Growth of Social Media = Growth of Video Games

Facebook has made it possible for a
new generation of gamer.

We have all been on Facebook getting our fix for the day (or the hour) and seen that one our friends need our help on their farm in Farmville. Chances are after we see this news pop up on our news feed we will bring up the game and help our friend out. The new trend in video games is not only on Facebook, but also smartphones and other mobile devices.

More people are playing more games on more platforms than ever before. This may seem like a good thing, but sales of the Nintendo Wii declined from $21.4 billion in 2008 to $18.7 billion in 2010. Another scary trend that is emerging in the video game industry is new and strictly social-game based publishers quickly becoming worth more than well established video game publishers. For example Zynga the company behind many of the games on Facebook is worth an estimated $9.3 billion which is more than the value of Electronic Arts (EA) publisher of Madden NFL and The Sims.

This image shows the expected growth
of video games in the next 3 years.

According to Meggan Scavio event director of Game Developers Conference (GDC); 

"What smartphones and social games is showing us is that you don't need a year or two-year development cycle anymore to make a profitable game, but those consoles are not going to go away."

According to the THE NDP Group, a market researcher, as many as two thirds of Americans play games and as many as a half of American households have a video game counsel. Meanwhile one out of five Americans age 6 and up have played games on social networks such as Facebook. To me this fact from The NDP shows that people are still playing games on traditional counsels, such as the Wii or the Play Station 3, but there is a shift in mobile gaming because almost everyone has access to mobile games.

Steve Jobs with the newest and
greatest iPhone4.

 The shift to mobile gaming can be accredited to Apple's introduction of the iPhone in 2007. In the same year Zynga launched Texas Hold'em Poker on Facebook. Since 2007 Apple has sold over 73 million iPhones and sold over 10 billion apps, as many as half of those being games. Facebook and smartphone games have done what the industry had not been able to do for seven or eight years before that, and that is to bring millions of new people into the gaming world.  Dave Roberts CEO of PopCap Games gives the example; If one were to ask a 50 year-old women 10 years ago if she played video games she would have looked at you like you were from another planet. Now she is likely to play Farmville or Bejewled on her iPhone.

The video above shows an iPod Touch, but it is powered by the same app store as the iPhone and shows a few different games you can play on an iPod or iPhone.  

This video shows all of the new and interesting changes Apple made on the iPhone4. This video does not have much to do with games on the iPhone but I found it very interesting. Watch if you have some time to spare.

Stay tuned for next week when I look at what producers of the major counsels are doing to combat this move to mobile gaming.