Social-games in the times of a pandemic
Social distancing is bringing people together online.
A quick history tour
For the cool people of the 2000s, one of the early memories of being on Facebook would be the game requests that you used to get from your friends. Sometimes they did make you end up playing the games with your friends, but as the time went by it became annoying and slowly the hype fizzled out.
Facebook also realized this and then, in the 2010s, turned its course to selling you ads instead of promoting games. As these social media platforms evolved, the push was now towards getting you ‘influenced’ and not so much on getting you to play the games.
These would be the early days of social gaming. Now, although games, and social connections in them through these platforms, still are a huge thing, the forced ‘social’ aspect of it has reduced a bit.
That being said, social gaming has definitely evolved in many other major ways such as PUBG, Fortnite, Words With Friends, or Minecraft. However, for any of such major games, that promote a social experience, you do need to engage enough with the game before valuing the social connections there. You don’t really need your friends and connections to progress in any of the games. You can still play them by yourself, and then end up making new social connections through the games.
Popular Social Gaming right now is where Gaming is first, and Social comes later.
The games that prioritized active social aspect as a requirement to play, didn’t really do that well. Since players already got reminded of the sour taste from the bygone times of notification spamming, it would be a task to convince your known friends to join any new game. So, what ended up happening is you wouldn’t have as many of your close connections playing the game, but you did make new contacts and connections in different games.
But all this was a thing of the previous decades.
Welcome 2020s
Just 3 months into the brand new 20s decade, we are in a situation where a lot of people are sitting in their homes due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This has also come with unprecedented amount of hardships for a huge population around the globe, and we definitely have to be thankful to all the medical professionals, and the essential services staff, that are fighting this on the front lines to ensure that we are safe.
At the same time, there is this potentially trend-making audience working and spending their time at home, all their important social activities have come to revolve around the internet connected devices that they have. A result of this working from home can definitely be seen on the meeting app like Zoom, which has seen a huge growth in their usage recently.
As people are catching up with majorly their work calls on Zoom, there’s a whole new catching-up-with-friends market that has suddenly opened up. Now with the ones social distancing and trying to find things to do and hang out with their loved ones virtually, these ways of true social experiences have come out on top.
One of them which has suddenly seen a massive spike has been a video calling app called Houseparty. While group video calling has been available in many messenger apps, what this app offers is to spend some of your video call time playing some simple real-time online games. This little addition has made the app a huge success in the current times for the people who want to hangout with their friends on video calls but wouldn’t really have any valuable conversations more than a ‘What’s up?’ and ‘Nothing much, sitting at home.’
Another really old time website which is also getting a lot popular is a cool space called boardgamearena.com where you can play a variety of board games online. It does give you a way to play some very popular board and card games in their online format which can be frowned upon by the board game purists. However, it does make the games accessible.
While this website has been around for 10 years, the growing popularity can be gauged by the fact that they’ve had to increase their capacity of live games by almost 4X in just 2 weeks (source).
Why so famous now?
It is very clear as to why this behavior has been seen in recent times with people holed up in their homes. Lot of people are unable to meet and interact with others physically and these spaces are helping them close that gap.
In addition to that, these spaces are also adding to some entertainment that can be enjoyed during the free time.
As these reasons are pretty straightforward and it is easy to see why these apps, which were already available but waiting to be noticed on a larger scale, are doing so well. But the question remains what next?
Is it just a fad?
There have been too many examples in recent times which you could see getting super popular and then disappear suddenly over time — Remember that sarahah thing some time ago? There are many more examples which anyone can think of as well, and all of them remained as a fad and disappeared from the people’s memories as quickly as it appeared in the first place.
So there are bound to be similar questions which you can think of for the current trend. There are a lot of ideas which would be floating around and being discussed on how this could sustain further with better features and updates for the products. One of them being nicely put in this Instagram slideshow post below.
What to expect now?
In the coming times, there could definitely be a push for new updates and engagement related features in these products which would try to improve the experience where the users are complaining about right now — Houseparty notifications, I am looking at you.
I can also expect more quick-to-market similar products which could be available on the stores which will try to ride on this wave. It might be difficult for any one of those to surpass the currently popular ones though because of the first mover advantage that these have right now.
What after things are back to normal?
The main reason for people using these products right now is because they are trying to fill the void of physical connections in this manner and trying to connect with others in as much interactive way as possible.
However, once the restrictions are over, and things are back to normal, would these motivations still hold?
As the experience in these products depends heavily on the availability of your friends and acquaintances at the same time as you, would this still be a feasible option for most of the current users and their contacts once everyone gets back to their routine?
Driving these inherent motivations, once things are back to normal, is where the products could struggle going forward. So, could the current behavior form habits which can then sustain the products even after things are back to normal?
These are some of the questions, which are dependent on the player behavior and motivations which these products wouldn’t have as much control on as they’d like. In the current scenario, what I can expect to see here is for everyone to make hay while the sun shines, and focus on the short term benefits over the long term ones.
TL;DR
- Social games have evolved to depend more on the gaming aspect first and the social aspect later.
- Because of the social distancing, social-first products are getting popular.
- The ones that have been around for a while have got the first mover advantage here and are seeing the benefits now.
- It would be difficult to sustain this popularity once things are back to normal because the current motivations of the users might not stay the same later.
- I expect all these products to exploit the current opportunity as much as possible without worrying about the long term plans.
#StayHome #StaySafe #FlattenTheCurve
