Social Platform Games Enter Into the "Frog Kissing Contest" Phase
While there’s currently a lot of excitement based on the massive amounts of investment that poured into the Social Platform Games market in the last half of 2008, it’s fairly clear that the bloom is off the rose in terms of the rocketing growth that initially spurred the industry.
Unfortunately for any young industry, the really high adoption rates that got everybody excited a few months ago can be your worst enemy as a significant chunk of your audience finds you so fast that you can’t sustain the same relative growth rate. There’s still big numbers, but anything over zero is infinitely larger than what you’ll get year over year.
Another issue that’s been faced by every new game category is after the initial wave of success there’s a following surge of new products into the marketplace as other developers and publishers enter the space. That’s doubly true when your development costs are low. The existing audience is quickly fractionated by all the offerings and you don’t get to have the string of huge numbers for every title that you had when you started out. And even if you can get a steady stream of new players, your "mature" gamers become more and more discerning in their tastes.
Social Platform Games are an exciting market, and there are lots of things to love about the possibilities in the next year. But like any hit driven business we can expect to see more and more failures landing between the successes.
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