Facebook: games lead the way on new platforms

October 27th, 2011, 00:40 Posted By: wraggster

Facebook has admitted that the company was caught off guard by its rapid rise as a gaming platform.
Speaking to us at yesterday’s f8 Facebook developer conference in London, Facebook director of platform marketing Ethan Beardsaid: “I think it’s surprised us how quickly games took off on the platform. We built something very general-purpose – we didn’t set out to build a games platform or otherwise, we just built a platform for social applications.
“I think in retrospect, it should have been obvious: games tend to lead the way on new platforms. Whether it’s PCs or phones, the games tend to be there out the front. The other one’s probably porn, but we don’t let porn on the platform!”
Speaking candidly to us about Facebook’s struggle to balance viral game marketing and social news, Beard explained that as games took hold of the wide-reaching network, a natural imbalance between the frequency of game- and real-life-related updates arose.
“Stories of the crops you’ve harvested [in FarmVille] had to compete with your sister getting married,” he explained. “I mean, your sister gets married once or twice in her life. Maybe three times [laughs]. Whereas you harvest crops all the time, every day throughout the day – those things are just miles apart in terms of how you actually surface the relevant information.
“And so we ended up in a world where people weren’t seeing their sister getting married because it was obscured by all this game stuff.”
Facebook has settled on what it sees as the right balance between the two disparate worlds, consigning game updates to the new Ticker feed and keeping users’ main feed clear for less frequent, more meaningful news. But why has it taken so long to get to this point?
“We took some relatively drastic moves to try to be like, ‘Okay, let’s at least carve these things apart,’” Beard responds, making reference to Facebook’s initial decision to entirely remove developers’ ability to post to users’ walls. “It was definitely challenging for the ecosystem for a significant period of time, but then it helped us to understand how to build a platform that has the right technology underlying it and an API that actually works well for both sorts of information.”
These game-focused changes have resulted in collateral benefits for other sectors, too, as Facebook partner engineer Simon Crossexplains.
“There are definitely some features that we built specifically for games which are available to all developers of the platform now. The Fluid Width Canvas, which allows for wider game screens, is now being used by news apps like the Washington Post Social Reader designed for Fluid Width. Same thing with Open Graph - the way we’re solving the distribution problem for games in the news feed now works for everyone, and it’s now what powers Spotify.
“We primarily built these things for games, but everyone benefits from games forging ahead.”
While the social gaming phenomenon was unlikely to have been foreseen at the time of Facebook’s inception, its unsettling of the social network’s natural order has been a wake up call to a company that now appears to better understand not only the importance of games to its users, but also to its own evolution.
Considering the 30 per cent fee that Facebook receives from every Facebook Credits transaction, together with Zynga’s upcoming IPO - expected to value the company at $20 billion – and it’s plain to see just how crucial games have now become to Facebook’s overall revenue.

http://www.next-gen.biz/news/faceboo...-new-platforms

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