MySpace hopes games will emulate music success

MySpace has told GamesIndustry.biz that it hopes that its concentrated push into games will emulate the success it's already achieved in the music business.

Speaking in an exclusive interview published today, co-president Mike Jones said that his goal is to have up to 60 per cent of users playing games on the social networking site within a year.

"Just as they use MySpace to discover and listen to music, I want them to use MySpace to discover and play games. It's an absolute big, big part of our mission," he said.

"For MySpace today, when we think about engagement on MySpace, we have about a billion minutes per month of engagement within games. People are spending about a billion minutes per month playing games."

Jones said the key to games on MySpace is virality and ensuring that users are confronted with gaming opportunities as soon as they log on to the site.

"There's a bunch of other bells and whistles that we could talk about that we're going to do within games, but the real pin for us is making sure we nail virality - so we're putting a lot of work behind that now. This first step we're taking today is about launching a whole new games gallery, making games a big part of the user experience, promoting it on user home pages, promoting it on sign-up.

"We're making sure that when users sign up to MySpace, on the first screen after sign-up they have recommendations, which include games and bands - at the same time. That's getting the user initially seeded with the content."

MySpace intends to feed back gaming data to developers to enable them to better create games and understand gameplay habits, with Jones stating that at this point he's not worried about MySpace making money from games - so long as developers can flourish.

"We're going to talk a lot about APIs, and the way that we're going to give data back to developers, so they can control and grow their audience bases on MySpace.

"What I would guess you'd find is that a year from now you'll be finding 50-60 per cent of our audience playing games every single day. Today it's close to 20-30 per cent, so even from a flat audience rate for MySpace of 100 million-plus users, I think we have a 2-3 times level of growth that we can see within gameplay on MySpace."

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...-music-success