January 21st, 2008 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Analysis & Editorial | No Comments »
Something totally different today as we look at the advantages of
gaming on social networks and how the ideas behind it could influence
mobile gaming.
The idea for this post is inspired by Playfish, where they mention the (sometimes obvious) benefits on developing games for social platforms like Facebook.
The biggest advantage would be the amount of gameplay data that can be collected through the platform as well as immediate feedback on design tweaks. A new feature can directly be monitored and adjusted if necessary.
Within mobile gaming, the possibilities are much more limited. Though the wap gaming platform can also offer this much data and feedback, traditional installed games will have bigger problems and in a lot of cases will never be updated at all. The only thing the developers of mobile games really have access to is the behaviour of for example multiplayer servers.
Playfish is also excited about the easy of updating games on social networking platforms. As gamers play purely online, it is just a matter of updating the scripts that run on the server. In mobile gaming, this mostly applies to wap based mobile games.
Another obvious benefit is the direct interaction with the user/consumer. This is a big problem in the world of mobile games as the operators and sales channels often don’t allow developers and publishers to build up relationships with their audience.
