CrowdStar’s CEO Peter Relan has confirmed that the social games maker is no longer developing for Facebook. The company is shifting all of its development resources onto smartphones.
“We are maintaining the old games, like Happy Aquarium, but we don’t build new Facebook PC games any more — we are 100 percent focused on mobile,” Relan said.
While 90 percent of the company’s revenues came from Facebook last year, he predicts that 90 percent will come from mobile in 2012. Zynga continues to dominate Facebook as a gaming platform, leaving smaller developers struggling to make money.
It used to be that social gaming companies could post to players’ walls to virally get the message out about their games, but with those channels closed, it’s harder to keep up with companies like Zynga, Electronic Arts, Wooga and King. CrowdStar now attracts 8 million monthly users, down from 29 million just last year.
Crowdstar’s Girl franchise, including Top Girl, Social Girl and Modern Girl, has collectively hit 20 million downloads across both iPhone and Android, with Modern Girl alone surpassing 2 million downloads within three weeks of its launch. The company has found an audience in females aged 13 to 30 less interested in sitting in front of a PC or a console to play games. “They are very mobile and communications-oriented,” he said.
While Relan says his audience has gravitated to mobile, he’d still be reluctant to develop for Facebook because he thinks the audience has plateaued or started to decrease. “If I was going after an older audience, I might focus on tablets,” he said.
Source: All Things D
