At an event at its Palo Alto, California Headquarters, on Thursday, where it hosted 100 game developers, Facebook, announced some new features to improve the gaming experience on its website, as well as a new policy loosening restrictions on how developers can market their games on the social network.
“The best way to find new games is through friends, and now you’ll have more opportunities to see what they’re playing. Friends will be able to start playing games immediately by clicking on the name of the game,” said Jared Morgenstern, Facebook’s product manager for games and credits in a Facebook blog. Those who play games on the social network will now have a separate stream that displays their friends’ game activity, as well as their scores and achievements in a ticker.
Gulf News is of the opinion that in relaxing restrictions on game updates, within Facebook’s general newsfeed, the company must walk a fine line between helping developers promote their games and irking users who are not avid gamers.
The Facebook’s newsfeed is a vital distribution channel for gamemakers, allowing companies like Zynga, Electronic Arts Inc. and others to reach vast numbers of users. But it vexed the network’s non-gaming users who found the constant notifications about their friends progress within various games to be irrelevant and annoying.
Last year, Facebook clamped down on the practice, so that Facebook users would receive notifications only about games which they had also installed. Under the new policy, Facebook users will see notifications about any game their friends are playing. But, Facebook head of games, Sean Ryan said the company had developed special algorithms that will only display updates if Facebook has a reason to believe that they are relevant to the person. If a person displays no interest in certain type of games, we will not serve them updates in the newsfeed.”
“No one wants to go back to the bad old days of people being very unhappy about gaming because they feel like they’re being spammed all the time,” said Ryan. He said that Facebook worked for months working out a balance between exposing more games to people, but only to people who they think want to play those games.
Under the changed features game players will be able to control who sees the games they are playing as well as which games are visible to those friends. They will also be able to add games to their homepage bookmarks section.
For a more immersive experience, Facebook is also introducing a bigger game screen. Games such as CityVille, Zoo World, Monster World and Mystery Manor are expected to get full-screen adaptability in the next few days.
Social games, such as Zynga’s Farmville, are some of the most popular activities on Facebook. More than 200 million users play games on Facebook every month, and the company takes a 30 percent cut of the sale of virtual goods that are bought by users as part of the game experience.
Since, gaming is Facebook’s core strength, it is only apt that Facebook undertake regular design adjustments to keep users hooked. According to Facebook, its top 80 games have at least one million monthly active users.
Ryan told Reuters in an interview, “Our games ecosystem has continued to grow. But there is no question that we want to grow it faster in a more high quality way for our users and developers.
It may be noted here that Facebook’s gaming revamp comes as Google unveiled a gaming element for its social network Google+. Google said it would offer 16 games from third party developers, including Zynga Poker and the popular Angry Birds game. The search engine giant which previously made an unspecified investment in Zynga said the games will be rolled out on its social network gradually and will soon be available to all. However, it is tiny collection when compared to Facebook’s treasure trove of games
Gulf News opines, “With the two Web giants competing to attract users to their respective online services, the dueling social gaming announcements underscored what could emerge as a key battleground between the two companies.”
Jeremey Liew, a partner at venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners commented, “It turns out that people like to play games, and it’s core to the social networking use case.” But he said the most important consideration for game makers is which social network has the most users. “Right now no one is going to be willing to give up Facebook because it’s where the users are today. Google+ got a terrific start but it’s got a ways to go.”