Media Dojo

Over 100 million games installed in 18 months. 40 million monthly players. 9 million daily players. Already profitable. 200+ staff spread around offices in Europe, US and China.

And, by the way, they don’t own a single server.

It’s often the case that when you use the terms “social”  or “cloud-based” to describe a company or a business venture, a lot of people roll their eyes—often for good reason. The bullshit to hard numbers ratio often exposes that you’re dealing with just the marketing phrase.

In the case of Playfish, the numbers speak for themselves. Founded in late 2007 by people with deep roots in the mobile ecosystem (e.g. Nokia, Glu Mobile), Playfish launched to take advantage of Facebook and MySpace as distribution channels for games. For quick overview of the company, check out the MD Tear Sheet.

Earlier this month I spoke with Sebastien de Halleux, Playfish co-founder and COO, as part of a research project for GigaOm Pro. The following is a more extended interview.

Media Dojo: Please define social gaming…

Sebastien de Halleux: Social gaming focuses the value on the interaction between friends via games as opposed to concentrating the value on the product side by selling a copy of a game. So we’re heavy on the idea of a game as a service and the connected nature of social experience as opposed to concentrating the value on the product side of selling a copy of a game.

MD: To state the obvious, then, how do you make money?

SH: From a business model point-of-view, the Playfish model employs micro-transactions during the game as well as in-game advertising.

MD: How does Playfish operate in the cloud?

SH: All of our business and commercial infrastructure runs on the cloud. The company literally only has laptops. We use Amazon S3 for storage, EC2 for computing, and use Cloud Front for content distribution across the fixed and mobile web. We were founded in October 2007, which was the first time you could get an entire company purely in the cloud.

MD: There’s a lot of mobile DNA in the company as well, how do you see social gaming in the mobile space?

SH: Today, there are about 1.5 billion web users worldwide who have access via a laptop or PC versus 3.5 billion mobile users, many of whom have some level of access to the Internet on their mobile device. So there’s already a very strong skew toward mobile computing in general as an access layer, especially outside the US. Social gaming is all about bringing a shared experience to a group of friends, wherever they are, whatever their access preferences might be.

It’s clear that more people are shifting a greater amount of their time from the bigger screen stationary experience to the smaller screen mobile experience via smartphones and netbooks. It’s not a function of us dictating that the user must have a specific device to enjoy a particular kind of content experience. It’s a function of the user choosing the stream that’s most adapted to their lifestyle at any given moment. As a service-based game company, you need to be able to offer a meaningful experience to people regardless of their access device or the social gaming model runs into problems.

MD: How does this work in practice?

SH: We launched an iPhone and iPod Touch version of one of our most popular titles, “Who has the Biggest Brain?” at South by Southwest this past March. It reached number 2 position in the Apple App store in the UK and was a top 5 mobile game in many other countries. The look and feel of the game is the same whether you play on your iPhone or your laptop even though the underlying rendering technology and input method is different. The key similarity is that your friends, who are Facebook friends in this case, are present as part of the experience regardless of whether you’re using your iPhone or a laptop. Moreover, your score and your progress within the game are preserved even if you pause it, change access devices, and re-start.

What’s important for the user is that they no longer think of the device as the platform but much more as the means to connect to the service. For us, the “platform” is the social network.

MD: What needs improving for the user to forget or not care about the access device they use to play one of your games?

SH: The iPhone is a revolutionary mobile media device but has atrocious connectivity once you get away from a Wi-Fi connection. It’s typically a use case never to assume 100% connectivity to a mobile cloud service. Managing this duality of being based in the cloud, but needing to maintain availability to the end user on questionable infrastructure is a huge technical and design challenge. Practically, this means that we still need to have the user download a client application into their device, mostly to handle the lack of bandwidth plus the frequent interruption of mobile connectivity. You often need to push updates to the client in order to update the service, which isn’t a good experience. So one of the milestones we want to see is the day when you can run a game in a mobile experience using Flash or something comparable to the web development model instead of needing a specific mobile client. That will require a big jump in mobile connectivity.

MD: What about on the cloud computing side? What needs to happen to take it to the next level?

SH: In terms of the cloud industry ecosystem, there are several forces in play. First, we are reaching a scale with 40 million monthly accesses to where we start to have increasing leverage as buyers of cloud services. When we started, AWS was the only credible provider. They’re still a close partner. But I think the market needs more mature options among different cloud providers, especially across geographies. At the moment, we’re very happy with our current partner but I think it’s important for the cloud industry to stay competitive. The second thing is more cloud specific services for businesses like ours. For example, our business depends heavily on micro-transactions. But it’s not uncommon for certain online payment providers to require a static IP address, which is a contradiction in a cloud environment. How to design a cloud-native billing layer is still pretty open territory. The next one would be cloud enabling layers, the tools that enable a company like our to manage and optimize the operational aspects of running a cloud-based business. Sure, there are companies focusing on this problem but many are tied to existing cloud providers. We’re like to see more cloud agnostic tool providers.

MD: Last question, how do you see games pushing cloud computing forward?

SH: Games will help cloud computing progress because of the sheer scale of demand it puts on the infrastructure. We’re probably one of the largest AWS Cloud Front customers because we need to push huge Flash files all over the Internet. This is a demand level you don’t see as much with business applications. The demand for game services will play a big role in developing cloud infrastructure, and especially tailoring it for low latency, efficient distribution and always-on connectivity. Latency and performance is everything if you’re offering games for multi-player experience.

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