RPG Transfer

One BIG bandwagon

Social games (read Facebook applications if you must ) are one of those aspects of life of which no one seems to have no opinion.  Many in the mmo community, like myself, would rather crawl a mile over broken glass and hot coals than spend any appreciable time with them.  When Scott Hartsman was on the No Prisoners, No Mercy s Show we were interested… then we let it pass like thoughts of last week’s dinner.   When Richard Garriott announced his Portalarium Company with the umpteenth iteration of virtual poker many of us rolled our eyes.  When Brad McQuaid announced his intention to start down the same path we were all sure he was simply hopping on the Zynga Bandwagon as it faded into the distance.  Now we here at NPNM find ourselves taking another good hard look at the words of Richard Garriott we quoted in our article And I shall call it the wheel .

Recently Steve Jobs announced a future bereft of PCs and cast upon a sea of mobile applications (and he is in a position to “make it so”) – and the Wall Street Journal took him seriously.

“So, I believe the casual gamer and the social gaming platform represent the largest ever yet seen emergence or change within the gaming industry. And all of us in the development community have a choice to either participate and lead in this journey or get left behind.” – Richard Garriott

While I was pondering those words, and the fact that even one of my favorite pastimes, The Sims, has gone mobile, word crossed our news feed, via Techcrunch  that Disney is set to acquire Playdom.

Playdom has been acquiring social gaming developers like they were giving them away free  -Metaplace,  Green Patch and Trippert labs , Three Melons , Acclaim, Hive7.com , and  Offbeat Creations . Now Playdom is on the verge of being acquired by The Walt Disney Company who in turn owns, Miramax Films, ABC, DiC entertainment, Fox, Saban Entertainment, Pixar Animation, New Horizon Interactive, Marvel Entertainment, ESPN, Tapulous, and Club Penguin.

My initial hope was that someone at Playdom knew a guy who knows a guy with lots of money who really, really hates Facebook games and wants to corner the market in order to rid the world of these canker sores on the butt of the universe.  In a move that epitomizes the concept of “there is always a bigger fish”, the mighty mouse is set to become The Godfather of Facebook games.  And while the ownership of Facebook is in dispute in the New York State Supreme Court, the number of users aren’t – that figure just hit 500 million users.  So if all these people are indeed “hopping on the band wagon” that is one hell of a big bandwagon. And now we know who will be driving that wagon.  None other than the mouse that roared, that mighty Disney Marvel who is set to make Playdom an offer they can’t refuse.

This doesn’t, of course, mean that anyone here at No Prisoners, No Mercy has to be happy with the prevalence of social games that are usually so sickly sweet that playing one game is enough to give a glucose overload to population of a major city.  Yes, we have played them (so we know whereof we speak) but not of our own accord. In my case my Facebook page (long since abandoned) was shanghaied by a friend who introduced me to The Sims and Farmville.  I owe her a debt for the former, and I still speak to her despite the latter.

So it seems that Facebook games are, sadly, here to stay – I guess I need to find a new hobby.

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather

[posted for Julie Whitefeather by The Webmaster]