“Mid-core” is a term that has gained some currency in industry circles in the last 12 months as a kind of halfway house between “hardcore” (Call of Duty/World of Warcraft types) and “casual” (everybody else, but usually with an inferred slant – meaning women). With all due respect to Zynga, something is very wrong with a platform when the top games on its charts are still the same old poker, a middling sequel to FarmVille and a bunch of very tired-looking content underneath that. It’s a dead zone and really only of interest to those who want to burn a lot of money to acquire users. While I certainly don’t expect Facebook to stop serving games, over the last 24 months it has become the new Yahoo Games or. The App Center has largely failed to shift the needle quantitatively or qualitatively, and so Facebook as a platform languishes and continues to be a game of who can afford to pay the most in customer acquisition. Not only does it allow for vanity metrics to go unchallenged, it means developers will be considerably less able to conduct market research. Likewise the recent platform change to deliberately hide once-publicly available app usage information behind a cloud of ranks and inferred positions is a deeply suspect move. He has his billion users but isn’t sure what he’s supposed to do with them.įor Facebook games none of this augurs well.
The general problem seems to be that while a scrappy startup attitude propelled Facebook to massive success, Zuckerberg and his team seem to be struggling to define what a mature Facebook looks like. Not only is it a boondoggle, it’s a potential user killer, and it reflects a deep lack of focus in the company. Recruiters, stalkers and daters, on the other hand, will. It might look great in demo, but nobody actually needs to search their social graph that often for information. those who don’t pay attention to the tech press) very uncertain about just how safe they are online. Not only does it open the door for all manner of creepy PR disaster stories, it will make muggle users (i.e. The more I read about Facebook’s Graph Search, the more I’m convinced it’s a ticking time bomb. Yet I think there are still some beacons to navigate and sharp rocks to avoid. As the proverb goes, we seem to be living in interesting times. Given how social has stalled, mobile seems packed to the gills, tablet is increasing and cloud gaming went bust it’s hard to be confident about where games will go in the next 12 months.
Everyone wants to know where to spend their development money most effectively, and nobody seems able to tell them. Studios are very hedgy about their prospects for 2013 and adopting a wait-and-see stance for every new platform announcement.
With a billion dollars less invested in social games (a 94 percent drop!) and Kickstarter only representing around 6 percent of all investment activity, the overriding theme is transition, changing dynamics and, well, chaos.Īnecdotally, this is also being reflected on the development side. This year the company seems to think that games are all a bit up in the air and is strongly advising caution. This is a theme also being reflected in reports, such as the executive summary of Digi-Capital’s latest Global Games Investment Review.
Last year may have seen a considerable degree of mergers and acquisitions (although the number of transactions were down 27 percent, their average size was up 60 percent), but it’s not clear what any of them are supposed to mean. A few years ago social gaming was that meta-trend, and it produced a flurry of activity in investment and acquisition as the potential of getting games in front of hundreds of millions of users for low cost struck a chord with investors and VCs alike.Īt other times everything seems in flux, and that seems to be the prevailing mood at the start of 2013. Yet despite all that, meta-trends do emerge, larger tides that lift all ships or founder them. There are always new angles to consider, players in the mix and potential directions to be taken.
WAR COMMANDER KIXEYE CLOSING SECTORS SERIES
Everything is balance, trends, pointers and a series of evolving narratives that subtly dance with one another across a crowded floor. It’s no great revelation that financial reports can be arcane and hard to interpret. He is the creator of leading game design blog What Games Are, and consults for many companies on game design and development. Editor’s note: Tadhg Kelly is a game designer with 20 years experience.
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