So about that browser-based Ultima game…
Submitted for Dragonly consideration: Zynga, the makers of (ugh) Farmville, are now apparently worth about $290 million more than Electronic Arts.
Which is to say that this:
Fricking Farmville!
Is, bafflingly, worth more than all this:
Numerous EA titles, many of which are awesome.
Now, of course, Zynga’s growth, which has decidedly stratospheric aspirations, isn’t necessarily a good thing, in that it’s not exactly sustainable. Zynga’s target market and marketing model are also…volatile, to say the least; they entirely depend on Facebook’s audience as their customer base. They’ll be fine as long as they can keep producing the next best thing as far as browser-based, socially integrated gaming goes…but I wouldn’t personally care to bet that they can keep it up.
Still, the example of Zynga demonstrates that there is a lot of money to be made in browser-based gaming that integrates with major social networks (Facebook, Twitter…). An full-fledged RPG in the Ultima vein probably wouldn’t make quite the same sort of killing that Farmville did, but would it be a fiscal success even so?
One suspects it would. And it just so happens that we know that BioWare Mythic has been working on just such a thing.
It’s not strange. It’s sad. The games EA publishes are,even the successfull ones, limited to gamers. I know people who play farmville who can’t even update their anti-virus….
There is that, as well. I was initially pondering making the same point in the article, but…eh, there was no way I could do it without sounding snarky. It’s an “it’s my job” thing, I suspect.
This is when you see stuff like this that you really realize the potential that Garriott’s Portalarium has.
FarmVille takes all of the compulsive-obsessive grinding from MMORPGs and has translated it into a cutesy, easily accessible format.
For anyone who ever thought that there was no market for female gamers, I think Farmville proves them totally wrong, I would wager that the millions of women who live on social networking sites make up a huge portion of the FarmVille market. I don’t mean this as a slam on the ladies, I am sure there are loads of male users addicted to this too. But I am going off my own experience, my wife is totally addicted to this game and so are all her facebook friends.
I agree with the author, facebook will eventually be replaced by the next big thing, much the way facebook replaced myspace and myspace replaced livejournal, and if Zynga can’t predict where the next big thing is coming from, they are sunk. Personally I think they are a one-trick pony who happened to be in the right place at the right time.
It has been suggested that the majority of Farmville players are women over 40. I can’t find verification for that claim, nor can I find hard numbers…but it sounds about right.
I’ve never played FarmVille, though I’ve seen my wife playing it. I don’t think she plays it anymore, so she must have gotten bored with it. There was some aquarium game that seemed similar.
I’m not going to waste my time looking it up on Wikipedia, dissecting its game mechanics and comparing them to “legitimate” games, or anything else in a similar vein, but my gut feeling is one of real sadness for everyday people and how commercial entities treat them.
Perhaps it’s because everything I’ve heard about FarmVille amounts to an insultingly shallow gameplay experience aimed at taking advantage of people who don’t play games, purely for the sake of exploiting their personal information via Facebook in order to accumulate targeted ad revenue. If that’s true, and it seems to be from my superficial knowledge, then it is profoundly sad.
I don’t blame the players, but it reminds me of those late night infomercials where clearly the weak are being preyed upon. Despite my Darwinistic tendencies, that really pisses me off.
I’m more disappointed in that this marks the future for gaming. And a dark future it is indeed.
It is a lot easier/faster/cheaper to churn out one of these cutesy casual games than it is to pump out a multimillion-dollar AAA title. Now, I’ve long been a supporter of smaller and cheaper development cycles on games, and I enjoyed Peggle as much as the next guy, but I still want a big, well produced FPS/RPG/RTS for the majority of my gaming pleasure.
I wouldn’t worry about the future of videogames just yet – there’ll always be a public for this kind of big AAA games. Casual gaming can’t really replace gamer gaming, simply because it’s just not the same audiance and the casual games if anything aims more at people who don’t normally play videogame, so it’s a whole new market.
I would say/hope the future might be what Richard Garriott is envisionning through Portalaritum: AAA games released through social network. Not sure if mixing the two would work, but that’s a bold idea.
The technology exists now which would enable the release of AAA (or at least AA) titles via social networking. This Unity thing I keep talking about is one such technology: a robust, mature 3D engine which can be turned into almost anything (FPS, platformer, RPG, puzzle game, etc.)…and which has a dedicated web player component. Games built in Unity can be published — for free! — to Mac, Windows, and Web by default (and to iPhone and Android via payware addon packages to the editing environment).
Of course, capability and realization are not the same thing; the technology may exist while the will to use it toward such an end may not. It will be interesting to see what comes out of Portalarium, for sure. Also interesting will be Mythic’s attempt at an Ultima browser-based game. Whether either of these will reach the level of an AAA title is yet to be seen, though both seem to be ambitious attempts at the goal.
My wife plays farmville and she has never played a computer game in her life! She is 32 by the way….
If you can reach her with a game, Im not sure its so profitable.
It’s the initially accidental release of personal preference that gets sold when people use Facebook. The algorithms slowly deduce who and what you are, what you’re looking for and who you know, selling both the mechanisms by which the analysis occurs and the product of the analysis to varying, uncommunicative parties. It’s like a legal virus.
Death to all intrusive entities, in every context. Queue fiddle and drunken ribaldry. Iolo, hit it!