Although he didn't call out any specific regions, a slide with colored maps indicated that California and Quebec were two areas where people had particularly voluminous brains. He added that like Pet Society, Restaurant City has more monthly players than World of Warcraft.įriendly competition was the last social emotion de Halleux discussed, as embodied by the game Who Has the Biggest Brain? Like how Brain Age challenges players with brain teasers and assigns them a weight, Biggest Brain doles out volume and lets players keep constant tabs on how big their friends' brains are.ĭe Halleux said one of the fascinating things about having 20 million people around the world taking standardized tests is that the developers can break down the results by region and see how smart people are by locality. With a trading and gifting mechanism built into the game, players are always collaborating with friends to get what they need. The game is built largely on collaboration, as players need specific ingredients to create specific dishes to help grow their restaurants. The next Playfish game de Halleux brought up was Restaurant City, in which players design and grow their own restaurants. A sofa shaped liked lips is a very popular item, de Halleux said, even though it sells for $40 worth of in-game currency. The game is free-to-play, but its focus on self-expression makes its microtransaction-driven business model run. Pet Society was designed to become better as more friends play the game, de Halleux said, which encourages players to invite their pals to play with them. As for evidence that self-expression is important, he compared World of Warcraft's monthly user number (around 12 million) with that of Pet Society's (about 17 million). De Halleux explained that Playfish's sandbox game Pet Society was created around the idea of self-expression, and he showed off a trailer highlighting the variety of character customizations in the title. Three key social emotions in Playfish's games are self-expression, competition, and collaboration. He pointed to board games like Risk and Pictionary, and how they create memorable moments not about the strategies used in the game, but about the social interactions the games facilitated. What Playfish does, de Halleux explained, is design its games into people's existing social experiences. A medium like movies can make people cry because they tap into those social emotions more readily than games, de Halleux added. However, traditional games don't tap into "social emotions" as much, emotions like friendship, anger, envy, and love. People spend nearly $50 billion on games today, de Halleux said, and the reason people spend that much money is because games generate emotions. The Americas, Europe, and Asia each have 30 percent of the company's player base, with 10 percent split among the rest of the world. As for where the gamers are, de Halleux said the answer is everywhere. They just want to play games with their friends, he explained. To put that in context, de Halleux said a Flash portal game would be considered a major hit with 10 million plays in its lifetime.Īs for who's playing the games, de Halleux said the audience is typically 16- to 34-years-old, split evenly between men and women, and don't describe themselves as gamers. In August, there were 50 million monthly active users, with 1 billion game sessions played. A year later, there were 20 million people using Playfish games on Facebook. Within a month, there were 100,000 people playing the game. They started by inviting 100 friends to play the game on Facebook. He explained the company's origins, with its first game, Who Has the Biggest Brain?, in 2007. "It's about designing and creating a experience for friends to play together and bringing those experiences to where those friends are when they're not in the game room," de Halleux said. What They Talked About: De Halleux kicked off his lecture by talking about the dawn of a new social era for games and recapping Playfish's role in that era. Country Story is just one of Playfish's wildly popular casual games. The company is also supporting the iPhone and iPod Touch with games like Who Has the Biggest Brain?, Geo Challenge, and Word Challenge. Playfish is a social gaming specialist and creator of popular Facebook games like Pet Society and Restaurant City. Who Was There: The third and final keynote address of GDC Austin 2009 was delivered by Playfish COO and cofounder Sebastian de Halleux.