Idle Games says you can't have a social game without real-time play

Simultaneously, they acknowledge that a "purely synchronous game" is a hard sell on social networks

Most social games only let players interact in an asynchronous way, meaning that players are never directly interacting in real-time. Jeffrey Hyman, the CCO of Idle Games, contends that true social games need a real-time option.

"Fundamentally I don't believe you can have a social game without at least offering up the ability to play in real-time with others," said Hyman. "At the same time, you're kidding yourself if you think a purely synchronous game will succeed on the social networks. One of our mantras about Idle Worship is that users should 'come for the asynchronous, but stay for the synchronous'. That nicely summarizes our mindset and approach in trying to marry these two different styles of play."

"While the synchronous feature is obvious to users, there is another technical innovation that's just as cool but less obvious … namely that Idle Worship features an 'unsharded' universe," he detailed. "While that term sounds as geeky as it actually is, what it means is that no matter what server a player is on, they are free to roam about the universe and play with anyone (regardless of what server they are on). The one (and maybe only) nice thing about having to build everything from scratch is that we weren't burdened with legacy code and were able to craft a gaming platform tailor made for the social networks."

Zynga: Social games are still not truly social

*Look at what Zynga is saying .....

The company's CCO believes there's plenty ahead for Zynga to tackle

Social games have taken the industry by storm in the past few years, and Zynga's been in the driver's seat. Interestingly, the term "social game" may be a misnomer of sorts, as Zynga's chief creative officer of external studios, Bob Bates, believes that today's social titles aren't so social.
In a new interview with GamesIndustry International, the veteran designer commented, "We're still in the infancy of understanding what's possible and what it really means for a game to be social. Right now we're viral, but true social, where you feel like you're actually playing with your friends, not 'I'm playing here, he's playing there' is still ahead."

He continued, "The sense of actually playing together, that's a real challenge, and I'd like to be in a position where I can attack that challenge. I don't feel like I know enough yet to pull that off; I'm still learning the space. Finding ways to do those kinds of things would be very, very cool."
It's true that the majority of social titles are largely asynchronous experiences, where players take turns making moves in games like Words With Friends or Draw Something, but synchronous or online multiplayer gameplay certainly isn't out of the realm of possibility for the social space. There are companies out there right now, like Idle Games, who are pushing for real-time gameplay in the social space.

"Fundamentally I don't believe you can have a social game without at least offering up the ability to play in real-time with others," Jeffrey Hyman, CCO of Idle Games said recently.
The challenge will be balancing synchronous and asynchronous so that a game can still be successful on social networks or smartphones. Often, asynchronous just works better for players.

Competiting for Entertainment Time

The battle is on now - a whole host of new platforms and technologies; from consoles, smartphones and tablets, to social games and browser titles, to cloud gaming are competing for entertainment time and dollars. The biggest change is that games have become much more social and mainstream.

The social factor in games has become much larger, and also what it would call the interstitial factor, which is that rather than people doing what you might call session-based gaming, where I'm going to go sit in my room and play Halo for an hour, I have the opportunity to pull out Angry Birds and play for two minutes while waiting in line at Starbucks. People now use games to fill the empty slots in their life, a bit more ubiquitously.

Over the last five years it really is about the diversification, not just of platform, but of the players, the demographics. Games really used to be something that were targeted to 16-year-old boys and guys. Now we have people of all generations, genders, walks of life, playing games, a lot of them on their cell phones, or on Facebook and now the iPads. The explosion in platforms has also driven a very healthy diversification of our players audience and brings about new audiences.

Gaming used to be something that maybe you spend a couple of hours in front of your Xbox or the PC. Now gaming is something that you can pull out of your pocket and play for two minutes here or there, or check into your Facebook thing, do something on FarmVille, whatever.

Zynga Buys Maker of “Words with Friends” for $200 Million

Zynga, maker of popular Facebook games such as FarmVille and Mafia Wars, has added another sought-after game to its name --"Draw Something"-- in its acquisition of startup OMGPOP Wednesday for $ 180 million. OMGPOP has been shopping itself around over the last few weeks.

Draw Something was launched just six weeks ago, but it's already taken the Apple App Store and Google Play by storm with over 35 million downloads. Draw Something is an addictive, interactive mobile game, similar to Pictionary. In Draw Something, one user doodles while other users guess at what's being drawn.

OMGPOP started out as iminlikewithyou, a social network where users met and played games, and grew into its own site, OMGPOP.com, in 2009. Draw Something is by far OMGPOP's biggest game, and is available on iOS, Android, and Facebook. OMGPOP company history is another story itself.

*NOTE* As predicted Zynga will start acquisition to continue its growth and to move into the various new sectors and areas of games. Guess mid-sore and hard-core acquisition will soon come.

Facebook Untapped Opportunities for Games.

Zynga may look like the all-powerful, dominant game publisher on Facebook. But it’s not too late to get in on the action there’s room for more game companies on the social network. There are rough...ly 220 million monthly active users playing games on Facebook, out of its total of 800 million monthly active users. About 50 percent of the gamers return daily to the site. Zynga dominates the field with 266 million monthly active users. But there are 375 games with more than 100,000 monthly active users.

“It’s not a market where 10 apps get all of the users”
It makes sense that more types of games will succeed on Facebook in addition to Zynga’s city-building and farm-building games. Example cable TV now profitably supports more than 650 different TV channels.

The huge emphasis on Zynga’s games has obscured the fact that there are only two “hidden object” games on Facebook - Mystery Manor and Disney’s Gardens of Time. The market could support more than 50 or 100 games in this genre.

Others emerging category is casino games, hunting games. There are other “mid-core” games emerging with lightweight combat options that appeal to both hardcore and casual fans. These include Zynga’s Empires & Allies, Kixeye’s Battle Pirates, and Digital Chocolate’s Army Attack. Kabam has also pioneered the hardcore game category with strategy titles like Glory of Rome or Dragons of Atlantis.

There are few or no fishing games, Christian games, urban games, role-playing games, fighting games, romance games and there are only two first-person shooting games. The romance category itself is a $1.5 billion entertainment market.

9 Billion Virtual Goods Market

The market potential is here today ...
9 Billion virtual goods sold last year and a booming 1 Trillion global entertainment market space to tap.

Games as a Service

One of the main success factor of social games today is providing *Excellent 5 Star Service to the players. This is the era of *Games as a Service where successful social games companies are actually providing a service to their players instead of just the game.

This service includes constantly updating the game on weekly basis to ensure there’s sufficient contents for the players, fast response to customers service, managing the community effectively, promotions, offers, sales and even matching players to players ensuring a lively gaming experience. Understanding the players needs and fulfilling them are all part of *Games as a Service SOP.