Social Games - Review from Standfort (Graduate School of Business)

Social games is games people played on social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, Orkut, and Bebo, with the key motive of socializing with friends and/or meeting new people. Social games were generally simple games that anyone could play and because the mainstream was being lured into social games so it was becoming the fastest-growing game market and increasingly popular on social networking sites. Beside that, to play social games, users did not need to be online all the time. Social games were often “asynchronous”, meaning players took turn and played whenever they wanted to, mostly because social game players typically did not spend enough time playing games on social networks to directly interact with their friend.

 

Traditionally, millions of hardcore gamers went to an offline retailer and paid $30-$60 per game title and sometimes $15 in monthly subscriptions for an MMORPG online role-playing game. Now, some social network give free-to-play online gaming and the free games could be supported by various revenue streams such as advertising, microtransactions/ virtual goods, application installs, and subscriptions. So, compared to traditional video games, social games still paled in comparison I term of revenua but had future growth potential.

Social games business model like a two-layer cake with icing, the largest layer of the cake was mikrotransactions/ virtual goods, a smaller layer was subscriptions and the icing on top the cake was advertising. So, the social games is a potential be a media sales virtual goods especially in asia because has positive trend beside advertising application install and subscriptions.