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Social Gaming Invites New Users

The San Francisco Chronicle has a guide to social gaming, which has helped the online casual games sector expand its mostly female, older-skewing audience to the younger MySpace and Facebook generations. As one tech industry exec says, it takes about three minutes to play a game of Scramble on Facebook.

As social game creator Marc Pincus, founder of the Zynga Game Network, says, "My games are for people who don't have time for games. I don't make games for gamers." Indeed, many of the most popular social games borrowing (sometimes a little too heavily) from classic board games like Scrabble, Risk and Battleship.

For most game makers, tapping into the social graph and selling advertising against that information is crucial. For example, "Scrabulous," the controversial Scrabble-like game currently in hot water with Hasbro, is one of Facebook's most popular games, attracting $20,000 per month in advertising.

Read the whole story at San Francisco Chronicle »

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