Wooga's CEO Says 'Playing' Is A Core Human Desire

 Jens Begemann, CEO of  wooga says that "playing" is a core human desire. He believes social games will change the entertainment industry. At his Games Developer Conference Europe keynote today, Begemann not only launched a new game on Facebook, Magic Land (read the standard press release here) but addressed a market segment he believes is being overlooked in social gaming - women.

Now, we all know that wooga makes social games and these are NOT the console games that we cut our teeth on of late - Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty, Halo, Warcraft, to name a few. These are asynchronous games that you play in short sessions with friends in your social network. By the way he talked today, you would think he believed that woman are the key to the future of monetization of all social games, saying, "We are paying attention to what women want to play and how they spend their time."

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Begemann believes that today's social games are not about taking console games and just making new games, but creating new social games for a new target groups. And, he believes the reason this group is NOT playing games boils down to four primary reasons:

Wants to play with friends

"You just can't put a team of developers on it and say, go adapt these games," said Begemann in his keynote. "There are only about 25 successful social games on Facebook, including Monster World, and this is because these games are created to engage users driven by key elements."

Begemann describes those must-have key social game elements as: customize avatar, decorations, expansions, instant build, materials, coins, magic and fuel. In fact, more than 35% of the revenue from wooga's hit game Monster World, comes from a "buying fuel feature" that users can buy to "power" their movements through the game.

wooga had some interesting stats on how Americans are playing games, with just 10% of their users from Germany, they are more interested in their global user base. According to his data, Americans spend 215 million hours on playing computer games. That number breaks down like this:  console games, 19%, social networks 16% and mobile devices 12%, etc. That group of women he wants to reach, they fit right in there.

He makes it clear that social games are not MMOG, they are  MPPG – Message Parallel Play Games. That point he hit hard. "Social interactions are getting more intense and more sophisticated, we have to create games that fit today's users."

Begemann mentioned the new live game updates Facebook announced last week (here on Forbes by Tomio Green) that sends out notifications to you about which of your friends are playing games at the same time. Begemann says the industry has got to get creative. "Now, it's up to game developers to develop features that allow synchronous play inside of this asynchronous gaming environment."

I asked him what his projections were for Magic Land and his reply was just one word: "Positive."