Playcafe

Earlier today I participated in Playcafe's online game show with Ken Jennings. I had been meaning to try it, and being a little bit of a Jeopardy fan, it finally caught my attention enough to log on for the live show. The show still needs some work - they had a few technical issues, the site could be more streamlined and the game itself could improve. But they have obviously done some good work getting their technology this far, the idea/concept is great and it was fun for ~30 minutes (it would be interesting to see data on number of users and their drop-off rates).

Playcafe sits between social online games (which are hot right now on Facebook and elsewhere) and TV game shows/programming. They will do well if they can hit the right mix of scheduled/hosted real-time interaction and anytime social gaming.

They have a static Facebook page today, but it seems like they could really benefit from more aggresively leveraging a social network:

1) People adding their application (whatever form it takes) and the news feed would help them get new users/viewers. I think today's show only had ~350 viewers - at least that's the number I saw on the player (but I may well be wrong about this) - which is fairly low.

2) Leveraging the underlying social network to invite people, see who is online during the live show and form teams and/or compete with people you know would significantly improve the experience.

In any case, it's a great idea and they seem to be moving in the right direction. It will be interesting to see how the show evolves (and, without a doubt, the soon to emerge flood of competitors).

Comments

[Mark G.]

Hi David,

My name is Mark Goldenson and I'm CEO/co-founder of PlayCafe. I noticed you posted about us so I wanted to say hello and answer some of your questions.

On using social networks, we definitely agree and have been experimenting with different ways to use them. We have accepted answers to our weekly questions through Twitter, enhanced our social network pages, and encouraged widget embeds. We've looked hard at developing a Facebook application but it's a tricky given the saturation of apps and reduced virality that's available. It's an option we're constantly evaluating.

On the technical issues, it was very frustrating for us as it looks like there was a denial of service attack on our site during the Ken Jennings event. We're still learning the details and are working to figure out a proper prevention for the future.

On metrics, I can tell you that the average playing session during our two live hours is 86 minutes per player per session. This is quite high for a website. Also, 45% of first time players come back to play again within a week.

Feel free to reach out if you or your readers have questions: mark@playcafe.com.

Thanks,

Mark