One of the biggest issues and trends in gaming is the way that gaming is drifting towards social networking and vice versa. So eventually they will meet in the middle and make up one big industry. I have written about this on here before.
In May this year Facebook opened itself to outside developers. In 6 months over 6,000 applications have been written (some of which are games) and already millionaires have been made. So Facebook is now a gaming platform. In the last year their membership went up by 134% whilst rival MySpace has only seen an increase of 12% (though it is still much bigger than Facebook). Much of this difference is down to those 6,000+ applications. It hardly came as a suprise then when last week Rupert Murdoch announced that MySpace too would allow external developers in (maybe he is reading this blog!). And this week Oberon Media announced that they are creating a game channel there. So now MySpace is a gaming platform.
There is obviously a massive market here for games, monetised with advertising. However there is also a great viral marketing opportunity. To create mini games on Facebook and MySpace that work to support your mainstream games on the dedicated platforms. You could easily reach tens of millions of exactly the right demographic for very little spend.
So are you a social networker? Can you see the opportunities here? Please add your comments.
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Hi,
I was just looking for info on “Kingdoms of Camelot” and found this thread. I use to play MHA. Zynga bought “My Hero’s Ability” over a year ago for the sole purpose of destroying the game and trying to get the MHA players to start playing other Zynga games on FaceBook.
I only mentioned this because I thought you would find it interesting that there are now several large groups of people that met playing MHA now looking for other games to play. I am in one, of at least 3 groups, that have started playing “Kingdoms of Camelot” in the last few months.