Social networking has dramatically changed the way mobile games are being designed, played and discovered. Less than ten years ago, the shift from asynchronous messaging and stable home pages to instant status updates and socially engaging interactive experiences on social networks pushed the rise of the web 2.0. The same change is currently ongoing in games. For game developers, this means new possibilities to gain better retail presence to drive downloads and revenue.

Whether it be fighting alongside your friends in Clash of Clans or sharing tips how to reach three stars on all levels of Angry Birds, gaming is more social than even. Mobile has brought games to the fingertips of everyone. The gamer is no longer just you and me; it can be your mom, a business traveler waiting for the next flight, grandma, or the little kid next door. Along the expansion of gaming audiences, game developers are facing the problem of all the time rising user acquisition costs and very limited retail presence for their games.

It doesn’t help at all that mobile application stores are full of high-quality games but only a fragment of those get featured. Instead of trying to beg and bribe the platform owners, or putting your money to banner ads, mobile video, cross promotion, community marketing, in-game advertising, free-app-a-day campaigns and similar, you might want to think of ways to leverage the crowd.

Emotions drive discoverability

Casual gamers do not queue outside game stores overnight to get the latest Call of Duty or read articles from gamer magazines. Casual gamers are the same rankers and raters that populate Pinterest, Youtube or Facebook. They stumble upon new games by learning from friends. They play only for seconds at a time and often do not even remember the title of the game, not to mention the developer.

According to this Nielsen study, Xbox gamers spend 84 hours on gaming per month. Mobile gamers spend only a little over 7 hours a month. It is much more difficult to get a mobile gamer to become engaged with a brand. That’s where emotions come in. Gaming is about emotions, and emotions are fuel for sharing. People share funny cat videos, engaging game play footage, victory moments and ridiculous jokes. These same basic motivational factors apply to games – when reaching a high score or passing a game on Veteran level, we want to share our achievements with the world. Emotions are instant. This means new marketing opportunities for game developers without paying big buck for it.

Games app drives discoverability for social games

Social games get additional visibility through the Games application on BlackBerry 10. This top 50 grossing games list is heavily populated by socially enabled games like 10 Pin Shuffle, World of Goo or Wacky Rapids. What’s even more interesting is that currently, nearly all socially enabled games are on the top grossing games list. That’s because every time a user reaches high score, achievement or completes a challenge, it will be posted to the timeline of the Games application and to the Popular games list for other gamers to see. Remember long tail?

Social has been the game-changer that the gaming industry was looking for. People who never played anything get hooked with fast-paced driving of Beach Buggy Blitz or flashy Fruit Blitz and start inviting their real-life friends, who then start playing too.

So, how do you leverage the crowd? The Games application on BlackBerry 10 is the social store window for all social games. All a developer needs to do is to integrate the social features provided by BlackBerry (Scoreloop SDK). That’s it. Check out the getting started guide for how to build Scoreloop into your BlackBerry 10 game.

With the upcoming launch of BlackBerry® 10, we’ve got a few new features on their way and we want you to be prepared for them.

We understand that the success of your app is based on marketing properly to as many customers as possible. With this in mind, we’ll be introducing a new Improved Relevance Marketing Meta-Data feature set.

So what does this mean for you? Well, a lot. When we launch this new feature set, you’ll be able to upload multiple sets of meta-data (this includes screenshots and descriptions) that will be platform and language-specific. That’s right — no need to spread your applications across multiple product SKUs.

For example, if you want to deploy an app supporting BlackBerry® OS, BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablets and BlackBerry 10, you can do it all under a single application submission instead of three – all the while maintaining distinctive descriptions and screenshots for each platform.

What’s the benefit to you? Less SKUs in the store to manage – a single app supplies the binaries and meta-data for every platform you support. What’s the benefit to end-users? When they upgrade their BlackBerry smartphone to BlackBerry 10 or buy a BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, their apps can quickly and easily be reinstalled via My World. This also means that you keep your customer base when your users change platforms. Additionally, the user will see meta-data (description, screenshots, etc) that is optimized for his/her device platform.

Some updates to the BlackBerry App World™ storefront search will be made to further improve app discoverability. In January 2013, it will be updated to include searching on the following fields:

• Title
• Keywords
• Vendor Name
• Short Description

Long description will no longer be indexed for search.

Below you’ll find all the details currently available and how they compare to what will be available when these features launch shortly.

So, there you have it! Sound off in the comments and let us know what you think.

One of Alec’s favourite things is to do a little myth busting regarding developing apps for BlackBerry®. He’s in Beijing at the BlackBerry® 10 Jam World Tour today doing just that. There’s a myth out there that there aren’t apps for BlackBerry smartphones and the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet. Let me help bust that myth.

BlackBerry smartphone and PlayBook users around the world have downloaded over three billion apps since BlackBerry App World™ launched! (Editor’s Note: You can tell Victoria is excited, because she doesn’t like using exclamation points in blog posts)

Three billion app downloads averages out to over 2.5 million downloads each day.  What’s even more important – and impressive – is that the number of daily downloads continues to increase. It took 786 days to reach the one billion mark, 210 days to reach two billion, and only 176 days to reach the three billion number. I should also note that this number does not include apps downloaded from third party BlackBerry app stores, or those pushed internally at companies around the world, or those downloaded directly from the web.

Special thanks is due to the over 28,000 BlackBerry App World vendors and the BlackBerry App World storefront team. BlackBerry App World has continued to grow steadily with more than 90,000 applications now up for sale (we know other platforms use other metrics like submitted, or approved, but we prefer the more tangible “up for sale”).

I look forward to sharing more great numbers from our app and dev teams as we continue toward the new year. What was the first app you ever downloaded onto your BlackBerry?