EVCin

When viral marketing tactics were curtailed by Facebook’s platform and policy updates, the question wasn’t whether developers would take a hit, but how much? And whether those that thrived on aggressive viral tactics would be hurt more than those that didn’t. I look at what appears to be behind those who did well and those that took a major hit.

The top games on Facebok are down 11% from their highs this month. While it looks like it might be due to the holidays, the successive declines in the peaks of the latest Zynga releases might suggest the life cycle for social games is changing.

As originally published at Games.com and later highlighted by Silicon Alley Insider.
No one questions whether sharing news or photos with friends and family is a fad, and when people get together to socialize, they often play games – from bridge to charades to Trivial Pursuit. As one of the largest social gathering spots on [...]

When Zynga stopped cross-promoting their synchronous poker game, it signalled that asynchronous game play may be the better long-term game mechanic for the Facebook platform. I look at the stages of Zynga’s social game development and how the fast growing audience has responded to earlier games. I also see a growing disconnect, where games are pushing the boundaries of users social bonds, subtly coercing users to befriend strangers to unlock new items and levels and wonder if a better filtering mechanism could help the growth of both Facebook, game developers and users.

One of the more interesting applications of the Social Game “sticky factor” that I introduced last week is the ability to look at the life cycle of some of the most popular games and identify some of the key feature roll-outs that greatly increased engagement. The sticky factor is simply the daily active users (DAUs) [...]