Is social gaming really just about games?
Social gaming is the dream paradigm—develop inexpensively, let the market drive product direction and use your early adopters as your channel for growth.
Sounds too good to be true. Cool thing is that it is both true and not just for social games. But also for all social applications and services that are being built on the Internet today. And it is fast becoming the option of choice rather than the exception.
Let’s back up a little here.
The real-time Internet created the fabric for the social web and opened up new avenues for marketing and distribution. But more importantly, it set strong expectations from the customer and community’s point of view.
Game play is nothing less than making web usage fun. Think of emoticons and birthday list apps on Facebook. I wrote about social design in a previous post and social game play is yet another component of that design construct. Commerce and information gathering and advertising should be fun and social. The infrastructure is here to make this happen; human nature has always been ready for this.
Static closed design and push marketing is out. Fun and social and evolutionary is in. And this is no fad.
We are in a customer driven, not a market driven world and customers, expect to have a community of interest to feel good about the products that we buy and the services that we use. If they don’t get that we simply click go somewhere else.
If you believe what Jeremy Liew lays out in his excellent post, that social games present a low-to-no-cost Development>Distribution>Discovery continuum, then what is true for games, should be true for information portals and apps and service on any of our online networks. And Beta is simply a state of mind, no longer the precursor to that abstract state of product release.
This doesn’t mean to imply that it is all easy now. Far from it. Success is hard and elusive and rare. But the social web allows anyone to prototype an idea, test it against a community, modify and evolve the product and grow the market and discover a business model if there is momentum. It’s easier to try, not necessarily easier to win but the math seems more slanted towards success than it used to.
A number of facets of ‘Social” are intersecting. Social as a perpetual state of development where the audience votes and designs with their interest. Social as game play where beyond pure social games, interactions as game play in even the most serious of venues, creates interest and engagement. And social as design which wraps development and game play into one.
This goes beyond the smart thinking in Wisdom of the Crowd. The markets themselves are in a way the source of the products that get built to service them. You launch your Beta with intention but the market will drive it where it needs to go…. if you are lucky and have the mechanisms in place to respond.
Kind of heady stuff but fast becoming today’s reality.
