EVCin

I hope you all had a great New Year’s Eve celebration. While 2009 saw the amazing growth of social games, looking ahead, I wonder whether 2010 will be the year where:

More complex game mechanics catch on?
Facebook changes continue to take away the institutional learnings from leaders like Zynga, helping to level the playing [...]

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.

PetVille gets massive ad campaign to jump grow over 2 million daily active users in a day; Zynga starts promoting some synchronous games; Playfish still seeing DAU traffic down since EA acquisition; Bejeweled Blitz gets some competition for gem-swapping audience.

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.

Nearly a month out, FishVille’s sticky factor approaches the same 30% level seen by rivals Fish World and Happy Aquarium, yet My Fishbowl maintains a sticky factor 33% higher than their rivals. How much of this is due to being natively translated in Chinese versus a game play mechanism that is based on stealing from your friends?