Social Gaming is the way the iPhone should go in 2009 says Zynga
Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga, one of the largest and most successful social gaming companies on Facebook, has announced that the iPhone is set to see a huge rise in the use of social gaming through 2009 if Apple decides to launch similar features that made the Facebook gaming craze so popular.
Pincus said, “The iPhone has most of the components to be one of the most important social gaming platforms. It has ease of access through the App Store, where games are even more accessible than on a social network. It’s social, and it connects online easily. And, of course, it’s always with you, so the games are always available for you to play. We believe social games will penetrate the iPhone more than any other platform.”
However, the social gaming platform has been criticised for not being strong enough to survive the recession and many are saying that although 2008 saw the boom of such a platform, 2009 may well see its downfall.
“Poor quality user experiences or misleading monetization mechanisms like some of the aggressive CPA practices we’ve seen in 2008 could jeopardize the perception of social games and our growth potential as an industry,” said the CEO of Playfish, Kristian Segerstrale, in an interview with Gigaom.
However, Pincus remains confident on the matter, stating that it is up to Apple as to how far the sensation can be converted onto the iPhone platform. “They could have a Home section on the iPhone springboard that creates a social network of all of your friends with iPhones. You’d register your Facebook or MySpace login with Apple, and they would poll all the interesting information from your friends and give you a Home Centre that gave you feeds from your friends, showed you various messages – including emails and in-network messages – and then on top of that would identify people in your address book, to unlock iPhone-to-iPhone applications for developers,” commented Pincus in an interview with Pocket Gamer.
Pincus’s company, Zynga, was the first company to release an iPhone game that utilised the Facebook Connect technology which allowed users to play games using their Facebook login details.
However, it is clear that Zynga is waiting for Apple to start picking up on more opportunities that Facebook have worked out over the years. According to Pincus, 2008’s largest problems come when attempting to bring the social gaming idea to those users who are not normally gamers. “The biggest challenge for social gaming in the year ahead will be to become useful and fun to non-gamers and to reach the mass market who have yet to embrace web gaming.”
Apple are clearly open at the moment to start working around their current policies and bring in new ideas as they have started to allow third party web browsers to be placed in their AppStore, something that was not allowed until now due to competition with Apple’s own software. Perhaps it’s time they started to involve themselves more into social gaming.
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