Addicted to sowing seeds, begging for gifts, harvesting and moving up levels on Farmville? At least I’m pretty much done with Farmville updates in my feed. Annoying it may be to people like me but for a good chunk of Facebook-ers it’s highly addictive. Some of my friends’ girlfriends have complained about lack of attention bestowed upon them by their Farmville-loving boyfriends ever since the social gaming scenario exploded on the Internet. So how do these social games actually make money? Well let’s find out.
The 3 new major players in the social gaming world are Zynga, Playfish and Playdom. Zynga’s most popular application on Facebook has 61 million monthly users. It is no doubt Farmville. Playfish’s Pet Society has almost 21 million users while Playdom boasts of more than 16 million users on both MySpace and Facebook. So many users, so much potential. Zynga plans to go public soon while there are rumors floating around that Playdom might have been acquired by EA for a whopping $400 million. These companies are believed to be generating as much as $300 million annually on the sales of virtual goods.
Continue Reading This Article
