Victory: A ranking system for what makes a social game into a blockbuster

Alok Kejriwal, chief executive of Indian game firm Games2Win, shared a couple of interesting charts with me that describe a way to rank social games by benchmarking how they stack up in a variety of important features such as the quality of the game play, the virality of a game, which makes it spread faster, how original it is, whether it has international appeal, and how addictive or habit forming the game is.

Kejriwal’s own internal game creators set up the ranking system, which they dub Victory, and ranked some of the world’s most popular social games using the system. The top chart shows the rankings of games such as Zynga’s FarmVille, and the other chart explains the ranking system itself. It adds some interesting perspective on what the top games share in common. If you’re making social games, you might want to be sure that your game rates high on these measures, which are undoubtedly subjective but still useful.