18 of the top 25 Facebook games lost significant monthly active users | Hacker News Reader

18 of the top 25 Facebook games lost significant monthly active users

insidesocialgames.com

36 pointsstartuprules35 comments

Excuse me while I weep for spammy games that litter my feed with massive amounts of pointless trivia, and pester me at every corner to invite my friends.

If your traffic drops because an avenue of spam has been closed, perhaps you need to take a good long look in the mirror.

Which isn't to say that third party notifications weren't useful for legitimate purposes - they wouldn't have even existed otherwise - but it was a massively abused system and I'm glad the hole's been closed.

The thing is, they actually got users. Yes, us nerds get really mad when we get our zillionth "what kind of floor cleaner are you?" quiz request, but these are numbers of people actually using those programs, right?

Spam also gets real customers - doesn't really improve the ethics of spam.

I guess you weren't the only one who didn't understand that you could disable all notifications from a particular app in two clicks.

Not sure why they couldn't separate spam in your feed from direct notifications...the later were 95% relevant for me once I hid everything from Mafia Wars and people sending me stupid presents.

> I guess you weren't the only one who didn't understand that you could disable all notifications from a particular app in two clicks.

At one point my friends were discovering new apps to spam notifications from faster than they could possibly be playing them. Blocking an app is no help when you have requests from a hundred different ones.

Blocking an app is no help when you have requests from a hundred different ones.

F.B. Purity

http://www.fbpurity.com/

works well for that. Constantly posting articles about the security risks and general stupidity of Facebook games also helps to make it uncool (at least among my circle of Facebook friends) to play Facebook games. If the spam keeps up even after that, the friends are removed from my feed, or, in the really bad cases, unfriended.

I stopped looking at notifications long ago.

I only ever know about the first time one of my friends joins one. After that all is silence as I hide the spambots.

Tangential: I wonder how well a game like Nethack would work as a Facebook game. The game could Facebook broadcast if a player ascends, dies after passing a certain (hard to reach) milestone, gets a high score or achieves an account-first...

I guess it probably would only appeal to whatever few people are into social media and are willing to play ASCII games. But it would be nice to see a real game--not to mention an important, venerable one--show up in my newsfeed all the time, instead of Farmville, Mafia Wars, that chef game with those obnoxious over-cute chibis... (Yeah, I know you can block them, I'm just lazy...)

or Legend of the Red Dragon :)

Most sites lose traffic in summer.

Yeah but this is unfortunately something more than that. Platform changes have been very painful recently and might be about to get worse.

In what sense is less traffic on lame social network games "unfortunate"? Seems like a net positive for humanity to me. :-)

That's because you consider yourself some sort of arbiter of taste. What you categorically dismiss is enjoyed by hundreds of millions of people who spend billions on it.

The ads bought by game makers are the reason Facebook is now profitable. They probably account for most of its revenue already and will probably be the vast majority of it going forward.

You run a social gaming company, so it's obvious why you feel that way. For most regular people they can be very annoying. Anything that makes games on Facebook less of an annoyance is probably a good thing in the long run, for Facebook anyway.

Ouch dude, that's way defensive.

It has nothing to do with taste. It has to do with Zynga providing incredibly shallow gameplay solely optimized for virality and addiction. It's not entertainment, it's a money grab. If you can't see that and you feel the need to shout down any opinion along those lines then you may not have the stomach to succeed in the social gaming market...

The month of March is 64% winter and 36% Spring. April is 100% spring.

Not in the Southern Hemisphere, but your point is well taken that a typical summer slump (noticeable mostly in the Northern Hemisphere) wouldn't be expected to show up as a March drop in number of users.

Sure. The dropoff is gradual as weather gets better. It's not a step function.

Maybe I should just resign myself to saying everything in twice as many words...

# words required + patience required = C * # of HN users, where C > 1... <sigh>...

Yah, those newbies. They don't get it and can't read pseudo code.

(the yearly summer trend is still far away regardless of how sunny it is in the bay area right now. If there is anything special this year is the relatively early arrival of Easter which may break patterns.)

ah, much better with more words.

this is why you shouldn't base your business model on another companies platform. should they make a design change (or even decide to clone your functionality), your business could be significantly impacted.

i'm sure facebook also sees the millions in revenue that 3rd party games are making on their site and are probably developing a soon to be released "Facebook Games"...

it's business.

Right because using the Facebook platform to gain tens of millions of users and hundreds of millions in revenue off simplistic games with poor graphics has definitely been a poor business decision.

if your a gaming company thats made millions thus far on fb, and VC's have backed you on the assumption that you would continue to make millions, and facebook decides they want to get into the lucrative social-gaming market & begins pushing their own brand of games and making it a little bit harder for users to find your games, what do you do as a company?

i just don't think it's a sustainable long-term strategy

Right it is the all eggs in one basket advise that everyone gets. You business plan should incorporate branching off of Facebook / iPhone / whatever closed ecosystem and into others so that if one closes your are not at the mercy of that single revenue stream. There is nothing wrong with bootstrapping on or developing for a closed ecosystem (financially)(and I don't get into the politics), but one should really have a plan to diversify ones self from a single revenue channel.

It seems like most of these social gaming companies are taking steps towards having games be less reliant on Facebook as a platform. Zynga is developing their own games site and HeyZap seems to be creating a pipeline of sorts b/w publishers and games.

yet facebook seems to be the center of the social internet. people don't leave facebook (i'm talking about your average fb user). the value proposition would have to be pretty high to get these people to move to another site to play games

some good news at last! (you gotta be really retarded to play facebook games)

The majority of those game anyway which attempt to appeal to the lost common denominator.

And also pay for people's rent, food, medical expenses, etc., etc...

I'm talking about it terms of actually playing them, not the developers side of things. I understand why they would want to reach the biggest market possible.

Yeah, I really should have responded to the original commentor.

The mere fact that somebody profits from it does not make a thing good or praiseworthy. Thievery pays for rent, food, medical expenses, etc., but that does not make it good. Lotus Notes pays for rent, food, medical expenses, etc., but it is a pretty poor email client these days.

Not for the developers of those games who still have bills to pay.

So then it's your position that security companies shouldn't offer any new technology to combat botnets for fear of putting out of business all the hardworking botnet developers who have bills to pay?

Those facebook games, and particularly the spammy notifications that some of them use waste many peoples time and cost society real money everytime anyone has to skim over some announcement in their feed or see some random notification.

I join the other people in this thread who have no sympathy for companies seeing their user bases drop because facebook has made it harder for them to spam users.

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