Social games have absolutely exploded over the last year or so, dominated mostly by Facebook and companies like Zynga. Traditional video game publishers are scrambling to figure out how to best leverage this burgeoning sector (EA did it the easy way by buying Playfish), but no one knows for sure where social games will really stand a few years from now.
Playdom CEO John Pleasants said the market should be worth upwards of $5 billion in three years, and one recent report notes that social gaming virtual goods sales should contribute around $835 million in the U.S. this year alone. Trip Hawkins of Digital Chocolate is so optimistic about the space that he thinks virtual goods, driven largely by the social games sector, could reach $100 billion worldwide during this decade.
We asked Sims and Spore creator Will Wright about the impact of social gaming during a recent in-depth interview, and he definitely seemed to put the space in a more realistic perspective than all the executives throwing around bloated estimates.
"I think it’s going to be an established area of games; I don’t think it’s going to take over the world," he commented. "People were saying that about online games before that and they were saying that about portable games before that. There’s always, when a new platform or a new niche emerges, there’s explosive growth in that niche; it’s like this void that’s being filled very rapidly, where there was a vacuum. So right now we’re at the steep of that curve. If you extrapolate that out, it looks like “Oh, that’s gonna be the whole market in 5 years,” but of course the curve never stays that steep. It’s kind of like the ecosystems are in this gigantic disruptive phase. Whole new niches are opening and other ones are shrinking and so we’re seeing some very steep deltas in different directions right now. I get the sense that in a year from now we’ll start seeing these things plateau towards what their natural equilibrium is."
Interestingly, Wright compared the nascent social gaming market to where The Sims was seven years ago. "What’s still remarkable to me is that there hasn’t really been a viable competitor for [The Sims]. Usually when a genre opens up you get several competitors coming in to fill that genre, but in some sense The Sims is a game of its own genre, which for various reasons nobody’s really copied. It’s almost like if you look at where The Sims was seven years ago, I think that’s where social gaming is now," he stated. "It’s like this big vacuum that’s opening and it’s gonna fill with a certain type of play experience, a certain type of demographic. We’re gonna fill that, but then we’re just gonna have another genre. In a sense, we’re getting a more diverse set of play game opportunities out there to the consumer, which is part of games really starting to come into their own and have more diversity."
Be sure to check out the full interview with Wright for much more insightful commentary.
