“Facebook games have redefined the notion of success,” suggests Sebastien de Halleux, co-founder of Playfish, one of Zynga’s bigger rivals. “Our own top games, Pet Society and Restaurant City, have 20m and 15m MAUs respectively. Both of them are comfortably bigger than World Of Warcraft.”
Co-founder of Playfish, Sebastien de Halleux
This means that, like Farmville, they’re big enough to keep an entire industry up at night, pondering a handful of difficult questions: what does Facebook mean for developers, publishers, and players in the long run? Is the network a stable enough platform to truly offer a hint of the future of games? If it is, what might that future look like?
At the moment, that future looks rather chaotic, as hundreds of developers, scaling from one-man-bands to corporate giants like EA, struggle to create the next Farmville. Facebook may refer to itself as the biggest gaming site on the web (it has more than 100 million unique users across its top ten titles alone) but it was never designed as such, and its journey to that state has been torturous. The recent arrival of a game dashboard has brought a little order to proceedings but, as with that other accidental record-breaker, iTunes, Facebook just didn’t see games coming.
FarmVille has over 75 million monthly users - more than France's population.
Developers did, however, and as soon as Facebook was ready to allow thirdparty applications on to its pages, games lead the charge. “The power of simply integrating games with the social web means we can use the social graph to tap into entirely new kinds of emotions,” says de Halleux. “We’re seeing games that focus on creation and collaboration. What this means for designers is that you’re getting a new, much wider, audience. The Facebook gamer is not the console gamer. It’s like when Nintendo realised that if you’re selling to the same people over and over, you will quickly start to struggle. This isn’t about gamers, it’s about friends, and if you look at the internet as a community, there are 1.8 billion friends online.”
Getting to those friends is already becoming more difficult, however. Although the network’s open source code makes the site easy to work with, complaints regarding constant notification spamming from games have seen Facebook stringently updating its terms and conditions. In March, a change to limit how many daily messages applications could send out to their users saw Farmville lose four million players in a single month, and Zynga was far from being the only company affected.
Creator of Earthworm Jim and MDK, Dave Perry
Zynga can take it, but for a smaller developer, such shifts can be truly seismic when working with a business model that requires word of mouth. “In the old days, you could put a button on the screen that just said ‘invite my friends’,” says Dave Perry, a veteran designer who has spent the last few years studying the free-to-play market. “One button would hit all your friends. That caused explosive spamming. Very quickly Facebook jumped on that. They really are listening to the users. That means, however, that if you’re a Facebook developer, you’re coming to work every day and waiting for that next email to tell you what the new restrictions are. You have no clear, simple future where you can just stick with one strategy.”
“Facebook is making it harder to do the things that probably weren’t very effective in the first place,” argues Phil Shenk, the founder of social game specialist Gravity Bear. “They’re taking the long view, whereas Facebook developers like to take the short view: they optimise for the present at the expense of the future. In theory, the more restrictive conditions are something I’m in favour of, and in practice I’m mostly in favour of them too. It levels the playing field. You’re not forced into spamming walls and that sort of thing. If that stuff was still allowed, it would be hard to compete without doing it.”
Gravity Bear's Battle Punks
But even if a developer has an audience, that doesn’t mean it will make money. Just as working out how to spread the word on a new title without irritating potential players was an early balancing act designers had to master, today’s teams are still struggling with the business of folding real and virtual economies into a single game – a game that, on a fundamental level, has to remain free to play.