PopCap: Social Gaming's "Golden Era" Is Over

Tom Goldman

Crying on the inside.
Aug 17, 2009
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PopCap: Social Gaming's "Golden Era" Is Over



The social gaming craze may have taken over millions of people's lives, but PopCap Games says the bubble is about to burst.

With social networking games like FrontierVille [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/101614-FrontierVille-Breaks-Five-Million-in-Two-Weeks] and Mafia Wars drawing in millions per month from every spectrum of the videogame audience, it was only a matter of time before so many companies tried to join in that the market became oversaturated. PopCap Games co-founder Jason Kapalka thinks that's happening right now, and that social gaming has seen the end of its "golden era."

Though Kapalka says it's "pretty obvious that casual has kind of won" and that "casual is the new mainstream," he doesn't think just anyone will be able to jump into the social gaming market anymore. Whereas a game called FarmTown could once survive off of the success of FarmVille, and a FarmZone could survive off of the success of FarmTown, Kapalka sees a struggle ahead for those jumping on the bandwagon.

"There's no shortage of terrible World of Warcraft [http://www.amazon.com/World-Warcraft-Battle-Chest-Mac/dp/B000H96C9M/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=videogames&qid=1283877528&sr=8-3] clones that didn't really work out, and you'll see the same thing I think here," he said in an interview with GamesIndustry. "A handful will survive, a bunch will fail. You're definitely in the stage right now in social games where there's a lot of bandwagon jumping, where everyone sees money, money, money and suddenly all these new companies appear ... It happened before in mobile, it happened before in casual - in the past it's tended to signal the beginning of the end."

According to Kapalka, social gaming will never go away, but the wild frontier of social gaming has already been populated. He says it's not the end "of the genre, but of the sort of golden era, where everything was a fresh blue ocean and all that stuff." The future of social gaming will be "hard-fought" and "tough," Kapalka thinks.

"You're already sort of seeing that, a lot of the viral growth of Facebook games is now shut down, they have to do it the old-fashioned way, which is by buying ads or by having something that people are actually interested in playing and actually want to want to tell their friends about," he points out.

PopCap will probably continue to do just fine because it's always created incredibly addictive titles like Plants vs. Zombies [http://www.amazon.com/Plants-Zombies-Game-Year-Limited-Pc/dp/B003O21A2I/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=videogames&qid=1283877960&sr=8-2] that aren't flashes in the pan. For those that seek to profit from the success of PopCap and other casual or social gaming developers, it may not be as easy in the future.

Source: GI.biz [http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2010-09-02-popcaps-jason-kapalka-part-two-interview?page=1]


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Echo136

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Feb 22, 2010
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I doubt that. I go over to my friends place for RPing, and he's got 2 computers set up. On both computers I see Mafia Wars and some sort of ninja game, both on facebook. In my perspective, I see the bubble going strong.
 

Quid Plura

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Apr 27, 2010
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It is probable the market is saturated with too much titles. We'll see. Depends a lot on the future of facebook too.
 

flipsalty

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May 11, 2010
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Echo136 said:
I doubt that. I go over to my friends place for RPing, and he's got 2 computers set up. On both computers I see Mafia Wars and some sort of ninja game, both on facebook. In my perspective, I see the bubble going strong.
That's quite an isolated incident, you can't make a claim on an entire genre from that.
 

snowman6251

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Nov 9, 2009
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I'm honestly just shocked that 1, there are people who actually want to play these time sinks, and 2, that there's some serious money in it.

How do they profit off these games? Is it ad revenue? Do they charge you 5 bucks in Farmville for the mystical golden cow? How does it turn a profit?
 

Jared

The British Paladin
Jul 14, 2009
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If it is about to end, I will be so happy - See Zyenga go Bye bye will make me smile
 

Mr.Pandah

Pandah Extremist
Jul 20, 2008
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snowman6251 said:
I'm honestly just shocked that 1, there are people who actually want to play these time sinks, and 2, that there's some serious money in it.

How do they profit off these games? Is it ad revenue? Do they charge you 5 bucks in Farmville for the mystical golden cow? How does it turn a profit?
What happens, from what I can understand, is there are both ads and revenue from them charging for "in-game" cash. Its all a sham, but you can't really blame them for making money off of what we consider to be a time sink, while the casual gaming crowd doesn't think of it that way. My manager where I work is addicted to Farmville, and has realized its a waste of time, but keeps playing. Its odd in a way, but he admits to not being able to actually play any other games because they're more then just click to win.

The casual gaming beast is certainly an interesting one. Perhaps PopCap is the "hardcore" casual game developer nowadays.
 

JEBWrench

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Apr 23, 2009
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snowman6251 said:
I'm honestly just shocked that 1, there's people who actually want to play these time sinks, and 2, that there's some serious money in it.

How do they profit off these games? Is it ad revenue? Do they charge you 5 bucks in Farmville for the mystical golden cow? How does it turn a profit?
Microtransactions.

Social gaming is the most lucrative path of the gaming industry.

Also, shouldn't this be titled: "PopCap takes ball, goes home"?

Now: Statistics!

33 Social games with DAUs of over 1,000,000.
19 with 10,000,000 or more MAUs.
6 with 20,000,000+ MAUs.
3 with 30,000,000. (All Zynga - thus why PopCap is taking their ball and going home.)

PopCap has fallen to 20th amongst social developers. That's why they're declaring the golden era over.

Pencake and CrowdStar with their 43,000,000+ MAUs, Playdom with 44,000,000+, EA with 54,000,000+ and Zynga with their 231,000,000+ would certainly disagree with them.

(Statistics courtesy: Appdata.com)
 

Atmos Duality

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Mar 3, 2010
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No market can expand forever. This is a predictable and necessary result.
Celebrate your successes, reap your harvest, but don't forget to tighten your belts.
 

Hayate_GT

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Mar 6, 2010
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Jaredin said:
If it is about to end, I will be so happy - See Zyenga go Bye bye will make me smile
smile?...i think i'll throw a party...at least they wont be in next years March Madness...
 

Cynical skeptic

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Apr 19, 2010
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The only problem is social games don't require any sort of investment to develop. Slap some shit together, get four people "playing" (read: spamming the shit out of everyone on your behalf), and you're set. You're well on your way to making way fucking more money than anyone should from an html based text game.

Facebook is the only reason this shit caught on at all. Its been a spammy scourge of the internet since the ARPA net, but until the massive success of a completely unregulated social network, moderators (ya know, those things facebook doesn't have) treated anyone "playing" a "social game" as plague victims. They and anyone they touched were quarantined and cleansed by righteous fire.

But since the internet now has more people of average intelligence than any other demographic, making yourself the unpaid employee of a developer of shoddy "games," is socially acceptable.
 

Outlaw Torn

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Dec 24, 2008
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Who cares about social 'games' anyway? It's just full of Scamga scams that are saturating the market worse than EA did with their endless sports games or Activision with Guitar Hero. Casual gaming will still have plenty of momentum.
 

laserwulf

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Dec 30, 2007
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Good riddance. With the "me too!" developers dropping off, maybe we can see some innovation in Facebook games.
 

Optimystic

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Sep 24, 2008
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laserwulf said:
Good riddance. With the "me too!" developers dropping off, maybe we can see some innovation in Facebook games.
AGreed - what happened to the D&D one dammit? Can we have some more hardcore facebook titles pl0x?
 

Lord_Panzer

Impractically practical
Feb 6, 2009
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Know how he'd be right? If he forced PopCap to stop making games.

The genre would die overnight. At least, the good section of it would.
 

Cherry Cola

Your daddy, your Rock'n'Rolla
Jun 26, 2009
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I'm with Kapalka on this. I always saw the Social Gaming craze as something that would just skyrocket in the beginning and then slowly sink.

Like MySpace.
 

zombie711

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Aug 17, 2009
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on one hand zyenga dies (farmvile, mafia wars) on the other hand popcap dies (bejeweled, plants vs zombies)
 

Tom Phoenix

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Mar 28, 2009
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Tom Goldman said:
He says it's not the end "of the genre, but of the sort of golden era, where everything was a fresh blue ocean and all that stuff."
I love the fact that he used the term "Blue Ocean", beacuse that was an accurate description of the ignored casual market a few years ago. Now, however, it is turning into a red ocean, one that is oversaturated with companies. And even more are coming, Microsoft leading the way.