Facebook has undergone a number of changes this year, but the one that’s had the most serious effect on the gaming side of Facebook was the implementation of restrictions on notifications. Those notifications served as a major way of drawing people back into whatever game sent it; a user would go online to see if they had any messages and end up playing a game because of a notification that said their friend had fertilized their crops in FarmVille or gotten a better high score in Bejeweled Blitz. With those notifications banished from Facebook, quite a few games have seen significant drops in usage — 18 of the top 25 games (based upon monthly active users) lost users last month compared to the month prior, with 12 of those games losing at least 1 million users.
According to a list compiled by Inside Social Games (via Gamasutra), MindJolt Games led the way with a loss of more than 7.9 million users, while Facebook’s top game, FarmVille, lost over 4.4 million users, bringing its monthly total down to just under 83 million users. That’s still twice as many users as the next most popular app on the list, Birthday Cards, but losing millions of users isn’t going to be good for Zynga’s bottom line. While this isn’t the major reason behind it, Zynga is reportedly considering ditching Facebook to create its own social gaming network.
Clearly, Facebook game developers are going to need to find different ways to bring users back beyond an optional email notification. As Gamasutra notes, former EA founder and current CEO of Digital Chocolate wrote about this very subject on his blog last month, saying, “The formula last year was viral growth through aggressive spam but that no longer works. This creates a fundamental need for richer games that are more entertaining and meaningful, that will sincerely motivate players to recruit their friends because they really want to play with them.”
“The spammy viral spread was also a free marketing department,” he continued. “With no more free ride, growth can only come from an efficient combination of legitimate virality and efficient marketing to help spread the good word. Again, as we look forward, many game companies on Facebook lack the financial resources to do enough advertising and lack the scale to cross-promote well. And even more of them have games that dont monetize enough to justify the advertising in the first place. Maybe it didnt matter last year when growth was free, but now it does.”
There are still millions of users playing Facebook games, and Facebook itself is still incredibly popular, so it’s not as if the market is no longer there. Developers will simply need to find ways to incentivize frequent and regular play sessions.
