May 14th, 2010
Via PlayNoEvil, a report examining the possibility that some social games may move from their existing “social engagement” model to a more virulent strategy using multi-level marketing. As the article note:
“…Facebook has turned down the knob on the data feed from games… and social games are suffering. Virtually every game and game publisher has lost millions of players each of the past several weeks.
While games like Farmville and Mafia Wars are often described as “viral”, it is pretty clear that most potential are immune or at least resistant to these games. Players only play if they are constantly reminded to keep playing by other players.
The games are not sticky, Facebook is.
Facebook does need social applications to maintain engagement and keep its customers on its site. It will be interesting to see whether Facebook opens the door again for these application feeds (perhaps under the control of an under-documented privacy feature).
Will this be enough for game developers or will they need to create actively viral games?
Is Amway coming to social gaming?
Multi-level marketing is certainly a proven business model. I’ve long wondered when it would hit online games. The loss of growth and even shrinkage that these social games have suffered would seem to imply a need for more drastic measures.
It would be fairly simple with games like Farmville to move from its existing “social engagement” model to a more virulent strategy using multi-level marketing. The more my friends play, the more loot I get. The more they pay, the more loot I get. Active messages initiated by players asking for their friends to help rather than data feeds can bypass the filters, and constraints, of any service like Facebook. After all, I can always send a message to whomever I want with a magic hyperlink embedded in it.
And, since there is no cash out model, more aggressive game creators will, no doubt, move past multi-level marketing and into pyramid schemes:
- Subscribe to get better residual rates from your referrals.
- Long, deep referral trees to reward players for insane levels of recruiting.
- All sorts of virtual prizes for engagement and referral.
This should all be legal as the lack of cash out will keep these MLM games from being construed as illegal pyramid or Ponzi schemes.
The challenge will be to define the game mechanics in such a way that players can feel comfortable playing and joining at any time – limiting the benefits of early entry… though Farmville and Mafia Wars and others have done this already fairly well with independent play in a social milieu.
Multi-level social gaming, here we come.”
This entry was posted on Friday, May 14th, 2010 at 12:46 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
