Posted 157 days and 10 hours ago
I\'ve been talking to a lot of people about the future of social gaming lately. The perspectives I\'ve been gathering are pretty interesting.
A repeating theme is the question of what the future looks like. Is it going to look like console games? What do social games mean for the broader gaming industry? Are people going to play games anywhere other than on Facebook, the web, and maybe their iPhone?
The answers I\'m generally hearing are all pretty similar, which is that social games are pretty much going to go the way of console gaming. When the Nintendo grew up in the \'80s there were hundreds of independent developers making games, some of which were pretty high quality, some of which were not, and almost all of which were operating on a relative shoestring budget. Over time, as with many industries, the quality bar grew higher, mergers and acquisitions occurred, and now we\'re at a point in time where there are a relative handful of players making big-budget games with brand names like Tiger Woods or Mario behind them. Those games sometimes take many years and many millions of dollars to ship, and it leaves little room for independent developers to achieve prominence.
My thesis, and the one on which Blue Frog Gaming\'s future actions are based, is that most people are taking an overly-simplistic view of the future in assuming that this is what will happen on the web. There are more ways in which social games differ from console/PC ones than I can count, but there are a few that I think are extremely important.
First off, the distribution model is different. Console and PC games are largely bought in stores, even to this day, either brick-and-mortar or virtual. As such brand names have a huge impact. If there\'s a game called Tennis 2010, and one sitting right next to it called Roger Federer\'s Tennis 2010, which are you going to pick? It\'s a no-brainer.
Facebook is a little different. You get invited by a friend. If your friend says \"I shot twelve under in Golf!\" does it really matter whether or not there\'s a famous athlete\'s name attached? Social discovery, which is missing in platforms like the PlayStation and the iPhone (a more recent example of brand domination) might change the rules drastically.
And then there are the habits of players. Most people play social games from work. Anyone running them will tell you that their traffic spikes Monday and Tuesday during prime business hours. Evony has a feature that lets you change the title bar so that your boss will see whatever you want them to in the minimized browser window at the bottom of your screen. Our game has an off-Facebook access point for people who wanted to get around work firewalls (which, unfortunately, is now being blocked by some itself). A way to play outside of Facebook was (and still is, since we don\'t publicize it well enough) one of our most requested features for that reason.
As a result, the games that succeed, I think, will be and have been, for the most part, ones that allow you to play for short periods of time and that you can quickly close your browser on and not be upset about. You wouldn\'t risk your boss walking in on you in the middle of Madden 2010, and a game might take too long for you to even consider starting. You can definitely spend 10 minutes on Restaurant City and close it at any point if needed.
Then there\'s the audience to consider. Who is playing social games? The answer, it turns out, is everyone. And the broader population is largely non-gamer. Most people don\'t play Xbox, or PlayStation, or World of Warcraft. To them a game is Solitaire or Farmville. Perhaps the less-involved social games, which are deceptively simple, will end up as mere gateway games leading people through the cycle until even your average middle-aged housewife is in a WoW guild. Perhaps the simplicity, however, is what makes them so popular, and attempts to push them into the mid-core/hard-core games that the big players produce will fall flat. My suspicion is that it will be some of both.
Last, but perhaps not least, there are serious technological limitations as to what can run in a browser. Flash is so poor performance-wise that you couldn\'t build a Madden in it that anyone wants to play, and there really aren\'t any other viable technologies at this point. Java might be better, but nobody has installed an applet since 1992. Unity may be awesome, but market penetration\'s a huge issue that they don\'t seem to be getting around with their web player.
The answer, some say, is cloud gaming, where the games run on PCs in the cloud, then are streamed, in high-def, to a player in the browser. I\'ll believe that one when I see it. Even just streaming 480p seems to tax most modern internet connections in the US, often involving painful buffering, and connections aren\'t getting any faster. Most areas still have about the same internet speeds available they did a decade ago. It looks great in carefully-controlled demos, but I\'m skeptical that a suitable user experience will be possible any time soon. As a gamer I hope it works out, but I\'m not holding my breath.
Also there\'s the fact that independent web games, many HTML-based or using very simple Flash interfaces, have existed and even thrived, for 10 years online. In that time customers have had at their disposal a wealth of big budget games, from Warcraft 3 to World of Warcraft, 2 generations of console games, DSes, iPhones, PSPs, and whatever else. And yet games like Travian still thrive, finding larger and larger audiences every year.
It definitely seems possible that given the differences in user base, distribution, technology, and customer habits, that web- and especially Facebook-based social gaming won\'t follow the same pattern as it matures that console and PC games have. The barriers to entry may raise, indeed they already have to some small extent, but I\'m not convinced you\'ll need a multi-million dollar budget to even attempt to play in the space the way you do on the PlayStation. And I find it ludicrous to assume that a set of technologies that have disrupted and democratized so many other industries (news, video, music, the yellow pages, mail, etc.) to varying extents will just lead to more of the rich getting richer in the gaming industry. The internet, and social networks, have been disruptive in almost every area they\'ve touched, yet the entire gaming industry seems to think it\'s going to be business as usual on Facebook in a few years.
On the other hand, it does seem almost assured that social games will look much different in five years than they do now. We\'ll look back on Farmville and laugh, the way we do when we watch an action movie from the \'80s. Exactly how I can\'t tell you my thoughts on, since it\'s a business secret, but suffice it to say we\'re still in the infancy of what is clearly a new experience. The lines between gaming and reality will blur to the point where it will become almost impossible to distinguish where one ends and the other begins.
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![\"FairlawnBananaNinja\"](\"http://bluefroggaming.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/fairlawnbanananinja.jpg\" "\\"FairlawnBananaNinja\\"")