Social Gaming

Hi reader(s). It's been a while.

So last summer I was job-hunted by a few social gaming companies, and that forced me to actually try to understand what that was about.
I used to be a social gamer, too. Not the kind that are being fed upon these days though, my expenses were more like server hosting, hardware and travel.

Now, what is the new social gaming revolution? It comes from 3 precedent revolutions combined :
- MMORPGs (Wow...)
- SNS (Facebook..)
- Mobile devices

And they combine the addiction powers of all 3.
- progression of the player. time sink. fantasy universe.
- group inclusion
- play anytime, anywhere

The combination is very powerful, and explains why the market is booming all over the world, even with games which are not fun to being with. The typical hooks are :
- beautiful ads (in other games, sites...)
- friends advertising on SNS

Once you try it, you are usually walked through a forced tutorial in which :
- you are more or less forced to spend whichever credits you started with
- you are strongly encourage to advertise and propagate the game
- you get slightly better levels and inventory quite easily.

Then, in a usually linear and boring progression, you get more inventory and XP, while being starved of credits. The point is to make you *desire* the credits so much that you are willing to put in real money. Sometimes, you even need a special kind of credits (which cannot be harvested in-game) for instance to remove in-game ads.

Think you are immune? Most of the customers thought that too... And then they wanted the next piece of armor, for which they could farm for 2h (with a lot of boring actions to do) or just spend 1$. Once the first dollar is spent, quitting the game is acknowledging that is was a waste of time AND money.

In most countries, gambling is prohibited or at least severely restricted, because it is known that people can be manipulated through psychology tricks to spend all their money (and their friend's too); but social gaming has not be deemed a threat yet. It is. Mostly because it targets people who are not prepared to face those strong addictions ; in other words : non-gamers.

In Tokyo, there are 2 industries that pay quite more than the average for IT workers : banks and social gaming. Birds of a feather....