Yesterday night while I was upgrading AllFacebook I noticed an interesting trend among some of the top gaming applications: they’ve been plateauing. While many of the applications have been able to pull off remarkable growth (Farm Town for example), a lot of the large gaming applications have appeared to experience a slow down in what was previously phenomenal growth.
Pet Society , the largest game on Facebook which is developed by Playfish, has experienced a flattening usage trend. Traffic has hovered between 10.8 and 10.9 million monthly active users for the past couple weeks. Total monthly active usage among all Playfish applications has declined from around 26.5 million monthly active users to 24 million. Playfish is not the only developer with flattening growth however. Zynga’s largest game, Texas HoldEm Poker has appeared to peak at between 12.2 and 12.5 million monthly active users.
The Game Is Not Over
Granted, the company (Zynga) is supposedly generating around $100 million a year in revenue, approximately one fifth the total estimated revenue of Facebook for 2009. Also Facebook hasn’t been updating their statistics as frequently meaning that some of this slow down may simply be a result of Facebook updating their statistics less often.
It’s also important to note that the business of social gaming is more about building annuities which pay residual income rather than one hit wonders. While the most popular applications tend to grow quickly, they also tend to keep their users coming back. Mob Wars for example, a game which has been on Facebook since the platform launched, continues to attract close to half a million users a day, generating a rumored $1 million a month ongoing for its developer.
A Possible Peak But Not A Slowdown In Business
Not a bad business right? While there is still room for growth within the social gaming space, the total user base appears to have maxed out at around 30 million monthly users. That means close to 15 percent of Facebook’s user base is actively participating in social games. Also of interest is the large percentage of social gaming users that come back on a daily basis.
The ratio of daily active users to monthly active users typically hovers around 50 percent for most social games. So what does this apparent peak mean for social gaming companies? Ultimately that the growth is no longer a given for catchy games. Social gaming on Facebook is going to become more competitive as developers compete for the attention of active social gaming users.
Do you play social games on Facebook? Do you think this is a seasonal slow down or has social gaming on Facebook finally peaked?
It’s summer! People are getting outside more and spending less time playing games on their computers.
No, I don’t think so.
If you look at the spread of games that are currently the top performers in the platform (and on other platforms like Myspace) there is a lot of similarity across the developers’ catalogues. That tends to induce a feeling of “seen it, played it” among users.
However, this is typical in all game markets. Early rush developers tend to spend a lot of time tripping over each other in the rush to copy each other. Mafia games are a good example of this in social games, Bejewelled games were the same in casual games. What then happens is that companies either settle in on their revenues or they work hard to innovate a new kind of game.
Games markets tend to be responsive to genre shifts, in short. It’s genre shifts that find new players and ultimately really expand the userbase because they don’t have the “seen it, played it” reaction already built in. Obviously as a developer myself this is something that my company is working toward, but on the broader level I think what we’re seeing is simply the settling-in of “Phase One” of social games, and “Phase Two” is getting ready to start.
Great article… one question though: where did you get your data to come up with the 15% (30M) of Facebook users play games every month stat? I don’t see a source cited…
the games on facebook are slowing down a lot because of flash player 10’s bloat. most users with cpus like the Pentium 4 2.8ghz are suffering the most, while people with quad core extremes are somewhat able to play at decent frames.
reverting to flash player 9 eliminates the lag completely, however some of the games require flash player 10.
cafe world is among the laggiest of all the games due to facebook’s code changes.
we need a fix for this.
Take Mafia Wars for example. It was a pretty good game till Zynga started releasing buggy code then not fixing it or taking forever to fix, adding constant special events that spam the feeds, and all the other wonderful “enhancements” that has pretty much ruined the game.
There is a boycott going on right now because of it. To counteract the boycott it is suspected that they are adding more popups to regain some the missing clicks. Particularly a Marketplace popup that will cause you to lose reward points buying things you don’t want because it seems to be stragetically placed to be clicked by “accident”.
Customer support is nothing but a joke with contant “canned” responses. Yet they are making millions.