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made available for free and make their profits via a combination of advertising, micro-payments and one-off charges for various kinds of premium access. It’s a model that owes everything to the internet, but that has itself rapidly become one of the greatest engines of online innovation around, not to mention a magnet for an entire generation of ambitious young programmers, designers, and even writers and artists.
    One of the most influential of all casual gaming companies is Playfish, a firm that has devoted itself to the social side of these games. Specifically, Playfish makes games that can be played via the social networking site Facebook, which at the time of writing had more than 200 million active users worldwide and ranked among the world’s ten most-visited websites. The games themselves are simple, but beautifully done: a geography quiz, a series of word puzzles, a game where you look after a cute pet, a four-part intelligence test called How Big is Your Brain? But the social integration they offer is subtle and extremely powerful, seamlessly integrating with users’ Facebook accounts so that they can instantly keep track of – and attempt to better – their friends’ scores, or admire each other’s pets. And behind it all lies a network of data analysis and tracking that sets a global standard not just for gaming, but for anyone hoping to make money from media in a digital world.
    Playfish’s CEO, Kristian Segerstråle, has a successful background in game design for mobile phones. Yet, as he explained to me at Playfish’s London office in mid-2009, the scale of success that Playfish has experienced had caught him by surprise. ‘It’s fair to say that we have been overwhelmed. We started off eighteen months ago with four of us. We are well over 100 people now in four offices: China, America, London, Norway. Our games have been installed nearly 80 million times globally. We have around 30 million monthly players. Our first game, launched in December 2007, has had more than half a billion game plays since then.’ By contrast, the most popular video on YouTube (founded in 2005) has been played around 120 million times, more than four times fewer.
    Social and casual gaming offers not only a new model of tapping consumer demand, i.e. integration with social networks, but, more importantly for the industry as a whole, a radical new way of thinking about games as a media service rather than merely a product. ‘With a social game,’ Segerstråle explains, ‘you only invest a fraction of the total development cost in the pre-launch, because you want to get it out as soon as possible. You don’t have a separate publisher or a crazy crunch at the end to deliver a huge project on a set date. What you want to do is get something out and get a sense of how big it might be. If it’s a dog, you should kill it as soon as possible. If it turns out to be a success, you add more.’ Gone are the massive – and massively risky – up-front investments. The majority of spending occurs instead after a title has launched, and can thus be based on direct feedback from and observation of users’ habits.
    It is, Segerstråle acknowledges, a model that has a lot in common with the web industry, ‘where people are incredibly used to the idea of tracking traffic through a site and optimising it’. And the data generated by playing a game – an interactive process far more complicated than the use of any other website, that might involve many hundreds of actions and reactions with mouse and keyboard within the space of a few minutes – yields insights into users’ behaviours that are far beyond any conventional online analytic tools. Playfish itself tracks over 100 million data points every day, giving it a fantastically detailed real-time picture of exactly how all its games are being played: information that it can follow up with targeted email surveys, asking individual players why they behaved in a particular