Zynga has dominated the social-gaming space thanks to audience hits such as Farmville and Mafia Wars, as well as the huge distribution they enjoyed through the Facebook platform. But the gaming audiences on Facebook appear to be slipping, according to research by IHS iSuppli. The market intelligence firm suggests monthly active users for Zynga’s Facebook games dropped from 266 million users in the third quarter of last year to 225 million in the fourth. The reasons? Bored users, distractions and Facebook’s non-gaming-specific audience. Is the honeymoon over for social-gaming companies?
Facebook rocketed to prominence as a gaming platform in 2009 and 2010. However, with equal speed, the market then settled into a state of maturity in 2011, with conditions becoming markedly more challenging for game operators. While Facebook remains a worthwhile opportunity for companies able to meet these challenges, the tone of the market in 2012 will be somewhat muted compared to the optimistic outlook of the past few years.
Read the full post at the iSuppli site.
More in Media
AI royalties for small and midsize publishers: collective licensing’s next big play
Don’t credit OpenAI’s ChatGPT, credit corporate LLMs – enterprise RAG is what’s creating royalty revenue for publishers.
The Economist licenses its content to enterprise clients’ private LLMs
The Economist is among those to start licensing its content this way – having opened its API to corporate clients with their own data ring-fenced LLMs in August.
Media Briefing: Why some publishers are flipping their position on whether to block AI bots
Some publishers that blocked all AI bots are rethinking their stance, as AI platform traffic raises new monetization and access trade-offs.