Victory: A ranking system for what makes a social game into a blockbuster

victory 2Alok Kejriwal, chief executive of Indian game firm Games2Win, shared a couple of interesting charts with me that describe a way to rank social games by benchmarking how they stack up in a variety of important features such as the quality of the game play, the virality of a game, which makes it spread faster, how original it is, whether it has international appeal, and how addictive or habit forming the game is.

Kejriwal’s own internal game creators set up the ranking system, which they dub Victory, and ranked some of the world’s most popular social games using the system. The top chart shows the rankings of games such as Zynga’s FarmVille, and the other chart explains the ranking system itself. It adds some interesting perspective on what the top games share in common. If you’re making social games, you might want to be sure that your game rates high on these measures, which are undoubtedly subjective but still useful.
victory 1

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About the Author, Dean Takahashi

Dean is lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He covers video games, security, chips and a variety of other subjects. Dean previously worked at the San Jose Mercury News, the Wall Street Journal, the Red Herring, the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register and the Dallas Times Herald. He is the author of two books, Opening the Xbox and the Xbox 360 Uncloaked. Follow him on Twitter at @deantak, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • I believe "Fail" would be a better name for this system.
  • I think the premise is great. The only problem is we do not have enough information on what constitutes a high mark in these areas. Judging cooking competitions is a subjective contest. Their judges however are told what a should receive a high mark. For example if you dont taste the meet and only taste sauce in a barbecue contest that is bad. I would love to see these guys release more details about their categories.
  • jection
    I don't think this is useless. And the ranking is subjective. I think you have to take it positively and not think so narrowly dude.
    bali luxury
  • Twinkle Toes
    No no no no no, you got it all wrong.
    You should think about the biggest and best FPS for the PC and totally do the opposite.
    You distribute it as a Crapbook application and it's an instant hit.

    Peeps on Crapbook are bored out of their skull. They will do anything to pass the time.
    Doing the most simplistic game will cost you practically nothing and will still get you a billion eyeballs. Phew! It's good to get that one out of my system :D
  • bobfet1
    This seems pretty useless - all of those measures are extremely subjective
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