Archive notice: This article was originally published on April 2, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
The boom in social networking communities on the Internet affects not only users’ communication behaviour but also the computer games industry. The enormous spread of social networks in recent years has created a trend that has produced an entirely new form of gaming. This type of play, grouped under the term “social gaming”, combines social aspects of online communities with those of increasingly popular casual games. The decisive criteria are immediate fun, easy accessibility and a manageable playing time. The merging of the two phenomena is now broadening the computer games industry’s overall online target audience. Community users who primarily want to communicate with friends online, and who would previously never have been interested in such offerings, are now also playing games.
“Social gaming allows me to stay in touch with my friends, all through a simple game,” explains self-confessed social gamer Marcus Segal to US newspaper the San Francisco Chronicle http://www.sfgate.com. The main difference from traditional casual games is that his preferred variant is not about competing with strangers online. “Users who play within a social network do not compete against complete strangers, but against their friends,” Segal states. For users, this distinction is very important. “Actually, I have not had good experiences with online games. Opponents often simply disappear when they realise they are losing. The likelihood of that happening when I play with somebody I know is much lower,” Segal says.
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“The casual games market is generally regarded as increasingly important. In recent years, this segment has grown from a small niche into one of the fastest-growing areas,” says Eric Jannot, spokesman for the German Interactive Entertainment Software Association http://www.biu-online.de, in an interview with pressetext. In the USA, the casual games segment has grown from an insignificant sum in 2002 to more than 600 million dollars in 2004. “For 2008, analysts even expect revenue of two billion dollars for the US market,” Jannot adds. The trend is not passing the computer games industry by without an impact. “Major game publishers such as EA and Ubisoft expanded their portfolios with specific casual game brands in 2006 and 2007,” Jannot explains.
It all began in the spring of last year with the announcement by community platform Facebook http://www.facebook.com that it intended to open its portal to third-party developers. Since that moment, which marked the starting signal for the booming social games trend, such games have sprung up like mushrooms on the Internet. Countless users suddenly felt inspired to develop their own small programs for the networking site. Although these applications ranged from photo slideshows to virtual gifts, it was already apparent that the games sector in particular would benefit from the opening. By now, however, other platforms have long since jumped on the bandwagon. Music portal MySpace, for example, opened to external developers at the beginning of the year.