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Anyone hoping to see a version of social gaming phenomenon FarmVille make an appearance on Xbox LIVE Arcade might want to brace themselves for some bad news. FarmVille creator Zynga doesn’t believe the demographic of XBLA is large enough.
“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,” Zynga’s chief game designer Brian Reynolds told IndustryGamers.
“[Xbox Live’s] too small a demographic. Think about, of my friends, how many of them own an Xbox 360? Well, I’m a game developer and I even come from a triple-A space so we might even be in the double digits… 20 or maybe even 30 per cent of my friends might have an Xbox 360, but effectively 100 per cent of them have Facebook and effectively 100 per cent of them have a mobile phone. Of them, probably 90 per cent have a smartphone.
He added: “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.”
The numbers back Reynolds’ claims. As of December 2010 Xbox LIVE boasted 25 million members, a significant figure until compared to the 600 million Facebook users.
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