社交游戏市场无疑是近来游戏世界最炙手可热的领域。过去几年涌现了众多游戏开发公司，这些公司在初创时期就凭借所推游戏获得数以亿计的营收以及掳获众多玩家的芳心。这些惊人的数字，以及游戏社交性蔓延至网络、手机乃至掌机平台的实情，使得社交游戏领域变得颇具魅力。然而虽然这个市场潜力无限，其对于独立开发商和传统游戏开发商来说却是颇具挑战性的领域。原因在于这类游戏大多依靠虚拟商品的微交易创收，而激发玩家对于虚拟商品的购买欲绝非易事。

本文旨在阐释社交游戏市场的经济学模式、初创公司从中能够获取的机会，同时为拥有有限资源的独立开发商提供战略模式，使其能够顺利进军该市场。本文分为两大部分，第一部分重要阐述独立开发商成功进军社交游戏领域的战略途径。第二部分主要阐述发行商进入该市场的战略方式。

简述社交游戏市场现状

社交游戏市场的相关信息更多是关于大型工作室的市场策略，鲜少会有关于独立开发商的消息。原因在于10大主要开发商拥有社交游戏领域50%的活跃用户，同时占据Facebook游戏和应用一半的营收。这些庞大的数据使得意图入驻该领域的开发商们不禁迷惑自身应该如何定位以同这些市场领先者（游戏邦注：他们拥有现存众多游戏网络和数百万广告营销预算）相抗衡，这促使他们对此望而却步。

好消息是确有独立开发商和发行商无需斥资百万资金就成功推出营收破百万的游戏。下文我们将详细分析独立开发商可以采用何种开发、营销和运营策略成功媲美这些行业巨头。

营收等式

社交游戏的多数营收均来自于微交易，但只有0.5%-2.5%的活跃玩家为游戏掏钱。因此，对于想要成功创收的公司来说，拥有数十万至上百万的活跃用户是其营收基础。RockYou首席执行官Lisa Marino认为，游戏日均营收为每1000名活跃用户创收10-30美元。这意味着，如果玩家的年均DAU（日活跃用户）为10万，那么游戏每年的营收就可达36.5万-100多万美元。这100多万并非Zynga的年均营收，而是针对独立开发商而言，这是一个很好的转变，独立开发商因此得以创建势头颇好的社交游戏公司。

参照appdata.com的开发商参数我们可以发现，众多诸如 Broken Bulb Studios、Bitryhmes和Tall Tree games的独立开发商拥有超过10万的DAU。如果Lisa的数据颇具可信度的话，那么我们可以假设他们每年的营收有望达数百万美元。所以如果开发商能够维持类似的用户数量，那么其营收也有可能达到数百万美元。

但是要如何做到呢？10万的DAU理论上看很美好，但开发商们要如何掳获这些用户呢？

游戏的制胜法宝

游戏设计是关键

为何有些游戏能够维持众多用户，从中获得颇好营收，而有些游戏却惨淡收场呢？原因很复杂，但通常归咎于游戏设计。社交游戏领域的的许多发行商和开发商之所以会以失败告终通常是源于游戏设计，所以我们有必要好好研究这个方面。

社交游戏设计的核心组成部分：

* 关注细分市场：瞄准细分市场，并使自己别具一格

* 游戏趣味性/用户粘性：核心游戏机制对于吸引用户表现如何

* 回访奖励：回访用户（游戏邦注：如检查农作物和补充能量）能够从中获得何种奖励

* 社交互动/身份：玩家能够通过何种有意义的方式同好友或者其他Facebook用户互动，玩家如何在众多其他玩家中建立起自己的独特地位。

* 进展：游戏应该具有合理的进展速度

* 虚拟交易奖励：玩家通过购买道具推动游戏进展能够从中获得何种奖励

* 内容更新：开发商如何通过内容更新维持用户粘性

其中至关重要的一点是，开发商应该瞄准用户认为有趣且颇具吸引力的尚有创新和游戏开发空间的细分市场。开发商如能做到这点，其胜算将倍增。

开发成本

开发商也许能够在细分市场取得成功，但其很难保证首次推出游戏就能大获成功。开发商应该考虑那些资金风险呢？

开发：

据Zygna表示，社交游戏的开发成本大概在10-30万美元之间，开发周期为1-3个月。独立开发商依据团队成员的不同，开发成本和周期可能低于此标准。有些团队拥有充足的资金，人员配置齐全，而有些团队仅由几位创始人或者创始人加几名雇员组成。通常，拥有充足资金和配备有齐全人员的团队由于需要支撑整个团队，开销均会突破10万美元。而只有小团队公司或者仅由创始人组成的公司能够开发5万美元以下的优质游戏。

营销：

发行是开发商面临的另一挑战。如果开发商需要依靠成千上万的用户来实现创收，那么他们就得设法掳获这些用户的芳心。实现这一目的途径多种多样，其中包括Facebook广告、在其他的Facebook游戏购置广告及其他免费渠道，下文将逐一详细阐述。

如果开发商拥有足够的资金，购买Facebook广告（游戏邦注：付费方式为每安装一次0.5-3美元）将是推广游戏最有效的途径。如果开发商是想要获取10万名用户，这将会非常昂贵的方式（介于5-10万美元之间），在这方面，热门游戏开发商更具优势，因此他们可以购买多个广告，可以在热门游戏中推广新游戏。

而独立开发商在入驻市场的时候通常只有少数资本，他们无法承担5万美元的营销预算，特别是在他们无从知晓首款游戏成功几率的情况下。幸好独立开发商还可以寻求其他解决途径，下文我们将进行详细分析。

运营：

开发商运营游戏通常注重两个方面：1.合理管理扩充游戏的加载 2.不断推出新的游戏内容和功能，保持用户粘性。

众多独立开发商选择Amazon EC2或者Rackspace之类的云解决方案，这是因为开发商只愿为实际使用的频宽付费。供应商在自己的网站公开价位，但据我们的个人经验来看，5万的DAU每月可以获取3000美元的收入，然而相比开发成本而言，这几乎是行不通的。

更多的资金通常用于支持团队的运作，团队通常由4-5人组成（游戏邦注：1人负责服务器开发，1人负责Flash开发，2名美工，1名测试员），这完全取决于开发商支付给员工的工资，这笔费用可以控制在每月1万美元之内，也可以突破3万美元。这一支出取决于开发商新推出的内容数量以及开发商给予员工的待遇。

综合成本：

以下是对游戏生命周期内各环节的估计成本：

对于任何开发商来说，最佳状态就是在不减少任何机会成本的情况下以尽可能低的成本发行新游戏。接下来我们将详细探讨实现此目标的策略。

设计和开发策略

瞄准细分市场：

瞄准细分市场的游戏比模仿市场先驱的游戏胜算更大。原因在于开发者如果无法像市场领先者如此具有吸引力，玩家拥有更多其他选择机会。如果开发商关注细分市场人群，那么其将很可能大获成功。这一策略在《Backyard Monsters》（少数即时战略游戏之一）、《Wild Ones》（即时战斗游戏）和《Car Town》（汽车竞赛游戏）之类的游戏得到淋漓尽致的体现。

保持简单风格，尽早发行，且让参数指导游戏的随后发展：

社交游戏以网络为生，内容更新不费吹灰之力。一旦开发商安装了核心游戏机制和经济功能，且确保游戏不存在漏洞，那么游戏便可发行，开发商因此能够尽早确认游戏，收获初期资金，支撑游戏未来发展。

寻找合作伙伴：

几大成绩显赫的独立开发商都是同各有所长的合作伙伴联手开发游戏，游戏大多采用免费形式。如果开发商能够找到拥有合适技能的合作伙伴，那么零投资开发将会是个行之有效的方法。

游戏营销和获取用户：

开发商的目标都是希望花最少资金获取最多用户。获取庞大用户群通常需要花费数以万计的费用，因此开发商若能找到经济的用户获取方式必将处于有利地位。以下就是获取用户的经济方式。

借助免费广告网站传播游戏：

Applifier、Appstream或者VIP游戏网站之类的免费广告网站都能帮助开发商宣传广告（游戏邦注：通过在其他社交游戏的顶部刊登横幅广告）。这些网站均为免费，且能够帮助开发商在《nightclub city》之类的热门游戏刊登横幅广告，所以开发商能够深入这些游戏的项目之中，获得大量免费广告资源。

其他免费广告网站还包括Coinwhale，其主要为组合社交游戏出售折扣游戏积分。通过加入网站之中，开发商得以被纳入网站的游戏列表，网站为这些游戏出售积分，开展更多免费推广活动。

游戏发行瞄准Facebook以外的社交网站，充分利用免费宣传：

Facebook并非游戏发行的唯一社交网络平台。有成千上万的玩家游走于Facebook之外的网站，他们体验游戏，和Facebook用户一样进行虚拟交易。这些平台很多对游戏内容如饥似渴，愿意为开发商提供免费宣传活动，帮助其获得最初用户基础。通过将游戏发行于这些平台，开发商的流量和新用户能够得到很大发展。

许多开发商认为致力这些网站很难物有所值，因为利用每个网站的社交、病毒式传播和付费功能都需要付出极大的努力。如果开发商决定亲自付出实践，或许能够从中获得回报。社交游戏开发商Maygem为独立开发商提供了一个名为APPwalk的解决方案，开发商能够通过单一API将社交游戏植入其他社交网站，充分利用网站的病毒式传播、社交和付费功能。这个工具使得开发商能够提供单一Facebook API同时于11个网站（游戏邦注：如Orkut、Hi5和Netlog）发行游戏，在这些网站获得免费宣传和广告。

本土化：

瞄准于其他玩家的游戏都能获得较快增长率。如果开发商能够将游戏本土化，将会获得比预期多得多的用户群。

开展小型付费营销活动：

决定是否在游戏中投入更多资源的关键是对于游戏的运作情况开展早期测试。如果上述方式无法获得满意的用户基础，那么开展小型营销活动，获取1-2万的用户定能够让开发商从中受益匪浅。如果开发商从中获得相当不错的MAU用户，且几周后DAU/MAU比例高达10%或者更高，这表示其可以考虑购买更大的营销活动。

透过发行商发行游戏：

推广游戏的一个最直接方法是同6waves之类的发行商签订协议。这一方式解决了开发商的营销和运营费用，但存在着很大的机会成本。通常发行商分成50%的游戏营收，拥有游戏权限，控制游戏的扩充计划并等其收回成本后才会支付开发商相关费用。所以虽然这一途径为开发商减少了上述营销和运营费用，但开他们得舍弃IP权限，在游戏真正创收前只能接受长期的延期付款。而且如果发行商决定不对游戏进行宣传或者扩充，开发商也无能为力。

用户粘性和虚拟交易：

假设游戏维持临界规模的用户数量，其就能开始创收，玩家也将从中获得乐趣。但游戏并不会始终发挥其全部潜力，为开发商带来创收，开发商只要有段时间没有提供新内容，玩家就会对游戏产生厌倦感，应用因此也会日渐低迷。为了防止这个现象的发生，开发商需要不断采取策略维持用户，提高营收。

通过参数优化营收和用户留存率：

参数能够向开发商反馈游戏的运作情况，以及玩家的体验行为。这使得开发商能够获悉游戏吸引玩家的元素所在、玩家厌恶的游戏体验以及游戏销售的最佳网点。开发商因此能够获悉未来的内容和功能更新要添加何种元素才能够提高用户留存率和营收水平。应用内部参数平台对于本身拥有专业技术技能的开发商来说将会是个相当直接的途径。

内容更新：

为了维持用户粘性，不断更新虚拟道具和游戏功能是个明智之举。虽然有时开发商会通过小更新来平衡游戏，但是时常推出大的功能更新对于玩家来说才更具吸引力。

为玩家提供多种支付选择：

多数社交游戏都是通过虚拟交易实现创收，因此为玩家提供尽可能多的购买选择是个很好的点子。其中包括：

* 使用强大的报价网站：Trialpay之类的公司能够针对特定用户群提供报价，如果用户购买，这将转化为开发商的营收。

* 使用Facebook Credits和Credit推广：Facebook为采用Facebook Credits的开发商开展各式各样的宣传活动，其中包括无障碍支付和双积分活动（游戏邦注：前者可以实现及时支付，没有付款期限，后者使得玩家能够为购买游戏积分的好友提供折扣信息，好友因此能够充分利用这些信息）。

* 在游戏中设置多个销售网点：用户可以在相关网点购买积分。这些网点应该覆盖所有具有购买意向的用户。

创建目标游戏网络：

顶级开发商之所以能够取得大量营收是因为他们拥有众多游戏，能够在游戏中开展交叉推广。开发商如果推出了一款热门游戏，应该考虑发行更多游戏，这样一来，他们就能够在游戏中开展交叉推广。

将游戏转移至其他社交平台：

通过Appwalk之类的工具将游戏植入其他社交网络平台能够帮助开发商获得新用户，这些平台的玩家能够带来和Facebook用户大同小异的营收。

如下图表归纳了上述观点。

总结

那么，开发商能够花小钱博得众多玩家的青睐吗？答案是肯定的，但前提是必须是优质的游戏体验，开发商得积极采用各种低成本用户获取和创收方式。

Mike Turner是Bitfold Online Games（游戏邦注：这是一家独立社交游戏开发商，主要针对Facebook、国际社交网络和手机设备开发原始IP）的管理合伙人。置身竞争日益激烈的社交游戏市场，Bitfold积极试验现有游戏，探索通过合理预算获取、吸引和维持玩家及提高营收的最佳方式。作为公司业务开发主管，Mike致力于将Bitfold游戏成功推向国际市场，帮助独立开发商和发行商制作自己的成功社交游戏。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，转载请注明来源：游戏邦）

Games Startups! What You Need To Know To Succeed In The Competitive Social Games Market

Without question, the social gaming market is the newly hot space in the game industry.  Some of the leading developers have emerged as companies only in the last few years and in that time have managed to gather tens of millions of both dollars and users from these games. With these outstanding numbers and increasing sociality of games not only on the web, but on mobile and console platforms as well, it seems like a very attractive market to enter.  However, for all its potential, it’s a place that many independent developers and traditional game publishers are having difficulty being successful in.  The reason for this is because these games are overwhelmingly financed by microtransactions of virtual goods, and knowing how to inspire users to pay you for virtual goods is something that’s not easy to master.

This article will attempt to shed light on these economics within the social games market, what kind of opportunity exists for new entrants, and provide strategies that independent developers with limited resources can use to make a successful entry into the market.  This article is one of a two part series that will focus on strategies independent developers can use to be successful.  The next will focus on strategies for publishers to enter the space.

The Social Games Market at a Glance

A large share of the news published on social gaming is information about the market strategies of the largest players and very little about independent developers.  The reason for this is because the top 10 game developers account for over 50% of the active users and revenue earned by all games & apps on Facebook.  These numbers can make developers looking at entering the market question what kind of positioning they can achieve against these market leaders (who have pre-existing game networks and multi-million dollar advertising budgets) and often discourage them from entering.

Well the good news is that there are indeed independent developers and publishers who have managed to launch successful million dollar games without mega-millions in capital.  We explain in detail below what kind of development, marketing, and operational strategies can be employed to independent developers who want to join these ranks.

The revenue equation

Social games earn most of their money off of Microtransactions, but only 0.5%-2.5% of any game’s active users actually pay.  Therefore for a game to earn any significant amount of money, it must have hundreds of thousands to millions of active users to earn well.   According to Lisa Marino, CEO of RockYou, games normally monetize at a daily rate of $10-$30 per 1000 daily active users.   This means that if you have a game that averages 100,000 daily active users throughout a year, your game’s earning potential ranges from $365,000 to over $1,000,000 in that year.  That isn’t the 100+ million yearly that Zynga is earning, but for an independent developer, it’s a decent chunk of change that will allow you to build a thriving social games company.

Looking at developer metrics on appdata.com, we see that there are many independent developers such as Broken Bulb Studios, Bitryhmes, and Tall Tree games (all of which who were founded less than 4 years go) each have audiences well over 100k daily active users.  If Lisa’s numbers hold any credit, we can assume that they’re probably earning several millions per year.  If your games can gain and maintain similar numbers of users, you have the potential to earn millions.

But how?  Gaining 100,000 daily active users sounds nice in theory, but how do you actually manage to get there?

Keys to making your games a success

Designing games to do well

Why do some games manage to retain and monetize users, and others fail completely?  The answer to this is complex, but often boils down to the game’s design.  Many publishers and developers who have entered the space have failed on account of bad game designs, so it pays to study this subject a bit.

Some of the key components to a social game design are:

-Niche Focus: Targeting a niche and being unique in that niche

-Fun/Engagement: How engaging the core gameplay is to users

-Incentives to Return: What incentives the game gives users to return (i.e. to check crops, when energy is recharged, etc.)

-Social Interaction/Identity: What kind of *meaningful* ways people can interact with friends (competition, sharing, cooperation, etc.) or other Facebook users and how can players establish themselves as unique among these other players.

-Advancement: A proper speed of advancement through the game

-Monetization Incentives: How well the game incentivizes users to buy things to advance their gameplay.

-Content Refreshes: How well the developer is able to keep fresh content to keep users engaged

The golden ticket however in our opinion, is to really focus on a niche that has room for innovation and to create gameplay within that niche that is fun and engaging for users.  If you can do this, your chances of success are greatly increased.

Costs of Development

Okay, well that’s nice, maybe you’ll make a hit, but you can never be sure that your first game will really succeed.  What kind of financial risk are you looking at?

Development: Zynga states that social games take roughly $100k-$300k and 1-3 months to develop.   Independent developers can often build a social game for less than this depending on their team makeup.  Some teams get investment and hire full staff, and some teams consist of only founders or founders + a few paid employees.  In our experience, companies with investment and full teams tend to spend over $100k on games by virtue of supporting a full staff.  Companies with small teams or founders only can build good games for under $50k.

Marketing: The question of launching presents a further challenge.  If your game needs to gain hundreds of thousands of players to be profitable, you’ll need to some way of reaching out hundreds of thousands of Facebook users.  There are several ways of doing this including purchasing Facebook ads, purchasing ads in other social games, and some cool free options explained later in this article.

If money is no concern, one of the most effective ways to market a Facebook game is to buy Facebook ads which range from $.50-$3 per application install.  To gain 100,000 users, this can quite expensive (ranging from $50k to over $100k) and it is in this area that the top game developers have the greatest advantage as they can buy lots of ads and market their new titles via their already popular titles.

Independent developers on the other hand are often coming to the market with relatively little capital, and have trouble affording $50,000 marketing budgets, especially if they’re not sure their first games will succeed.  Fortunately, there are other solutions which we discuss below.

Operation: In operation of your game, you’ll generally be focusing two things: properly handling load as the game scales and creating a constant stream of fresh content and features to keep your players engaged.

Hosting on a cloud solution such as Amazon EC2 or Rackspace is what a lot of independent developers choose as developers only pay for bandwith actually used.  Pricing is posted on these provider’s websites, but we know from personal experience that 50,000 daily active users can rack up about $3,000 in charges monthly, however compared to the cost of development, this is generally neglible.

The larger cost often comes in supporting the burn rate of your live team, which for us consists of 4-5 people per game (1 server developer, 1 flash developer, 2 artists, and 1 tester) depending on how much you pay your people, this could amount to under $10k monthly, or it could be over $30k.  This cost all depends on how much new content you deliver, and what you pay your people (if anything).

Overall Costs: The summary of estimated cost for each portion of the game lifecycle looks a bit like this:

The optimal situation for any developer looking to publish a game is to get these costs as low as possible without reducing any opportunity costs.  Strategies for doing this are discussed in the following sections.

Design & Development Strategies

Go Niche: Niche games are generally a better bet than doing games that imitate the market leaders.  The reason being is that if your game fails to be as engaging as the leaders, there are already many more well established choices for your players to migrate to.  If you cater to a niche and the demographic within that niche, you’re much more likely to succeed.  You see this strategy working well for games like Backyard Monsters (one of the few RTS games), Wild Ones (Realtime combat), or Car Town (car & racing game).

Stay Simple, Release Early, let metrics guide later progress: Since social games live on the web, updates can be made painlessly.  Once you have implemented the core gameplay, economic features and ensured the game is bugfree, it’s good to release so that you can get early validation for your game and earn some initial money to fund its further development.

Find Partners: Several highly successful independent developers have started as groups of partners with the necessary skills to build a game and have developed their games for close to free.  If you find partners with appropriate skills, it can be good way to develop without investment.

Marketing your game & acquiring users:

The goal of any developer is to get the maximum amount of users for the least amount of money.  With the cost of acquisition of a significant number of users being in the tens of thousands, it is advantageous for developers to find cheaper ways to acquire lots of users.  The following are methods of gaining these users without spending large quantities.

Join free ad networks to spread your game:

There are several free advertising networks such as Applifier,  Appstream, or VIP games network that allow you to spread your game via ad banners on the top of other social games.  These networks are free and post their banners on popular games such as nightclub city, so if you are able to get into their programs, you can gain a great source of free advertising.

Other free advertising alternatives include Coinwhale which sells credits for games at discounted rates for packages of social games.  By joining their network (free of charge), you can be included on their lists of games for which they sell credits for, driving more free promotion.

Publish to social networks outside of Facebook & take advantage of free promotion:

Facebook is not the only social network to publish on.  There are millions of users on networks outside of Facebook that play games and many monetize as well as Facebook users.  Many of these networks are hungry for content, and provide free promotion to new games to allow social game developers to gain an initial userbase.  By publishing to these networks, developers can get a large initial boost in traffic and extra users.

Many developers consider this too much work to be worth it due to the work required to utilize each network’s social, viral, and payment features.  If developers were to do this themselves, they would be correct.  For this however, social game developer Maygem is coming out with a solution for developers called APPwalk which allows them to port social games to multiple social networks with a single API and use all viral, social, and payment features on those networks.   Their tool allows developers to use a Facebook style API to publish to about 11 networks at once (such as Orkut, Hi5, & Netlog), and get free promotion and advertising on those networks.

Localize:

Games targeted towards other players often grow at impressive rates.  If you’re able to localize, you might be able to gain a significantly larger audience than you thought.

Run a small paid marketing campaign:

One of the keys to know whether to invest more resources into your game or not is to do an early test to see how it performs.  If the above methods have not managed to gain a satisfactory userbase, running a small campaign to acquire 10k-20k users can let you gauge this.  If you retain a decent portion of those monthly users and your ratio of Daily Users to Monthly users after several weeks is 10% or higher, that is an indication that your game is engaging to users and you can consider purchasing a bigger marketing campaign.

Publish with a publisher: One of the most straightforward ways to spread a game is to sign up with a social publisher like 6waves.  This option eliminates your marketing and hosting costs, but has a SIGNIFICANT opportunity cost.  Generally publishers take 50% of your revenue, take rights to your IP, control your game’s expansion schedule, and don’t start paying you until they recoup their expenses.  So although this option negates upfront marketing and operations expenses, you often stand to lose rights to your IP, and may have a significant period of delayed payments before your game realizes return.   And if your publisher decides not to promote or expand your game, there’s not much you can do about it.

Engagement & Monetization:

Assuming your game can gain and maintain a critical mass of users, it will start earning money and your players will be enjoying themselves.  However, it might not be earning at its full potential and after a while without any fresh updates, your players will get bored and your app will shrink.  To prevent this, you need an ongoing strategy to retain users and improve monetization.

Optimize monetization & retention with metrics:

Metrics tell you how your game is performing and what users are doing in game.  This allows to gauge what is engaging users, what is making them leave, and where your best points of sale in game are.  From this information, you can gauge what further content & feature updates will help increase retention and monetization of users.  Implementing a home-cooked metrics platform will be fairly straightforward for developers with proper technical skills, but there are also metrics tools such as Kontagent that can be used as well.

Content updates:

To keep your users engaged, it’s wise to keep the flow of new virtual items and cool features constantly moving.  Sometimes these will be small updates to balance the game, but it’s often fun for your users if you roll out major new features every now and then.

Offer lots of payment options for your users:

Most games earn from microtransactions, so it’s a really good idea to offer as many options as possible for players to make these purchases.   Some of these include:

Using Strong Offer Networks: Companies like Trialpay offer extremely targeted offers to your users based on their demographics which convert in revenue for you if they buy.

Use Facebook Credits and Credit Promotions: Facebook is coming out with lots of promotions for developers who use Facebook credits.  These include frictionless payments which enables immediate payments without a prompt, and the two credits program which allows users to post discounts to friends on buying credits for your game, make use of these.

Make lots of points of sale in your games: Users should have the option to buy credits at all relevant points.  There should be options everywhere that a user might want to purchase.

Build a network of targeted games: Many of the top developers earn so well because they have multiple games in which they can cross promote their games.  If you are able to get one successful game, you should consider releasing more so that you can use your games to cross-promote each other.

Port to other social networks: Porting to other social networks via tools like Appwalk can gain your extra users and who monetize at rates the same as Facebook.

The table below summarizes the above statements.

Conclusion

So in short, do developers have opportunity to gain traction without a gazillion dollars?  The answer is yes, but it takes good games, and pro-active use of the lower-cost methods of gaining users and monetizing them.  Happy entertaining!

Mike Turner is a managing partner for Bitfold Online Games, an independent social game developer that focuses on original social game IP for Facebook, international social networks, and mobile devices. In the increasingly competitive social games market, Bitfold has been vigorously experimenting with their games to discover the best methods to acquire, engage, retain, and monetize users within a reasonable budget.  As the head of business development, Mike focuses on making Bitfold’s games successful internationally and helps independent developers & publishers create their own successful social games.（Source：Socialtimes）