcases the division’s technological expertise in working on different platforms, from online to social to mobile. “For us, with 15-20 million unique users on these dot-coms, we know those same consumers are playing games on Facebook or downloading in app stores,” Hulett says. That allows GameHouse-and Facebook-to draw more players into the social network’s territory. The arrangement also will help GameHouse in its drive to become a leading social publisher, Hulett says, because players who work within the Facebook Credits system on GameHouse’s sites will be counted as daily users of Facebook games overall. But when we talk about anything other than Facebook, people shut their brains off and stop thinking.” “I think we’re a little cro-magnon in the game space when we talk about social games as this alien thing,” Hulett says. Hulett says that frictionless gaming experience will help make social games even more mainstream, and potentially break down the idea that “social game” only means something that’s played on a social network (Google+ also offers games, and GameHouse is on that nascent platform too). That’s a big deal because it helps usher in the future of casual-type games, where you might start playing one on your connected TV, switch over to your smartphone or tablet while riding the bus to work, and then continue on your work computer during the day. And any purchases made or progress achieved by a player will show up when they switch platforms, between website and Facebook, or vice versa. With Facebook Credits enabled outside of the social network, two GameHouse games that were previously only available on social platforms-Collapse! Blast and Uno Boost-can be played on GameHouse’s website. Matt Hulett, Real’s senior VP of games, says it’s a major step in building a revenue platform that developers and studios can use to tie games together, regardless of where they’re played.
But bringing credits outside Facebook’s garden has implications well beyond a few candy-colored time-wasters.
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