How Zynga's CityVille Drew 70 Million Players In Less Than a Month 101
An article at Gamasutra takes an in-depth look at how Zynga's new browser-based social game CityVille managed to accumulate tens of millions of players in the relatively short time since its launch early this month. Quoting:
"The Facebook interface induces a high degree of user blindness. It does not do a great job of exposing new games and applications, and lacks a directory or a 'Featured in the App Store' style of editorial (as Apple does for the iPhone), which means that for most developers there are huge problems in getting their games in front of users' eyeballs. With all of the free advertising channels on the platform now constrained or dead, this has meant that the Facebook economy has been acquiring an increasingly Darwinian shape. Where it used to be an egalitarian environment in which any developer could strike it big, over the last year it has become top-heavy with larger developers accruing exponential success, and cutting off oxygen to smaller companies by default."
Not only Zenga. (Score:5, Informative)
I am helping a friend make a "facebook game" and within 1 week in alpha status with ONE post to friends we already have 10,000 players. He is studying Zenga's money making setups and asking how we can replicate them. I suggested lower prices to entice the dollars out of the wallet faster.
Honestly, if you can find some half-assed coders and a http server with mysql and php on it and have a game idea that is somewhat fun you can get a million players easily. I suck at PHP,HTML5, JS and it's working. IF he actually hired some skilled people and some skilled artists, he would be doing far better.
The number of facebook games out there that are crap are amazing and they have players..