Social Media has changed the world of computer gaming drastically. In the past few days we have witnessed a stupendous applause for social game creators. Zynga was valued at one billion dollars and console gaming giants EA Sports bagged PlayFish for $300 million. A Russian Social Strategy Game maker Nival Network has rasied 5 million dollars to improve their games further. So what is it that makes the social gaming such a lucrative trade? All we know is that they are free and come with silly adds.
I was a computer games fans since my college days. (My school days were computer free; hard to imagine, eh) I used to paly on for 8 hours in a single sitting. That seemed like waste of a day; almost. Today my gaming preferences have changed I am on Facebook most of the time, at home and during work. I dont play console games much. Its games like Farm Town, Mafia Wars, Be-A-Tycoon that I play now. I don’t have to sit for 8 hours straight. I play in realtime with millions of players. I am now playing the whole day. But it does not affect my work or commitments. Most of my friends are on social networks where I play these games. They visit my farm and harvest my crops. I do the same for them. We send each other gifts. I don’t have to kill my social life for my gaming habit. I make friends through my games rather than loosing friends for my games as it was in the case earlier.
Thats me - On my farm.
Enough of my social gaming side. We were discussing what makes the social gaming so lucrative. It the sheer number of players that makes the difference. When a console game is released it sells say a million copies in the first month. Things then slow down and die out. A copy of hottest console game like Modern Warfare 2: Call of Duty will cost your as much as $100 per copy. Now consider Zynga’s Farmvillie that has an active userbase of 65 million users. Every now and then FarmVille intorduces new objects like “chicken coops” that can be bought with $3. I hope you can do the maths from here. There are lots of other stuff like big houses, special trees, garden decorations etc that users can pay to have which free users won’t.
The power of micropayments when multiplied with a massive userbase converts into big profits. Plus no one thinks for a second time before paying up half a dollar through paypal but we do think it over before paying up $50 or more for console games. Well, did I mention the cost of buying a console? Thats another $500 at least.
Facebook and MySapce expect to see their revenues triple in coming year riding on the popularity of Social Games.
Popularity: 21% [?]
