Exploring 'Untapped' Realms Of Facebook Gaming With Social Dev A Bit Lucky

While the social space is undoubtedly dominated by large players like Zynga and Playdom, the California-based studio A Bit Lucky believes there are "tons of opportunities" for smaller devs to find a niche in the social market. A Bit Lucky made its debut in 2010 with Lucky Train, and in September the company launched its second title, a hardcore-focused strategy title dubbed Lucky Space (pictured). Gamasutra recently spoke with company co-founders Frederic Descamps and Jordan Maynard to learn more about A Bit Lucky's optimistic take on the social market, and why the team decided to focus primarily on a hardcore, male demographic. Descamps explained, "At one point, everybody was saying, 'Well surely there are no males that want to play Facebook games.' And we were like, 'surely it’s not true,' It was just a self-fulfilling prophecy that games on Facebook were just not made for men before." In an effort to disrupt that "self-fulfilling prophecy," A Bit Lucky set out to create a title that incorporated some traditional, hardcore game elements in addition to some classic social game tropes. Maynard explained, "I think there actually is a lot of potential for mainstream gaming and social gaming to overlap in a meaningful way." "With Lucky Space, for instance, we're bringing over the Diablo or WoW loot drop mechanics where you have the whole green, blue, purple, epic item hierarchy. I knew that that was going to be a success the first time we actually got a purple drop in Lucky Space and I was like, 'Oh yep, that hit that vein.'" Of course, hardcore mechanics don't mean much without a hardcore audience, and Maynard says that the game's detailed sci-fi aesthetic will help attract a more traditional gaming audience. "We think visuals are a big part of the question of how to get a hardcore audience. We think that those two things are probably pretty closely intertwined, and the player who wouldn't give us a second look at FarmVille or a similar game might see a building in Lucky Space that's got the particles and the glow and the shadows and the 3D animation and take notice and say, 'Hey this is actually something that I relate to.'" Like many popular social games, Lucky Space emphasizes base-building, resource management, and plays from an isometric perspective. Yet despite these similarities, A Bit Lucky sees a lot of room for further diversification in the social market. "I think there are tons of opportunities for innovation. The space is still extremely young, right? I mean, social gaming really started around late 2007, so it’s still super young," said Descamps. "With games, in the times before FPS and before RTS people were saying, '[The space] is played out, it’s done, this is everything we can do on a computer,' and then a new genre appears and later, people are again like, 'Alright, that's it, that's all the genre is going to be,' and guess what? DotA and MOBAs come along and it’s definitely turning out to be a new genre, one that I play every night," Maynard added. "But even outside of that, there are so many genres that haven't been tapped on Facebook yet." One reason for Facebook gaming's limited breadth, Maynard said, could be the space's historical reliance on metrics-driven design. "You know Zynga -- they’ve gotten better at this recently -- but back in the past they were very, very metrics driven. In my opinion, if you’re a hundred percent analytics and metrics driven that will get you to a local maximum, but if you look at the history and the context and the love of the craft, you might see that there is a higher hill to climb," Maynard said. "So that’s why I think [developers] would always say, 'Oh the market is only females age thirty-five to fifty' or whatever because that’s what their metrics were showing them, but there is this other thing, this untapped thing out there."