Day 2 at GDC 10 was dominated by the exuberant Alex St John. The recently recruited President and CTO of social networking site Hi5. St John was stirring things up to promote the launch of Hi5's developer program.
In a carefully choreographed presentation, St John managed to verbally destroy Zynga and Facebook. With a supporting cast of executives from large game publishers, the presentation was clearly aimed at positioning Hi5 as the savior of mass market online gaming. Dismissing popular social games from Zynga for their shallow game dynamics and spam like use of viral channels, St John described Facebook as the church next to Hi5s nightclub. Hi5 will almost certainly be marketed as an edgier alternative to Facebook. The presentation was pure entertainment, unless you were representing Facebook or Zynga.
St John was masterful at switching on a dime from castigating Facebook to befriending game developers in the audience with his encyclopedic knowledge of gaming that stretches back to the origins of the industry. The audience were extremely receptive to his wooing.
St John was a pioneer in the gaming industry and his last website WildTangent is apparently the largest private gaming site in the world with 30 million monthly uniques. Quite impressive considering that until today I had not heard of St John, WildTangent and had very little knowledge of Hi5.
A couple of important platform features were announced. St John wants the ability for users to have private personas, e.g. avatars. This approach is fundamentally different to Facebook's open, public profile. According to St John Facebook's approach is driven by their need to feed advertisers with it's customers profile data. St John is determined to monetize from gaming and not ads. This approach to privacy is much better suited to supporting gambling related applications than Facebook.
Whether or not you believe the hype you can't argue with St John's experience and that of the seasoned executive team he has assembled. I'm sure we will be hearing a lot about Hi5 in the near future.
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