Social Games to Facebook turn the tide

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Tencent Science and Technology (Shanhui) Beijing time June 14 News, consulting company Digital World Study (Digital) founder p. J. Maikenili (P. McNealy), writing on the Technology blog website AllThingsD Today, says social-game developers are turning to other platforms, influenced by a variety of factors, particularly Facebook's discriminatory policies in viral marketing. The following is the full text of the article:

Issues related to the Facebook IPO (IPOs) distract people from their business. Despite the overall impression that Facebook is still growing, Facebook has shown signs of danger, particularly its social gaming platform and its relationships with social-gaming companies.

Currently, social gaming accounts for about 12% of Facebook's revenue and may be a bit higher in profits. Social gaming company Zynga is Facebook's biggest developer partner. But other game developers are dissatisfied with how Facebook treats them, and have started porting games to other platforms. While Facebook is still the biggest social gaming platform, the economic benefits and opportunities of developing games for Apple's iOS devices and Android devices are attracting developers to "go Facebook".

The biggest problem for developers is Facebook's discriminatory policy on viral marketing. For example, if a Facebook user has 30 friends on the buddy list, as long as 1 friends start playing Zynga's game-such as "Castleville"-users will be notified. However, if a friend plays a non-Zynga game, the user is not notified. This kind of notice is a kind of viral marketing form, to the developer's marketing expense has the very big influence. Other developers can only increase ad spending on Facebook, as Facebook has banned the use of viral marketing by other developers other than Zynga.

No matter how many ad budgets developers put on Facebook, they can't use viral marketing, so the cost of getting new users is very high. Facebook's marketing and advertising revenues have been affected as developers move to other platforms.

The move to Facebook has begun

The first developer to publicly admit to switching to other platforms is Crowdstar, a social gaming company, but it is not the only developer to turn to other platforms. Over the past 6 months, more and more developers have moved away from Facebook to other platforms, just not publicly announced.

Facebook also admitted in its IPO roadshow that advertising revenue was lower than expected. While I think social gaming is not the only reason Facebook's advertising revenue is less than expected, it sends a dangerous signal to Facebook.

Facebook rivals: Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft

Social gaming platforms are emerging, and the social gaming market is at an early stage of development. For example, while Apple's ipad is now the dominant tablet market, there is no clear indication of which platform will be second. The next 12 months to 18 months, when Amazon or Microsoft becomes the second-largest tablet maker, they will be big enough to attract developers to develop games that support only tablets and no longer play for Facebook.

In the next 12 months to 18 months, the tablet market will become increasingly competitive. As the ipad's low-cost competitor, the Kindle fire market share will continue to rise, and Microsoft will devote considerable resources to boosting the growth of Windows 8 mobile devices and Windows Phone devices.

Google, Amazon and Microsoft are actively lobbying developers to abandon Facebook, offering subsidies, ad support and other support to developers, prompting developers to abandon Facebook to their platform, a strategy that has worked.

In the game-machine era, changes in market patterns usually take 5 years, and the time of market change in the social game era will be shortened to 12 months, or even 6 months. This means that the pattern in the tablet and social gaming market will be very different from the present in the next 1 years.

The loss of distributors ' revenue and advertising revenue means it's more important to work with Zynga

As more publishers move more development activities to other platforms, such as the Kindle Fire or Windows 8 social platforms, it means that the revenues from Facebook's social games and associated advertising will be lost. This will further magnify Zynga's risk of publishing more games in its zynga.com than Facebook.

Zynga is obsessed. Although most of its revenues and profits come from Facebook, it is strengthening its mobile business and launching its own portal zynga.com. The Securities and Exchange Commission's materials show that Zynga's partnership agreement with Facebook expires at the end of 2015. Zynga has been expanding its non-Facebook business, making it a rift in its relationship with Facebook.

How does Facebook respond? Does Facebook need to change?

Some analysts think Facebook needs no fuss about it, simply by continuing to use the user to access its services on any platform. But game developers have started to "go Facebook", and new platforms may change the market in a relatively short time.

What can Facebook do to retain developers

In addition to changing the rules relating to Facebook coins, an important move to regain the favor of game developers will be to provide more viral marketing opportunities, such as including game activity in dynamic messages. Reopening viral marketing will be a direct and clear response from Facebook. But the only developer who does not welcome Facebook's move is Zynga, as Facebook's full launch of viral marketing means Zynga's games will face more competitors.