在休闲游戏发展之初，Alex St.John便成立一家公司准备瓜分走一部分的用户，如今社交游戏盛行，St.John又打算重操旧业。

这位傲慢、贫嘴的微软前任多媒体营销战略家如今是旧金山hi5 Networks公司的新任董事长兼首席技术官。这家生长环境并不如意的社交网络公司想从社交游戏潮流中寻觅一线生机。

St.John自从卸任WildTangent的执行总裁后，于9月加入了Hi5。他说：“我认为这是一个十分激动人心的机会，因为目前了解社交网络游戏的人仍在少数。”

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“我们正在进军一个未成熟的领域，我知道在未来的10年内如何去开拓社交游戏商业环境的相关模式。”

St.john轻易地将自己的竞争对手归结为“笨蛋”、“不成熟”、“低能”，如此的傲慢在很多人看来很愚蠢。然而，他的确是一位久负盛名的游戏商业能手。作为一名工程师，St.John是微软Direct X技术的主要创作者，这项技术为后来所有的多媒体程序、3D图像、媒体播放器、休闲多人游戏和XBOX游戏奠定了基础。

去年11月，St.John为Hi5提出了新的发展方向。

据comScore称，这个64人的公司每月的访问人数从2009年6月的5760万人次下降到了3680万人次。（Hi5提出的访问数据为大于4000万人次。）。2009年4月，该公司通过裁减近一半的员工才达到盈利2500万美元。

与此同时，这家成立于2003年的社交网络公司从曾经的世界排名第三位下滑到了目前的第九位。为了创造更大的利润，该公司越来越注重对游戏和虚拟商品的开发，例如，引进自己的虚拟货币。

St.John表示Hi5的战略就是要运用游戏打造一个便于人们自由交流的“游乐场”，他们并不开发自己的游戏，而将重心放在增添如3D人物、虚拟商店等附加游戏特征。例如，上周Hi5开始发售“恶作剧”礼物：用户可以派遣化身到别人的主页上捣乱。

“无需质疑我们公司的商业模式，我们将围绕社交建立一个大型的多人在线游戏（MMO）。玩家将为其付钱，这是一种十分简单，易于理解、效果良好的货币化商业模式。”他说。

Crosslink Capital首先针对Hi5的活动投资了1400万美元，其合伙人Jim Feuille也加入了Hi5董事会。此次，Hi5累计获得投资资金3400万美元。

然而，战略分析家Jia Wu仍对Hi5的策略持怀疑态度。因为其用户基数大大少于Facebook，且主要集中在拉丁美洲。

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St. John承诺Hi5将在美国占据重要地位。

他仿佛觉得社交游戏的丰收硕果随处可得，而实际不管是社交游戏平台和社交游戏开发公司，HI5并没有任何实际的优势。

St. John认为社交游戏和休闲游戏有很多共同之处，这些简单，便于下载的游戏在雅虎、MSN等门户网站上倍受欢迎，并取得了明显的收益。而专业的游戏门户WildTangent、BigFish、ealNetworks等公司也都获得了不俗的流量。

“我们将有能力去吸引更多的用户”，他说。

他看起来好像并不担心来自各个领域的强势竞争，St. John认为谷歌作为一家具有独特核心能力的大型企业将无法在游戏领域取得成功。“大公司并不擅长趣味性开发”，他说。

他还认为拥有许多著名游戏如FarmVille、PetVille、 MafiaWars和Treasure Isle的全美第一游戏开发公司Zynga总是开发“无趣的游戏”，并最终将受困于其对Facebook的依赖。

Facebook通过限制Zynga与用户的直接交流，霸占了相当一部分Zynga的盈利收入，迫使Zynga不得不在广告宣传上加大投资。除此之外，Facebook强迫Zynga和其他游戏开发公司使用Facebook Credits进行虚拟商品的交易，获得了其他游戏开发公司30%的营业额。

去年10月，Facebook停止了游戏公司向用户发送信息的免费服务，急减的流量或多或少引起了游戏开发商的怨言。Facebook的首席执行官Mark Zuckerberg则声称开发商们不间歇发布信息正在使Facebook成为“垃圾邮件的汪洋”。

与此同时，Hi5已经成功吸引了部分缺乏Facebook广告宣传资源的游戏开发公司。

Exponential Entertainment是西雅图一家视频小游戏制作公司，其执行总裁David Long称Facebook太过“噪杂”，在Hi5能获得比Facebook一百倍的流量。

hen casual gaming was young, Alex St. John started a company to “run away with the audience.” Now that social gaming is hot, he wants to do the same thing again.

The former head multimedia marketing strategist at Microsoft is a brash and salty-tongued new president and chief technical officer of San Francisco’s hi5 Networks Inc., a struggling social network that sees salvation remaking itself into a gaming network.

“I thought this was a very exciting opportunity because obviously gaming works in social networking, and very, very few people understand why or how,” said St. John, who joined hi5 in November after stepping aside as CEO of WildTangent, a large, 12-year-old gaming sales and advertising network he co-founded in Seattle.

“Companies entering the area are naive,” he said. “I know how to advance the state of the art in business models in social gaming by 10 years into the future in one jump.”

Such cockiness might seem foolhardy, but St. John—who lightly refers to competitors as “dumbasses,” “amateurs,” and “morons”—is a well-known gaming-business veteran with technical chops. An engineer, St. John was one of the principal creators of Microsoft’s DirectX technology, which became the foundation for all Windows multimedia applications, 3-D graphics, media players, and casual multiplayer and Xbox games.

St. John was brought on in November to chart a new direction for hi5, a 64-person company that has seen traffic drop from 57.6 million monthly visitors in June 2009 to 36.8 million over 12 months, according to comScore (hi5 puts the number at just over 40 million).

The company became profitable on about $25 million in revenue by cutting nearly half its staff in April 2009, the same time that it recapitalized and replaced founder Ramu Yalamanchi as CEO with Bill Gossman, an executive in residence at main investor Mohr Davidow Ventures.

Started in 2003, hi5 is now the ninth-largest social network in the world, down from third, according to comScore. Traffic is primarily outside of the United States as a result of an innovative crowd-sourced translation program, and revenue comes mostly from advertising.

In an effort to make more money, the company has increasingly focused on gaming and virtual goods, for example, by introducing its own virtual currency.

St. John, who recently moved to the Bay Area, accelerated that process, but with a twist.

St. John said hi5’s strategy is to become the “playground” where people using both real and assumed identities can socialize around games. While not developing its own games, it will use “addictive” gaming features like 3-D avatars in Flash programming, a store for virtual goods, and gifting, he said.

Last week, for example, hi5 started selling “prank” gifts in which a user’s avatar can be dispatched to do mischief on other users’ homepages—like smashing what appear to be holes in their computer screens with a baseball bat. In the near future, St. John said he expects to introduce a set of graduated prank responses—like depositing a crater on someone’s page, with debris sent to friends’ pages.

“Instead of being confused about our business model, it’s going to be a giant MMO (massively multiplayer online game) built around socializing. People pay for that, and that’s a simple, well-understood business model that monetizes very well,” he said.

hi5’s moves inspired Crosslink Capital to lead a $14 million round of venture funding, bringing the total raised by the company to $34 million. Crosslink general partner Jim Feuille joined hi5’s board of directors.

Jia Wu, a gaming analyst with Strategy Analytics, said he remains skeptical of hi5’s new strategy because it has a much smaller user base than Facebook, and much of that is in Latin America.

St. John promises the company will become a significant U.S. presence.

He acts as though low-hanging social-gaming fruit is everywhere for the plucking, and the fact that Facebook and Zynga have hundreds of millions of people playing games and Google is widely expected to launch a major foray into gaming confirms only that a feast is waiting for someone with more savvy.

St. John argues that social gaming has many similarities to casual gaming, the easy-to-play, downloadable games that grew popular and lucrative on portals like Yahoo and MSN. Over time, specialized game networks like WildTangent, BigFish, and RealNetworks were able to siphon off huge amounts of traffic, he said.

“We were able to run away with the audiences,” he said.

WildTangent, which raised $76 million in venture capital, even developed a successful virtual currency called WildCoins that this year will register $100 million in sales, estimated St. John, who is no longer on staff at the company but is a stockholder.

Google is a big company with a different core competence, St. John says, and it will likely fail at gaming.

“Big companies suck at being fun,” he said.

Zynga, the No.1 game developer on Facebook, with huge titles like FarmVille, PetVille, MafiaWars, and Treasure Isle, makes “bad games” and is trapped by its dependence on Facebook, St. John says.

Facebook has taken a potentially large chunk of Zynga’s revenue by limiting the gaming company’s ability to communicate directly with users for free, thus forcing Zynga to spend more on advertising.

In addition, Facebook has pushed Zynga and other developers to use Facebook Credits to handle sales of virtual goods. Facebook is taking 30 percent of sales from other developers, though it recently signed a five-year deal with Zynga with terms that are not public.

Efforts to get comment from Zynga were unsuccessful, but the San Francisco company has been making big moves to diversify, announcing partnerships with Yahoo and SoftBank in Asia and reportedly taking a large investment from Google.

“Facebook is an example of a company that didn’t intend to be a gaming company,” St. John said. “It’s one accidentally. And that’s not a good situation to be in, because gaming is a very specialized, very sophisticated business,” said St. John.

Last October, the company stopped allowing developers to send out free notifications to users, and developers large and small have complained about dramatic losses in traffic. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the constant flood of messages from developers was making Facebook “spammy.”

Facebook is hardly ceding ground, and it maintains that other changes already made and in the works, such as adding email notifications and a games dashboard, have made it possible for quality games to continue growing and raising money. Facebook users spend 40 percent of their time on the network gaming, and the company is preparing to hire a head of games partnerships, said spokeswoman Malorie Lucich.

hi5, however, is having some success attracting small game developers who don’t have resources to advertise on Facebook.

David Long, CEO of Seattle-based Exponential Entertainment, which makes movie-based trivia games and applications, said Facebook was “noisy,” and he is getting 100 times as much traffic from hi5 as Facebook.

“I really believe these guys are on to something,” said Long, who previously started and sold an 80-person gaming company to Paramount. “Right now, they’re really moving the needle for us, so we’ve been very happy with them.”(source:portfolio)