Trials ahead for those working on the social network’s “wild platform” according to senior execs.
LONDON–Facebook gaming is big business. Zynga, which develops Farmville and other top Facebook games, was recently valued higher than Electronic Arts, and other social publishers have been snapped up for large sums of money. At the same time, changes to rules and regulations have caught some publishers out, as have worries around privacy and the illicit sale of user data. Speaking at the London Games Conference today, two senior executives in social and casual games spoke out on the troubles facing those developing social games for Facebook.
Heiko Hubertz is CEO and founder of BigPoint, one of Europe’s largest developers of social games, which was recently partially acquired by NBC Universal. He warned that Facebook games faced a rocky future. The high costs of user acquisition combined with Facebook’s capriciousness with regard to platform rule changes made it a very hard market to enter. He highlighted Facebook“s attempt to take up to 30 percent of firms’ in-game revenues via the Facebook Credits system as a particular threat.
John Earner, European MD of EA subsidiary Playfish, suggested that this outlook was too bleak. While Facebook was a “wild platform,” things were going to get better. The current changes on Facebook and the increased revenue share being demanded by the social network were challenging, he said, but for the best. Comparing the recent changes to a forest fire, he suggested that the changes in policies on Facebook would make the platform a much better place for developers in the future. “In the long term it creates a healthy ecosystem,” he said.
Developers looking to be successful on Facebook needed to be nimble and to make sure they lived “within the spirit of the law” rather than skirting the boundaries of what was acceptable to insulate themselves from the dangers of policy changes.
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