Love them or Hate them

Recently I was reading an article on cnn.com and it got me thinking and hence I decided to write about it.

Now the article about how famous social networking games like Farmville, Mafia Wars, Cafe World etc are now. Of all of them Farmville has taken the world by storm. Its a simplistic game where you are given a piece of land and you grow crops on it. Players plant virtual crops that can be harvested hours, or days, later. Along the way, they invite online friends to become their neighbors and help each other by sending gifts or helping with the farming. There's no way to "win," but players take satisfaction in building big, fancy farms that they can showcase to their friends. The fact that they can be satisfied with so little is amazing.

Some interesting facts about Farmville

• Avg active players 27 million daily/75 million monthly
• Out of these 60% of the player are female with avg age ranging from 18-34 yrs.
• This app has 118 million installs which is more then the population of France.

Zynga the gaming company which is the creator of all these games has hit a jackpot with the success of their games on Facebook. But every rose has its thorn. As the popularity increased so did the number of complaints and lawsuits. People are getting increasingly annoyed with the amount of updates they are getting because one of their friends has bought a tractor or caught a fish or killed a gang member. Recently on Farmville, a group called "I don't care about your farm, or your fish, or your park, or your mafia!!!" had more than 5.2 million members recently.

Now here is most interesting part of all of this. With the gaming industry booming and the age of the game consoles like Xbox and Sony fighting it out with interactive gaming and fitness console from Nintendo Wii, why is a simple social networking game be so popular. The reason is simple. Unlike other games you can play the games while sitting in a conference call when in office. Think about it, you are sitting in a boring meeting and you can pass time playing Farmville. Zynga says that the time when they get maximum number of player playing Farmville is between 8 AM- 9AM CST.

Personally I am not a fan of getting updates on all my friends playing. Nowadays when I log to my Facebook, its impossible to find genuine message from my friends. All we wanted was a simple networking site where we could just hang out with our friends but these games have turned Facebook into something else. Hence I don't like it anymore.