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Will Wright On FarmVille, Sims, Filling Vacuums
by Kris Graft [PC, Console/PC]
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April 20, 2010
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Will Wright knows a thing or two about emerging genres. He's the creator of games such as The Sims and SimCity, which launched new categories in video games.
Social gaming is today's category that is experiencing surprisingly explosive growth. Wright acknowledges the quick rise of the sector, but is reluctant to say that the growth will continue indefinitely, noting past trends.
"I think [social gaming] is going to be an established area of games; I don’t think it’s going to take over the world," he told IndustryGamers. "People were saying that about online games before that and they were saying that about portable games before that."
He added, "There’s always, when a new platform or a new niche emerges, there’s explosive growth in that niche; it’s like this void that’s being filled very rapidly, where there was a vacuum."
"So right now we’re at the steep of that curve," he said. "If you extrapolate that out, it looks like 'Oh, that’s gonna be the whole market in five years,' but of course the curve never stays that steep."
The most-cited example of growth in the social games arena is Zynga's FarmVille. The Facebook farming game boasts over 32 million daily users and 80 million total users.
"It’s kind of like the ecosystems are in this gigantic disruptive phase," Wright said. "Whole new niches are opening and other ones are shrinking and so we’re seeing some very steep deltas in different directions right now. I get the sense that in a year from now we’ll start seeing these things plateau towards what their natural equilibrium is."
He said that The Sims did something similar, filling an entertainment vacuum that nobody even realized existed. The franchise has sold over 125 million units across 10 years.
"What’s still remarkable to me is that there hasn’t really been a viable competitor for [The Sims]," Wright added. "Usually when a genre opens up you get several competitors coming in to fill that genre, but in some sense The Sims is a game of its own genre, which for various reasons nobody’s really copied."
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It certainly didn't get the response that the Sims did. Perhaps it's science fiction theme (and mild, mostly optional RTS elements) turned off people from The Sims' demographic?