Traditional (yes, already traditional) farming mechanics have already peaked on Facebook and now more and more classic casual games are taking over.

An older but outstanding example of this is Bejeweled Blitz.

Farming out the foot in the door for people who (even now) when asked if they play games will categorically say no. All that while being level 25 in Farmville.

I believe that as even these audiences mature into casual gamers, we will see increases of quality and numbers of games where game design surpasses the Skinner box.

- Tadej

I’d say that I don’t see anything negative in the fact that more people are willing to try games and perhaps even spend money on those.

[donuts vs game quality]
Yeh, “better games” and “more donuts” don’t necessarily cross. I just think it’s a darn good job to get some donuts from this industry.

[zynga & bad deals]
I don’t have much more comments on those. If Zynga can learn from the past… that’s a good thing. Time will tell.

[fb & virality]
I think FB really can help with sharing. Spamming & sharing are 2 different things and I really think that they made the right move. The less spamming there is, the more quality sharing there can happen. Don’t wanna confuse quality & quantity here.

FB has an established platform: any browser based game can leverage this system. After I started adding friends in there, I quickly saw how easily the network can expand very quickly. Compared to “do some new browser based game” the FB can provide a base for this.

I look forward to seeing what iphone OS4 will bring. I would also suspect that more sociality might be seen in hardcore games. Think of Steam for example: tons of users… but the games don’t have much “share with friends aspects”. Maybe in the future Steam (and others) will provide APis for leveraging their user base.

Perhaps, but what does this really mean? Does it mean more people will buy EA games? Does it mean more people will buy indie games? Or is this yet another market segment that might not interact with other segments, kinda like the market for casual games?

Sure, it’s great that more people are playing games, but if those people are only ever going to be interested in “Something Wars” or “FarmSomething” games, then is this really meaningful to most of the people here?

I guess I’ve just seen too many people get overly excited about “the market growing!” when some new game comes out.

These guys have done something that major gaming companies struggle with: tons of donuts.

Yes, but not because they made better games, but because they could spam people easier on social networks. According to some articles I read, the activity on social games have been dropping for the past two months because Facebook made it harder for games to spam others.

Also, be careful that you don’t confuse lots of players with lots of donuts. If you really take a look at Zynga’s revenues, last year they made a lot less money than other game companies did. According to research I did, they made only 20% of the revenue Blizzard does despite having about 2500% of the users.

Okay, Zynga has done bad deals

Zynga has been sleazy, to the point that the CEO admitted it. “…I did every horrible thing in the book to, just to get revenues right away. I mean we gave our users poker chips if they downloaded this zwinky toolbar which was like, I dont know, I downloaded it once and couldn’t get rid of it.”

Is there some jealousy going on? Probably. But, that doesn’t mean that people are necessarily being too hard on Zynga.

FB can make things go viral.

Yes, but FB is making that harder because people, not surprisingly, don’t like being spammed. As I said, there has been a decrease in average users for the big Facebook games over the last few months as the notification policy has gotten more strict on Facebook.

There’s also a general feeling of backlash against Facebook as people get sick of the changes in privacy policies. There’s the story of the decentralized social network Diaspora getting $200k in individual funding via a Kickstart project to come up with a viable replacement for Facebook after the latest wave of privacy issues. Note that their original goal was $10k… that’s a bit of a response.

I guess I don’t mean to be the prophet of doom here, but I don’t think the future is so rosy with social games anymore. Perhaps I’m wrong and something big will turn around. But, those are my thoughts.