Facebook is preparing to bring ten titles to their social gaming area in the next year, and these won’t be Farmville games, but hardcore titles that you would find on Steam and Xbox Live.
Video games may be down on the money right now with the American stance on violence in video games having some effect on murder in the US, nevertheless games are getting more interactive, more innovative and more exciting.
Three ways you can tell: the amount of money being spent on voice acting, development and other features in a video game – the amount of gamers buying or downloading a certain game – the amount of YouTube gaming channels that are hitting millions of subs.
Facebook see this tide turning and want to get a slice of the action. They have almost one billion active users and many of them may turn into Facebook gaming users, if the games on the social network are worthy of playing.
According to leaks by Reuters, game titles will include:
- Offensive Combat – an FPS that Facebook has tested out and got positive results.
- Rumble Entertainment – a medieval adventure game.
- ChronoBlade – an action RPG.
And seven more popular types of games.
With a demographic that largely plays role-playing, first-person-shooter, adventure, action and fantasy games, we can see the excitement already bubbling. Some hardcore Steam fans will not enjoy the move to Facebook, but if the content is good and runs well on the social network, we cannot really give any harsh criticism.
We suspect all games will be free-to-play and offer micro-transactions. The developers will get 70% of all in-game payments and pay the rest to Facebook. The social network offer their huge audience and simple to set up accounts for this 30%.
Again, we wonder if this is the start of a Facebook ecosystem that may end up being an operating system on a social device. If Facebook can get games developers and content providers to make apps for them, then why can’t they contend with Google and Microsoft in the search engine, browser and OS markets.
[Source: CNET]