A View From the Road: FarmVille Isn't Going Away Pages 1 2 3 4 5 6 NEXT | |
Oh geeze. I thought this was talking about FarmVille in the book/movie "The Road". Confused the hell out of me.. | |
Google was dethroned?! When did this happen?! OT: They're here to stay. But what shocks me is how the iPhone was developed into a great gaming platform. Social tools like phones, Facebook, Twitter, and gaming CAN mix. | |
Damn it I'm too tempted to say it."This isn't news. God, I hate Facebook. FarmVille sucks, it isn't even a game. Why are you writing about this?" That just had to be said, any ways what made zaguna popular over other facebook apps seems to be effective marketing and luck. The only thing you can learn from them is that the more people you bring in to play, the better you do, thats what makes it spread like wild fire. | |
So social games are here to stay. Um yes, I agree. Is the point of this article just to hear yourself talk? | |
Are you not familiar with the idea of an editorial arguing a point...? | |
Man, Twitter sucks so hard, I can't imagine a single good use for it, and don't understand why someone would want to spend any time on it at all. It's just so... useless. *wry smile* -m | |
Fine. I'll accept that its here to stay. But I won't like it, nothing on Earth will make me like it. My retort: "Like how you could be doing something while you plant fake crops?" | |
Facebook, like myspace before it, is a fad and will die out just like all other fads. Eventually the current crop of users will grow up a bit and realize nobody cares they took a poo at 9:13 am, and it contained corn. Saying Farmville is the wave of the future is like someone in 1985 saying breakdancing was the future. Yes it looks that way NOW but give it a couple of years. | |
Wow did you make this post just to hear yourself talk? OT: Finally someone who looks at this from a rational point of view. MM was a pain in the ass, not because Zynga was in it, but rather because people would complain endlessly over it. It got to be rather irritating to be honest. Thank you for a well written argument and an enjoyable read | |
You forgot to crow 'LALALALALAL, I CAN"T HEAR YOU.' And yes, the reason Farmville is succesful is the same reason people are still sending chain letters/e-mails. If one person gets ten people to play, who get nine people to play, who get nine people to play(not ten because the previous guy is always one of them), then soon enough you've got hundreds of thousands of people playing and trying to get the couple thousand people who resisted to join in. | |
I really have nothing to do with the social gaming side of the interwebs. And I like that. Leave them be, and we can carry on. Nice subtle article about how we should shut up about March Mayhem already, by the way. | |
Joking aside, I really don't get the artificial 140 characters limit per post in twitter. It's really like "you have to be shallow about it" as someone remarked on the IRC the first time I noted this. | |
I actually have the opposite problem. I'm good about Facebook, but I can never remember to log into Twitter. I know there are apps that will allow you to update both, I just need to set aside time to set them up. | |
140 characters is the upper limit of a single text message sent from a dumb-phone. Since the service came into being just before wifi and 3g enabled smart-phones really became ubiquitous, the service was built around the ability to use it entirely on the go, from your phone, requiring the 140 character limit. They've just kept with it. In most cases, anything you want to say can be said in 140 characters (and you can always use a second tweet). Sometimes you just have to get creative with how you word what you want to say. The service has constraints, those constraints don't nnecessitate shallowness. -m | |
Huh. Very well said. Especially the last bits with the LA LA LA, it just makes people look ignorant. | |
Oh my God. Why are you here? If you just created an account to make comments like that, you should probably un-create it, quick. | |
Look I have said this before and I will say it again there are no massive barriers to gaming. There are plenty of easy introductory games out there like Crash that are perfect to help new gamers along. The problem is not high entry the problem is people being lazy that is why things like Farmville work. There is little to no effort required on the users part. It is like learning an instrument if you want to get into you will stick at it. If you are going to be one of those twats who is in it to be cool you will lose interest and drop it. That is the problem with this apparent gaming barrier people are lazy nowdays simple as that. | |
"Yes, we know that Zynga has done some shady things, but this isn't about its ethical practices (or lack thereof) - they don't even enter into the picture here." Yes but wouldn't it be great if someone would have done what they did for gaming without being shady and openly exploitive of their audience. I'm all for Facebook and social gaming, my issue is solely with Zynga. | |
Or like someone in the 50's saying that Rock and Roll was a fad. My point being: We don't know. Dismissing it outright makes you sound like an old man telling those damn kids to get offa mah lawn. I don't like facebook anymore than you, but I would be an idiot to pretend it isn't something huge right now, or that it reaches a huge untapped demographic. | |
oh, hey Shamus, you got a new hair cut or something? Joking aside, I understand your point, but it doesn't change the fact that I despise farmville and the like with a burning passion. After trying it for five minutes, it wasn't hard to realize that solitaire and minesweeper were better designed games, because they... you know... require some sort of thought | |
you're completely neglecting buy-in costs. There is a financial barrier to gaming that is very much present, and which disuades people from entering the gaming spehere, particularly those who only have a passing interest in gaming very casually. In order to play videogames, you need to buy both a system that can play any given game (PC, or console, take your pick). You also need to buy accessories, the game itself and so on. If your'e a person who has only a very base-level interest in games, or who is a little curious, but unfamiliar with the market, you're not going to make that outlay of cash. Farmville is a free game with a built-in distribution model. You don't have to buy anything, there's no extra tech needed, and if you're on facebook, you already own a system that can play FV. If you have FB, you have access to FV. However low you might consider the barrier to gaming to be (and I would argue that it's much higher than I've described here, on account of several additional factors) you must see that literally -no- barrier is going to outperform "some" barrier. -m | |
Uh, wrong. While you're absolutely right that if someone tries hard enough, long enough, they'll eventually learn just about anything you put in front of them, there isn't enough immediate reward for many folks to bother putting the time and effort into gaming. If you're trying to balance a job, your family, and other real life activities, the promise that you maybe will eventually have fun in a month just isn't good enough to put up with the difficulty -- especially with just a few clicks you can be having fun now. The financial barriers are also very, very real. Most families already have a computer, because it's useful for so very much. Spending $400 on a gaming console is no small decision, not when there's the mortgage and whatnot to consider. It's not that people are lazy, they simply don't share your priorities. | |
Yes I am well aware of neglecting the financial barriers. I was simply going with as stated the apparent barrier of effort required to actually play the games which was seemed to be highlighted. This is untrue as gaming is not that hard to actually get into effort wise. Also if you can play Farmville you can play loads of old PC games so that really negates the cost of platform. | |
I don't mind those games, because... well... I don't play them ;) But I have a great issue with Facebook. And that is the fact that it seems to become more and more "needed" to enjoy "life". Ok, that might sound weird. But more and more contests and stuff are directed through facebook, even the Escapist has the ask Rebbeca Mayes Muses question thing, which you can only take part in if you are on facebook. I jsut dislike how ONE internet site is controlling so much of things these days. And its not like I have a choice in "facebook provider" its either facebook or not facebook. I myself is not on facebook.. yet... but I feel its harder and harder not to be. How can we let one "program" rule so much of our life. PS: Sure e-mail and phones are very much needed in this day and age, but I have a choice in service provider. And I have never seen a contest been held exclusively through MSN. | |
Yes while I am well aware I am ignoring financial barriers I was commenting on the fact that this apparent barrier of effort is stopping people from gaming. Which it isn't. If the financial barrier was given more detail fair enough but it is not. I thought that this barrier of effort was much more stressed in the article which is completely untrue. As gaming is not that hard to get into if you start with something small like Mario or Crash Bandicoot. Even CoD can be breezed through on easy. While there is a financial barrier there are many games that can played if you have a PC capable of playing Farmville they just won't be as mainstream as Cod more brower based games some of which are very good. | |
*Shrugs* I'm one of those that thinks Zynga gets too much attention, and I think those numbers are very deceptive. Right now Zynga has the advantage of being the first ones on scene using this method to sell advertising. I believe (personally) that this is where most of their revenue comes from, I do not think they are making all that much money off of the "cash shops" of games like Farmville or whatever despite what they might present. Still getting millions upon millions of "hits" is an impressive thing to someone who wants to sell advertising space. The problem though is that as more people get involved in this, that audience is going to be increasingly divided, the hits in each area are going to go down, and it's not going to be all that profitable or special in the long run. Back during the 1990s you had all those mall survey guys, which started out being fairly popular. You'd have some dude approach you, and offer you free samples of so and so product in exchange for doing a survey. It was cool for a while but then it got to the point where you had these dudes staking out pretty much every high traffic mall, and even multiple groups operating in the biggest ones. Leading to the whole "want to take a survey" joke from Animaniacs because it became hateful and annoying. The current situation seems a lot like that where Zynga seems cool because they are the first ones doing it. They will consult and sell "Expertise" until the market is saturated Besides, we've more or less been here before. Back before the internet became what it is now, we had these things called "Bulletin Board Systems" or BBSes. People used to run them out of their houses, and there were these things called "Echos" which were the social networking sites of their day where BBS systems would share message boards by periodically uploading and downloading information to people running "hub" systems. This is on a larger scale, but fundementally the same thing, and will doubtlessly end the same way. I find it somewhat ironic because it seems that while time goes on, the same basic events re-occur. Right now we have this Zynga thing, and at the same time we've got people trying to bring back Interactive movies of the sort that were tried around the advent of CD RoM tech for PCs. I could be wrong, but in a few years I'll imagine some fortunes will be squandered by people trying to emulate Zyga. You'll have dozens if not hundreds of "social network games" for casual people, many of which will become ghost towns, constantly fighting to get someone to buy advertising space. Ironically I also suspect that there will be a couple of fairly successful games but they will succeed by using the online social platforms, while not being all that "casual". I look at things like say "Trade Wars" and other similar games for the BBS systems which seemed to be the most enduring of the crop once the mad rush died out, and people finally realized they weren't going to make money by programming ANSI graphics. :P | |
Facebook will die out. Social networking and social platforming will not. | |
I'm sure just like all other popular casual games, Farmville is here to stay. It's not particularly news at all. It's more common sense. When a game gets as popular as Farmville even if Facebook dies out, it will live on somewhere else. That's why there's so many versions of "Bejeweled" and "Tetris" and all of those other casual games that we all just hate to love. | |
I find Farmville funny because a lot of people are like, "ZOMG Harvest Moon was awesome!" and then turn around and say "ROFL noob stop playing Farmville its not a game!!!!11!one." They're (almost) the samee game, and I can't see why people are raising a ruckus about it. I don't like, or even play, Farmville but I don't play Harvest Moon either because it's not the kind of game I like. | |
And a person who isn't already into gaming wouldn't know that. -m | |
No, Facebook will turn into zombie website that hides in the tubes and infects other packets as they go by, slowly turning the entire internet into a mass of websites sending you requests to join your friends. ...Anyways, I wonder what will kill Facebook, another site or an internal collapse. I'm going to say the later, but I am curious as to what would replace it. | |
Bingo. Look, I know it's easy to think that gaming is as easy to get into as riding a bike, but it's not. We can't even make that sort of judgment because we've been playing games for years - almost as much time as we spend in school. It's literally second nature to us. It's not second nature to millions and billions of other people. | |
Facebook MAY die out, who's to say what will and will not last. My only REAL beef with Facebook gaming is that, at the moment, it's largely shovelware (Zynga included) designed to scam players with endless spam and freemium incentives so that they'll eventually pay for something they've been enjoying for free. | |
Already people are being robbed because they posted pics of their new TV and also listed when they would be out of town. Already people have been arrested or lost jobs because of pics on facebook/myspace. Right now it is only the curmudgeons and paranoids (I'm a little column A, little column B) who avoid "social" internets, eventually the mainstream will realize any information available can and will be used against them. | |
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A View From the Road: FarmVille Isn't Going Away
You may not like FarmVille, Facebook, or Twitter, but guess what? They're here to stay.
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