ESPNU College Town's Jay Arrera reveals how TV might help social games grow [Interview]

ESPNU College Town, released just over 30 days ago, has already amassed over 2 million monthly users and released two major content updates introducing Facebook Credits, baseball, softball and myriad new items. Regardless of the Playdompedigree, social game growth is in a weird limbo where companies will take a step forward only to take two more back. So, it begs the question: how? ESPNU College Town's Senior Producer Jay Arrera tells us how Playdom managed to attract a few million college sports fans in less than 60 days (hint: lots of TV advertisements) and how the studio plans to keep them coming back for more.

What was the inspiration behind ESPNU College Town and why use the ESPNU brand specifically?

ESPN actually approached Playdom. The company had recently launched Social City in the spring of this year, it did very well and actually received the Game of the Year Award at GDC Online. ESPN were big fans of the game and they approached us and said, 'We have an idea for someone to be an athletic director, we've seen that you made a really popular game in the social game space.' We formed a partnership where ESPN would work with Playdom on multiple titles and this is the first title in that series.