Facebook's Ryan On 'Improving' The Social Network For Game Developers

Author: by Staff

Facebook's director of game partnerships Sean Ryan spoke out on the company's recent efforts to interact with social game developers, saying, "it's up to us to continue to improve our offering" to game developers. Ryan, who previously served as CEO of LiveJournal and online gaming executive at News Corp, joined Facebook six months ago to help the company establish a stronger relationship with game developers, who had historically been left in the dust by Facebook's sudden policy changes. In a recent interview with Gamasutra, Ryan said that Facebook took note of these problems, and set out to talk with developers and make the platform a more suitable venue for games. "As of Q4 last year, we were looking at the game platform holistically saying, 'now that we've fixed some of the issues we had before, gaming is very important to us, so let's take a step back and look at what can we deliver to developers,'" he said. "We work with probably a hundred partners directly and the other thousand through more indirect means," he continued. "This is my question every single day: 'What feature are we missing on the platform?'" He also noted that Facebook aims to maintain this developer-platform relationship not only to make life easier for game developers, but also to ensure they remain loyal to the Facebook platform itself. "All we can focus on is making ourselves a better platform. At the end of the day, the developer has the choice, and if we deliver the way we should, then I'm not that concerned about it, but it's up to us to continue to improve our offering," Ryan said. Keep an eye out for the full interview with Sean Ryan, which will go live on Gamasutra on this Wednesday.