There’s a new kid in class. Just so happens this kid is a pretty big deal and wants to play.
On 11th August, just 44 days after unveiling its new social network, mega brand Google announced the addition of gaming to its social platform, adding to their arsenal against Facebook, stating: “Sharing is more than conversations. We want playing games online to be just as fun and meaningful as playing in real life” (Vic Gondotra, Google’s Vice President of Social Business) on its release. That Google Games is being introduced through Gondatra’s social project Google+ is telling when a company that permeates almost all aspects of online life could have done this before as one of its many projects.
It follows a growing movement towards ‘Socialization’ of all Internet behaviour (exemplified by ‘Likes’ or Google’s +1 which enable sharing) and concurrently a ‘Gamification’ of social media and online activities. Aspects of our online activity are being infused with gaming characteristics such as competitive motivations, challenges or tasks and rewards, deals or prizes while social elements add to this.
Google aims to capitalize on this by integrating a gaming platform into their new social network, which could one day see Google’s personalized ads, data from search, geo-locational, and personal data all working together. Initially Google+ games will only showcase 16 titles which may help games developers compared to the thousands to chose from on Facebook. These games can be played on various other platforms already but Google is professing to do it differently by making them less visible with a separate news feed -“it will be there when you want it and not when you don’t”- and different fee structure; “Google’s determined to break Facebook’s stranglehold on the social games market by undercutting its rival on fees to game developers.” says Scott Steinberg on Mashable.
However will Google make money on the 5% cut they are taking from developers compared to Facebook’s 30%? Facebook’s Shaun Ryan slammed Google Games saying the reason they are at 5% is “because they don’t have any users”. There is an air of acute competitiveness rising between the two companies as Google Games directly flirts with Facebook’s core user, Ryan comparing it to McDonald’s attempts at selling premium coffee in the face of Starbucks. Either way Google has a great deal to gain from diversifying their audience and entering a growing market before it’s flooded.
Facebook is fighting back by with a secretive project under the codename ‘Spartan’, a rumored plan to implement their own HTML5 mobile platform. This would gaining revenue from gaming on their mobile apps, which they currently are losing out on:
When users playing Farmville or any other Facebook game purchase something via PC browser, the app’s developer and Facebook each get a cut. But when this happens inside the Facebook app, the mobile operating system manufacturer gets the money that Facebook would otherwise pocket. And considering the popularity of the Facebook app and mobile gaming, that adds up quickly.
Molly McHugh Digital Trends July 27th 2011
Facebook is one of the most popular mobile apps on Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android yet it doesn’t make revenue from the program’s current profit structure.
Facebook Credits were seen as one way to counteract this, introduced in 2009 and made compulsory in 2011, credits are the virtual currency that Facebook benefits from.
Spartan would be Facebook’s own mobile web platform, designed to work with their social hooks and ecosystem, working with automatic Facebook logins and using a new set of APIs. Most importantly it would mean no more profits leaking from Facebook’s outsourced payment methods thus far.
A developer claimed that Facebook “want to be the Zynga of mobile gaming”, which is odd as they already benefit greatly from a relationship with Zynga, some calling Zynga the barnacle on Facebook’s ship. Zynga is currently the biggest kid in the social gaming playground, due to its crucial partnership with Facebook where games such as Farmville encourage players to play socially through their network. Zynga’s success, it has been noted, is almost entirely tied up with Facebook as a platform yet their games attract 6.5million users daily and the high level of user engagement makes it an attractive opportunity for advertisers.
To further complicate the relationship between Facebook and Google, last year Google invested in Zynga, a move seen to many as a way of infiltrating some a Facebook’s stronghold in social data. At the time it was speculated that this was also a move indicating Google was planning their own social gaming platform, proved correct with the release of Google+ Games, which included Zynga Poker.
Spartan would see Facebook seriously profiting from the smartphone-bred traffic it gets and also begin to establish itself as more than a social network; an innovator of software and systems. Spartan would mean games developers could potentially sell virtual goods within mobile Web browsers. Founder of startup Sibblingz (a multi-device social gaming platform), Ben Savage says they are working with multiple Facebook game developers to make their platform Spaceport compatible with Spartan.
Although online games have come along way the essence and motivation for gaming online remains very simply the same; to play fun games socially. Indeed Farmville has relatively crude graphics but people choose to play these games over more sophisticated platforms because they are social. So social, in fact, that they now are part of our social network landscape, as ubiquitous as messaging and sharing.
Just as gaming online no longer means playing virtual games alone, it also no longer means even entering a separate game space to playing anymore as gaming culture seeps into other aspects of our realities, or augmented realities. More and more we will see our online activity, and social networking not only supporting games as Facebook does for Zynga, but becoming the game. The ‘Gamification’ of our online activity has already permeated retail, socializing, education and news. Its success may be because it uses technology to tap into fundamental aspects of human behaviour; competition between peers, hunting instinct and reward systems.
Take Foursquare, based on classic gaming structures but using GPS technology to allow people to ‘check in’ via their phone to real-life locations and receive rewards. Or SCVNGR, which also fuses social and location-based data to deliver an online version of a classic treasure hunt game. SVNGR, builds a gamified layer on top of maps of the world and through mobile technology allows users to earn points or prizes for completing challenges in ‘real life’.
It works incredibly well for brands, just ask the countless multinational companies who have employed social, gamified or geo-locational platforms for engaging, new-age campaigns, including Disney with Gowalla, McDonalds or Domino’s with Foursquare and Swarovski or Topshop with SVNGR.
This follows an increasing move towards an Internet of integration, namely an integration of social, commerce, work and play and where more than ever before, different aspects of behaviour are amalgamated and streamlined through leading platforms.
However, who will win between the biggest online players in the world of gaming and social remains to be seen.
By Elle Holgate
