DIGC102 Presentation outline
Research area: Social gaming – Online gaming industry ¡Think Facebook & MySpace games- Farmville, Mob Wars, Texas Holdem Poker etc.
Importance:
• Both gaming and social networking are increasingly being used in our technologically accelerating society.
• Facebook is commonly used as almost everyone I know holds an account. It is a utility that connects people from different communities across the world and has a novelty aspect to it (games and applications).
• Unlike conventional video-gaming methods, our friends are not sitting at a computer with us; geography is not an issue in the virtual world.
• New consumers- Many people who have never played games are playing with their “friends” via social networking applications.
Research question: What are the features of social gaming (demographics, ownership, regulation, popular games, costs) and how might it be different to conventional video/online games.
Resources
¡ Social gaming company websites:
Zynga: http://www.zynga.com/
Playdom: http://www.playdom.com/
Playfish: http://www.playfish.com/?page=frontpage
Social Gaming Network: http://www.sgn.com/about.html,
¡ http://appdata.com/ - Facebook application metrics,
¡ ammature Blogs,
¡ Inside Social Games, Gigaom, e27, Social Media Biz, Tech News, RMM, Games Beat, Youtube,
¡ search engines: Google, Googlescholar, Creative Common Search,
¡ primary research: users of social gaming applications,
¡ online news sites, scholarly articles,
¡ and the Social Gaming Summit 2008 website.
Problems
¡ There aren’t many scholarly articles or data/statistics on it as it is a rarely new phenomenon.
¡ There is a fine line between social gaming and online gaming.
¡ Ownership of Social Games is highly concentrated – not many companies to compare.
Brief findings:
• “It is now redefining how games are produced and distributed.
• SG company ownership is concentrated.”
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/84943702-9821-11de-8d3d-00144feabdc0.html
• “While social networking is focused on connecting people together, we should expect the best of social gaming to be about creating and building relationships with those friends.”
http://gigaom.com/2008/05/23/what-makes-gaming-social/
• “More interactive entertainment is the shift.” – Craig Sherman, CEO of Gaia Online, the largest online hangout for teenagers.
• “Q: What percentage of the audience are you making money from?
Kim: 5 to 10% is doing pretty well. We get disparaging comments from other companies who think that’s too low to consider a success, but we always tell them “My playerbase is 10 times bigger than your player base.” (Min Kim, Vice President of Marketing, Nexon America).
Sherman: The highest I’ve seen is 16%”
http://www.massively.com/2008/06/18/the-social-gaming-summit-casual-mmos-and-immersive-worlds/
¡ “Social Games: The Web 2.0 of Gaming:
Social gaming has been likened to Web 2.0 in how it made games socially interactive, with players playing against each other, and the ability to contribute with tonnes of user generated content for games.”
http://www.e27.sg/2009/02/01/social-games-the-web-20-of-gaming/
Yesterdays Facebook Leaderboards @ http://appdata.com/
Application Leaderboard
1. FarmVille 37,659,165
2. Causes 27,629,727
3. LivingSocial 23,207,364
4. Mafia Wars 20,715,711
5. We’re Related 20,332,117
Developer Leaderboard
1. Zynga 103,164,985
2. Playfish 49,995,434
3. RockYou! 32,774,415
4. Causes 27,629,727
5. Slide, Inc. 25,937,741 6
• “The biggest social game developer, Zynga, now has nearly half as many staff as Facebook itself.
• Gareth Davis (Facebook’s platform manager for games)
“In the last year we’ve seen a big increase in the quality and quantity of games. Now, we are a game platform where tens of millions of people come to play games every day.”
“We’re seeing a whole new category of games designed for the “social gamer” who would never describe themselves as a gamer.”
“And the other trend we’re seeing is the large traditional game companies getting involved. EA has been involved for a while. ”
http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/08/03/future-social-gaming-facebook/
¡ Independant game makers:
“On Facebook, every month or two, we see a game come out of nowhere that doesn’t come from a studio. It comes from an independent developer, who is able to get distribution using the social graph and change the industry and the type of games people play.”
http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/08/03/future-social-gaming-facebook/
• Before being able to pay with the Facebook payments option, users must first buy Facebook “credits” directly from Facebook.
• Once they have credits in their account, users can then spend them however they like in Facebook applications that have integrated Facebook’s payment solution or in Facebook’s gift shop.
http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/06/01/facebook-payments-alpha-test-now-live-in-3-apps/
• “Zynga is now part of the social gaming establishment and it has fended off challengers such as EA, which is losing some of its talent to the social gaming industry.
• Facebook Connect, the technology that lets developers embed Facebook identities in non-Facebook sites, will help spread social gaming far and wide this year.
• Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo have all embraced the technology to some degree. That means the consoles will go social and it will eventually be possible to play the same game across multiple social game platforms — the realization of a possibility that had us intrigued two years ago, before the platform had even fully launched.
• At some point, the silos of the social game industry will all be connected by some kind of common tissue.”
http://games.venturebeat.com/2009/06/24/in-recession-social-gaming-comes-of-age/
