Facebook is a big, crowded and often noisy place, so it may be unsurprising that many potential app developers are seeing their prospects for breaking through shrink as the network’s user base approaches 700 million users. Many are wondering if Facebook is now closed to developers altogether.
Early adopters of the social-game space, such as Zynga, Crowdstar and Playdom – known in the industry as part of Facebook’s “Top 10” – are still raking in all the users and much of the revenue, but rising ad prices, a cluttered market, and higher transaction fees are forcing smaller players elsewhere.
“For the most part, the window of opportunity for games on Facebook has closed,” said Chris Cunningham, CEO of Appssavvy, a firm that pairs marketers with app developers and one that has worked extensively with Facebook. “There was a three-year window for companies entering Facebook, but since Facebook opened their platform in 2007, each year has brought stricter restrictions and requirements that have changed the Facebook app marketplace forever.”
Cunningham said that developers can still enter the fray, but they should also look into other platforms where the opportunity to create a new hit game still exists.
As Facebook enforces stricter and stricter guidelines for developers, some companies are welcoming developers to come and build. Spil Games, one of the largest gaming platforms in Europe, works with 20 developers – compared with Facebook’s hundreds – but has just opened its own API, so developers can build on the network.
“What we hear is that developers are having a hard time finding the audience on Facebook,” said Spil CMO Oscar Diele, who sees 50 million gamers a month. “It’s getting more and more difficult to get visibility and grow an audience.”
Diele, who is a competitor to the social-media giant, said he’s seeing another trend – developers skipping Facebook altogether in favor of platforms that are specific to social games. Another huge gaming portal, Bigpoint, with 200 million users, also recently opened its API for producers in hopes of luring developers that might otherwise focus on Facebook.
To read the full article in Advertising Age, click here.
