Viximo Releases Its First Game On Facebook

This past month we released our first game on Facebook, an updated version of our popular photo-sharing game, Snap Me Up (we like to call it SMU).  Collectively on various social networks around the world, SMU has been played by more than four million people since its launch in 2010. Because of its success, and also because it’s really the only social game we have made, we decided this would be a natural choice for our foray into the Facebook frontier.

In Snap Me Up, players find fame and fortune by buying and selling photos of their favorite people.  Each player chooses their own path to riches and must decide to buy low, sell high or simply be the hottest person on the market.

This is how our PR folks have described SMU. In reality though, SMU stands apart by being one of the few social games that has the unique ability to take on a life of its own. Because we designed the game so that the collection of photos in it are comprised entirely of what the players submit, we never know what types of photos, or what types of players, will contribute to the game. That makes playing SMU sorta like a cross between a flea market and a masquerade ball.

Originally we intended to simply make SMU as standard of a social gaming experience as possible. You know, all the classics - energy, free gifts, achievements. If you threw a virtual monkey in there we wouldn’t be too far off from about 90% of the games already on Facebook. However, what we learned from listening and observing our user base is that there was a compelling need for more ways players could engage socially with each other. This led to our first set of game improvements, which seek to make the game a micro-space for social interactions, without having to go so far as to friend another player on Facebook.

Of course, SMU is far from finished. We are always looking for new ideas and listening to our players to find ways that we can make it better. Who knows where it will end. To modify one of the more famous Woody Allen quotes, “Social games are like sharks, if they don’t keep moving forward they’ll die.”