While lulzing at Matthew Inman’s, a.k.a. the Oatmeal (@oatmeal), latest state of the web comic, I tripped over a statistic:
Over 60% of Facebook’s traffic comes from people playing games and the average social gamer is a 43 year old woman.
I don’t know exactly where this statistic originated, but it’s on the intertubes so it must be true. More importantly, why is this interesting?
Social obligation. Facebook’s massive success is built on the shoulders of social obligation, i.e. someone you know “invites” you to do something and you don’t want to be rude. This is how people like me who have more teeth than real-life friends have 300+ Facebook friends.
And this is why social gaming works. I recently watched an interesting case study unfold in my News Feed that proves this point; Facebook had subtly redesigned their game notifications, causing consternation among the gamers in my network, who proceeded to broadcast a) their displeasure at Facebook and b) their apologies that game notifications were going unanswered.
Pretty powerful stuff.
This is why Zynga will be worth 11 figures despite a scary dependence on Facebook.
Thoughts?
Where average statistic originated: http://www.infosolutionsgroup.com/2010_PopCap_Social_Gaming_Research_Results.pdf
Just had to share, a tangent thought from worth of Zynga: http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20110725-705921.html
Not a very large sample size, but it makes sense. Social games are the new bridge clubs. I recall seeing a very interesting presentation from developers at Pop Cap at SXSW last year, crazy stuff.
WSJ post requires a subscription.
h/t slashdot “What I didn’t anticipate, what actually came along to drive down the
cost of 3D graphics hardware, was games. And so the virtual reality
that we all talked about and that we all imagined 20 years ago didn’t
happen in the way that we predicted. It happened instead in the form of
video games. And so what we have now is Warcraft guilds, instead of
people going to bars on the street in Snow Crash.” : http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidewalt/2011/09/19/neal-stephenson-reamde-video-games/
Sorry about WSJ, I had read it hardcopy, went and found it, didn’t scroll down to notice it wasn’t all there. So it goes.
No worries, interesting note on games driving hardware. Plus, Snow Crash ftw!