Social Video Games is $100 Billion Industry
Social Gaming is the next step in the gaming industry, since people prefer playing games with friends rather than sitting alone on a couch, more and more developers these days are trying to build new platforms where gamers around the globe can pool in their skills, enjoy, learn and battle it out.
See, Xbox Live and PlayStation Network (PSN) both are online gaming portals of two of the biggest gaming consoles in the whole world and yes they are quite popular online social gaming networks.
The ideology behind this is simple; when you play with your friends the amusement multiplies by a factor greater than 2 and not just gets doubled. People spend more time in gaming and they play often too when they are playing on popular online social gaming networks.
Social Gaming is also a big part of social networking websites these days, not only Facebook but IMs like Yahoo Messenger are trying to add as many interactive fun games that they can so that people get stuck to their portal for long.
Facebook and the “Billion Dollar Idea”
Facebook is worth more than $40 billion at the moment but that is not only because they serve network ads. No, Social Gaming has played a major role in their success, people who have free time love to play social video games so Facebook came with this idea to integrate social gaming with their network.
See, playing on a gaming site is one thing and playing on a social networking website is another. Whatever you do is shared on your wall, unless you take privileges from the app, so the more you play, the more your wall gets cluttered and more of your friends join in.
A perfect marketing strategy to get more gamers, that is why Facebook is paid a lump sum of money.
This is probably the reason behind Cityville Social Game getting more than 75 million active users in less than a month of its inception.
Take it this way, you play cricket in a room, do people know you are playing? Can they join you? No, of course not but when you play in a garden, people can come in and join, this is how Facebook works.
Okay, enough description… where is the billion dollar idea?
Facebook’s revenue and social video games’ popularity are interconnected with a simple concept called “Game Credits”. If you want to beat your friends with special weapons or tools you can purchase them using credits and that’s how Facebook makes most of its revenue.
The amount of FB credits sold in social video games is distributed 70/30 – 70% for the game developers and 30% to Facebook.
Brilliant idea to generate revenue of a free network, want to play Farmville better…? just buy something, cool!
The Future of Social Gaming and Video Games on the Web
In the last decade there has been a rampart increase in RPGs (Role Playing Games) like World of Warcraft (WoW) was initially a game developed for Windows but now it has taken a major audience on the web that play day and night to save their empire from others.
Social Gaming is a big thing and I won’t be surprised if more and more people join in the development of Facebook games and video games for portable computing devices.
iPhone and Android OS would be developers prime choice because they have good popularity amongst users.
What do you think as 2010 was a year of social networking, will 2011 be a year of social gaming? Please share your thoughts with friends using social bookmarking tabs and with Wizard Journal using comment box.
