Revisiting: Did Facebook Eat the Casual Game Market?
I spoke to the New York Chapter of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) last week, touching on a previous blog post but updated with more data showing how:
- Facebook is rapidly capturing the traditional casual game demographic that has been a mainstay of sites like Pogo.com (over 400% growth between February and September of this year)
- Big Fish Games is continuing to watch it’s traffic decline
- declining traffic, over-saturation of product is exerting downward price pressure and less margin for developers
There is no question that working with Facebook has its own challenges and requires a different level of investment, but it’s hard to ignore the macro trends when trying to figure out where to invest next.
Did Facebook Eat The Casual Game Market?
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Just looking at our own results, Big Fish has definitely lost market share but I don’t think it has been entirely to social. We have seen significantly higher performance from some of the other traditional casual game sites (particularly Verizon Games and iWin). Facebook is definitely eating into the core of the casual game market, that’s why Merscom will be announcing a social gaming initiative this week, but a lot of these issues are more local than indicative of the state of the industry.
I think you did a nice job Lloyd of covering some of the issues for casual game developers making the leap to Facebook in your recent post: http://www.merscom.com/blog/social-media-and-casual-video-gaming
[...] bet is to focus on bringing EA’s most successful casual content under the pogo.com brand – the casual player is migrating from the Pogos of the world to Facebook. Poppit, Word Whomp, Jungle Gin already have created socially engaging games where users work [...]