Interview

Mass of 'gnarly' social networks confusing gamers, claims Suddenly Social's Randy Farmer

Firm focused on infrastructure

Mass of 'gnarly' social networks confusing gamers, claims Suddenly Social's Randy Farmer
As strange as it might seem for the CEO of a firm involved in the social games business to criticise the sector, Randy Farmer can speak with a certain level of impartiality.

Suddenly Social doesn't muddy its hand with the consumer side of the social scene, but rather takes care of the server management, deployment, operations, and scaling of the games themselves.

While Farmer, who has worked for everyone from LucasArts to 3DO, thinks Suddenly Social has much to offer studios, on the other side of the equation, he believes consumers and developers are currently being confused by the wealth of social networks vying for their attention.

We caught up with Farmer for his take on what Suddenly Social brings to the table.

Pocket Gamer: What differentiates Suddenly Social's multiplayer infrastructure from others already out there?

Randy Farmer: Chip Morningstar and I have been working on massive scale social server infrastructure for over 30 years and the Suddenly Social technology represents our combined learning in that area.

So, the technology is already mature and road-tested.

We're truly the only cloud-style application platform for games on the market. That means you can actually write server-side game logic without having to worry about scaling, operations, deployment and the like because we take care of this for you.

This is different to the message-relay structure of other gaming cloud services.

 

We provide social mechanics not found in any other server platform such as cross-game or platform messaging where users can chat or interact with one another.

As an example, I'm playing Poker on my phone and my wife is playing a farming-style social game on her laptop. Pamela asks for a seed to help complete a quest. I receive the message and click to help Pamela, she receives the seed and neither of us have left their respective games.

Is this being pitched as alternative to Apple's first party options, or do you imagine developers will employ Suddenly Social alongside Game Center?

 

It's complementary.

Games can use Game Center for their user identity and we can work with their social information.

Game Center is designed for 2 player peer-to-peer games, where we enable massive connectivity through a true client-server architecture.

Furthermore, we work with any identity system whether it's Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or OpenFeint. We're completely agnostic. Our technology can import someone's social graph or create their own specifically for the game.

 

How much interest did you have in the platform's beta?

 

We work with a small number of large companies, who have pilot projects using Suddenly Social.

We also have our own small studio who created a wonderful 8-player multiplayer Rock/Paper/Scissors game called Bad Pets and a multiplayer Liar’s Dice game called Dice Club.

 

All of this really helped test and refine the application platform readying it for prime time.

 

How do you plan to make money from the service?

 

We require no upfront fees. We charge based on the number average daily active users (DAUs) across a month. The idea is to reduce the developer's upfront risk and only charge when they are monetizing their game.

We think this is a great fit for the freemium model and it has been received very positively. From our internal analysis, our pricing can save developers 66 percent or more compared to other approaches.

 

Is Suddenly Social limited to iOS, or is this going to stretch across multiple platforms?

 

We already support Javascript and HTML5 for browser based games as well as iOS.

We plan to support anything that our customers want, but at the top of the list is Unityand native Android support. Our client library is very small, so we will soon support every device our customers want.

 

Would there be any advantage in turning Suddenly Social's back end tools into a social platform like Mobage or GREE?

 

Interesting question! We already provide a rich set of social mechanics including cross-game messaging, real-time presence, friends or rivals or guild social structures and inventory management.

 

We could easily compete but we're trying to stay away from becoming a social network ourselves. We're positioned as providing complementary services to GREE and Mobage much the same as our relationship to Game Center.

Social identity is becoming gnarly problem for developers. It's confusing to players to have different accounts all over the place. We took the approach to be agnostic and work with everyone. That gives maximum flexibility to developers and a simpler experience for users.
Thanks to Randy for his time.

You can find out more about Suddenly Social on the platform's website.

With a fine eye for detail, Keith Andrew is fuelled by strong coffee, Kylie Minogue and the shapely curve of a san serif font.