The past few years have been a period of divergent growth for the video game industry. The millions made by social games have created a frenzy amongst big game publishers to venture out into the blue ocean and grasp at the “casual” market. The value of creating and maintaining a community around a game is now apparent.
No one foresaw the overnight success of social games. Zynga, the global leader and highest valued social games company garnered an estimated 30 million DAU (daily active users) with in the month of September. Last month, Cityville (Zynga’s most successful game) reached more users than 2010’s Call of Duty reached in the last year. The company’s ability to exploit Facebook’s userbase is how Zynga’s market valuation rose above that of game giants like Electronic Arts and Activision. It’s easy to foresee now that AAA games are heading to be more “social”.
Holding a game controller may not be universal, but wanting to be a part of a community is. At their start, Zynga did what triple-A studios didn’t: use the community to expand the game’s reach. Social games are the most successful on Facebook because of the already present communities. Zynga saw the marketing value of having one user tell a friend about a game, and designed systems to inhibit that occurrence. This user-to-non-user marketing is how the average Facebook games manages to break 10 million DAU every month.
Large-scale developers are expanding how their users can participate in the community. 2011’s biggest FPS games, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3 now have browser-based social services. Activision-Blizzard believes that social platforms like CoD:Elite “addresses the growing market shift towards social, casual and mobile gaming”. DICE commented on Battlefield 3’s social platform by saying, “social platforms for games will make a huge difference in how people perceive where the game starts and ends”. These sentiments will continue to grow in the industry.
The games industry is a naturally evolving medium; it’s well-versed in iteration and change. In 2009, EA acquired social games studio Playfish for an estimated $400 million. Two years later, Playfish’s first EA published game, Sim’s Social pierced Facebook’s top 5 games and ranked number two game in terms of DAU. Zynga is going public in July 2011 and will possibly become the highest valued games publisher in the industry. Games will continually strive to be more prevalent in today’s society. The adoption of the social games template is just another step taken to help grow the industry. In the metric of popularity, games can overtake movies, and in the metric of creating communities, games can be like nothing we’ve seen before.