Mygaffer said:
The numbers I have looked out show a company that overestimated how big their audience was going to be and how long that audience would hang around.
I think we going to start seeing people lose interest in these types of games as time goes on due to the lack of any real reward in playing them.
I was considering this overestimation, combined with the capricious nature of social gaming popularity and I came up with a sort of forecast for the future, which will inevitably be wrong, but bear with me as I go through a series of causes for what I think will cause the social/casual gaming market to implode in the next few years:
1) Originality is rare. Ripoff after ripoff after ripoff. How many times have you played Bejeweled, but it wasn't Bejeweled, but it behaved mostly like Bejeweled, so you just shrugged and played it anyway? Words With Friends isn't anything new (Scrabble came out a few years prior), but the implementation of it was original. Same goes for Draw Something, as it's just networked Pictionary. Nothing new, but implemented well enough to get quite popular.
2) The number of people playing those two games now is probably ten percent of what it was at its peak. Free games mean you don't really feel like you have to get your money's worth. Take a PS3 or Xbox game: You pay sixty dollars for that game, you play it for weeks, even if it's not very good, because then you can really tell people, in-depth and at great length, what a shitty game it is. Free game? Even if it's good, one day you close it and you just never open it again. Big deal, you're not going to miss it.
3) There's a percentage of people who will pay for virtual donkeys and the vast majority won't. If they don't, then the developer has to monetize the game through in-game advertising, which immediately turns off a fair number of people. If they don't go the advertising route, they're just giving away the game, because there's this bizarre myth that games should cost 99 cents or $1.99 at the most. And then people ***** and moan when they feel they didn't get their 99 cents worth over the course of the twenty days that they played the game, giving it the lowest rating possible (these are the people who rate everything as either five stars or one star on a five-star scale; I HATE THESE PEOPLE).
4) Everybody's making these games, and they're getting worse and worse, as well as more and more bland. Less original and less sparkle, shall we say. At some point, the incoming money is going to be stretched so thin that there's no money in making casual games anymore, at which point most of the developers get out of the market and people start paying up-front for games again.
5) For anyone who doesn't understand why someone would pay for a virtual donkey, though, it becomes easy to understand if you consider a Street Fighter analogy. Some moves in Street Fighter are a pain in the ass. So, if you're playing Street Fighter against someone at an arcade and you put your dollar or so into the machine, it says, "For just another quarter, I can tie that Special button to the spinning piledriver you can't pull off. Noob." You think anyone's going to throw in that extra quarter? Yep, faster than you can say Shoryuken.
An alternate theory to all of this is that everything will remain status quo and the cream will merely rise to the top. However, my opinion remains that, in the future market of clones of ripoffs of doppelgangers of copies of games, there can be no cream without adequate protection for original material. The whole house of cards will collapse.
