Part 1: the Facebook games

As the title suggest, today is all about mighty browser games.

Let’s start with the disclaimer. This will be no in-depth description, my data might be a little off and the estimations even more so, but the main purpose is to give you an idea about what you or other are doing in your/there spare/working time.

I would say is official: solitaire was defeated as the main work hours time sink and no.1 reason for company looses. Not by the financial crisis but by so called Facebook games. Know also as sandwich games (as you have time to make a sandwich until your repetitive clicking will transform into results or your action points recover so you can click some more...note that this deffinition was born when this were played at home), is almost impossible that you did not hear about them.

There are by no means new inventions, yet one can not wonder: how come they got so big?
Money ! Most of you already know that but let me try to put the things a little beter into perspective.

The above mentioned social site provided an almost perfect tool for them. But they are hardly limited to that location. There are so many more out there (on the web that is), that from one reason or another did not fit into their schema. Look teem up.

Let me come back to the task at hand, the advantages offered by current social networking sites. First it made them so accessible. Even more so, as the majority of the users are new comers in the land of gaming thus providing both the obvious bigger numbers of a new market and other less noticeable advantages. Talking about the former ones, it pays to have a green audience in more way then one. Many of them don’t even consider they are playing games, but socializing. Ask your friend is they ever played computer games and they will say: never, although you get their Farmville updates daily. You can also take advantage of the longer period until they get bored once hooked up (that can be debatable as is a personal opinion).

Second, it helps the “applications” improve their money making tools (still far away from perfect though). The recipe is FTP (Free To Play) and for the web games it translate into a no charge application providing in game bonuses for two currency: real money and friends. I don’t want to enter now into the model description, Wikipedia is your friend, but I want to emphasise the second currency I just mentioned. This is not entirily new: to get better you have to get your friend to join your game as well, hence more potential paying clients, but is indisputably the main reason for their growing and flourished in the Facebook environment.

Third, if you are already using the normal application as layout managers, friend classification of what ever is your thing, then you are more likely to use another one with pretty pictures that fits the same frame.

I bet one can find more of this little reasons but I want to focus on the numbers now. Let’s see how the second currency (friends = user numers) come into place.

Most Popular Facebook games in 2009 (numbers are reported by facebook, this is not a place to question them; also no link, if you are not playing them yet you should not start after this)

1. Farmville                                                                  74.000.000 (74 mil)

2. Café World                                                              30.000.000 (30 mil)

3. Mafia Wars                                                              26.000.000 (26 mil)

4. Fish Ville                                                                  24.000.000 (24 mil)

5. Texas HoldEm Poker                                               20.000.000 (20 mil)

6. Pet Society                                                               20.000.000 (20 mil)

7. Restaurant City                                                        16.000.000 (16 mil)

8. YoVille                                                                     15.000.000 (15 mil)

9. MindJolt Games (this is a collection of games)           14.000.000 (14 mil)

10. Bejeweled Blitz                                                       10.000.000 (10 mil)

Did you start pondering already? Numbers were in this case rounded down . Added up is a total 249 mil… the total number of Facebook users is reported to be over 350 so the math is ok, but keep in mind that most (if not all) of games users are playing more then one. They might have their favourite although, but still the numbers of unique users gets down a notch or two. Statistically, (that is a word often used to back up not reliable data, but of course is not the case here) Free To Play games convince around 10% of their users to invest a small sum of money in item purchasing. 10%of those users (1%from total) are going over the top spending more then they would ever admit to their family. This numbers are estimations based on data reported by “real” games that follow the same model, so you can subtract some percentages for the web games as they have weaker incentives to make you spend. Adding that the standard monthly spend (person estimation) is between 2 and 5 euros, you can come up with a number of over 50 to 70mil Euros monthly in earnings for only the first 10 games.

This is not really accurate, some other more complicated aspects and lack of published data are to blame for this (you can see how I cunningly drew the responsibility away from me) but is only meant to give you a rough idea about the interest involved.  Adding production, developing and maintenance cost, that are to my humble opinion lower then any other games with moving parts out there, you can spot here a good business opportunity. So there is no surprise that other did that before us. Hence the web game explosions. From power players like Zynga, who is currently dominating the market, to newcomers like my favourite Islanders Gogogic they are going for you money. Their methods are constantly improved (the runner up Playfish has only 2 games in top 10 but its ingenious game construction brings them, eligibly more income then its competitors) and they all are hurrying up to take advantage of the boom because this is not going to last for ever.

I know you and me don’t pay for such trivial stuff, but when you read about the women who spends 1000$ to dress her virtual cat and acknowledge she is not alone, then you are on the right track here. The wining is marginal if you have a limited number of users (especialy that within the large public is more likely to find paying customers then among clients of a niche game). So go public and more important have something to offer for every taste (they are going to chose the cuddly animals anyhow)

No conclusion to this one, as I feel there are still things to be said. Until then check this statistic link http://www.infosolutionsgroup.com/2010_PopCap_Social_Gaming_Research_Results.pdf