Kristian Segerstrale, CEO and co-founder of Playfish (formerly worked for Glu Mobile, a leading global publisher of mobile games) told gamesindustry.biz in an interview recently that Playfish, one of the largest and fastest growing social games companies in the world, is targeting platforms such as iPhone App Store, Facebook and MySpace and that he predicts that games consoles will be a niche product in the next few years.
The low down:
Impressively, players get to completely design their own pets anyway they like. Having played Pet Society for a while and met some of their creations you will sometimes wish they didn't. LOL!!
To start with, the players of this game also get a house with a garden and an increasing number of rooms. The players will need to keep their pet happy, clean and well-fed. To help them achieve this, from the start the pet will get a soap and a brush, basic clothes and some coins. For more food, clothes, house furniture and toys for the pet the player will inevitably need more coins. These coins can be earned through visiting other pets. These can be other facebook friends' pets or other pets they meet in the pet society village or the cafe.
Coins can also be earned in the Daily Lottery, winning awards, in hurdle races at the stadium or simply by shaking trees in the street :) (I'm serious!)
Washing, brushing and petting and feeding other pets is also known to earn players pets coins.
The more active the pet is in Pet Society, the more experience points it will gain. This will also help the pet earn coins and awards.
One recent welcome addition enables pets to go fishing in the Pet Society pond and fill their fish tank with varieties of fish and marine life.
For those impatient among us, or looking for that extra special piece of clothing, decoration, you can head to the cash shop or the bank and pay for some pet society cash. The good thing about this is that a part of the money they make on some products goes to WWF (World Wildlife Fund) to support its efforts to protect many endangered animals. Some of the rest of the cash, I imagine, could be going to help feed starving game developers too lol!
The secret of it's success? Definitely has to lie in it's simplicity and appeal to users with different age groups who simply like pets. It taps into people's basic nesting and nurturing needs. Also, I can imagine that the fact that Pet Society is availabile in so many different languages gives it a huge advantage in market penetration other games simply do not have.
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