Courting the socially connected should help make games more profitable.

Casinos for years have pursued “whales,” gamblers who spend quite a lot of money, called “high rollers.” They are trying to entice them to go to with lavish perks, like free rooms and free airfare.

With the increase of mobile devices, online social games, and the free-to-play business model, the pc gaming industry has joined the quest. It isn’t hard to work out why: 0.15% of players account for half the in-app purchase revenue in free-to-play games, in step with Swrve, an in-app marketing company. Winning the affinity of those few big spenders could make a tremendous difference in a game’s profitability.

At the sport Developers Conference in San Francisco on Monday, Dmitri Williams, CEO of NinjaMetrics and associate professor at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication, made the case for going after another species of whale: the social whale.

Williams argues that, while businesses have explored business-to-business and business-to-consumer relationships, they’ve didn’t adequately consider the worth of consumer-to-consumer connections.

“You’re already running a c-to-c business,” Williams said. “Players seek advice from one another.”

[Are you following the inside track out of GDC? Read GDC: Google Play Games To Support iOS.]

Despite the saying, “Talk is reasonable,” Williams argues that speak is simply too valuable to disregard. Social whales, through their talk, and more so through their actions, encourage people to spend time in games and to spend money.

Williams said a contemporary McKinsey & Co. study found that between 20% and 40% of e-commerce value might be attributed to online social interaction. He said his work suggests this figure is in the direction of 25%. And social whales account for an enormous component to that slice of the pie.

“Social whales are around 10% of the population and control about 60% of social value,” Williams said, defining social value as “extra behavior created by someone across their social graph.”

To buttress his argument for why social value could be tracked like “lifetime value,” a measure of the revenue on account of a particular customer over the years, Williams described a study of health records and relationships in an undisclosed town. Presenting a graph of the social connections among people during this town along with their weights, he said the information showed through the years that once people gained weight, their friends were also prone to gain weight.

“What this implies is people make one another fat,” said Williams. “It means fatness is socially contagious. i’m not making this up. Here is actually what happened.”

Social contagion shouldn’t be confused with viral contagion. Rather, Williams’s point is that folk who follow an approach to life that ends up in being overweight usually tend to encourage a similar behavior among their social connections than among those with whom they are not connected.

For game developers and other business, that’s an issue for winning the hearts and minds of social whales, those that make other players spend through their participation, enthusiasm, and interaction.

“a man with loads of social value will induce their friends to play more… they were socially contagious they usually got you to play more.”

To court such players, Williams said, game developers should consider freebies and discounts. He also suggests giving them something to share with one another — the virtual gifts Google plans to feature to its Google Play Games service, as an instance — and giving them the way to pass such favor onward through social channels.

Williams also cautioned that disruptive or negative players — trolls — could have the other effect on game revenue. He estimated about 2% of players might be characterized as “super-bad apples.” He advised searching for how you can isolate these players, perhaps in a “troll pond” (an isolated game area) with each other, to maintain their discontent from poisoning the sport for others.

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Thomas Claburn was writing about business and technology since 1996, for publications comparable to New Architect, PC Computing, InformationWeek, Salon, Wired, and Ziff Davis Smart Business. Before that, he worked in film and tv, having earned a not particularly useful … View Full Bio

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