I hate the term “Social Gaming.” It seems to suggest that people never played games together online before social networks like Facebook came along and unleashed game developers like Zynga to spam us all into trying multi-player poker. Were it not for the U.S. government’s crack down in 2007 on the hugely popular online poker sites, cutting off market millions of online poker fanatics and driving them to Facebook to discover a new outlet for their gambling addictions, we might never have had the epidemic known today as “Social Gaming.” What is lost in the hype around Zynga’s success is the hundreds of hugely successful multi-player games that preceded them. It doesn’t seem to help to point out to people that after Poker, Zynga never actually made another genuinely "social" multi-player game again. The extent of “socializing” in Mafia Wars is spamming strangers to join your gang. Socializing in FarmVille is limited to periodically surveying the barren dying wastelands of all your neighbors’ farms. Hence my observation that “Social Games,” as that term has come to be defined in Silicon Valley, aren’t really “social.”
When asked to suggest a better term for them I briefly considered referring to the phenomenon as “viral gaming” until it occurred to me that even this wasn’t an especially useful differentiating term. After all, Zynga’s games aren’t even viral in the sense of spreading through genuine word-of-mouth enthusiasm. I can think of several online game companies whose genuinely “social” online games spread virally online to enormous audiences and revenues without needing help from Facebook OR venture capital. Consider Jagex’s RuneScape founded by Andrew Gower in Cambridge England. At its peak RuneScape reached nearly 12 million monthly unique gamers and registered millions of subscribers with its Java-based RPG without the benefit of Facebook, venture capital or any apparent marketing effort whatsoever beyond simply being a hugely popular game. The same occurred for Adventure Quest, which was created by a 21-year-old kid living with his parents in Florida, as well as for Miniclip in London and, of course, the many hugely popular poker sites that cropped up independently in the U.S. before the crackdown.
Is it really a big new event in gaming that all the middle-aged housewives that used to play multiplayer card games and backgammon on Yahoo Games and Pogo.com found their real world friends to play games with a little more easily on Facebook? I don’t think so. Yet there is some characteristic of “Social Games” that smacks of a new phenomenon in gaming, but what could it be? After much contemplation I have come to the conclusion that the correct term to apply to the new phenomenon is “Parasitic Gaming.”
You see, the reason Zynga made one genuinely social multi-player game on Facebook and never did it again is obvious. What they discovered was that Facebook had presented them with a rare and precious opportunity to acquire Facebook’s audience virtually for free by designing minimalist games that prey on the inherent contagion of Facebook’s social graph to promote themselves to Facebook’s audience and siphon them off to Zynga. Real multi-player social gaming was just an impedance to that effort because people didn’t need to spam their friends with invitations when Poker provided a ready supply or immediate online players.
Of course, Facebook subsequently recognized the threat and closed the viral loophole by severely constraining the way Facebook games can spam their users with invitations, requests and notifications. Facebook’s crackdown will have two interesting effects on game developers. First, developers will be increasingly forced to buy their audience via advertising, like most other online game publishers on the Internet. Second, gaining user adoption on Facebook will be incredibly difficult for all but the largest game developers, who have the advertising budgets (not to mention their own free advertising on their canvas pages) to block out smaller competitors.
It is fair to say that with Facebook moving aggressively to contain the leak by preventing games from freely spamming their users that the halcyon days of “Social Gaming” (part 1) are nearly at an end, and the online game market will return to business as usual in which great, genuinely “social” games spread virally online without needing help from anybody and lesser titles will rely on buying advertising and doing distribution deals to reach their audiences. Even Zynga, having nearly outgrown its host organism will have to wean itself from dependence on Facebook and learn how to make games that people genuinely want to play and share with their friends voluntarily.
42 Comments
March 11, 2010
What a steaming pile of cow manure.
March 11, 2010
I haven't finished reading this editorial but I know it is dead on. I would live to find the person(s) responsible for FarmVille and hand them by their thumbs. There's one game I got sucked into on Facebook, Nightfall Bloodlines, and it has done more to keep the social aspect of Facebook nearly unusable. There's no reason to make people friend everyone and their dog in order to play a game. No one ever really interacts with their game friends so all it does is bloat the news feed and flood you with stupid invites.
March 11, 2010
Alex you are a gaming luminary! If Clarence, if this is cow manure, than manure is gold!
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March 20, 2010
Interesting analysis. I think a better comparison is that Zynga et al's games are `sophisticated slot machines'. The games are designed to take advantage of very specific behavior patterns in very specific people, using insidious and carefully designed reward cycles, and they "work" their victims into two paths: give more money or bring more people (to give more money). There is no skill involved, there is no social interaction with others, nothing new or emergent can arise, and the games simply repeat themselves over and over (there's no 2nd or 3rd game inside). I completely agree that this is unsustainable.
May 5, 2010
You need to read the fine print in your own articles, quote: "There's a balance between how long it takes to develop such an incredible title... and how long you wait for the [customer's] appetite to be both satisfied and whetted for the next title. That's something I think the company has done well."
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