The End of Social Gaming As We Know It? - Page 2
TechSavvy lead technology analyst Scott Steinberg compared social gaming to speed dating. “Every game has something intriguing to it, but you’re off in a matter of minutes to the next thing,” he said. When the next sensation arrives and the current frenzy fizzles out, I suspect there are going to be a lot of losers left scratching their heads.
When I spoke with Ken Yager, a principal at the distressed investor MorrisAnderson, he called the gaming consumer’s attention span “a very real threat” to the industry’s recent successes. He said, “I think we are still in the wild, wild west of the social media experiment. There is going to be one winner and 100 losers.”
Meanwhile, the social gaming sector is getting more interesting. Last week, Platogo unveiled an application that enables casual game developers to integrate their games with the Facebook experience. The company’s chief executive Jakob Sommerhuber, in San Francisco last week for the Game Developers Conference, told me he thinks the sector is headed toward a transition period. Until now, the larger players in the industry have had a significant advantage, he said – “because they have a huge user base, so they can cross-promote their next game.”
While Sommerhuber expects changes to the landscape, he is still a believer in the industry as a whole. In fact, social gaming companies’ strategy of selling virtual goods for real currency – nothing for something – is a business model that we all wish we could pull off. “I do think that is sustainable,” Sommerhuber said.
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