Growth of Social Gaming Market in 2011
Since the release and huge success of FarmVille by Zynga on Facebook, the popularity of gaming on social networking sites has greatly increased. These games are designed to satisfy players on a psychological level, which is the reason behind their rising popularity and addictive nature. Also, there is no restriction of time for these games, they can be played in a ten minute coffee-break or you can play them the whole day, this is one more reason for their success.
This year, the social gaming business is set to cross $ 1 billion mark. The number of internet users playing these games at least once a month in U.S alone is set to increase from last year’s 53 million to 62 million which forms 27% of the total internet audience. This is why games present a great opportunity for marketers for promoting their products.
The three main avenues of revenue for social games include virtual goods, lead generation offers and advertising. Only 6% players actually spent money on virtual goods this year but this has generated revenue of $ 653 million in the U.S alone. In the last year revenue share of virtual goods was highest at 59.6% followed by lead generation offers at 26.3% and advertising at 14.1%.