By now anyone that uses social sites like Facebook know about Farmville or many clone variations of the game. It is a simple completely never ending game type that swept the social networks by storm. This unique viral marketing is booming and staying at a descent rate keeping a good percentage of its players hooked for the next fix to hold them over.
Let’s look at the simple design of the game type. You have a piece of land, island, or cafe… you are level one and can only make or plant certain items. Each item takes an actual real length of time to produce. This process can vary from a few seconds to a few days. As you continue this process you earn experience which levels your avatar unlocking new items to produce wealth or experience. You then use the money you earned to buy new items to plant/build or novelty items to make the area look more unique. So far it sounds simple and quiet dull right? It is… though some people find it relaxing… but what gets them hooked?
Let’s dive a little deeper into the depths of the game. Eventually you’ll get to a point “you need X number of people to help you meet this require to get this item” event. Oh No! What do you do!? Well, you invite your friends to the game and have them click your link to help you! Now… let’s say you have 10 friends invited to the game. With this we figure 50% will join. At this point I will start a running total.
You = 1 (invited 10 friends)
50% of 10 friends you invited join = 5
Total people you know playing including you = 6
Times the number of people playing the game you don’t know that have just done the same thing = thousands
As you can see the numbers become staggering just in the base level. This game works on social networking, the ability to spread by word of mouth. This is viral marketing at its best. No money goes into advertising; the people playing do it for the company. Now… these games are 100% free to play so why would a company want so many people playing and not make any money off it?
Money is the next piece of the puzzle. After awhile you will be playing the game, more of your friends join in and help you raise barns, finish a house, cook some food, etc… a new item may appear. However, this item is special – it requires a special currency of in game money that you earn 1 per level. Bad news… this item is a few hundred in game dollars… how can you possibly get this item before your friends and show it off? Buy the in game money! That’s right these companies use micro transactions that don’t seem like much but make thousands to millions of dollars in transactions. Many people may not spend real money on a game like this, but a good percentage would. After all who would miss $5.00 here and there?
The companies bank on this. Again we will bring simple math into this. Say a company has 1,000 active players. Now let’s assume that 25% of the 1,000 players would buy in game currency one time at the price of $5. The company just took in $1,250. Now if you say the company had 1 million players with the same 25% you now just turned that income into $1,250,000. All that money just flows in and it took only a small amount to finance the product.
Some people may wonder why this actually works. The answer is simple. A very easy to learn game mixed with the human nature of greed and the quest to one up the person next to them. It all whines up to the old saying, “Keeping up with the Joneses”. Each new cash item brings something that grabs at the player subliminally telling them they want it because their friends don’t. The vicious pattern goes on until the company runs out of ideas or until the high from the player eventually wears thin.
So there you have it… a simple yet addictively easy game that can drain hours out of your day becomes one of the quickest moneymakers for companies. So the next time you visit one of these games take a look and see for yourself. All I can say is… play at your own risk and good luck!
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