The Growth of Social Gaming
Posted: Friday 28 October, 2011
Will Davis
Social gaming has grown at a phenomenal rate in the past few months. At the recent London leg of the F8 conference it was announced that Facebook now has more gamers than XBOX, PlayStation and Nintendo combined. But how did this growth spring up in such a short space of time, and is this popularity likely to be maintained?
It’s no secret that social media has been an over riding success in recent years, with Facebook creeping ever closer to one billion users on a daily basis. But even so, some of these games on Facebook are garnering more daily users than some of the most established console franchises are in the same time frame. How come they continue to prove so popular?
Their success appears to be based on what made Facebook and other social platforms so popular in the first place – the emphasis on socialising and interacting with friends. Rather than placing focus on graphics and narrative, these games have put the involvement of friends at the forefront of the gameplay. FarmVille exemplified the perfect way to do this – as users completed tasks on their virtual farm, achievement notices were posted to their friends’ Facebook feeds, encouraging them to help progress their farm, at the same time more often than not encouraging them to start their own virtual farm. The cycle continued in such a manner until the game became an unbridled success.
Games have since progressed to play upon the success of encouraging friends to interact with one another. For example, Bossa Studios’ Monstermind encourages users to create a city which they must then defend from real-time monster attacks launched by their Facebook friends. Although the game is based more on strategy and attacking friends rather than helping them, the fundamentals remain the same and play upon the social nature of Facebook to progress the user experience.
Since such lesser know developers have found success through social channels, larger brand names have looked to enter the fold, with the likes of EA and social adaptations of The Sims and FIFA launching in recent weeks, to name just two examples.
With global brands looking to cash-in on the ever growing popularity of social gaming it would appear the popularity is more than a fad. As social platforms such as Facebook become more advanced, offering a wider variety of applications and utilities to entertain their user base (as with Facebook’s integration with Hulu and Spotify), users will continue to spend more time on these platforms and as such these gaming platforms are only likely to prove increasingly popular.
