Will the social gaming bubble burst? Gaming industry veteran Denis Dyack thinks so:
“It is damaging traditional gaming for sure but… how it’s going to work out is anyone’s guess. The trend that I see is it’s probably going to be one of the biggest bubbles and explosions that our industry’s seen in a long time and I think when it crashes it’s going to crash very hard. I don’t think there’s an economy there…
I don’t know about Zynga – I think that’s a big micro, but I think that the amount of venture that’s being poured in, in general, that’s most of the video game industry investment. As far as I know right now, it’s going into pure social gaming. It looks like marketing to me. It doesn’t look like real gaming. And maybe it’ll change, I don’t know. It looks very, very dangerous. I think Zynga’s valuated more than some traditional publishers right now that have been in the industry for decades. I’m sorry, but I just don’t see it. It seems imaginary to me… it doesn’t look long term healthy to me.”
(via ARTICLE by @excaliburps for @deltagamer)
Dyack certainly makes some good points about overvaluation, but I think he’s missing the demographic differences between “true” gamers vs “social” gamers. The people that play Dyack’s games are true gamers and the Zynga masses are in large part new to the world of gaming. Facebook gaming engages users who want to be social and share with their friends while they play, rather than maintain a special and somewhat separate subgroup of gamer friends who they connect with via XBox or WoW that they may or may not know in real life.
The social or casual gamers that have only recently started to move online to play. These are people who likely haven’t owned a game console and entered into gaming through social (Mafia Wars / Farmville) or mobile (Angry Birds). It’s simply a different — and much bigger — segment. Even if users join and burn out in predictable waves of say 3 months of enthusiasm for a given game, there’s a big population of new Facebook users who are just now dipping their toe into the gaming water.
What do you think? Will the “bubble” of social gaming burst?
