Social gaming – the missing link
Based on Interpret’s Q4 2009 New Media Measure™ survey, approximately 46 million people are playing social network games such as “Farmville” and “Mafia Wars” on sites such as Facebook. A smaller but still significant group of over 11 million only play these games and don’t play games on platforms such as the Wii or PS3. According to Brenton Lyle, Senior Strategist at Interpret, “social game players are not only sophisticated users of social networks, but they are very amenable to advertising as well.” According to the data, users who play games only on social networking sites are twice as likely to visit company profile pages and click on advertisements or sponsors versus the average social network user.
The above comes from a press release from my company, Interpret. Other than selfishly showing off, I couldn’t let this news go without comment. For the last three years, we have been tracking on a quarterly basis a wide variety of media (traditional, digital, video gaming, etc.) behaviors among 12-65 year olds in the US. For most of those quarters, we didn’t see much change in the size of the gaming audience. The incidence hovered around 47% fairly consistently, until late 2008 when we saw a huge spike in gaming – 28% increase, to be exact. It set off major alarm bells in our office as our first concern was that there must be something wrong with the data. After several late nights, much analysis, and the harried nerves of our analysts, we determined the data was correct. Over the following quarters, video gaming in the US held at those higher numbers. The Wii had been in the market since December 2007, so we attributed some of that growth to it. But, another interesting trend was emerging that was slowly proving to be a major factor in expanding the gaming audience – social networking. From Q3 of 2008 to Q3 of 2009, the video gaming audience increased 28%; over the same time period, social networking grew by 56%.
Facebook has now become as important to gaming as other casual gaming sites. Between 3rd and 4th quarter of 2009, Facebook surpassed Yahoo! as the number one casual gaming website among casual gamers.
