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Social games like Farmville, Café World and Mafia Wars have created a raging demand for virtual goods, but arguably have done little actual good for their millions of avid players.
DPL Health Games co-founder Laila Partridge hopes to change that. Noting that online social games are more addictive than, say, fat-free cream cheese, Wellesley-based DPL has developed a social game that rewards players with virtual goods as they achieve weight-loss goals.
A serial entrepreneur and former director of strategic investments at Intel Capital, Partridge says she had been working as a consultant with online role-playing businesses, and became “enthralled” by Farmville.
“You’ve got something that’s habit-forming and addictive, and you’ve got a social element and mainstream adoption by middle-aged women,” Partridge said.
DPL’s product, which doesn’t yet have a name (the company name is the initials of the three founders’ first names), is built on the SimCity concept that other online social games have used. Instead of a city, a farm, a café, or a crime family, the game gives each player a virtual home among a neighborhood of homes. Meeting diet and exercise goals wins players points that can be used to furnish the home and do activities in the nearby town. A social element lets players exchange gifts, and encourage one another.
Partridge’s two co-founders are Don Mitchell, a serial entrepreneur, and Pete Gast, a software engineer. The two worked together in the Boston-area office of San Jose middleware maker BEA Systems Inc. in 2008, when the company was acquired by Oracle Corp.
At this point DPL’s game is a relatively simple prototype, but Partridge says she’s not worried about fast followers. DPL is not going to Facebook right away, she said. Instead, their strategy is to be first in the door at dieting juggernauts like Weight Watchers with a white-label game that will help retain subscribers. According to Partridge, the most successful of those companies’ programs lose 50 percent of their participants in the first week. After 20 weeks, only 2 percent are still on board.
“That’s kind of the beauty of this,” she said. “We’re not here to create a diet. We’re not here to create a plan for diabetes. We’re the group that’s going to say we’re going to bring up that adherence. Why? Because this game is habit-forming. It’s fun.”
DPL plans for subscription revenue from organizations that use the product, as well as in-game sales of related products and ad revenue from in-game special offers.
If the product works in dieting, future applications with marathon and other fitness and sports training may emerge, Partridge said. For now, though the company is pre-revenue, Partridge feels confident DPL will do well if it attracts marquee customers. If a diet works once, the customer tends to come back to it again, she said. That, in turn, makes dieting companies themselves into loyal customers.
“You’ve got 40 names that really matter in dieting,” she said. “Once you get those people, Weight Watchers is going to stick with you because of the nature of the weight business.”
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