“A Little Bird Told Me” Autopsy
While Looking for various TechCrunch articles to use about online social gaming, particularly Zynga, I found a post that raises a point so far no one else I have seen has considered.
In the TechCrunch article, social gamers apparently spend an average of around two months on a game before moving on to something else. This has largely been heralded as a problem for the game developer community—the less time a player spends playing a particular game, the less chance he or she will purchase in-app goods or products related to that game.
However, this blog post speculates that Zynga (the biggest social gaming company currently out there) is deliberately shifting gamers from one game to another, because they see that they are not spending money buying products for that game, so they incentivize them to leave that game, offering a player boost for another game they may actually spend money on.
Without saying too much else right now, it is an interesting thought to toy around with, but it does beg the question: Even if Zynga couldn’t monetize a player with in-app purchases, couldn’t they do so in other ways (advertisements being the most immediate)?
