What's wrong with Facebook games?

Matt Mihaly has a good post up talking about whether casual or hardcore games are more successful on Facebook. And while he took a stab at what types of games are going to work, I thought I'd step back a bit and just see how games are fairing on Facebook overall. Even with the limited stats provided by Facebook, we can start to get a picture of what works and doesn't work on Facebook.

I'll have to admit that the first pass on statistics surprised me. Of the top 100 most active Facebook applications, games do not do statistically better than the average application. Games only have a marginally higher percentage of active daily users (8.57%) than the overall average (8.01%). And if you expand the criteria to include all apps that use game-like mechanics, (such as Superpoke), the average is still in the same range (7.71%). It's a wash.

 

These numbers do not jive with the incredible popularity of games on the general Internet (as I have talked about before), so what's going on here?

Well, digging a little deeper, many of the Facebook games are simple single-player games whose only social mechanic is that they post your score for your friends to see. Jetman and Tower Blox are two such examples. What happens if we just count the games that are specifically multiplayer, and therefore fit the social nature of Facebook better?

Ahh, that's more like it. Multiplayer social games such as Warbook and Scrabulous average 11.4% active daily users, a good 30% higher than the average top Facebook app (8.01%).  I'm sure if we could actually get engagement, attention, and retention metrics we'd see the same trend. This combined with the relatively high percentage of games represented in the top 25 applications (7 games) would suggest that there is simply a lack of quality, socially-focused games on Facebook.

With an average install base of 2.7m users for top Facebook games, this is a massive new distribution channel that makes the curated Xbox Live Arcade look like a backwater. I'll be chatting a bunch more on the topic at GDC in February where I'll be leading a panel discussion on Facebook and the new web of Social Gaming. I've grabbed  TJ Murphy (Warbook/SGN) and Mark Pincus (Texas Hold'Em) and it should be a one stop shop of what works, what doesn't, and the size of the opportunity presented by social online gaming. Should be fun.

Oh, and while you're at it, on Monday we publicly released our first Facebook app (more of a toy than a game really) -- Make Me.

 

 

Comments

[Hung]

Pretty cool app though I think you will do better if you let people make characters for themselves, then label it as they please, and also allow them to make more than one.

[DoordGarf]

A memorandum is written not to inform the reader, but to protect the writer.
-- Dean Acheson

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