If you have been observing an increasing number of strange notifications on your Facebook from your friends asking for “Ingredients”, “Assistance to Slay XXX” or to “Assassinate XXX”, do not be alarmed. They are just harmless messages from the relatively new hype in town – social games.
The appeal of social gaming can not be underestimated. I have played a wide variety of games previously – from turn-based strategy games to construction and management games (SimCity, Championship Manager), from RTS (Warcraft, Starcraft) to MMORPG (Everquest, WOW). I never would have thought that there will come a day where I will just be satisfied logging into a game twice a day to farm my crops, or do some tasks to earn gold – all by tapping on my phone. There is a strange sense of satisfaction in watching your own small world grow in size and diversity. There might be no aim or end to the game, but strangely, it has become a habit to log in at specific times of the day to check in on how your “world’ is doing.
How big is social gaming? Market research company NPD Group recently discovered that approximately one in five Americans from the ages of six and upwards now participate in some type of online social gaming platform. Absolute figures? 56 million in the U.S. and growing fast daily.
With games that include Farmville and Mafia Wars attracting million of users, and creating billions of dollars in revenue, the move towards social gaming is definitely a blessing for social networks such as Facebook who no longer rely solely on advertising dollars to earn revenue. Facebook, for example, takes 30% of all money spent on Facebook credits on these games.
That NPD study also reveals that 10% of those who responded said they have paid for online gaming, that’s approximately 5.6 million users, with another 11% stating that they would probably pay for the experience in the future. That’s another 6.2 million there. Revenue don’t only look good, they look amazing. In 2009 social gamers spent $2.2 billion on virtual goods, with $6 billion expected by 2013.
Another positive aspect of the social gaming boom comes in the form of older users and females outnumbering younger males in this market, which just means that this genre is catering to a much bigger slice of the population.
Farmville, with an estimated 80 million users, can cause quite the demand for a game, all the more on a platform that just got to number one in smartphone sales for the past 2 quarters. DNStination Inc, has recently purchased Farmvilleandroid.com. Considering DNStination Inc also owns farmville.com, it would be pretty safe to assume that the incredibly popular game is coming to the Android platform sometime in the future.
As we know, apps developers go where the demand is. It's just pure business sense. If there are more Android users, there will be more apps developers for the platform. Who knows – maybe the next big social game will come from an Android app!
