Great Article on Asynchronous Gaming…
… also known as “games you can play with your friends without having to be online at the same time.” In this case, it’s a Wall Street Journal article from this weekend that focuses on Scrabulous, a Facebook application. It’s basically Scrabble, except you can play turn-at-a-time with multiple people over whatever timeframe works for you.
I’ve written about this before, but I think one of the biggest things we as an industry can do is focus on enabling async gaming on gaming platforms. People can’t always sit down and play a marathon Halo 3 session together, and it’s pretty obvious to me that one of the major reasons Scrabulous is so popular is that it both allows you to play on your own time, as well as play from different locations (thanks to being web-based). This is actually one of the reasons I’m so excited about Microsoft’s LIVE Anywhere initiative. Over time, LIVE will be one of the largest online gaming networks that allows you to play with single identity across multiple platforms wherever you wish. Async gaming fits naturally here.
Don’t believe the potential? Here’s a quote from the article:
Since its Facebook debut in July, Scrabulous has grown to about 950,000 players. According to Facebook’s data, 36% of those players (about 342,000 people) are “daily active users,” or people who have logged in every day over the last 30 days. That’s compared with an average of 7% for the site’s top 50 tools and games, according to SocialMedia, a social-advertising company that tracks Facebook activity.
Just last night Halo 3 had just under 600k users online when I was playing. Scrabulous has over half of that playing at least once a day already – and that’s just one game. What happens when we start seeing hundreds of these sorts of games? Time will be easier to find (since you’re looking for bite-sized slices), but you’ll have to filter through and find the worthy games. Guess there will always be challenges to overcome.
Note: if you’re interested, make sure to read the Wall Street Journal article soon. It’s only free for a limited time.
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Hmm….where have I heard this before?
Likely dinner.
>What happens when we start seeing hundreds of these sorts of games?
Well, if all other online games are an indication, we’ll have a 30% increase of total players, 95% of which polarized around two titles at most, and the remaining hundreds getting the scraps.
I’d love to see something like that on Xbox live. And when another player takes thier turn you get a message from them.
I tried to play Chess with one of my buddy that way over Facebook and it was good for a while but I ended up getting bored. I do agree that it has a lot of potential and it might be something for people that has more patience and less free time than me.
I used to do this when it was called play by email. Not a new concept, but I suppose implemented in a new way.
Re: "I used to do this when it was called play by email. Not a new concept, but I suppose implemented in a new way."
Yep – it’s absolutely not a new idea. What I find fascinating is that in the industry’s rush to multiplayer gaming we sort of skipped over enabling async gaming… you know, the sort of thing people have been doing with board games for thousands of years.
Now I don’t ‘do’ facebook or any other so-called social networking site, but my guess is it’s a free game. If I’m right in that assumption, you really can’t compare that and its user number to a $60 to $150 (depending on where you live and what version you bought) game like Halo 3.
On a side note; did Halo 3 underperform sales-wise? I can still order the edition with the helmet at several sites here in the Netherlands. It’s probably just me, but I was under the impression it’d be sold out within seconds of it becoming available…
Re: "On a side note; did Halo 3 underperform sales-wise? I can still order the edition with the helmet at several sites here in the Netherlands. It’s probably just me, but I was under the impression it’d be sold out within seconds of it becoming available…"
I really doubt it… could just be that a lot of folks didn’t want the helmet. Had I bought the game I’d have gone for the middle tier special edition, with the bonus disc. Don’t want to store a helmet on the shelf.