Introducing Football Franchise
When we first started writing the Football Survivor Pool app for Facebook, we looked into the various football apps in their directory to see if there was already anything like it. Interestingly, I found that despite Facebook’s sizeable American user base, almost everything I came across with the term in it was soccer. Real football was nowhere to be found.
Our Survivor app did pretty well for the short time it was open for registration. The nature of a survivor pool requires it to not be open to new members indefinitely, and since we had the idea so late in the summer we were only able to register people for a couple weeks. Still, we were happy with the response.
We quickly realized that Survivor Pool had somewhat limited viral potential. We decided to give away the same prize to the person who referred the winner as we were to the winner himself, so that definitely incentivized people to tell their friends. But, they pretty much installed the app, made their pick for the first week, invited some friends once, and that was it. There wasn’t much reason for them to come back to the app on a daily basis, and by the time they had to come back to it, registrations had closed.
Still, we were growing at a pretty decent clip, since giving away a free 50″ plasma screen seemed to get a higher than average acceptance rate. We also used feed items to remind people to invite a bit. Overall it was well worth the effort, and we’ll probably expand on that app in the future.
Earlier in the summer I had started playing Mob Wars, which is a tremendously popular social game, and I’d become rather enamored of the genre. It reminded me of some of the elements of RTS and RPG games, but at a slower, more casual pace. It kept me coming back a few times a day, each for a relatively short amount of time. So I was able to keep up with the game, enjoy it, and yet not waste hours a day. My time is valuable to me, as is true of most people, so I really appreciated that.
I became convinced (and still am) that this is one of the next big things in gaming. Mob Wars isn’t the last word though. It’s a great start, and a great app, but it’s still early. It’s more Karate Champ than Street Fighter 2.
So when, in my search for football apps, I stumbled across a soccer-based social game called Premier Football, I was pretty excited. Even when I found out that by football they meant soccer, I thought a sports-based social game was a pretty sweet idea. So despite the mediocre reviews, I signed up.
What I found was a very good idea with very poor execution. The app was slow and buggy. The UI was confusing at best, in many places borderline unusable. The graphic design made me throw up in my mouth a little.
Still, the app had a couple million installs and a couple hundred thousand monthly active users, so I pushed on to find out why. And I did. Buried deep down below all the garbage were a couple pretty nifty ideas.
So I took them and ran with them, mixed in some concepts from other social games, changed the sport to real football (or as Euros call it, American football) and formulated what I felt was a great game. With a whole lot of coding on Chad’s part, and some help with the mechanics and UI from both of my cofounders and a few beta testers, we’ve got what we think is a pretty spectacular early version. Introducing Football Franchise.
The idea is pretty simple. You have a football team and your goal is to make it the best. You can train your players (and name them after friends which is more fun than it sounds like) and play matches against other teams. With the money you make from those, you train more players, and buy certain upgrades and licensing deals that make you even more money. As your team wins games you gain experience and level up, unlocking new upgrades.
From the response we’ve gotten from early beta testers and users, I think this one might just be a hit. I look forward to improving it over time. Game design is something I’m fairly new to, but I’ve been playing them avidly for as long as I can remember, even one professionally for a few years, so I think I can learn it.
Give it a shot and let me know what you think. I’d love to hear how I could make it better.
October 31, 2008 at 7:35 am
Hey, that sounds an awful lot like a game I was addicted to back in 2004 called projectrockstar.com. You manage bands so have choices like training/play live/record songs and it's incredibly addictive given that it only takes around 10 minutes to play each day.
I can't let that proper Football quip fly though. Football is the name of a sport primarily played with the feet. American Football is some variation of Rugby and is played mainly with the hands. So not even a variation of Football!