Social Gaming Booms In 2010: A Billion Dollar Business

Social gaming: a downright term that kept us busy during 2010! Through the years

we saw games evolving on Facebook and MySpace like Farmville (by Zynga). This game is all about being a farmer and the daily job involved. In this game you can interact with your facebook friends and even become neighbours of them. This is still a big game on Facebook, over 82 million people worldwide play this game at least once a month and over 32 million people play it daily. Estimations tell us Zynga has more than 230 million active players across multiple social networks. Zynga has been founded in 2007. A little more than two and a half year later they already crossed the 100 million users barrier, those are quite the growth figures!

In the year 2010 games like Frontierville, Zoo World and Social City are speeding to the top. Games are getting more realistic, like in Social City.Just a small fact: in little more than 6 weeks this game reached the barrier of 12 million users. Numbers like this normally only seem to take place in beautiful fairytales! This game is all about running a real city like a major. We all know this from Sim City, but with a lot more options and of course the social aspect. Just imagine, 12 million users in just merely 6 weeks! The established social gaming companies like Zynga, Bigpoint, Playdom and Playfish are all growing massively on this trend. But these are not the only bizarre numbers that go round in the social gaming business. Maybe you can remember Electronic Arts bought Playfish for $400 million last year? This year Playdom got acquired by Disney for about $750 million! Who knows what huge sales next year or the year after will bring?

Since 2008 the Social Gaming market really started to grow big time. According to the research committed by Inside Virtual Goods the Western Social gaming market grew from about $250 million in 2008 to $490 million in 2009 and predictions for 2010 are rising up to $1 billion. That same company states the following: "2010 will be remembered as the year that games on social networks became a billion dollar business". Predictions for 2011 state that social gaming will grow to $1.25 billion for the overall global market.

Where will it stop? How exciting will the users of social networks stay in the next year? For example the casual gaming market has already grown pretty mature. A lot of companies have tried and are still trying to grab their share. Maybe the principle of users getting overfed with information will be applied here as well. There is the hard fact for every good old business the cash cow eventually turn into a dog. Will this happen after 2011? Or will the hype remain on to even break bigger barriers? We will just have wait and see what the future eventually will bring us. In the mean time I'll enjoy myself with a Balloon Tower Defense game or some nice Puzzle games.

by: Michael de Fries

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