Facebook周二晚间在针对游戏开发人员举行的活动上宣布，将对其社交游戏架构做出一系列更改。

与以往一样，此次更改也引来一片争议之声。即便如此，有分析指出，为解决其游戏所面临的问题，此举势在必行。这也意味着Facebook将继续在用户体验和第三方开发人员的需求之间需找平衡点。

social game

Facebook游戏所面临的问题：顾此失彼

最大的改变体现在开发人员获得用户的渠道上。此前，Facebbok已经大量削减提供给开发人员的渠道。现在，游戏信息只会显示给其他正在玩相同游戏的朋友，即Facebook游戏玩家与好友分享游戏的同时，不会打扰那些不玩游戏的好友。

Facebook表示这样做的目的是意识到Facebook上游戏玩家和非游戏玩家是两个截然不同的群体，据统计，非游戏玩家的数量已经超过2亿人。

Facebook首席执行官马克·扎克伯格（Mark Zuckerberg）指出尽管数以亿计的用户喜欢Facebook上的游戏，但另一方面也有大量的用户对此并不感兴趣。

今后，Facebook游戏玩家将可以自由地与好友分享游戏的挑战和进度，而不必担心非游戏玩家好友受到打扰。

KlickNation CEO及合伙创始人马克·奥特罗（Mark Otero）表示此举将会创伤开发人员的积极性，并且这种改变太过突然。尽管如此，他认为从总体上这种改变有利于网络和用户体验。

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其他两项新游戏特征

Facebook的改变还将带来两项新特征：

更为智能的书签功能：用户使用量最大的应用将被自动收藏，并且应用自身不再请求用户进行收藏。

更为突出的标记功能：在用户有未完成的游戏任务或为回应的游戏邀请的情况下，用户主页的书签上就会突显出一个标记，下次游戏时会提醒玩家。

Facebook的新游戏团队

另一变化体现在Facebook的组织结构上。该公司游戏团队产品经理杰瑞德·摩根斯坦（Jared Morgenstern）表示其目前正在完善公司的游戏团队。Facebook拒绝透露团队的规模，表示将从各个部门抽调力量。该团队除负责游戏架构和功能的开发工作外，还将与Facebook的虚拟部门展开紧密合作，为公司获得更大的未来收入来源。

Facebook revealed a set of changes to its social games infrastructure at an event for game developers at the company headquarters on Tuesday night. Each change to the gaming infrastructure in the past has stirred up controversy, and this time was no different. But for all the trouble associated with games, Facebook clearly needs them. So the company continues its delicate dance between user experience and the business needs and wants of third-party developers.

The Problem With Facebook Games: A House Divided

The biggest change was to the channels by which developers acquire users. In the past, Facebook had cut down severely on the ‘viral’ channels available to developers, distribution channels like filling users’ news feeds with updates about their friends’ actions in the social games they are playing (of the “Timmy has just bought a cow” variety). Now, such updates will only be shown to other friends who are playing the same game as well.

Why the change? Facebook said it has seen a strong dichotomy on the network between non-gamers and gamers, who number more than 200 million. Opinions are heated on both sides.

Said chief executive Mark Zuckerberg: “Hundreds of millions of people like playing games on Facebook… but hundreds of millions of people hate playing games on Facebook. Games are this interesting duality.”

While Facebook gamers will get to see all the actions and updates of friends playing the same game, non-gamers will only see a “discovery story.” This type of update will note that a friend has started playing a game, but not any of the specific in-game actions they take.

“Discovery stories are going to be an important part of the user acquisition/distribution channel,” says Facebook vice president of partnerships and platform marketing Dan Rose.

While Facebook is attempting to give back to game developers some of the ability of the past to easily acquire new users from the network’s huge user base, some developers I talked to were not happy with the changes. Only allowing existing game players to see their friends’ game-playing updates makes it tougher for developers to reach out to new users who don’t play their games.

“This was a traumatic change,” says Mark Otero, CEO and co-founder of developer KlickNation, noting the suddenness of the changes.

But Otero thinks that in general the changes are good for the network and for the user experience, and likes the re-engagement features. Which leads to:

Other New Game Features

Two big things here: smarter bookmarks and more prominent counts. Bookmarks, on the column to the left of the news feed, will be made “smarter” in that the apps that people most often use are automatically bookmarked in that space. The apps themselves won’t need to request their users to bookmark them now.

“Counts” — for instance, the number displaying how many messages are unread also in the left column — will be displayed more prominently for games, when users have outstanding invitations or tasks uncompleted. Instead of a gray number, the counts will now appear in a slightly more visible blue box next to each game.

Both of these changes are aimed at helping make apps more prominent and accessible to users. This was previously the mandate of the Games Dashboard that Facebook launched at the beginning of this year. Dashboard apparently isn’t cutting it yet. Says Jared Morgenstern, product manager for the company’s games team, “We think the Games Dashboard kind of sucks right now.”

Facebook’s New Games Team

Another major change was organizational. Facebook’s Morgenstern says he is now heading up games team for the company. The company declined to say how big the team was, but said that it drew members from various departments. In addition to working on the games infrastructure and features, the team will work closely with the Credits team. Credits is Facebook’s virtual currency, and a potentially large source of future revenue for the company.

Playing Good Cop, Bad Cop With Game DevelopersFacebook also played a little good cop, bad cop with the worried developers at the event.

Delivering a conciliatory message, Rose said, “We recognize some of the things in the past have led to reducing the distribution of games and having traffic go down, and that sent the signal that maybe we didn’t care about games.” But Rose pointed to the new Games Team saying, “There’s no better way to demonstrate commitment in this company than to assign engineering resources to this area.”

In contrast, Zuckerberg took the offensive, trying to steer the conversation away from concern about lack of viral channels to an implicit challenge to developers to create better games.

“Early on it was all virality, so much so that developers would use virality as a channel to re-engage people because [in-game] re-engagement was so weak,” Zuckerberg said. “Now games that are good, that are high quality that people want to use for a long time — people will want to stick with them.”

Necessary Evil, Irksome Good

The running theme of the night was the duality of games and the difficult balancing act Facebook is playing. That games are so divisive on the social platform shouldn’t be a surprise, games were not part of Facebook’s original DNA. One mini-shocker Zuckerberg revealed at the event was that games are one of the biggest factors that negatively affect user engagement on the network.

But clearly, there are people who are addicted to Facebook games, as Farmville’s more than 60 million monthly active users can attest to. Not only do games help Facebook keep a large segment of its population coming back, they are also an increasingly important source of revenue. Farmville-maker Zynga for instance is estimated to make $600 million this year, mostly through sales of virtual goods. Facebook Credits is now being implemented on all the major developer’s games. Facebook takes a 30% cut of each transaction, which will eventually make games a significant revenue source for the company. In addition, games will help legitimize the Credits system, if many start using it. I speculated that this will be important to Facebook if it makes a play to become a payments provider on the Web for digital goods.

Expect Facebook to continue making changes to its games platform as it navigates these tricky, but important, waters.(source:forbes/netease)