
Ask HN: Are social games, such as Farmville, “dead”? - kermittd
I&#x27;m working on a design case study for Facebook and am curious if HN thinks that social gaming as seen on Facebook or Myspace is severely diminsihed with the near ubiquity of smartphones or not.<p>By dead, I don&#x27;t mean destroyed but weakened significantly. Concrete numbers that weren&#x27;t from 2012 or 2013 were difficult to come by.
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idunno246
facebook killed "social gaming." social games became large because fb
encouraged spamming invites to get more people to use and grow facebook, and
then slowly locked down that channel. So, you could spend $5 in ads to get one
user, that user would get 5 friends to join, so it only cost $1/player, and
theyd spend $2 on average. This was great for building the platform, but once
at critical mass fb needed to capture that money so they squashed the social
channels in favor of their ads.

So now what happened is gamers on fb only would spend say $2, without invite
spamming at $5 installs you lost money. But turns out people who own iphones
spend money more easily. So everyone moved into mobile. While it didnt have
the social channels, you could extract say $6 per user, so that $5 per install
was still profitable. Before Apple really cracked down on some shady
companies(they bot you into the top 10, you get thousands of installs from top
10 placement), you could drive that cost down even further.

Today, all the free to play apps in the app store follow a lot of the same
patterns as social games - clash of clans is just a clone of backyard
monsters(fb), which was probably a clone of something else. Some have social
elements, mostly top charts, but... These games were never truly social, they
were just addiction feeding machines. Effectively they just changed the name
to f2p on mobile.

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kermittd
Ok very cool. I never looked at it from the business/ad side my process was
far more simplistic ie Mobile Platform = superior game.

Yep the switch a roo from "social" to free to play is one of the things I
noticed.

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nwjtkjn
Perhaps for now, but the ubiquity of smartphones could also bring them back in
new and interesting ways. The most recent runaway hit was Pokemon Go, and
though it was clearly a fad, it may have had more staying power if the social
aspects were stronger, e.g. direct PvP battling.

Caveat: Take what I say with a grain of salt; I've never built a game in my
life.

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tnone
I'd look into Facebook's actual app policies if I were you.

What made Farmville successful was to basically bribe players into sharing by
rewarding them with in game currency. This resulted in a ton of spam.

If that's not outright banned by now, it's possible the feed filter makes
those messages all but invisible regardless. They want people to pay to
advertise now.

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GrumpyNl
Take angry bird for example, see where that company is now.

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kermittd
Hmm true though I tried to focus more on social apps made on top of social
networks, not ones developed primarily for mobile devices. But regardless good
point about angry birds, and just look at Zynga now even with Farmville.

Also thanks for the reply!

