Top 5 Sites for Casual Games
This may not come as a huge surprise, but according to Interpret’s quarterly survey, New Media Measure, in the first quarter of 2010, Facebook was the number one site for causal games. More than a quarter, or 28 percent, of casual gamers reported they use Facebook to play, representing an 18 percent increase from the previous quarter. All this is good news for Zynga, who entered into a five year deal with Facebook in May. And Zynga must be feeling pretty confident these days: the company just raised $150 million from Softbank and hired a new CFO. Plus Google bought a stake in the company last month for somewhere between $100-$200 million. All of which are driving IPO rumors.
Speaking of Google, it’s no secret that the company is putting social games at the forefront of its planned “GoogleMe” initiative. But can a company essentially engineer a phenomenon that has for the most part grown organically? There’s no doubt that Google is an incredible technology company with almost unlimited resources and engineering talent. But it’s a company that has stumbled when it comes to social. Any initiative that requires a network effect (of people, not machines) has faltered (or perhaps found some middling success). Google Talk. Google Docs. Orkut. Do we even need to talk about Google Buzz? So it still remains to be seen if Google can essentially reverse engineer social phenomena.
