5 Ways Console Games Will Use Facebook in the Future

With games like Blur implementing Facebook Connect and XBox 360 and PS3 integrating Facebook directly into their dashboards, we’ve seen console game makers and console makers actively connect with Facebook.  That said, the proliferation of gaming on Facebook and the power of the social graph mean that even the most hardcore console games will want to enable their players to connect with one another with the help of Facebook.  We take a look at 5 ways that console gamers will likely do this.

 

Sharing Your Achievements

It won’t be long until you can share your latest Call of Duty kill streak on Facebook.  And after that, it will be a standard feature.  As long as games continue to reward players with achievements for grand successes, game companies will continue to offer players the ability to spam their own and friends’ walls with their huge achievements.  There will certainly be an element of elitism to the posts, as well.  “The only achievements I ever see on your wall are Farmville cows… I just won 6 games in a row in Call of Duty: Neomodern Cyber Warfare 6″.

Syncing With Your Social Graph

Imagine starting a new game of Madden Football for the console and immediately seeing that a bunch of your Facebook friends are currently playing in a league, and that they’re welcoming friends to come and take over some of the AI controlled teams?  That’d be an experience that could easily be powered by Facebook, and would be a great way to immediately get to what’s important in sports games: playing with friends. 

Imagine a game like Street Fighter as well, where you could immediately know which of your friends play the game, and even watch replays of said players.  This works especially good with more obscure games as well, because your huge Facebook friends list probably has more friends than your gamertags list.

Games That Connect With Level Building Mini-Games On Facebook

Imagine playing a game like Star Wars: The Old Republic MMORPG on your XBox 360, and knowing that you want to increase your character’s dexterity.  You’re at work though, and since you don’t work at a games company you have no ostensible excuse to play the game at work, you resign yourself to the fact that you can’t increase levels away from the console… Until Bioware releases a Facebook “Dexterity Force Training” application that allows you to connect your Facebook account with your Star Wars game and gain dexterity from Facebook.  This kind of integration has already occurred with the Toy Soldiers: Match Defense game we covered recently, where players contribute to their team from a simple Facebook application.

Fan Page Exclusive Content

We’ll see more and more offers relating to joining a company or game’s Facebook page.  The Facebook page is one of the best ways in modern history to connect with your players where they live, and certainly the best place to upsell digital download packs and virtual goods.  For that reason, I think we’ll see more games offering special in-game items or maps to players who click “like” and sign up for Facebook fan pages.  We already see this with email addresses, so I do expect the offers to ask players to sign up for the Facebook page as well as give up their email address.

Integrated News Feed

To allow the Facebook news feed to compete with Twitter, Facebook will eventually improve both the search and categorization of status updates.  You’ll be able to tag your posts with a topic, similar to how you do on Twitter, with tags like #MarioKart.  And once that’s in place, people can see all public Facebook status updates related to one specific game, viewable as friends-only or as a complete set.  Of course, the games could then put that into their games and you could have a live stream of what your friends are saying about your current game. Combine this with calendar-based events like weekend tournaments and you have a new way of connecting to all your gamer friends, thanks to Facebook and some console ingenuity.

Hope you enjoyed the list!  For more updates on social games from Social Times, follow me on Twitter and add Social Times as well.

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