Facebook Games' Growth Slows

With major games like Civilization World, the Dragon Age spin-offs, and most notoriously Farmville, Facebook has long lingered in the shadows waiting to become the next important gaming platform. But Sean Ryan, the director for games partnership at Facebook, now reports that growth on the platform, in terms of number of players, has slowed. Ryan, however, does not despair at this negative development. Instead, he suggests that Facebook must now consider which features they should be adding to their platform to make and keep it more appealing.

Integral to this move, Ryan states, is diversity in the games library available to users, and a system that gives recommendations to the users based on the games they’ve previously played, which is intended to make it easier for users to find games they did not know existed on the platform. In addition, Ryan said that their work towards less “…”spamming” on users’ walls…” of users great exploits on their virtual farm might have been part of the reason for this slow growth. According to Ryan “…game spam was one of the top areas that was brought up by people unhappy with Facebook,” but avoiding this annoyance, which many Facebookers are probably grateful for, lies in correlation to the slowing growth of the player base. Also, he believes that Facebook must instead find other methods of virally spreading news of their games.