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Social Games IntroducedOnline games have always had a social aspect; gamers involved in multiplayer games and tournaments, shared their opinions and experiences with gamers of their kind in various games forum and so on. However, the growing popularity of social networks such as Myspace or Facebook has brood a new hybrid of online games. Meet the social games, online games often as old and casual as "scrabble" played by members of a social network.
Social Gaming - the Beginning
In other words, if once online gaming communities were built to satisfy the players' needs to communicate and discuss their rather solitary pastime; now, social games are developed to provide members of social networks a sort of activity instead of browsing through their exes' profiles. Therefore, social games tend to belong to the family of casual games and to be less time consuming then MMORPGs with an evident fore to word and trivia games and good old Texas Hold'em poker. Next up, were online gaming networks such as Mytopia, gaming communities designed especially for social games.
Apparently, it all started out with "Scrabulous," a Facebook application based on the classic word game allowed members of the popular social network to play against one another or just to compare their scores. Scrabulous success – average of 650,000 players a day – drew more game developers to cash in on the old-new opportunity. Currently, the number of social gaming platforms in Facebook alone is estimated as 2,700.
What the Future Holds
However, as the social gaming market grows the competition grew tougher. Social game developers, talented as they may be, would find it hard to stand out amongst the thousands of games platforms and other applications, especially since large-budgeted tycoons such as Electronic Arts and Sony Computer Entertainment Europe want to bite their share as well, and their products might just be absorbed in cyber space.
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