We mentioned earlier that Command and Conquer would most likely have Facebook features. But what about the games already on there?
It might surprise you that Doom is already an app. You can check it out here: Doom App. We were having a little trouble getting it to run though.
What is even more surprising is that big franchises are turning into Facebook games. The much beloved Dungeons and Dragons games have already partially gone the Facebook route with Heroes of Neverwinter.
You can also read about some very revealing quotes made about Command and Conquer here: C&C. This shows you just how much publishers want Facebook to be a huge part of their company. They will put some legendary franchises on it.
But the main question is, why? Facebook actually has negative connotations with the most hardcore of gamers. The answers are simple, but there are many of them. Let’s go down a list here:
- Traditional gamers have proven unreliable. They pirate, they whine, they resell games. Nintendo showed everyone you can be successful without appealing specifically to them. As did the angry birds team. Non-gamers often buy as much or more if you get them. As someone who considers himself a hardcore gamer, this is a tough but true realization to come to.
- Microtransaction models for games are huge right now. Paying to win is a very successful venture that a lot of people are involved in. It works, but for how long?
- Facebook is huge and you can get marginal ad revenue off the games. However the exposure you get from such games? Worth a tremendous amount of money. It is worth doing just to get a chunk of the crowd.
- There are too many smaller reasons to even mention. It’s the wave of the future, low production costs and success of other franchises are just a few of them.
This approach is actually rather stupid if you don’t have a niche which could fit in with the Facebook crowd. Atari is doing some risky business here, and if someone like From Software were to do this they would fall flat on their faces. However if this can work for you game, it could be an easy path to success.
