Facebook is the focus of a new gold rush for developers. Everyone is trying to find the next Farmville. The question is, why is Facebook so popular? I believe there are 3 key reasons:
- It’s ubiquitous
- All your friends, in 1 place
- It’s so easy to start playing
Ubiquitous
Facebook is everywhere! There’s no escape. Nearly everyone I know is on it, so nearly everyone I know can play games on it. That is a massive market ready to be tapped. No console game could get close to the number of Farmville players at its peak.
All your friends in 1 place
Nearly everyone likes to play games with friends. All the way back to chess (and beyond) games have been a good way to interact with others. Being online gives you access to millions of other players, but why play with strangers when you can play with friends? The solution? Friend lists.
John Vechey (Popcap co-founder) recently had some interesting thoughts about Facebook and friends lists:
I’m very pro-Facebook. I never want to make a friends list again… I hate making friends lists in games. Take League of Legends - I was playing for three weeks until I found out some of my friends had been playing!
The problems with friends lists as a concept include:
- The need to recreate the list each time (or most times)
- You need to know which of your friends to add - you sometimes need to stay in contact externally to keep track of who’s playing what
- They sometimes need a complex string of characters to be entered (an email or a series of numbers). This is less of an issue with a PC, but with consoles and their less well suited input controls this turns into a real effort
Efforts have been made to reduce the pain by using shared lists. But why bother at all? Most people have a ready made friends list in Facebook. I’ve seen Blizzard is looking to get into Facebook - and it’s not a moment too soon! I hope other developers take note.
Research is needed to find how gamers would want Facebook/the game to behave with this information. For example would gamers want their “game” friends mixing with their “real life” friends online, or should they be separated? How would gamers like their online gaming behaviour broadcasted, if at all?
It’s easy to play
Adding a game to Facebook is easy. No installation, very little loading screens and no initial costs. This means there’s no real technical barrier between the developers and the potential players.
Conclusion
Facebook presents a very compelling case to developers. Large markets, easy access and strong links between people. It’s also compelling to gamers. An easy access point to games, and strong social interaction with all your friends who are also playing.
All that’s needed now are iconic Facebook games that can capture peoples imagination, spare time and wallets. Before that can truly happen, there is much work that needs to be done looking at gaming and social interaction and the interaction between the two.
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Just another tester commented on 1 September 2010 at 3:48 pm
In addition to the All your friends… reason it’s also worth noting the new social acceptability that Facebook lends games.
However, I don’t know to whom you refer when you say ‘gamers’, I don’t think I’d refer to anyone who plays Farmville or any Facebook/online flash games as a gamer. The distinction is the casual nature in which the content is consumed; in my mind a gamer is someone who invests a large portion of their leisure time and disposable income on gaming - as a hobby or past time more than anything - rather than 15 minutes a day on a flash application.
You are right to think that the Internet has a very positive future in gaming but I don’t think that Facebook or flash games in general present a compelling platform to gamers, only to those of a casual disposition to lucid content.
I also don’t think that the majority of companies ‘get it’ when creating content on new social media platforms. They spend all their time trying to collate and present the user’s or user’s friend’s information in some random fashion alongside their logo. Games companies seem to have realised that the way to make compelling content, and to keep the users coming back, is to focus on the core mechanics of your content - your friend’s exist purely as a game mechanic: “get 30 neighbours to increase your land area”, “water their land and be rewarded with stuff you can use to make your farm better”, “you can only build that fancy looking barn if you swap those few rusty nails for a rugged weedwhacker”.
Alistair Gray commented on 6 September 2010 at 12:39 pm
3 excellent thoughts in 1 post.
- Your point about the added social acceptability for games is a good one, so many more people play computer games on Facebook (and with their mobiles) than they used to.
- The discussion over who is and isn’t a ‘gamer’ could well be a long complex one. I like to see it as a open house - anyone who plays games (be it electronic, or otherwise) is a ‘gamer’. I’ve then got to breakdown the difference between ‘casual’, ’social’, ‘hardcore’, etc. It seems everyone has their own definitions.
- As to if companies ‘get it’. That’s a real toughie. You could fairly say that games companies have a different aim to others. All they need is to keep people coming back for more, while other companies need to push their message.
I’d have to agree though. No companies have really caught the imagination as they could do.