Just this week Sorority Life, one of the most popular Facebook games, was released on Android and with recent announcements from Zynga, we can expect to see more social games begin to appear on mobile devices. Zynga specifically announced that their most popular game, FarmVille, will soon be available on the iPhone, and just as with their expansions to other platforms, other games will soon follow. How well will these games fare on Mobile?
One of the key elements that have made social games unique is there integration with the Facebook social graph. The more that a player can interact with their real world friends using the social graph, the more social the game. Social games makers like Zynga have taken classic game mechanics and applied them to social networks like Facebook to generate viral growth and fun, social gameplay experiences. On mobile, it will be vital that their ports of the games use Facebook Connect to allow the games to stay social, but the problem becomes that this needs a data connection and a decent phone. Only smart phones that are capable of authenticating with Facebook are going to be able to do this Connect integration.
This is also part of the broader issue that Facebook social games are currently played on desktop and laptop computers with stronger graphics processors and unlimited web access. This means that social games makers will probably want to start with the high end devices like the iPhone and top Android based models to increase their sales base and ensure a better experience. One of the best incentives to develop for iPhone is that a developer can fully predict how the game will play in the consumer’s hand, but with the Android OS, there may be a variety of phones with different resources that implement the game.
In any case, we’ll no doubt see these games jump over to mobile, and try to win mobile users the same way they’ve won Facebook users. They will have to compete with strong mobile game makers like ngmoco and GameLoft, but I think Zynga is ready for that fight.
