Social Games: The Industry's New Wild West

You've seen them. You may have played them. And now they are big business.
7/20/2009 9:20 AM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 4

It all began the moment I joined Facebook. I was bitten by a vampire. And a zombie. Then I was invited to play Scrabble. Now it's all Mafia Wars and Farm Town. And it's not just Facebook. Sites like MySpace and even Twitter are fueling a burgeoning game industry. Social gaming is taking advantage of the Internet's unique ability to accumulate social connections in order to encourage greater investment in what have been, to this point, very casual games.

For a few years now, the social gaming sphere has been drawing talent from the "traditional" videogame industry. Last June, EA's former Chief Operating Officer John Pleasants became CEO of Playdom, a social/casual gaming studio that had already claimed gaming legend Steve Meretzky. Similarly, EA's founder Bing Gordon is a board member for industry leader Zynga, the company that recently opened an East Coast office headed by strategy-game guru Brian Reynolds. So what does the future hold for a game space dominated by clones, micropayment-dominated progress-bar games, and shallow game design?

Brian Reynolds, the designer of deep strategy classics like Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri and Rise of Nations, may seem an odd fit with the much lighter fare on Facebook, but he admits to getting hooked on the social games the site offers.

"It's the current entertainment I am addicted to. They are games I enjoy playing, though I wasn't sure why at first. There was no real deep design here. Part of it was instant gratification, but also the voodoo of social networking."

A simple game of Scrabble, for example, may start as a way to interact with an old friend you have not spoken to in years. That interaction may become a deeper social engagement -- you exchange news, rediscover old similarities or rivalries, and are soon regularly competing for high scores or a won/lost record.

But if invitations don't follow, the game may be a failure. And, given the Internet's viral nature, something new will always come along.

"We have to keeping making games [at Zynga]," says Reynolds, "Because they rise and fall. We continue to build a game even after it goes live. You have to keep adding to them. You cannot slow down game development."

It's this constant pace of developing, upgrading, and launching that separates social gaming from the traditional game industry. Where EA or Blizzard can spend millions of dollars on a team of hundreds, more than two years before a game hits shelves, social gaming companies can spend only weeks on a game, launch multiple betas to test new features, and adapt the game on the fly. The immense player base of these games keeps the pace viable, because there are so many avenues for monetization.

Brandon Barber, Zynga's vice president of marketing and another refugee from EA, explains that the size of the audience -- often in the millions -- means that traditional "eyeball" metrics and Internet advertising can be as important to the bottom line as the in-game sale of items. The business model has been so successful that he expects the big interactive media players to soon break into the social gaming market.