Draw Something's creator pushes back against claims about the game's collapse. Plus: the limits of branding, living at the mercy of Facebook, and the saddest request the company has ever received.
Draw Something, the Pictionary-style social online game, went from being the number one social game of all time — with 50 million downloads in 50 days — to a cautionary tale about fleeting Facebook fame. But not before Dan Porter, the creator of the game, was able to sell it to Zynga for $180 million in March of last year.
Porter has described himself as an outsider to the gaming world, and admits he is an awful drawer. His favorite Draw Something words, he says, are simple ones like "moustache" and "glasses."
But he is business savvy and pop-culture-obsessed. He was the President of Teach for America at age 27, started the Virgin U.S. music festivals while at Virgin U.S.A., and while at TicketWeb, lead the company's $35 million sale to Ticketmaster. It's been one full year since he created Draw Something at what was then OMGPOP, a struggling game company.
Porter spoke with Buzzfeed about his game.
What have you learned from working with Zynga.
People rag on Zynga for not having originality in some of their games or for not being first with games. People don't understand how hard it is to maintain a game as a service.
A game's service team is as big as the team who built it. It is little things like how regularly you release content, and having more power to dive into the data and understand people's patterns of how often they play and how many people they invite to play. We run this game that, a year later, still has millions of users.
But you lost five million users in the month after you were bought by Zynga.
There was an out of control meme that was not accurate. They had incomplete information based on data people could get from connected Facebook users. Half our users didn't use Facebook, largely because as the game spread, there were many older and younger users.
You still lost a lot of users.
Our game was at its peak perhaps the most popular social game ever. It was basically a major frenzy. It is impossible to sustain that. You almost get a pile on effect because people want to join to see what is going on and not all of them will stay.
It's like the number of people who were watching Gangnam Style videos, versus now, when it has kind of tailed off. So we had to go from a manic point to a settling point. The irony is that the point at which it settled is still a very very large number.
Facebook data suggesting user loss after OMGPOP was bought by Zynga:
Porter points out that Facebook's numbers didn't tell the whole story.
Via: appdata.com
There has been controversy about the new advertisement model where brands are used as words. How was the decision to do that made?
Originally we put brands in the game because they are a part of pop culture and the everyday life. It wasn't like overly conscious or really by design. And then we were like, "holy smokes, millions of people are drawing the Nike swoosh and the Coke logo. Man, we are such idiots, we should figure out how to get paid for that." So we reached out to ones that made sense and are iconic and fun.
Were you concerned that people would be upset about being bombarded by ads?
I was a little concerned with that. I agree with you personally that there is advertising everywhere and people are always trying to message you and you always have to try to steel yourself against it. But the reality was people love riffing on the brands that resonate with them. We would test them and they would always be among the most popular things drawn.
It is so low key in the game. There is no messaging that comes along with it. The players have total creative control over it. They could integrate the brand with their drawings and just like they do in their life. It is not seen as marketing. At the end of the day it isn't the biggest revenue source for the game, so there is a lot of flexibility.
Is there anywhere you would draw the line?
You wont see anything that isn't fun, like pharmaceutical companies. I think oil companies and cigarette companies would really upset people.
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