Coray outlines the tenants for designers to create a great social game.  While some gamers are understandably unsatisfied with the current options in the Facebook game market, it's a new market and investors and customers alike are still figuring out their expectations.   Games without a clear and specific price point are fantastic opportunity for a variety of reasons, but the reasons why this model is attractive for investors and customers are naturally at heads with each other.  Investors want the highest return with the lowest risk and customers want the highest quality experience at the lowest cost.

Of course, as an independent developer one has to appreciate monetizing your games.  It’s important not to forget that for investors one of the draws of Facebook games, or games ‘on the cloud’ in general, is the fact that they solve the issue of piracy that was taking a huge cut from the bottom lines of major releases. 

As much as I truly believe Coray’s tenants are not only the foundation for a great experience for gamers- as well as a better path to sustainable value for investors, I can appreciate the driving forces behind the games that are more of a grind.  Developing games is a daunting business for everyone involved.  Companies large and small come and go because they are just so difficult to make and there is so much risk involved.  Facebook games are relatively cheap wagers at huge, ongoing, income streams. The economics just lends itself to printing as many products as possible, throwing them into the market laced with heavy, proven monetization mechanics and seeing what sticks.  

In some ways it’s akin to learning a few jokes and buying 1 decent outfit, then going out and just hitting on every girl you see every waking hour.  It may not be classy, but if it was a huge bar with 750 million people in it- eventually you would get a ton of results.  

Like most things in life, market opportunities and challenges often stem from the same well.  The social market is 'flat' and easy to enter creating a hyper competitive atmosphere where the safest best is creating and monetizing viral channels, and hard. The key to success isn’t merely reaching the market, but reaching a critical mass of initial players.

It may seem quaint, but time was half the challenge was just getting your product to market. The system was inefficient and one could argue, unfair, but the fiefdoms had a way of handling quality: a gentleman's agreement. When John Ford wanted to make what turned out to be the masterpiece, The Quiet Man he had to go to a so called b-studio, Republic Pictures to get the passion project funded. The deal came at a price of course, the studio agreed only under the terms that Ford also made the more mainstream, though also quit good in its own right, Rio Grande. 

In a closed off market, you can work the major and minor players who decide who can go to market. Facebook is as 'flat' as it gets though, so you have to either dominate or cut through the clutter.  So far this has mostly happened by aggressive marketing driven by aggressive monetization.

Thankfully, this is the video game industry. And I'll stack our crap to gold ratio up against any other entertainment industry any day. Investment is pouring into Facebook games and the experiences are only going to get better. CLE is certainly betting on it!

-Dylan Tredrea, COO