As Facebook quickly seized status as the most prominent and fastest-growing social gaming platform, the platform-holder came by some unique challenges that continue to follow its growth.
The company has had to balance the needs of game developers who depend on virality with providing a good experience for users who simply want to connect with friends without receiving notifications about their friends' FarmVille pets.
"Our goal is to make it so as few people as possible come to the site and have negative experiences," said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at a media event held at the company's offices to discuss the latest changes the company is making to the ways games interface with its user experience.
Essentially, users will be generically notified if multiple friends are currently playing a new game, but successive updates about their play will be concealed from other users -- unless the other users are also players of that game.
It creates a divide on the social network between gamers and non-gamers, but it also aims to ensure that the only people who will receive game updates are those who are interested in them. Zuckerberg sees it as a similar kind of screening process to the way users actually share interests in real life.
"In real life, if one of your friends plays FarmVille and you don't, they probably wouldn't come up to you and say 'Hey, I just got this new cow on my farm,'" he explains in video of the event recorded by VentureBeat. "They might say 'Hey, I found this new game that's really cool that you should check out.'"
"Giving this kind of context is what we want to emulate on the site," he adds. The company made changes earlier this year to the kinds of notifications Facebook games were allowed to send their users, aiming to keep "join my game"-type spam in check. But as a result, numerous popular titles on the social network experienced steep declines in their userbases.
That attrition continues, and Facebook has required further occasionally-controversial concessions from its game developers, such as the deployment of its universal Facebook Credits currency platform -- which gives it a 30 percent revenue share. But the company continues to evaluate its decisions as it evolves, Zuckerberg says.
Games are a major force on Facebook, but it's a double-edged sword: "One the one hand, games are a phenomenon -- 200 million people or more are playing games on the site," says the CEO. "On the other hand, game [notifications] are also one of the biggest complaints that we get."
Being more permissive of notifications and game "stories" in a user's newsfeed directly creates more complaints for Facebook, continued Zuckerburg. But stringent modifications to notification permissions causes difficulty for game developers, some of the most significant players in the Facebook ecosystem. Games drive userbases, but they also threaten to drive userbases off, and finding that balancing point appears to be Facebook's current goal.
Thanks for the write up. I don't have time to read it now, but I'm going to save it out and read it later. It looks pretty good (and good show with the references, too).
It will be nice to not have to hide everything that comes up that I don't care about.
But as Anatoly points out in his response to the changes, it will make it more difficult for developers to find new players. But is that a bad thing? Now Facebook developers have to use similar marketing measures that traditional developers use to get new players.
But is this worth it? How would 360 users feel if they could only see achievements on games they have played? How would that effect business if I cannot look at my friend's achievements and see a game I have not tried and go out and find it? I guess it is different since you are not alerted every time your friend gets a new achievement.
I think that is a good way to go. I was under the impression a while ago that Facebook was planning separate news feeds for applications and status updates. Meaning there would be a bookmark on the left that I could click and see all the game alerts that my friends have posted from all the games they play. I guess that never happened. I think it would have been the more elegant solution.
I believe the goal here is to improve the user experience, and Zuckerberg's remarks about how people actually talk about their games rings accurate to me. I'm not constantly telling my friends several times a day about what I'm doing in the games I play. Most of them don't care, and if I did spam them with game updates, many of my friends would be less interested in talking to me. I think the changes here reflect that reality and I welcome them.
I wonder what this means for other types of games that use Facebook Connect? For instance, I am an iPhone developer, and we are in the process of adding pushes to Facebook as part of the social aspect of games we are developing. I'm still looking into the rules, but it seems like they would be similar I guess. You can only post FB notifications to people who have the same game, except for an initial "I just got this game and you should check it out" post and the occasional invite. Makes sense to me.
Games aren't the only culprit here, either. I also think they should remove the "So-and-so changed their profile picture" and "This person is now friends with this person" posts, because these posts can get pretty spammy at times too.
game makers essentially exploited facebook to get that big in the first place. so i see them coming down to a more sensible level, and one that doesnt rely on spam to maintain.
l_you_new_Facebook_policies.php
But as Anatoly points out in his response to the changes, it will make it more difficult for developers to find new players. But is that a bad thing? Now Facebook developers have to use similar marketing measures that traditional developers use to get new players.
But is this worth it? How would 360 users feel if they could only see achievements on games they have played? How would that effect business if I cannot look at my friend's achievements and see a game I have not tried and go out and find it? I guess it is different since you are not alerted every time your friend gets a new achievement.
I think that is a good way to go. I was under the impression a while ago that Facebook was planning separate news feeds for applications and status updates. Meaning there would be a bookmark on the left that I could click and see all the game alerts that my friends have posted from all the games they play. I guess that never happened. I think it would have been the more elegant solution.
I wonder what this means for other types of games that use Facebook Connect? For instance, I am an iPhone developer, and we are in the process of adding pushes to Facebook as part of the social aspect of games we are developing. I'm still looking into the rules, but it seems like they would be similar I guess. You can only post FB notifications to people who have the same game, except for an initial "I just got this game and you should check it out" post and the occasional invite. Makes sense to me.
Games aren't the only culprit here, either. I also think they should remove the "So-and-so changed their profile picture" and "This person is now friends with this person" posts, because these posts can get pretty spammy at times too.
I wonder if some of the issues that Facebook has could be solved by looking at it as a game, instead of a "social platform". Food for thought.