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Comment by shocks | Hacker News Reader

What about those of us without Facebook? :(

So far it seems as if facebook connect is a huge fail, even from the early analytics, it seems like a guest option or a way to register w/o facebook is key. I think we'll be adding that as quick as possible! :)

Depending on your demographic of players this may be a mistake. HN will complain a lot about Facebook login but take words with friends as an example - you can play the tutorial without logging in and then it's FB login to play for real. Period. Why? Because a major driver of growth for them is Facebook. They've optimized their flow so that the average player invites other players, they used OpenGraph to post a lot when players take in-game actions, basically Facebook allows them to grow their userbase by having each user spread the game to more users.

The fact that so many games have Facebook only login is a sign that when done right, with a demographic of players that accept it (almost all, the SF Bay Area is way more anti facebook-login and sharing than most of the rest of the world), the players you lose by having only Facebook login are made up for by the viral spreading you get from Facebook users.

The caveat of course being that you have to design, from the ground up, for the game to spread through Facebook. If you don't, it's not worth it. But if you don't, you need some other strategy to make the game spread, and there are very very few unfortunately.

Yeah I assumed the HN crowd would be more affected by the facebook connect restriction. I think there's definitely pro's and con's with facebook connect, email reg, and guest play. I do think there's some aspects of playing real people that's more appealing.

Finding the right demographic would be great, I think at this point we're still trying to figure out what to do with the game play to make it fun, clean up bugs, tutorials etc.

We're also working on the android version, mobile we think will be a huge driver for this game (in our mind).

Really do appreciate the feedback, and we'd love to hear more from you

Neat - any plans for iOS? BTW nobody I've challenged has responded, would be awesome if with your admin superpowers you started a 'random' game with me. I'm Jeremy Rossmann, fb username jvross.

Depending on your demographic of players this may be a mistake.

How could having the option of registering sans Facebook be a mistake? In what way could broadening your target audience be a poor choice?

Hinging your cart entirely like that (becoming a sharecropper that is completely dependent on the goodwill and cooperation of a much bigger partner) is seldom a responsible business strategy.

Adding email registration can be a mistake in situations when users who would have signed up through Facebook now sign up through email instead. Depending on what % of your growth is driven by virality vs organic discovery and how viral your fb users vs email users are (could be a 10X difference or more) you can be better off losing say 50% of players but having the remaining 50% sign in through Facebook than having 80% sign in through email and 20% through Facebook. It really depends on your numbers.

I have a gut-level reaction to this reasoning, which is that I believe that when you provide less value to your users you will likely get fewer users no matter how well you've justified the opposite case to yourself.

But I also have some specific reasoning that leads me to believe it's not a poor choice to provide another way to sign in. Signing in with facebook is extremely easy compared to normal signup paths. What this means is that most people who trust you with facebook will still sign in via facebook. And I don't think there's much of an argument that people who don't trust you with facebook will be signing in with facebook if it's the only option.

You can always allow them to link with facebook later, after they know what the game is, and after you've explained to them why linking will be valuable to them.

> that I believe that when you provide less value to your users

You're assuming that more options always increases value, but this is not the case. See Apple and, let's say, the Samsung Jitterbug for counter-examples.

Yeah, forcing users to make a decision or navigate a cluttered UI are both ways in which options decrease value. So adding options can suck if people aren't going to exercise them (which is what I see with a lot of options that get added to software -- only a very tiny percentage of users ever tweak them.)

However the claim I was debating was that a second sign-in method would be bad because people would exercise it. The argument was basically that it's bad because it's increasing value for users in a way that decreases value for you. And I don't think adding a second sign-in method to a page that currently only has one button really causes a difficult or confusing decision or creates a cluttered UI.

I suppose I still do see your point, though, since I personally wouldn't go much beyond that -- "sign in with facebook or twitter or google or browserid or github or create an account or or or" sounds like a miserable experience.

The correct answer doesn't exist. There's a methodology you can follow to find an answer for every product, and it will vary case-by-case and sometimes over the lifetime over the product. Your gut reaction will be right many times but wrong sometimes as well. It's entirely possible to run the numbers and figure out what the right decision is right now for this game.

>In what way could broadening your target audience be a poor choice?

Presumably, because there exists a population of people who will log in via FB if that's the only option, but will log in using another option instead if it's available.

Depending on the size of this population and the added value of having plays log in via FB instead of another method, it might outweigh the benefit of capturing those players who will never log in via FB but may play if another log in method is available.

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