近几年来，社交游戏风潮已经融入了成千上百万游戏玩家的日常生活，然而最近社交游戏开发公司PopCap Games却认为这一如日中天的游戏产业“黄金时代”即将走入尾声。

随着FarmVille和Mafia Wars等社交游戏每月吸引了上百万游戏玩家，越来越多的游戏开发公司开始进入社交游戏市场。这种发展趋势迟早会造成社交游戏市场的过度饱和，而Popcap Games的合伙人Jason Kapalka则认为现在的市场已经出现了饱和现象。随着越来越多公司的进入这一领域，社交游戏的“黄金时期”已经结束。

尽管Kapalka说“休闲游戏已经取得了初步的胜利”或“休闲游戏将成为游戏的主流”，但他并不赞同任意公司都可以进入社交游戏领域。然而由于FarmVille的大受欢迎，市面上就可以看到各种山寨版游戏如FarmTown或FarmZone等。因此，Kapalka看到市场饱和将给社交游戏领域带来的挑战。

FarmVille

在《魔兽世界》盛行时也出现不少克隆《魔兽》的游戏，它们其中不乏失败的作品。现在社交游戏面临同样的状况，成功的很少，大部分只能随波逐流。越来越多的游戏公司进入社交游戏领域，他们都认为可以盈利，然而不知不觉间市场就过度饱和了。这种情况在手机游戏，休闲游戏等领域都曾经出现过。它就标志着社交游戏领域已经开始逐渐走向了尾声。

然而Kapalka并不是指社交游戏会就此终结，只是发展最快的黄金时期已经过去。在将来的社交游戏领域竞争将更加激烈而艰巨。

Kapalka说，现在已经出现了类似迹象，现在不少病毒式传播的Facebook游戏都已经关闭。游戏开发商不得不回到原路上：购买广告，设计一些能真正引起玩家兴趣的游戏。

然而目前PopCap公司并无需为此担忧，该公司总是能开发出令人耳目一新的经典佳作如《植物大战僵尸》等。未来对于那些想要以模仿取胜的游戏开发公司将更加艰难。

植物大战僵尸

The social gaming craze may have taken over millions of people’s lives, but PopCap Games says the bubble is about to burst.

With social networking games like FrontierVille and Mafia Wars drawing in millions per month from every spectrum of the videogame audience, it was only a matter of time before so many companies tried to join in that the market became oversaturated. PopCap Games co-founder Jason Kapalka thinks that’s happening right now, and that social gaming has seen the end of its “golden era.”

Though Kapalka says it’s “pretty obvious that casual has kind of won” and that “casual is the new mainstream,” he doesn’t think just anyone will be able to jump into the social gaming market anymore. Whereas a game called FarmTown could once survive off of the success of FarmVille, and a FarmZone could survive off of the success of FarmTown, Kapalka sees a struggle ahead for those jumping on the bandwagon.

“There’s no shortage of terrible World of Warcraft clones that didn’t really work out, and you’ll see the same thing I think here,” he said in an interview with GamesIndustry. “A handful will survive, a bunch will fail. You’re definitely in the stage right now in social games where there’s a lot of bandwagon jumping, where everyone sees money, money, money and suddenly all these new companies appear … It happened before in mobile, it happened before in casual – in the past it’s tended to signal the beginning of the end.”

According to Kapalka, social gaming will never go away, but the wild frontier of social gaming has already been populated. He says it’s not the end “of the genre, but of the sort of golden era, where everything was a fresh blue ocean and all that stuff.” The future of social gaming will be “hard-fought” and “tough,” Kapalka thinks.

“You’re already sort of seeing that, a lot of the viral growth of Facebook games is now shut down, they have to do it the old-fashioned way, which is by buying ads or by having something that people are actually interested in playing and actually want to want to tell their friends about,” he points out.

PopCap will probably continue to do just fine because it’s always created incredibly addictive titles like Plants vs. Zombies that aren’t flashes in the pan. For those that seek to profit from the success of PopCap and other casual or social gaming developers, it may not be as easy in the future.