*Shrugs*
I'm one of those that thinks Zynga gets too much attention, and I think those numbers are very deceptive. Right now Zynga has the advantage of being the first ones on scene using this method to sell advertising. I believe (personally) that this is where most of their revenue comes from, I do not think they are making all that much money off of the "cash shops" of games like Farmville or whatever despite what they might present. Still getting millions upon millions of "hits" is an impressive thing to someone who wants to sell advertising space.
The problem though is that as more people get involved in this, that audience is going to be increasingly divided, the hits in each area are going to go down, and it's not going to be all that profitable or special in the long run.
Back during the 1990s you had all those mall survey guys, which started out being fairly popular. You'd have some dude approach you, and offer you free samples of so and so product in exchange for doing a survey. It was cool for a while but then it got to the point where you had these dudes staking out pretty much every high traffic mall, and even multiple groups operating in the biggest ones. Leading to the whole "want to take a survey" joke from Animaniacs because it became hateful and annoying.
The current situation seems a lot like that where Zynga seems cool because they are the first ones doing it. They will consult and sell "Expertise" until the market is saturated
and we'll doubtlessly see companies who invest in this now collapsing as the market becomes divided and the novelty wears out. We're looking at what amounts to a fad, that like all fads seems "massive" and like it will go on forever. I don't object to Zynga and these "social media" games getting some coverage, but I think it's being taken waaay too seriously.
Besides, we've more or less been here before. Back before the internet became what it is now, we had these things called "Bulletin Board Systems" or BBSes. People used to run them out of their houses, and there were these things called "Echos" which were the social networking sites of their day where BBS systems would share message boards by periodically uploading and downloading information to people running "hub" systems.
On BBS systems you had these "Door Games" which were very simple games where while logged in you could do stuff have your progress saved, and then other people logging into the same BBS could do the same thing, and at the end of the day it would process results. Some games would work off of hubs and send packets out so people on multiple boards could play together and such. Less advanced and "purdy", but pretty much the same exact thing that you see here. A few people got the idea that this was the way of the future because of all the people that could be reached, and a few lucky fellows made apparently a small fortune through registration fees with some of the first successful games. Tons of people jumped on the bandwagon for these games used by "casual" BBS users and in the end it simply went nowhere except for the first few guys. Interestingly some of you might remember a game called "Double Daggers" by "Prince Desty", in the credits it has "Additional Ideas and Concepts by Therumancer" (that is me). Never went anywhere, but when I was a kid I was pretty into the whole BBS thing and thought Door Games were da bomb.
This is on a larger scale, but fundementally the same thing, and will doubtlessly end the same way. I find it somewhat ironic because it seems that while time goes on, the same basic events re-occur. Right now we have this Zynga thing, and at the same time we've got people trying to bring back Interactive movies of the sort that were tried around the advent of CD RoM tech for PCs.
I'm probably not explaining/articulating myself well, but basically I doubt think this is a big deal. Indeed I think it's only become one because of all the hype surrounding it.
I could be wrong, but in a few years I'll imagine some fortunes will be squandered by people trying to emulate Zyga. You'll have dozens if not hundreds of "social network games" for casual people, many of which will become ghost towns, constantly fighting to get someone to buy advertising space.
Ironically I also suspect that there will be a couple of fairly successful games but they will succeed by using the online social platforms, while not being all that "casual". I look at things like say "Trade Wars" and other similar games for the BBS systems which seemed to be the most enduring of the crop once the mad rush died out, and people finally realized they weren't going to make money by programming ANSI graphics.
