Article: “After the harvest; the need for commercial and social innovation in social gaming”

I recently penned the above-titled article which resides on the Soshi Games web site at http://wp.me/pOdJu-2b

An excerpt is below.

Do we seriously think that as an industry we can keep feeding people ever so slightly different tile-based farming/animal husbandry games? I find it amazing that there has not been a tidal wave of lawsuits claiming copyright infringement already but perhaps that is because most of the established studios all seem to be acting in the same way. The relentless churning out of shameless copycat applications isn’t a triumph of creative innovation but, rather, an exercise in fighting to suckle on the teats of rapidly draining (cash) cow. The triumph of social gaming has been to reject the perceived wisdom and technical arms race of the traditional games industry and in doing so to create easy to use, positively themed entertainment offerings for a significantly larger addressable market. We do not need rapid technical evolution but users, whether paying or not, will very soon grow tired of ‘same old genre rehashed-ville #27’pretty soon. I would argue that the ‘Top 25 Facebook games’ list needs to include at least five new games every month. Equally, I’d suggest that we need to see at least a dozen different studios represented in that top 25 list in order for creativity and innovation to flourish.

Kontagent – Top 10 Social Game Metrics

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