I was looking through the bookmarked items this morning in my rss feed and came across this story in the New York Times; More Than Games, a Net to Snare Social Networkers. The story talks about the Zynga Game Network, a company devoted to developing online games that work on the pages of popular sites like Facebook and MySpace.
Not a week goes by that I don’t read about another company looking to tap into social gaming and the idea that you have to build communities around your game in order to support the advertising. The only problem is and this is a big problem really. The market is becoming to saturated with everyone wanting to get involved in Facebook and soon MySapce’s game section. I believe in the idea of the Long Tail by Chris Anderson. However, I also know there are only so many people in the world that can support so many versions of Texas hold ’em or Scrabble like clones.
A piece of advise for my marketing peers. Tread lightly if you’ve not already entered this space. In a few months it’ll be one year since Faccebook opened up its API and the battle to be number one or even get decent traction is harder then it was just 9 months ago. Check out the Playstations 3 demo of Home at GDC below. Maybe this isn’t the future of social gaming but it’s a fun interpretations of what it could be.
Update: GameDaily’s AdWatch has a short interview with the CEO of Zynga Game Network.
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