The key to making an online game successful is attracting people who ask their friends and then start sharing and competing with each other, Runaway Play director Tim Nixon says.
Mr Nixon was this week celebrating that Flutter, a game he and his team at NHNZ developed, went viral on Facebook after being loaded on to the main game page.
After getting accreditation for the main game page, players rose from 50,000 to 500,050 in two weeks. Last week, the number of players had risen to more than 600,000.
For Mr Nixon and his team, it was a matter of learning on their feet.
"We had to deal with a huge explosion of users and how to deal with the scale. We had built our system to deal with the growth but theory and practice are very different things. We really felt the brunt of it."
About 40,000 people play the game each day, and many of those players were returning.
The challenge was to keep the content interesting enough to keep them coming back, he said.
"We needed incentives to get them to invite their friends - give them something to talk about or do together as part of the community."
The players were drawn back to the game by the collective nature of the game. A number of communities had been set up and were working together to help each other move up the levels of the game, Mr Nixon said.
That was the main aim of social media.
"We have had phenomenal growth but it didn't come overnight. We did a lot of work and made decisions early to manage the platforms to cope with this growth."
One of the keys to getting aligned with Facebook was using the Facebook virtual currency, he said. Facebook was keen for all games on the site to use its virtual currency.
There was about $US1 billion ($NZ1,248,135,868) of revenue made from games on the Facebook site but most of the money went through third parties. Facebook wanted to have more control of that revenue and wanted its currency to be used across all games, Mr Nixon said.
If you used your credit card once on a game, then it would able to be used across all other games at the push of a button.
Flutter was also designed differently from most other games which encouraged players to only help themselves, he said. One of the biggest sellers in Flutter was buying a flower which could only be pollinated by your online "friends" in the game. As the pollination took place, the profile picture changed.
Also, Flutter had a gifting system which cost players to give gifts to their friends.
Runaway Play wanted to avoid spamming, common in many games, Mr Nixon said. When players gave gifts, it often involved a mass mailout to other users which gave the sender more points but did not help the recipients.
Facebook had started turning off the spamming channels.
"People are a bit less selfish in Flutter. They are helping other people. It is nice to put this detail in the game. It is a bit idealistic but in the end, it got the attention of Facebook and has proved successful."
NHNZ was talking to other networks who were starting to see the potential of developing games to run alongside television programmes, he said. There was a large profitable niche market that NHNZ wanted to tap into.
"This is a chance for us to carve out a position for ourselves - find a niche and be the best," Mr Nixon said.
