Playdom has largely been in stealth mode and only came out with its brand to the public about six months ago, but it's already made huge waves. The company is the leading developer on MySpace and it recently got its games on Facebook as well. Pleasants confirmed our notion that Facebook has been growing faster and the fastest growth for Playdom of late has been with Facebook. In fact, Playdom has been seeing triple-digit monthly growth on Facebook, Pleasants said.
While we imagine the Playdom target audience and the audience for social/casual games is quite different from the traditional console/handheld demographic, Pleasants really sees these games as entertainment for everyone and there is some overlap. “Given how fast the social gaming space has grown, it's hard these days to find a Halo or Madden player that isn't probably playing some type of social networking game. I mean there's somewhere between 50-100 million people playing games on Facebook, so that's a big swath that's going to cover people who are core console gamers as well as people who are not console gamers.” A Playdom representative added that anecdotally she got two e-mails from friends who said their parents were playing their games. “It's really exciting that a 62-year-old woman and 65-year-old man are playing our games,” she said.
Pleasants elaborated, “Look at it this way: there are probably between 200-250 million people worldwide who are playing either a console or handheld game. In the online and mobile space, I believe that number [of players] is somewhere between 800 million and a billion people... you're talking about 3-4 times the amount of people that have these devices and have this access. The Internet is the biggest gaming platform in the world.”
So if the growth potential is so tremendous for the online and social gaming space, should we expect it to overtake the traditional video game market (now worth about $40-$45 billion globally)? Pleasants doesn't view it that way. “This isn't the automobile business taking over the horse-and-buggy. It's about growing the category,” he said. “I think what you're going to find – and what I was pushing hard at EA – is that console games will become services, meaning ongoing releases of content, persistent IDs for customers, etc. For example, I want to be able to play Tiger Woods on an iPhone, on a computer and a console and I want to be able to buy extra clubs or an extra course, or buy the course on my iPhone and play the course on my PC at work, and then go home and play it on a console like the Wii. It's that cross-platform connected gameplay, with everything online and effectively a service. I do believe that is going to overtake the game industry. If the industry is $55 billion in a few years, I think most of that will be games as services. That's what Playdom is so good at – they change code on their games daily. It's about running a live dynamic ecosystem.”
And beyond online and mobile, Playdom's games, and social games in general, are bound to hit the console space. Facebook is already getting more tightly integrated with Xbox Live and DSi, so IndustryGamers thinks it's just a matter of time before these social games are found on consoles too. Pleasants agreed and noted that all these platforms will start to “cross-pollinate.” He of course sees that “as nothing but another opportunity for Playdom.”
