In Ren's thread on virtual world history, Mike made the following comment:
But let's put it in perspective. In three months the number one social game on Facebook has gone from zero to over 50 million players. Not registrations, but actual unique monthly players (about 20 million daily uniques).
So, yesterday, USA Today noted the same. Zynga's Farmville is at 56M:
Gaming is the most popular application category on Facebook and MySpace. There are eight games on Facebook with more than 12 million monthly active players. That surpasses paying customers for World of Warcraft, the most popular multiplayer online game.
It seems social software works better when people are given something fun to do with it. Some interesting notes in the story about the size of the virtual property market, the rise of the freemium model, the addictive quality of the games, etc. Pretty good for USA Today...
I don't have any major insights from all of this. In general, it seems: 1) the huge casual market for light games is now forking toward light social games, 2) social software is recognizing the profitability of the ludic turn and the virtual property business approach. This means, I guess, that we should anticipate more VC moving toward light and networked social games.
Other thoughts?
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