Facebook Games Will Die - Cows Will Go Unmilked

"nevertheless, Facebook still decrees it has yet to "find it's Mario," in essence saying that it has yet to find its defining social game [...]"

I totally understand why Facebook makes this claim from a business perspective; they need to keep interest piqued, so they dangle the ubiquitous promise of "the best is yet to come" in front of customers and investors. However, I think Facebook really HAS found their Mario -- for better or for worse.

There is a strong dividing line, but one that often goes blurred or overlooked, between social gaming and casual gaming. Companies like Popcap are the juggernauts of casual, which are defined as small (and typically free or cheap) games that you can play in a browser or on a mobile device for a few minutes at a time. For the most part, these games have no strong multiplayer component, and that defines their separation from the Facebook-style social genre. Casual gaming is something that is unquestionably still on the rise, and this isn't going to change until its market's driving platform, mobile devices, ceases to be steadily increasing. Social gaming is a totally different story, and as this article suggests, it has plateaued.

That's because, just as the casual genre was and still is driven by handhelds, the social game genre is driven by social networking services. So, the inevitable stagnation of social networking sites means that the games driven forward by the networks' explosions will never reach their previous peak.

So it's somewhat dubious for Facebook to claim that they still haven't launched a game that defines the social genre, because I think that's *exactly* what Farmville is. The game has a larger and more dedicated player base than any other in the history of social games (over 10% of all Facebook users), it has the highest microtransactio n-driven revenue of any social game, and it has incredible name recognition even amongst non-players (albeit typically with a negative connotation). What is the game, then, if not an icon that defines the genre? Mario wasn't necessarily the best team ever released for the NES. It was just the most high profile title.

Even when Civ rolls out for Facebook down the road, it's going to be an entirely different beast. It won't be the "hip new social gaming phenomena" that came out of nowhere and took the Facebook user base by storm. It will be a web-based port of an already established and famous franchise. Will it succeed? Maybe -- I'll certainly give it a try. But with the diversity of the Facebook audience in mind, I think it would be a Herculean achievement to approach the 10%+ market penetration high water mark.