Yep, ‘Social Gaming’ Still a Fad.

Not the future of gaming.

When ‘social gaming’ was really starting to take off there was this really big rally around how it’s going to be the future of the gaming industry and how it will be impossible to resist this move towards massive appeal and near-zero entry barriers.  I stated up front that I thought this was a load of crap and I have always stood by what I call the “farmville generation” being a fad — right along with Myspace, Facebook, and any other sort of social networking.

On Yahoo! today there is an article talking about some statistics showing how 23 of the top 25 biggest Facebook games have seen a decline in users, marking a two month decline overall.   Depending on how you look at it, you may find blame in Facebook for removing the spam and cross-promotion.  I think that has a huge part to play, but it also speaks to the games themselves.  People only tried them when they were inundated with the spam.  It took millions of people spamming the heck out of millions of other people who originally had no clue what the heck these things were in order to get people trying them.  As I’ve said before, this is not and never will be a basis from which to claim a lasting trend in gaming.

Just like Facebook will soon die off much the same way Myspace has, Farmville and its kind will soon be nothing more than a blemish people try and cover up.  The iPhone gaming is going to see an increase as Farmville/Frontierville become playable and other games follow suit, but like previous surges in ‘social gaming’ and ‘mobile gaming’ it won’t last. There is absolutely zero foundation for these games.  The real online gaming started slow and built upon itself for a very, very long time before taking off and each genre has its own story to tell about how it started small and slowly earned the popularity it has today.  There is also a history of development along with trial and error.

I have nothing against people who want to play these games.  I also have nothing against the games themselves.  I’m only interested in debunking the idea that this is the future of gaming.  They may generate revenue and they may even have a temporary spike in users that is quite impressive, but they are a dead end beyond the short term.  The more people and developers steer towards ‘social gaming’ the worse it’s going to be when they have to turn right back around.  They, like my Tamagotchi, are a fad.  Make money on them now while you can, but do not think they will be here to stay.

  • Facebook will die off? What?

    I’ve got friends from more than a decade on there. I’ll never cancel my account if only so I can keep up to date contact info for people for reunions and stuff. Not to mention it’s how most parties and trips get planned these days. It’s very handy for those select purposes. However, if you mean spending many hours a day on facebook, almost living a life on facebook… then I agree with you. These days I forward messages to my email and never visit otherwise.

    As for the games, it’s clear there wasn’t quality content there to support the initial fad. However just like the video game boom and bust in the early 80’s I expect that a handful of survivor companies will come back with products that have more substance and continue moving forward. Many of today’s players will toss them aside, some few may head upmarket to subscription or AAA F2P mmos.

    What the success of these games does prove is the power of social networking in spreading interest even with a mediocre product. How about an app for WoW that tells you what servers your Facebook friends are playing on? Or for a new game, how about a server recommendation that uses your social networks and/or physical location to group you with your friends and neighbors?

  • I still like my imaginary restaurant.

    MySpace is still doing surprisingly well. There is a wasteland of abandoned accounts, but it still holds several demographics.

  • “Social Gaming” is a fad only as a buzzword. I never really cared for the term since gaming is mostly social to begin with. Farmville and its ilk are like Uno and Monopoly. Sure they are simple and trite but games none the less and they will always have a market.

    With regards to the listed article. I am curious to see how they count a user of the game. Also nowhere was it mentioned how facebook itself was used during that time.

  • Aww, now I miss my Tomagochi! Those things were hilarious. Them and Digimon back when they were, y’know, handheld little boxes and not some crazy cartoon show.

    But on the topic of social gaming with you I must agree. I know so many people who sink time in to those games on Facebook, and try to get me to join. I’ve ignored every single invitation to those games. They’re ridiculous, and in some cases emasculating (I mean, really, “Sorority Life?” Does a guy really need to play that? lol). Sorry, I make fun of my brother for playing that on a regular basis.

    I read a neat article on Farmville actually, and how it technically isn’t even a game, because games are generally free from real-world obligation (We’ll just ignore Metal Gear Solid 3 and it’s “internal clock” that made food spoil, that was just annoying). Where Farmville, on the other hand, makes you come back every 8 hours to click mindlessly some 600-odd times. I’ll have to see if I can find the article again, I think you’d enjoy it, Keen.

    I applaud your (semi) neutral stance on the issue of the social games in themselves, though. You, unlike me, say nothing of the games specifically and simply make a broad contention in regards to them. And I must say that I agree.

    I’ll find that link and put it up here, though. It was a good read.

  • I hate to double-post, but I can’t seem to find a way to edit a comment. Here’s that article:

    “Cultivated Play: Farmville”
    http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/content/cultivated-play-farmville

    It talks about society and video games and how games are a necessary part of being a responsible citizen according to Aristotle and Caillois. Then goes on to delineate why Farmville is not a (good) game based on the definitions of a game given by the above philosophers.

    I hope you (Keen, and anyone else who happens to stop and read it) enjoy. I found it fascinating.

    Cheers!

  • It’s one thing to say the fad “social gaming” will eventually wither and dissipate, but to say Facebook as a whole will die off in the near future is ludicrous.

    400 million users Keen. That’s almost one 1/14 of the entire human race; it’s also many times more users than MySpace had its peak. Facebook is no longer a social fad, it is a social phenomenon, and I can’t see it going anywhere soon.

  • i dont see it. why would i waste my time playing an addictive shitty game. When i can waste my time playing an addictive good game such as wow lol 😛

  • “i dont see it. why would i waste my time playing an addictive shitty game. When i can waste my time playing an addictive good game”

    Quoted for truth….

  • Keen, you are missing the point of both the MySpace and Facebook phenomenons.

    MySpace didn’t haemmhorage accounts because people lost interest in what they could use it for – it went into decline because Facebook arrived and offered them a much better platform.

    Facebook may go the same way in due course, but not because it’s a fad that has run it’s course. If Facebook declines it will be because another social networking platform has appeared that does the whole “keeping in touch with people I know” thing better still.

    The “gaming” part of Facebook is a tiny, tiny sideshow. Facebook isn’t a gaming platform, it’s a convenient, effective, costless way for people to communicate. When cellphones appeared in the 1980s cellphones were derided and dismissed as a Yuppie fad. Now they are infrastructure.

    Social networks aren’t a fad, although Facebook probably isn’t going to be the final iteration. Gaming on social netwoorks may well be a fad, but really, outside of gaming blogs, no-one cares about that.

  • I can’t agree more.

    To me, facebook and social gaming is exactly like the Wii. A good idea released at the right time, but with no legs and too many people flooding the market. It will be successful but it wont last beyond the current generation because it’s strength has no real depth to it.

  • I love how almost everyone is latching on to a single overstatement and ignoring the rest of his comment. Yes, Mr.10th-person-to-point-it-out, you’re right, Facebook has gone beyond “fad”-ness and isn’t going to sputter out because people got bored. Good for you for pointing that out. That still doesn’t change the fact that social gaming via Facebook is this morass of useless crap with no depth that ought not even qualify as a gaming experience.

    Besides the above all-too-common issue of debate, the following statement got me a bit:

    “The ‘gaming’ part of Facebook is a tiny, tiny sideshow.”
    I’d ask Bhagpuss for clarification on this statement, assuming he sees this reply. I’m not quite sure what he means by what he’s saying. Simply because if you look at the statistics upon which Keen’s contention is based then 1/5th of the Facebook population plays Farmville (That’s ~80 million per month as of last month, 400 million total accounts. 80/400 = 1/5).
    Consider that, proportionally, more people on Facebook play Farmville (80/400, or 1/5th) than there are people in the world on Facebook (~1/14th of the world’s pop on Facebook according to Jay, posting above).
    Or consider that ~80 million people playing a game equals just over HALF of the sales of Super Street Fighter IV (143,000 units), Just Dance (144,000 units), and ~3k shy of half of Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (166,000 units) for the month of April.

    Just judging off those numbers and comparisons, I have trouble seeing how gaming on Facebook is a “tiny, tiny sideshow.” While I do think its a sideshow, but mainly because I see Facebook’s social games as a land oversaturated in bland, shallow gameplay with no story and no point beyond taking up time and perpetuating itself to new users like a virus. Regardless of my personal views I think the initial comment warrants clarification.

  • I don’t know why I went from 80,000,000 to 80,000 in my head when talking about unit sales in the above comment. I wanted to correct myself before people jump all over it and ignore the entire message in favor of pointing out that I missed a few zeros, haha. It’s late for me right now. The fact of the matter is that 80,000,000 people equals more than ten times the units sold for the top-ten grossing titles that came out in March: GoW3, Pokemon SS, FFXIII, Battlefield Bad Company 2, Pokemon HG, FFXIII(360), Super Mario Bros. Wii, Battlefield Bad Company 2 (PS3), Wii Fit Plus, and MLB 10 The Show.

    Not to mention that 80 million is about 7 times the population of World of Warcraft right now. We’re talking 7 times more people playing Farmville than the most successful MMORPG on the market to date. That’s not a small number by any stretch of the imagination. Sure Farmville people aren’t shoveling out $15.00 a month plus $50-$100 for an expack every other year, but even for a free game, anything that’s over 6 digits is impressive. There are plenty of F2P MMOs that don’t do anywhere near half as well as WoW, population wise.

  • Define “plays Farmville” is really the issue here. You have the benefit of all your friends doing it, you download the app or whatever, and you click a button a couple times a day in between checking your wall and updating your status to “high school is depressing.”

    Now, there may well be a market for this kind of super casual thing that you can futz around with for 5-10 minutes a day while doing other stuff and then you can laugh about it with your friends over lunch or coffee, or whatever but its barely “gaming” at all. Let me put it another way: Force people to actually pay for this and guess how many people would keep doing it.

  • I can definately see where your frustration is coming from but youve got to understand the market, social gaming has been around for quite a while, and just because one form dies out doesnt mean its dead all together. In fact, its growing at quite a rate, because its cheap to develop games, its easy to develop games, its easy to market the games, and the crowd that plays them are mostly uninformed. Look at the crowd that the Wii ended up getting in. A group of people that has never really been seen before in any form of video gaming. This is a similar crowd that social gaming is targeting and with great results. The people are there, so the money is there, its definately not on the decline, quite the opposite.

  • Fads are fads no matter how much popularity or notoriety they produce, they burn bright and then fade away. Social gaming as a fad will not last forever, but I’d wager it will leave it’s mark on the industry just the same.

  • Because dropping down to “only” 66.6 million users is a sign of the end times.

    I may hate Farmville with a passion but I can see it’s more than just a passing dalliance.

  • Gaming companies are always trying to expand their playerbase. Using WoW as a perfect example, Blizzard made MMOs more accessible and easier to play. To that point, MMOs were a niche in the gaming community and it took a certain kind of player to play them. I often read posts from the hardcore MMOers that complain how WoW made MMOs too easy. That was a part of WoW’s success and if the game wasn’t made more appealing to the broader gaming audience, would they have ever hit the millions of players they did. They tapped into the right things to luring in those gamers who wouldn’t have normally played an MMO. Current MMO populations (minus WoW) indicate this until we see the next broadly appealing innovation in this space.

    Social games are similar in that gaming companies have found a way to entice casual and non gamers to play. That’s an untapped market. They know they have the hardcore gamers and they cater to us with different games. Now they have this channel to reach the rest of the population with little, simple entertaining games that take up very little time.

    So perhaps the person who claimed “this is the future” was overstating a new and different segment of the broader gaming community. There’s plenty of room out there for all gamers and we need not all play with the same enthusiasm or play the same games.

    The low cost and maintenance of these social games combined with the microtransactions make them very appealing to make for a company. But they will need to innovate and make the games more interesting or they’ll lose their demographic.

  • Social networking will never die. It’s way past the fad stage. Facebook is nearly as ubiquitous as email. Myspace died because Facebook replaced it. Facebook will be king until it is replaced by something better. But social networking will never die.

    And as long as there are social networking platforms then someone will make games for them. Farmville might die because it is crap, but it will be replaced by better games. Count on it.

  • But everything pretty much falls into the category of “fad”, doesn’t it? A spike in initial popularity that eventually tapers off? Or are you defining “fad” as something that soon becomes “a blemish that people try to cover up”?

    MySpace is certainly not a fad then, because i know quite a few musicians and artists that still use MySpace as their preferred contact network.

    Anyway, do you have any articles where people claim that social gaming was going to be the future of the gaming industry? i’d be curious to read them.

    thanks!

  • Don’t undermine your initial hypothesis on social gaming by linking to a wildly speculative and unsupported statement such as “Facebook will soon die off”; I made myself reread that line a few times, as I assumed I was misinterpreting the sentence…

  • I really do feel that Facebook is a fad and will die off. Sure, it will be replaced by the next big thing but that doesn’t make it any less of a fad. Eventually social networking like this will become a thing of the past. I really do think that. Given the rate at which these websites are turning over, it only seems like eventually people will lose interest.

    Social gaming is apart of that argument, except it’s accelerated. Mobile gaming is also in the same situation. Gaming on an iPhone is here today and gone tomorrow. Mark my words.

  • The only way i see Facebook declining and go out of fashion is when a better social networking website appears.
    The simple matter of fact is that social networking websites are here to stay and won’t disappear any time soon.
    You have hundreds or even thousands of them. Facebook may have the biggest userbase because it serves many purposes at once but there’s plenty of other successful networking sites.

    As some examples i’ll mention Orkut (who has a massive userbase in Brazil), Hi5 (big in Europe, although it lost Steam when Facebook appeared) and sites turned more to a professional experience: LinkedIn is a great example.

  • “Mobile gaming is also in the same situation. Gaming on an iPhone is here today and gone tomorrow. Mark my words.”

    Yeah, you’re right Keen. 20+ years of mobile gaming advances represent a fad. /rolleyes

    Hooray for sensational blog posts! This one doesn’t seem to have the same legs as your Obama and LotRO posts though.

  • @Proze: I think the major difference between your statement and Keen’s is simply semantics. When he talks mobile gaming he seems to mean on platforms that weren’t originally designed for gaming (ie, the iPhone). Compared to your definition, which seems to be that mobile gaming means just what it sounds like, “gaming on the go,” (ie, GameBoy, GameGear, PSP).

    I would like to point out that a lot of the games on the iPhone are fairly similar to the games you find on Facebook or Newgrounds in terms of quality: very shallow gameplay with no other real point than to kill time. Not all games on the iPhone are like this (Zenonia is a great example of an exception), but a great many of them are. As long as games continue to be made to that standard for a platform like the iPhone, it will not succeed long-term as a gaming tool.

  • @Wren (and keen i guess)

    What would be the criteria for you to say “Ok, i was wrong. Mobile gaming will succeed long-term as a gaming tool.” or “I was incorrect to state that Facebook was a fad, and gaming on the iPhone wasn’t ‘here today gone tomorrow'”.

    You’re really setting up a self-fulfilling prophecy here, because in 5-10 years when the iPhone incarnations is replaced by whatever comes next you can say “see! i TOLD you it was just a fad!”.

    Same could have been said for the atari 2600 in the early nineties. Yeah you’d be right noone games on the Atari anymore, but console gaming is alive and well to this day!

    in my opinion, mobile gaming (excluding mobile consoles such as psp, etc) has always grown, and will continue to grow. I would not be surprised to see MMO-like 3d games on mobile (non console) devices soon in the future (5 years or so).

  • “I would like to point out that a lot of the games on the iPhone are fairly similar to the games you find on Facebook or Newgrounds in terms of quality: very shallow gameplay with no other real point than to kill time … As long as games continue to be made to that standard for a platform like the iPhone, it will not succeed long-term as a gaming tool.”

    That’s a categorically ridiculous position to take. What kind of games were you playing on cell phones five years ago? Snake? Solitaire? (Man, if they keep making games to the standard of Snake, cell phones will never succeed long term as a gaming tool. Am I right?)

    The iPhone is leaps and bounds more advanced than cell phones of just a few years ago and the games available in the AppStore only succeed in showcasing this advancement. In fact, the very reason this discussion takes place is because of its real, actual viability as a gaming platform. Yet, it seems that critics want to compare and contrast it with the most advanced form of gaming available — consoles and PCs. Of course the games available on the iPhone don’t have the depth and complexity of those on traditional gaming platforms. Hardware introduces SOME constraints.

    Why not compare games on the iPhone with the games of its predecessors? That’s where the real ingenuity becomes apparent. If history is any indicator of speed of innovation, you can expect to see some amazing things in the near future. Not only that, but it would be helpful to abandon the notion that the iPhone is a cell phone. It’s a pocket-sized computer that just happens to have a cell phone embedded. A computer that is more powerful than the desktops with which you grew up, in all likelihood. Did I mention that it fits in your pocket?

  • I really do look forward to the day that Facebook dies down and people stop telling me I HAVE to sign up for it.

    I would have no problem with Facebook if it wasn’t for the fact that I am some sort of SOCIAL OUTCAST for not being part of it. The number of times I have heard “You should be on facebook” is enough to make me want to scream.

    Very few things cause true vitrol in me, but being pressured into something I have no desire to do is one of them. And because I have no interest in these things, I am cut out of the communication loop. I am no longer e-mailed or phoned with information. Just “oh, you didn’t know? You should be on facebook; I put everything there.”