Todd Northcutt gave a talk at ION yesterday called Seven Cool Things You Can Do With Buddy Lists. Here are my notes from the session; he said that his slides will be posted at poweredbygamespy.com. My comments are in square brackets.
You can increase consumer game play and loyalty to a franchise by keeping gamers engaged while not actively playing.
Fun fact: Call of Duty 4 has no buddy list system for the PC!
Buddy lists are a means, not an end, and a buddy list system is not interesting by itself. Northcutt uses the phrases “connected gaming” to describe games that share stats, replays, and accomplishments but are not necessarily multiplayer or massively multiplayer.
Buddy lists create stickiness. Buddies can make you play games you may not even particularly love [is this a good thing?].
Three things that help stickiness: presence (see what your friends are doing), messaging, and easy invitations to online matches.
Contextual competition: leaderboards are irrelevant by themselves. On a typical leaderboard you are the 4,230th best player out of 846,111 players. If you take a leaderboard and filter it by just your friends on your buddy list, you’re now the 2nd best player out of your 12 friends. That’s way more powerful.
The non-core users care about stats too! You just have to make them relevant. For example, the default view on Mario Kart Wii is your friend score distribution, and even global stats highlight your friends.
You can use buddy lists to build a better matchmaker. If you can’t play with friends you should at least play with people who play LIKE your friends. Perhaps give preference to FoaFs (friend-of-a-friend).
Break down barriers to continue the game experience outside the game itself. Crossmessaging, between platforms (different OSes, console/PC, etc). Let out of game people see that friends are playing to entice them in.
Broadcast messaging enables 1:many communication with all your buddies. If Joe joins game X, ping all his friends that “Joe just joined game x”. Or send brags to your friends. Even game devs can communicate as buddies as another way to get messages out to players.
Enable commerce: let players know “your buddy has this cool thing: do you want it too? Click here to buy now!” You can sell full games, expansion packs, user trading, and microcontent this way. [Seems like I'd burn out on all the advertising, though.] Contextual “Buy
Now!” is super powerful.
Create a deeper and more rich social network. Help the game be more about relationships than content. Search for ways to create new relationships between people. Populate buddy lists better, import mail, [do local graph search for common FoaFs]. Provide easy introductions between users that are similar to encourage mingling with people you might not know but might like.
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