With more and more games appearing on social network sites such as Facebook, David Crookes looks at whether a new, lucrative platform is emerging.
Format: Web
Are you an avid player of Farmville? Did you play Lexulous (or Scrabulous as it was once called), the word game application that once took Facebook by storm? Do you love Mafia Wars? If so, then you're one of thousands, nay hundreds of thousands, of people who are gripped by a growing trend for playing games on social network sites.
There are a whole host of games playable via Facebook and similar sites and that's not counting the numerous movie and music quizzes in which users are asked to take part on a daily basis. You can play rip-off Mario titles, engage in many retro games or have a bash at fresh offerings, all created by a wide range of people with various motives.
Some want to show off their programming skills and gain the kudos of having the games played by a sizeable proportion of social networkers. Others want to test the market with a view to making some cash along the line.
But whatever the motivation for creating these apps, the fact is a new distribution method has opened up for games and it's pulling more people into gaming than ever before.
If games were ever classed as being for geeks, a combination of casual gaming, the Nintendo Wii and shared titles on Facebook is helping to cement what was once a niche hobby in the mainstream conscience.
MySpace is also in on the act, having opened up its network to games developers and people of all ages are playing. Suddenly, gaming is become socially acceptable.
One of the hopes is that games on social networks will become so commonplace and so popular - and signs are they already are - that these fledgling casual gamers will soon migrate to games on other platforms. That your granny who adores Farmville will suddenly decide to give Call of Duty a go.
It is, say many, the start of a new way of playing with the emphasis on online and involving your friends and family.
But social networks have worked wonders in other ways too. They have been used not to play games but create them. Legendary games developer Dave Perry attempted to harness the skills of large groups of people with his Top Secret project.
The aim was to develop a massively multiplayer online game and it was up to the people who signed up to Perry's website to dictate how the title would progress.
So how will game developers make this pay? With advertising and the purchase of in-game items. Advertising executives across the globe are already falling over themselves to find ways to exploit games distributed by traditional means (ie. to the shops) and on relatively new digital download platforms such as Xbox Live Arcade.
What has caught the imagination of advertisers is the realisation that 18 to 34-year-olds are spending hours and hours playing games. This is the very same audience the advertisers have been doing their very best to pin down. They are finding it increasingly difficult to reach this age group through the traditional methods of television, radio and the press.
So when word got round that adults were picking up the likes of Grand Theft Auto and Prince of Persia they grew to accept that the PlayStation 3 and Microsoft's Xbox 360 are media well worth tapping into - especially when they also noticed the games cost up to 40 pounds a time. This is a market flush with affluent buyers.
But of course, paid-for content is also possible. People already pay money for pictures of birthday cakes and the like on Facebook and FarmVille and its like make their cash via in-app purchases.Above all, people across the world love to share. They like to share their lives, which is why blogging and social network profiles are popular. Now they like to share their games and how well they are progressing. After all, what's the point of getting on Facebook or MySpace and playing a game in isolation? Surely it's all about having fun with the friends you've spent so long "collecting". And what better way to do that than with a game?
