Nobody could have predicted how popular Farmville would become – apparently a lot of people are really into the idea of pretending to plant potatoes, and pretending it’s important enough to bother everybody on their Facebook friend list about.
Fortunately or unfortunately, nobody’s getting unsolicited invitations to clean up cow poop over Xbox LIVE any time soon, because dev Zynga reckons that with only 30 million subscribers, the service is just “too small” for Farmville.
“The thing that seems to make social gaming and networking magical is the fact that all my friends are potentially there and they might see the things that I’m posting or doing or expressing,” chief game designer Brian Reynolds told IndustryGamers.
“[Xbox Live’s] too small a demographic … 20 or maybe even 30% of my friends might have an Xbox 360, but effectively 100 percent of them have Facebook and effectively 100 percent of them have a mobile phone. Of them, probably 90 percent have a smartphone.
“So when you think about the social potential of a platform … if we made a game on Xbox Live, I think — forgetting about the fact that I might have an artificially high percentage of friends that do it because of what my profession is – the number of anyone’s friends that’s going to be able to participate in the social experience is going to be a very small number so the amount of social capital that there is isn’t going to be very high.”
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