Whether you like it or not, Farmville was the top game on Facebook for 2009. And its success is being attributed, not to a desire for sustainable agricultural growth, but to sticky games and an impressively large and seemingly growing advertising budget. Zynga, the game’s creators, are known for their aggressive use of Facebook’s marketing channels – whether it’s in the players interests or not.
Even if you only visit Facebook sporadically, you can’t have missed the bright, eye-catching posts about chickens, trees and mystery eggs. And despite Facebook’s constant evolution of the platform to stop this kind of spam, I suspect many Facebookers haven’t worked out or bothered to turn these messages off.
So why do games on social networks follow the trend of offline and then online businesses? Why do companies go for spam to acquire customers, rather than a Seth Godin permission marketing approach? I suspect the answer is that creating something worth spreading takes too long and is too hard. It’s much easier to fill the social networking streams with flyers, because even though you’ll annoy some, the brand awareness gained and the percentage of people who try it out of curiosity might (if you’re an early-mover with a big budget) just produce a runaway fad. But eventually, someone will put in the effort, whether it’s an established game company or some indie Flash developer, and then the farms will be foreclosed.
Tags: marketing
Go read this article by my favourite gaming blogger, Tadhg Kelly – http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/TadhgKelly/20100126/4239/Ethical_Design_Are_Most_Social_Games_Just_Virtual_Slot_Machines.php