hi5’s Alex St. John’s Prescription for Anti-Social Games

Hi5’s CEO Alex St. John hopes to change the world a third time. Once would be enough for most people, but St. John is boisterous, larger than life, sometimes outrageous, but always gregarious. We sat down with him to talk about his thoughts on game technology, avoiding becoming an accidental game platform and figuring out how to make the most of social games.

Technology at play

He claims a certain influence on game graphics, working on the first five versions of DirectX whilst at Microsoft. And he claims that WildTangent, the publisher he founded, reached the top of its game.

And now, he wants to have a real impact on the social networking boom. Last November, St. John joined a social network, hi5, confident that he had created gaming platforms twice before and could do it again.

“You have these companies that are accidental gaming platforms,” he begins. Facebook makes a great target, but St. John adds: “To be fair, Yahoo a decade ago is another example of an accidental gaming platform.”

“As a result of entering the search business, they woke up – overnight – with a huge number of people who wanted to play online games,” recalls St. John.

But that’s only natural: whenever people get some new technology, they want to play a game with it. Or, as St. John says, “Interactivity is the native media of computing.” People have the urge to fiddle with things, and when things react, “that’s amazingly compelling.”

Brave new market

There’s a notion that social gaming has created a whole new market. But St. John is ready to refute: “No, it didn’t, not a single one.” He remembers Microsoft in 1992. “Microsoft adamantly believed…that spreadsheets and word processors were the dominant use of the PC, because every time they did a survey, that’s what people said they used them for.”

“I said, ‘You know what, we should do a survey where we don’t ask people, we measure it, find out what they really spend their time on,’” remembers St. John. “And when that survey came back, the number one use of the PC, in terms of time spent, was playing games. Everybody. It was the usually dominant use case.”

“But when you asked people what their dominant use case was for the PC, they said, ‘Oh, I use it for work.’” The conclusion that St. John draws is that people love playing games. “But they’re not eager to admit it — or weren’t, in that era.”

Accidental platforms

If you look back a decade ago, companies like RealNetworks and Big Fish Games and WildTangent were the Zyngas of that era to Yahoo’s social networking, says St. John. “We were the first companies making casual downloadable games for Yahoo when they were the dominant game destination. We were pulling those audiences away, until we ourselves became the publishers, the game audiences came to us and left those sites, and we became very advanced – not just at producing games, but monetizing them effectively.”

“So when you see a phenomenon like Facebook come along and form an accidental game platform,” St. John says, “One of the surest bets I’ve seen over the years, is that they’ll fail at it. They will screw it up. Because it’s not their native business. It’s not in their DNA.”

“So as valuable as that business is — companies that aren’t native to gaming usually aren’t very successful at it over the long run,” emphasizes St. John. “And that means they’ve created an opportunity they themselves can’t take advantage of fully.”

The power of purpose

But that’s looking at accidental platforms. What would a platform-on-purpose be worth? As ever, St. John has opinions on the subject. “At Yahoo’s peak in online game publishing they were maybe – with the world’s biggest gaming audience – doing $32 million a year,” he estimates.

He refers to the financials of three companies that used to publish their games on Yahoo, saying they “represent $500 million in revenue, from a fraction of that audience.”

“So the leaps in monetization and efficiency over the years from selling games to the same audience were dramatic.” Yet many people speak of Zynga’s success as unimaginable, unattainable, and unchallengeable. But St. John has no difficulty thinking big. “You know,” he responds, “Online gambling in the United States is illegal. But it’ll be $6 billion in revenue this year.”

St. John estimates those illicit online gambling revenues are five times the revenues of World of Warcraft, which he says does $1.2 billion in revenue a year, and is the most profitable game in history.

“I know that half-a-billion sounds impressive,” he says of the growth casual games experienced in the post-Yahoo world. “But we know there’s a market six-to-twelve times larger.”

There’s enormous demand for gameplay, says St. John, and social gaming is, relatively speaking, just a tiny blip. “So I think there’s potential for tremendous growth.”

When you see an accidental platform, St. John says it’s very useful to recognize that some of it is secret sauce, and the rest was thrown in for other purposes. “And what people always do is confuse those,” he says. “They can’t tell the difference between the thing that made it successful and the thing that’s in the way.”

If you look at social networks, you might agree with St. John when he states, “Real identities are actually a burden to gaming.” He continues by saying that spamming your friends, business contacts, and co-workers with news that you got a new cow is annoying. “That’s why Facebook cracked down on it. If you look at very successful MMOs, virtual identities work great.”

Taking the socio-path

St. John and his hi5 team at GDC Online

Now that St. John is responsible for a social network of his own at hi5, those observations led to the creation of their Sociopath Platform aimed squarely at developers. “It’s our anti-social network architecture,” he says, only half joking.

It lets people play on the hi5 network without login, account, or registration. “You can go play the same social networking games you find on Facebook on hi5 with no registration,” says St. John.

What’s fascinating about social network games, says St. John, is that a segment of games no one wanted to play on Miniclip or Kongregate, magically become successful inside Facebook. “What that tells you is that there’s some pixie dust that the social network is adding to games that make bad games good all of the sudden.”

When you add the social graph characteristics, it becomes popular. But that limits the audience. St. John had another revelation: “Why don’t I get my fat social portal out of the way, and let the games do messaging, importing, contacting, inviting, and gifting directly to the users?”

That architecture had been reserved for the social platform, but hi5 hopes to open it up to any game that would use it. And to make things easier on developers, hi5 has cloned compatibility with Facebook APIs, so games developed for his network can be used there, too.

Although it’s too soon to say, St. John hopes that hi5 will prove to be a platform that makes the most of social network games, instead of being an accidental platform.

The hi5 Developer Portal is currently open.