Competition within Mobile Gaming

Investors and entrepreneurs continue to invest money and reinvent the digital and mobile gaming industry. The gaming economy is opening up the door for new jobs, technologies and growth since it was just introduced a little of 10 years ago. What is interesting in while mobile gaming continues to see growth; social gaming sees declines on the mobile platform and growth within game consoles. Social games, those that are featured on popular sites such as Facebook continue to decrease in popularity. This might be because Zynga and Facebook are no longer working together and can explain why Zynga’s stock is also decreasing. Also, there is a lack of innovation and difficulty engaging consumers on social networks and marketing on sites such as Facebook is continuing to become more expensive.

Interesting enough, Electronic Arts, or EA, has made it public that they will be shutting down their social games available on Facebook. EA has expresses their interest in mobile games and believe social games to be a thing of the past. Even thought there is a large market for social games, EA is still struggling to make their mark. They are determined to shift their attention to mobile gaming since realizing purchasing Playfish, a private social gaming company, for $300 million was a mistake.

EA has then shut down Playfish’s most popular games including The Sims Social, SimCity Social and Pet Society. The Sims Social was one of the most favorable games on Facebook and up to 10 million users daily, since being bought out by EA their daily users has dropped to about 500 thousand players (according to App Data).

Innovation and creativity is essential for developing a popular and interesting mobile game and attracted consumers. From experience, the mobile games that seem to attract users are those of smaller creative companies rather than large billion dollar companies, such as EA.  But they seem determined to pop the social gaming bubble and it will be interesting to see how the gaming industry will evolve.