BunchBall Widget – A Review

BunchBall is a social gaming site that offers a variety of Flash-based game widgets for blogs and social networking profile pages.  Most of the games are of the classic variety – stuff like Asteroids and Space Invaders, and an IM service is built into the bottom of the widget.

BunchBall has been in the news recently because they just closed their Series A round of funding.  Pete Cashmore has the coverage here. 

According to Pete's coverage, BunchBall also plans to offer ad revenue sharing with sites hosting their widgets.

Applications & Opportunity

Like embeddable video, games are sticky, viral content that can keep viewers coming back.  About a year ago, I put up a BunchBall widget of the classic game Snake on another blog that I write.  That post became one of the blog’s most popular posts.

Unlike most of the other widgets covered in this blog, BunchBall widgets are participative experiences that go beyond a one way flow of content.  Furthermore, the social aspect in which users compete with each other for high scores, or even play against each other, can enhance community among a blog’s readership, and provide the publisher with another vehicle to enable reader to reader interaction.

It would seem that these sorts of games would be a nice fit for the MySpace community.  Like the Quizilla widget, these things are pure entertainment.  No shopping, no commercial undertones, just games.  But for whatever the reason, the BunchBall widget has not taken off with MySpace yet.  If you do a “site:myspace.com BunchBall” search on Google, it returns 16 results.  Compare that to 972,000 results for “site:myspace.com Quizilla.

So is BunchBall just in need of a few tweaks to get things rolling with MySpace adoption, or are the deeper, more structural challenges?

Configuration & Testing

BunchBall’s configuration tool is fairly straightforward.  It lets you select the destination for your widget from each of the big social networking and blogging communities (and some smaller ones), and offers one click add functionality with TypePad.

You can adjust the colors and size of the widget, and the thing scales down pretty well to fit most sidebars (see the mini Space Invaders in my left sidebar). 

As a Flash-based widget, BunchBall games will fit just about anywhere that allows embeds.

BunchBall makes, in my opinion, two poor decisions regarding their configuration process; 1) they provide the widget code in a pop-up window (which was blocked initially by my browser; and 2) They require a registration before you can grab a widget.

Editorial

So why hasn’t BunchBall seen a larger adoption among the MySpacers who should be their sweet spot?  I’m not sure, but I have a couple of theories.  The forced registration isn’t helping, for sure.  I’m also not convinced that a MySpace crowd who has been raised on games with stunning graphics can appreciate the classic games.

Don’t get me wrong – I think I understand why BunchBall requires registration.  Like MyBlogLog, they are trying to build a distributed social network across their widgets, and to provide community in a box to blog and site publishers.  If you take a look at the BunchBall.com home page, the emphasis is on social gaming, and on tying their widgets into existing social networks and IM communities.  Forced registration may also be a requirement of their revenue sharing strategy. 

However, I would much rather see them remove all obstacles to the proliferation of their widgets, and if anything, require a quick registration to play a game.  This would still give them the opportunity to start building a community among participants of their widgets.

I see the gaming widget space as tremendously exciting.  If I had to choose one vertical with the potential to produce a widget with YouTube-esque breakout potential, it would be gaming.  Things will really get exciting when games are developed specifically for distributed, widget-ized play.

I’m not sure if BunchBall’s current offering of classic games and forced registration is the right recipe to produce a winner.   Now that BunchBall has raised some money, they have more options in front of them.  As they have probably been thinking longer and harder about distributed, widget-ized gaming than anyone else, it will be interesting to see which direction they take.

 

Comments

[Michael Berkley]

Excellent editorial on BunchBall. FYI, Pete Cashmore first posted on BunchBall back in February, where he introduced his vision for a Universal Media Widget for the Distributed Web. If this intrigues you, check out this recent post:

http://splashcast.wordpress.com/2006/10/30/universal-media-player-for-the-distributed-web

Keep up the great commentary!

[Rajat Paharia]

Hey Lawrence -

Great writeup and analysis, and we have been thinking long and hard about widgets. A couple of things:

(1) You can't build a business on widgets that don't directly or indirectly make you money. I see a LOT of activity in the widget space, and not a whole lot of people making money. Ads on widgets doesn't seem to be a viable solution - first because you're potentially violating the host site's ToS, second because you have no idea if the ad is ever being viewed since profile pages and blogs are often very long, third many advertisers and networks don't like their ads being shown surrounded by content they can't control and fourth click-through rates are really bad.

(2) Because of this, we're no longer focused on widgets. We’re currently focused on “social gaming”, providing multi-player casual gaming as a hosted service to social networks, personals sites, and communities of all sizes. We enable site members to quickly and seamlessly start and play games with each other without leaving the host site, increasing retention and stickiness. And we’ve made integration a snap.

So we’re currently what you’d call a b2b2c company - we provide social gaming services to sites, which they provide to their visitors & members. We’re currently not trying to create our own destination site - http://www.bunchball.com is largely for demo purposes at the moment, and doesn’t showcase the full range of integration options.

best, - rajat

[lawrence]

Thanks for sharing that Rajat. So will those gaming solutions be licensed to host sites? Or will it be done on a rev share basis somehow?

At a minimum, it would seem that your stand alone widgets could remain a nice, free promotion vehicle for your b2b2c service.

[Rajat Paharia]

Hi Lawrence,

We're currently doing licensing and revenue-sharing deals, and they're not mutually exclusive.

Right now our focus is elsewhere, but when we get some time we'll definitely think more about how to use our widgets as a promotional vehicle. I still think they're cool, I just think that it's hard to build a business around widgets alone.

best, - rajat

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