Innovation and Entrepreneurship

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Gareth Davis, the platform manager in charge of Games at Facebook, delivered his keynote Tuesday morning at the Game Developers Conference. Davis opened the Social & Online Games Summit to a packed room inside the Moscone Center. Davis focused his talk on the changes in social gaming and told the audience that, despite FarmVille, the killer social game is still “out there”.

“Early cinema evolved into a specific language for that media, bringing about cuts and edits and certain types of shots. Every new media brings new content and every new platform brings a killer game. There are many examples: Sonic, Halo, Mario. I believe the iconic Facebook game lies still ahead of us. The ‘Mario of Facebook’ is out there,” said Davis.

“And, it will likely come from someone in this room. Pretty exciting.”

According to Davis, gamers are now willing to share their real identity online–after all, most people on Facebook use their actual name– and this will bring about a new feedback loop between the real world and the online experience. Aside from simple stuff like having bragging rights the next day at lunch after winning a game, Davis shared some ideas about how real-life things can influence the gaming experience.

“A game on Facebook can know many things about you. Your age, your name, your interests, your friends. What if the characters in your game look like your friends, or the game environments are based on your interests? Or maybe you can see places from the photos you’ve taken. This will bring in a whole new level of immersion,” Davis elaborated in Room 134.

Davis also spent some time outlining Facebook as a games platform. Facebook is changing the way games are designed, because for Facebook, games are services, they live in a cloud. Developers can add things to a game after it has launched, they can change it and even do things like test new features on a limited group of people. Designing a game on a social platform is changing the thinking behind games: You stop thinking about how do you sell most games on Day 1, and start thinking about how do you build an audience and keep them coming back day after day?

In addition, Facebook is building itself with Facebook Connect and Games Dashboard to provide what Davis dubbed ‘multi-platform social gaming’. Users can play a game on whatever platform and whatever device and still be playing the same. So, a user can be on his Xbox 360 while a friend is playing the same game on a mobile phone, another one joins in from their laptop and so on. Even though different devices pose technical restrictions in terms of raw computing power and graphics, gamers can still have a shared experience.

The crowd had a number of questions for Gareth Davis, who answered them in good humor. As far as on-going things such as Facebook’s virtual currency known as Facebook Credits, he remained evasive. Credits are in beta, and they will be rolled out later this year, he said, but didn’t say exactly when they will be released them to developers.

All in all Davis’ message was very clear. Games have been, are now, and always will be social, and this is changing the business and gaming profoundly. He pointed to the upcoming installment of Sid Meier’s Civilization game on Facebook and sounded very convincing when he said: “This will be another great year for social gaming.”

Tags: Facebook, gamesbeat

Companies: Facebook

Facebook will finally make itself heard in the rapidly developing world of location-based services, according to The New York Times. The company will unveil a location-based feature at its f8 conference in late April.

Nick Bilton reports:

The new location feature will have two aspects, according to the people familiar with Facebook’s plans. One will be a service offered directly by Facebook that will allow users to share their location information with friends.

The other will be a set of software tools, known as A.P.I.’s, that outside developers can use to offer their own location-based services to Facebook users.

We had told of at least five geolocation projects being hacked on last month at Facebook, but it was unclear whether any of them would get the green light to go to market. (The company, which prides itself on hiring engineers that build and break projects quickly, always has several experiments in the works.)

The move doesn’t necessarily spell the end for the group of startups like Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt which have led the way in geolocation. Facebook thinks of itself as a platform for a whole host of location-based experiences and many of these apps, Foursquare included, can already publish location data to Facebook’s stream through Facebook Connect. As long as these smaller companies can offer something extra like great shopping deals or a gaming experience, they can co-exist with Facebook and even share their data with the company too.

Facebook has to walk a delicate line because it now caters to a mainstream audience, not a crowd of early adopters. So it has to design a product that doesn’t alarm people’s sensibilities around privacy while still offering cutting-edge features. Although Facebook’s engineers have been working on such a tool for close to a year, it waited to see what kinds of experiences people preferred, whether it was persistent-location sharing or temporary check-ins.

Tags: geolocation

Companies: Facebook