What's in store for social games now that every so-called platform from the iPhone to Facebook is alive with little apps that eat our time and attention and in return report back location and engagement?
I asked an insider -- entrepreneur and Facebook developer Fabian Tan -- to report from this week's Social Gaming Summit 09 in San Francisco. Here's the first of two installments.
Multiplayer online games like Second Life have been around for years. But the game industry is increasingly focusing onto a new profitable type of game, so-called 'social games'.
Justin Smith, founder and editor of the blogs Inside Facebook and Inside Social Games, defines social games as casual games that are "designed to be played with friends on online social platforms".
Smith was the first speaker at the second annual Social Gaming Summit this week,a conference in San Francisco where Internet companies, game companies, venture capitalists and advertisers came together to talk about the latest trends - and how to make the business more profitable.
While social platforms like Facebook or Twitter still have to show how they will ever be profitable, a new generation of gaming companies already generate good revenue on these platforms.
After opening up its platform for developers in 2007, Facebook has become the premier platform for social games. Now MySpace, Hi5 and other social networks have jumped on this wagon. The social games landscape is still emerging and experiencing its own gold rush. Many young companies are dominating the market, leaving the traditional game companies like Electronic Arts behind.
Social games live from the experience of interacting with other human beings - particularly your own friends.
Sebastien de Halleux, COO and Co-Founder of Playfish, one of the largest and fastest growing social game companies with 30 million monthly players on Facebook, pointed out: "It's a very different story if you are beaten in a game by a computer or your little sister." For de Halleux, board games rather than video games are the model for social gaming.
The industry has created a little game for almost every taste, whether they are sport fans, singles or just awfully smart guys. The German startup wooga just launched Brain Buddies, a game that lets you compete with your friends in memory, logical thinking, visual and math challenges. Make a Baby lets you raise a virtual baby with a friend, and in the Playfish game Pet Society you adopt a virtual pet. After you buy a virtual doghouse and clothes, your pet can play with the pets of your friends. But don't forget to feed your Fido with (virtual) food every day!
NEXT: Guest blogger Fabian Tan on the monetization strategies behind social games. Fabian is a German entrepreur with a background in the mobile Internet business at Jamba and VeriSign. He recently founded the Silicon Valley-based company Fabulous Apps.
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