Gareth Davis, head of gaming at Facebook, indicates that Facebook increasingly features more games for hardcore gamers. In fact, he indicates that there is now a niche for every Facebook gamer.
“We have so many users now on Facebook that we can have really big niches. 100 million user niches. We see the emergence now of companies on Facebook who are building what they’d call a core game. Games targeted at people who played PC games back in the day, strategy games,” said Davis. “They’re at the quality level now of those PC games. We think that area has really emerged in the last 18 months.”
“I think we’ve really seen the game developers understand that it’s not one-size-fits-all, it’s about different kinds of game for different audiences,” he added. “So we’re seeing this broadening now of the kinds of games and audiences and you can be very successful, creating different types of games and you can make a lot of money doing it. We’re seeing a real maturing of the eco-system as people figure out the right opportunities and go after them.”
Developers like Kabam and A Bit Lucky are currently serving the hardcore crowd on Facebook, leading to new markets being served. “I think as we’ve been tuning this the games industry on Facebook has been very successful,” said Davis. “It’s continued to be able to gain mass markets of users, tens of millions of users. They’ve worked out how to engage their users – the engagements levels have been way up over the last couple of years. And monetization. They’ve really figured out how to provide the right things to the right people so that they’re willing to pay for it.”
Despite this, Facebook is not looking to make games of its own. “We’re not going to build games because games are really hard to build and our expertise is in building the platform,” noted Davis. “So we are 100 per cent focused on building the best possible platform to enable developers to build social experiences everywhere, particularly mobile, today.”
Source: GI.biz
