The Return of the Space Cowboy

That's true - here's my belief about social media gaming in general, and I'm going to lump social media gaming and casual gaming into the same pool. I think I've lived through what will now be three, once-in-a-lifetime, major shifts in the economics of our industry.

The first was the emergence of the industry - I was one of the very first game developers, and got to ride the wave of the growth of the business, and was very fortunate.

Number two was the emergence of online games - Ultima Online, you could argue, is one of the reasons why that came to pass, but in the last ten years all of the growth in our industry has come from online games.

If you look at the economics, Ultima was one of the best-selling solo-player games in history. Ultima Online, however - which I could hardly get anybody to back, I had a very difficult time getting it started - when it did come out, it sold ten times more than all the other Ultimas combined.

By the way, as that market grew, World of Warcraft makes 10-to-100 times than Ultima Online ever made, so that's the scale of money we're talking about. We're talking about the entire first twenty years being dwarfed by not only my first game, but every game that has been successful since in online gaming.

The third wave is happening right now, with the emergence of the casual gaming customer, largely through the social media networks. What people in this industry better smarten up about, I think, is to recognise the power of this coming wave.

I actually think that in my career I made one stunningly strategic error, and that was being a big Apple fan at the time of the emergence of the IBM PC. I though that surely the consumers are as smart as I am and would realise what a superior platform the Apple was - I kept all of our development on the Apple and it nearly put us out of business, because we had to retool everything quickly as the IBM rapidly took over.

Well, the same thing is happening now with social media. There's no question that core gamers still exist, but the money flow is already shifting so quickly that if you look at the biggest games that are offered on social networks, not only is the player base again ten times higher than World of Warcraft, but the monetisation is now rapidly exceeding all of the games that all of us think of as traditional games - or "higher quality" games.

What's interesting about that is that traditional games people are looking at social media games as having game styles beneath them, they're too simple, or the quality of the offering just isn't inspiring - which, by the way, I have said too, so I understand people's reticence.

But I actually think that this growth wave in social media networks will quickly become the level of quality of offerings that we're more accustomed to, and it's going to become the financial powerhouse of the industry.

So you better choose to participate yesterday, or you will be left behind. I think it's that big a deal, and that important.

No, it will ultimately be part of one large continuum of what I'd call trivial games up through totally immersive, typical games. If you think about it, Tetris is quite capable as a social media game - even though it never was, but it's light enough to have been - but is also played by a lot of serious gamers.