Game on the Wall
Social gaming keeps players hooked with smart programming, savy marketing and by making winners of us all.
by Pranay Parab
Social networking websites have attracted people across countries and age groups. The challenge has always been to keep users hooked, with regular updates and new applications. But most sites have found it rather tough to hold on to their flock, evident from the mass migration of users from Yahoo! to MySpace to Orkut and, finally, Facebook. Users are quick to board the next bus. But, of late, that bus has been stuck at the Facebook stop. Social games are one of the main reasons people refuse to budge from here.
Social gaming is a relatively new phenomenon among India’s ever-increasing community of netizens. Most of these are flash-based casual games, making them easy and fun. This also widens the target audience, as very few people want to play games, which are hard to win. These games tick not because of revolutionary programming but superb marketing.
With viral marketing, where liking, commenting, rating and challenging others are the potent weapons, many new users are attracted to the games constantly.
Although several users have found their favourite games due to these initiatives, others have suffered, as these in-your-face marketing initiatives clutter news feeds.
And then there is the added fun of being able to play with your friends, wherever they might be. Parvathy Jayakrishnan, a Bangalore-based journalist, says, “I started playing social games as time-pass. The games get very addictive and competitive when your friends are playing with you.” Enter Zynga and games like Mafia Wars, FarmVille, CityVille and Texas Hold ’Em Poker that have kept people hooked.
Zynga’s success has been its energy consumption and replenishment model. With every task a player takes up, he/she consumes a certain amount of energy. Pretty soon, the energy is used up entirely and one has to wait for it to replenish. The regeneration is time-bound and can be sped up only by various payment options available in-game. Through the payment option, many social gaming firms earn a significant chunk of their revenue.
But this method has been criticised, as players are paying good money to skip the bad parts that social game product managers have intentionally woven into their wares, according to blogger and professional game industry programmer, who goes by the name of Schlaghund.
But this has hardly been a deterrent. Vipul Kamble, a postgraduate student in Mumbai, has never paid for a recharge. He is willing to wait out the regeneration time as the stages of difficulty keep him hooked.
Then there is “neighbour gating,” made popular by Facebook, where a game impedes a player’s progress until they have added a certain number of friends to the game. Facebook has blocked accounts in the past for sending bulk friend requests rapidly, a problem encountered by many Mafia Wars players who looked to increase their mafia size to avoid being robbed in-game.
However, Facebook is not the only place where social gamers reside. Some are to be found at dedicated gaming portals like zapak.com or thegamebox.com. These portals don’t ride on social networking websites, but still provide a social experience.
Hungama Studios’ thegamebox.com has tried to make the gaming experience truly social by providing popular social network features like a wall, news feeds, likes. Manish Malik, GM, Hungama Studios, says, “The first elements of social gaming are sharing, commenting, liking. Every single-player game now has a multi-player experience because any action of mine in the game reaches the entire audience at thegamebox.com.”
Meanwhile, the new kid on the block, Google+, is also trying to plough into Facebook’s turf by offering several games. And there are dedicated “games stream” to ensure that the updates don’t clutter users’ news feeds.
But for everyone the struggle is to make users return. Many gamers say that these games have a very short shelf life as users get bored and quit. “I think game designers need to constantly renovate a game to keep the players in it for long,” says Jayakrishnan.
