October 2012
Beginner
336 pages
7h 51m
English
Chapter 6
Future Trends and Opportunities for Facebook Games
In This Chapter
- Developing for cross-platform and mobile connectivity—especially via Facebook Connect
- Creating shareable user-generated content
- Seeing the end of updates as a viral channel
- Forecasting unlikely Facebook gaming trends
As a game platform, Facebook changes and evolves so quickly. It’s been difficult to keep up with its evolution, even during the four months it took to write this book. When I began writing it in January 2012, for example, Zynga’s dominance of the market was utterly unquestioned. Then came March, and within a few weeks, a Pictionary-like game called Draw Something (from a small developer called OMGPOP), launched, grew wildly, and was suddenly the most popular Facebook game overall. (Unsurprisingly, Zynga purchased OMGPOP days after this “most popular” milestone was reached.) Played on iOS and Android using Facebook Connect functionality, its success strongly suggested the strength of at least two future trends (discussed in the section “Cross-Platform and Mobile Connectivity”).
