Cantr II Facebook Application

[Cwalen]

Use of the FB API to enable full FB access to CantrII?

A hell of a learning curve from my present knowledge, but every Cantr player who also has a FB account being able to recommend to their friends, not just a url but automated links?

Savage server load, socially disruptive as the newby population becomes tens or hundreds of times larger than our current player base, SOOO many iddjoits who are used to Zinga games not knowing what the hell is going on. I would imagine it would take two years of my spare time for me to know enough about Cantr's back end and FB's API to integrate them, probably just as much time for the community to work out how we could possibly deal with the impact of the integration.

Imagine looking at the top of your screen and seeing 6754 players active in the last 15 minutes. In terms of financially viable FB games, it would be a failure, monatrising the traffic might not pay for the additional server load.

Possibly a topic for a new thread, and definitely beyond my knowledge, might have been discussed before.

Do we dare consider it?

[Doug R.]

Possibly a topic for a new thread, and definitely beyond my knowledge, might have been discussed before.

Yes, definitely a topic for a new thread. We're just discussing running an advertisement here, not bringing on the apocalypse

[Joshuamonkey]

Topic Split
If the apocalypse happens, we can take off the application, but really I think this is a good idea. So if someone wants to make a Cantr facebook application, I encourage it.
We wouldn't suddenly have many many players, because even on facebook word has to spread and people have to actually like the application; there's plenty of unpopular things on facebook. It's a good way to spread the word though.

[CN]

I, for one, would not be opposed to a Cantr app for phones, iPhone or Droid. I'd be aaaall over that xD

[Snickie]

I, for one, would not be opposed to a Cantr app for phones, iPhone or Droid. I'd be aaaall over that xD

WANT.
Especially since more often than not I play Cantr on my Droid. I'm on it right now, actually.

This might belong in another thread, but I'd at least like to see CantrSpy on Android and iPhone.

For me, though, the apps would have to be free because I'm not allowed to buy paid apps, and my parents think I spend too much time on Cantr anyway, they'd especially not let me buy a paid app for Cantr.

[Joshuamonkey]

Any sort of app by Cantr staff would be free. And I wouldn't expect anyone to make a non free one.

[Chris]

If a tutorial town is ever created, that would be good for FB. Then, to get into the real game, they would have to go to the Cantr website.

[Jason W.]

As long as it's not exclusively available over facebook. I don't get facebook at work, so it would cut my play time by 80%.

[Misato]

...but I'd at least like to see CantrSpy on Android and iPhone.

OMG, yes! Since my computer died I've been playing on iPhone and iPad, and I've been going crazy without my spy! lol

Also...a Cantr app for FB would be so awesome!

[Cwalen]

It's been a while since I was seriously looking into the FB API, (before the GFC). Back then there were a lot of free scalable hosting services available for startups for new apps, but I sort of assume that they have vanished now.

From my reading at that time, there was a chance for about $.5 per player per month for advertising, with an expectation of $.5 more from buying items and the like in-game. I doubt despite the extent of my research that everyone was sharing all their information but the basic equation was advertising costs V player retention. Player growth was strongly driven by advertising (tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a month) and by "rope in a friend and we'll give you a free cute bunny".

Cantr doesn't have a culture of looking for dollars (no one would even attempt to build something this big except for it's intrinsic beauty) and doesn't reward players for recruitment (or donation) so our equation would be surviving any increase in new players, and server load. I don't expect there will be support for buying items or time or anything in game, and unless we set up the interface to refresh more often we'ld be looking at less advertising revenue as well. (most successful FB games are geared more to page refreshes than anything else.)

The suggestion for newby town/island is excellent in my mind, If half of our current player base is on FB, and invite a few friends each, who create a few charters, we could possibly double the population in a few weeks. Apocalypse now. For a game like Cantr which is quite unique in my experience the challenge of integrating these people would perhaps be more significant than the programming effort. Having a newby in every town screaming "WHY DONT PEOPLE TALK TO ME" every two minutes would really suck.

A tutorial island of some sort with FAQ's guides, and most importantly a level of intelligence and experience required to enter the world at large seems sensible to me if we were going to commit to FB.

And I'll add getting a better idea of the effort involved to my list of things to do, and report back here when I am done.

[joo]

This might belong in another thread, but I'd at least like to see CantrSpy on Android and iPhone.

Adobe is extending support for publishing AIR apps for mobile devices (currently they support publishing Flash-based apps to the Android and iOS native formats, but not HTML-based apps like CantrSpy) so that should become possible in a while.

[Joshuamonkey]

There already is a large FAQ guide: http://www.cantr.net/index.php?dt=cz00ODQ4NjgzMyZsPTEmcGFnZT1mYXEmYWN0aW9uPTA,

From my reading at that time, there was a chance for about $.5 per player per month for advertising, with an expectation of $.5 more from buying items and the like in-game

Facebook would pay us?
Thanks for the information, Cwalen.

Cantr doesn't have a culture of looking for dollars

That's true, but Cantr does need them.

Also, after trying to get more players to join Cantr II for more than two years, I don't consider having too many "newbie" players as a limiting concern. I understand that this will be a big project though.
I invited 200-300 of my facebook friends to Cantr II, yet I haven't noticed a single one even making an account, if that gives you an idea.

[Cwalen]

Just a quick one for Josh before I go full rant mode.

FB doesn't pay directly, page refreshes, that drive the adds in the side bar, that brings revenue.

And having a FAQ available is a wonderful thing, finding a way to stuff it down the throats of newbies, if we do position ourselves in the path of a wave of new players that could swamp our current player base, not to mention the PD, that's what I am talking about.

As I said in the last post, it's a conservative estimate, though possibly hopeful that a FB launch could without advertising bring as many players as we currently have in a couple of weeks.

Most wont stick, unless we position ourselves to monetrise the traffic they might bankrupt the org, I'll stump up half our current annual revenue to improve our capacity to deal with the load if this idea gets accepted and realized (Assuming that we are taking 1K a year and I will be paid back if and when we double it)(sucks to be me if we don't)

Just about everyone is on FB, just about everyone has a couple of friends who might like Cantr, and at least one that will try for a week or so. If that assumption is correct? That less than doubles our server load and swamps most towns with a bunch of confused people who think they are playing yet another Zinga game.

[Cwalen]

Like I said, it's been a while since I was even close to up to speed on this. FB games were a multi million if not multi billion dollar a year industry. I shudder a bit at the suggestion we can just kill the app if the load gets too big, but as a last resort I suppose we would have to. I have no doubt that the advertising revenues have fallen since the GFC.

Just running through the figures in my head again, out loud, to try to establish a base line, before the facts have been thoroughly checked.

We have what 2000? active daily players? an aggressive positioning in the advertising market means that _was_ possibly worth up to 24 thousand a year. LOTS of untested assumptions in that statement.

The game is not refresh driven at the moment, we don't hang adds off every new page, frankly I am not sure if I want to see this project go that way even if the community is up for it. I believe advertising streams may well have shrunk since last I had reliable data, back then you could expect a few thousandths of a cent off each page refresh, more for unique or targeted refreshes. I do NOT want to give anyone the impression that I have a working knowledge of this, just to share what I was able to find out in a couple of weeks of research last time I looked at it a long time ago.

I have a bunch of NDA's in my files somewhere that say that I am not supposed to go into too much detail for another 5 years or so, and I was just a researcher, not a coder or executive. None of the projects I worked on went to market. (knowing the people well I can probably avoid the NDA's, as long as Cantr's interests do not clash)

In my not so humble opinion, Cantr is well positioned to make a hundred times what it does at the moment, which would drive up our server load considerably. The path from here to there is fraught with a little coding, a whole lot of social readjustment and legal and ethical considerations that if not handled could destroy everything.

Doug was right, this could be an apocalypse, as enthusiastic as I am about the possibility, at a conservative estimate we still couldn't afford a single top flight programmer, like some of those that built this world. The big boys in the field were spending more per month in advertising than Cantr has seen in it's lifetime on each of several projects. I'ts a whole new world out there.

I'ld write for pages about Zinga games, but the figures say most of it, 50+ million daily users. Designed primarily for retards who enjoy primary colors and clicking on a screen to see numbers get bigger and bigger. Cantr doesn't have that broad market appeal. The current organization couldn't cope with 600 million a year in revenue. I haven't seen a single document on "small game goes to FB and makes it big, (or even small)".

Perhaps in rediscovering Cantr I am just getting a rush of blood to the head, (that sounds so like me) but I found it again, by remembering it existed and heading to the bottom of voting sites to find it. The concept is marvelous, that the coding has been done is bordering on the improbable, no one who was involved in the industry would bother because it does not fit the conventional form for a viable project.

And tomorrow, when I deal with today's hangover I'll get to work and try to come back with some current, real, facts rather than half remembered, deliberately obscured visions of what used to be. (anyone else with basic research skills who wants to follow the drive towards pie in the sky is welcome to e-mail or pm me, so we can avoid duplication in the effort)

Just don't be blinded by the thought of a few more dollars, or hundreds of thousands of dollars, in the kitty, from the reality that if we want to reach toward this potential things can move faster than we can cope with, and our resources are absurdly limited.

[Joshuamonkey]

We have what 2000? active daily players?

Total players: 1014
Total English players: 395

Most won't last long. More players means more potential for good players to find the game, as well as more staff.
The others we can get rid of if it becomes a very serious problem..