Social/Phone Gaming and Bugs
With the comments from some analysts today that social gaming is flat or unsustainable, let me mention something that may be clear to people on the inside but might not be visible to the outside:
Social games, and mobile / iPhone games, are designed to exploit platform bugs.
What does this mean?
- Some facebook games became popular because they exploited the ability of applications to generate unlimited spam on facebook feeds, when facebook was becoming popular. They gained free advertising exactly at the moment when people were receptive to it.
- Some iPhone games exploited the difficulty users had navigating the iPhone app store. The apps that were in the “top free” lists generated lots of eyeballs, and eventually lots of conversions, simply by being near the top when people were searching. It’s much easier to settle for the top app than to sift through page after page of stuff.
- In the past, old mobile phone games and services created phenomenal amounts of revenue by tricking phone users into texting something to a shortcode. They then enrolled the phone subscribers into a monthly service that they didn’t understand, and they benefited from the fact that phone bills are hard to read - many of these customers didn’t know why their costs increased.
All of these bugs - and many others - are in the process of being resolved by the platform owners. When these bugs are corrected, games will have to compete in an entirely different ecosystem than the one they were familiar with before. Their process of natural selection will suddenly have to adjust to different fitness criteria. Some games may persist, other games may not.
What many companies do, however, is constantly push the edge of the bugs and attempt to refine their viral appeal. This kind of A/B testing and focus-grouping generates the highest possible effectiveness out of every exploit, but separately publishers still have to generate the kind of lasting appeal that builds a franchise people want to play.
