Jon Radoff’s Entrepreneur 2.0 Blog

Last week I was at a panel at the AlwaysOn OnHollywood event. The subject was on bringing social technology into online entertainment.

The panel was moderated by Kara Swisher (Wall Street Journal writer and co-producer of All Things Digital). My co-panelists were Drew Curtis (CEO of Fark.com), Rooly Eliezerov (CEO of Gigya) and Abdul Khan (Co-Founder, I Beat You).

My main takeaway from the panel: I think the entertainment industry is still a couple steps behind. Instead of talking about Facebook and MySpace, they should be talking about Glam and Clearspring (and, dare I say, GamerDNA). The old social-networking model that’s based on the virality of friend invites is at a point of market equilibrium in my opinion. We need newer, cooler approaches to attracting members.

You may view the whole session here: OnHollywood 2008 Archive

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I wrote an article for Gamasutra on the subject of viral games. You can read the full story here over at Gamasutra.

For those who want the Reader’s Digest version, here were my main ideas:

• Design games that sell themselves; make them watchable and easy to engage with. Magic the Gathering (the card game, not the online version) is a great example.
• Design games with fansites in mind. World of Warcraft has done a great job creating an ecosystem around the company, supported by data from the Armory.
• Support guilds and clans; in other words, support the social groups who pick up games.
• Support player-created content. This is like an adaptation of the “supporting fansites” idea, but it expands on the idea. Games need to be larger-than-life–and larger than themselves. They need to allow members to participate in the whole lifestyle of the game, through machinima, player-created maps and mods, customization, etc.
• Avoid level segregation: I think this is the biggest mistake of many MMORPGs. Yes, this has worked fine for World of Warcraft…but they now have amazing scale, and they were relatively early to market. Unless friends have easy ways to play with each other, you aren’t going to engage them.

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