Disclaimer:- I work in Social Gaming.
I am a PC Gamer. A pretty hardcore one at that. So when Social Gaming came out, I was one of the skepticals. Not believing it’d be our glorious saving (to take gamers mainstream and make it acknowledged as a sport/skilled endeavour). It still isn’t. It’s a pastime. But you know what it got right? The business model. It could make money with very low development times and low overhead costs.
Companies like Blizzard/Xbox producers couldn’t believe it. They spend over 3 years making a game. Social gaming companies release game in 3-6 months. Budget lesser check. Money through transactions check. Irritated counterparts check.
But what goes around comes around.
In the gaming industry there are 2 types of games. Pink Games and Blue Games. Pink games are those that are attuned to Women (feministic in nature) and the Blue games are those that are attuned to Men (masculine).
It was mostly Pink in the start
How could Zynga make farmville one of the most popular games of all time? They had a lot of luck, but more important they kept it simple. It was easy for your mom to pick it up, it was easy for your sister to play it. Imagine getting them into Starcraft 2 or some hardcore FPS games. First of all they won’t appreciate the depth, secondly they had to go through the “hardcore gore” barrier that most games were filled with. They were all blue. They tended towards ninja fighting, guns, warriors, alien, shooting machoism. They had some games in the pink category (mostly bejeweled and flash games). The concept was simple, the engagement factor high.
That’s really why social gaming picked up. What people didn’t realise is the loyalty exhibited by the Pink category of gaming. No one had catered to them, imagine making a barbies day out on PC. It might have been a wild hit. Scorned by the internet of men but a huge hit perhaps. Did it happen? Nope. So we can’t say what would have happened.
That’s where Farmville comes in. It’s a pink game. Easy to start with, no hardcore elements (and frankly not much strategy) but HUGE engagement because you rope in your friends who are like you just wanting to have a good time. Not play a sport, but enjoy a hobby.
The Mid ground
World of Warcraft was one of the first few games that got the concept of a mixed ground between Pink and Blue. Sure we had other team games and some outlier-women playing a lot of blue games but largely uniting the community was not a focus. Gender differentiation was clear, distinct and sacred. But games like WoW blurred those lines. Women are accepted into gaming now and even respected when they take the joystick (so as to speak). But it was limited, it was easy to make them and it had a business model everything was well with the present. But then it started dwindling. Games outgrew each other. Easy game development meant 100s of competitors. Audience demanded more. Complexity, I feel, is the next wave of the future. The Blue Future.
The Blue Future?
But do you know why largely games were pink in nature in the start? Because the technology was limited. Flash with it’s lack of support for 3d Architecture prevented any hardcore games/3d animation to really break though. The platform, Facebook, in itself was quite limited in capability to embrace the change.
But things are changing. A new game engine called Fliso has now been brought into the equation. It has faster games than Flash has ever seen before. Some claim upto 100 times.
So here are 4 predictions that I am going to make on the future of Social Gaming.
1. It’ll go more blue
We men are a patient lot, we want high engagement, we want lots of gore. Most games are going to involve strategy and teaming up. It’s not going to be a casual endeavour. It will remain social though.
2. We are going to see Real time action in games.
Currently most games are turn based. You move, then I make a move, then you make a move then I make one. But we don’t have a Real time element yet. This is not because people haven’t thought about it.
3. We’ll have a Non Facebook platform to play games on
Sure Google+, Facebook, everyone’s here. That’s all good. That’s not however a scalable model if they continue to depend on Flash. Either Flash will die or we’ll have a browser independant version to play games on. Something like what id Software did with Quake Live except the concept of install the game locally is not going to happen, we’ll have cloud install account login and then play. Blizzard almost did it right with enforcing the play online no LAN concept but you still have a massive 8gb download. That must go.
4. The Tablet/touch revolution is going to be the future not the keyboard.
You need to be engaged and I predict superior touch technologies (and others like the Kinect) to play on. It’ll all be touch because that’s what permeates from our Mobile. I am sure we’ll still have people on the PC and keyboard (but in 5 years we’ll have a virtual move over to the non pc version).
An interesting question is how does a game like Starcraft 2 work in such an environment? I’d say you’d have options to deploy forces and mark battle areas. Stuff like moving them back would be clicking unit factions and pulling back or pulling forward. Is this the best solution? No. But it definitely is super interesting with our developments in the Human Computer interaction area.
As a hardcore PC gamer though, I hope I get this one wrong.
Conclusion
Don’t count Adobe just out yet. They released the Stage3d engine that uses the computer architecture to power their graphics. Which in English means that you get faster games, more realistic ones too.