目前，在众多Facebook游戏应用中，排名前100的Facebook游戏中仅有5款是可以进行即时互动的同步游戏。而在Facebook社交网站前25个应用中，Zynga Poker是唯一的一款同步游戏。每周，Facebook社交网站都会涌现出各种类似的不同步“社交”游戏。不论是在FarmVille中耕地，播种，浇水，收获，还是在Cafe World中洗锅，买菜，烹调，上菜。这些看似有趣不同的游戏体验其实不过是换汤不换药罢了。

现在，Facebook社交网站中充斥着各种热门游戏的“克隆”品。农场经营类游戏有FarmVille，Farm Town和My Farm，动物园管理类游戏有zoo World, Zoo Paradise和Zoo Kingdom。

据游戏邦了解，各种社交游戏开发商互相模仿游戏机制，但最终归结为两个主要目标：病毒式传播和货币化。换句话说，社交游戏公司的目的就在于吸引2%的付费玩家，而让其他98%的玩家通过发送各种垃圾公告“钓大鱼”。然而从今年起，情况有所变化啦！

今年初，Facebook社交网站开始对病毒式传播渠道渠道采取了严厉的禁用措施。这迫使热门社交游戏FarmVille的用户流量在过去一年中下降近一半，日活跃用户也从原有的3200万下降至1600万。或许有人会以为这部分玩家是腻味了FarmVille，投入到Zynga旗下其他游戏？不是的。有数据显示，今年2月Zynga旗下全部应用的日活跃用户总计高达7000万人，然而在Facebook禁用病毒式传播渠道后，该数据下降率高达39%，仅余4300万。但是，Facebook社交网站并没有就此罢手，最近又将Game Feed Story从非游戏玩家的Feed中移除，缩小了News Feed作为病毒式传播方式的能力。

另一方面，在促进游戏增长的支付市场也显示出了长期的下降趋势。在Facebook发展成熟的美国市场，由于病毒式传播渠道的禁用，各大社交游戏开发商为了获取更多的用户资料，不得不在广告上投入大量资金。

我认为，在未来的1到2年期间，社交游戏领域的发展趋势在于开发即时同步游戏。这一领域较之目前的非同步游戏拥有更广阔的发展空间，可以融入更多的游戏机制。

我之所以这么认为首先是因为人类是群居动物。不论是球类，棋牌类等游戏中，人们都喜欢一起进行游戏。

事实上，很多社交游戏业内人事并不看重玩家是否在与现实生活中的朋友一起游戏。

最近一份PopCap玩家报告指出“网友”和“网上陌生人”在游戏玩伴调查表中分别名列第2和第3。另外，76%的玩家表示更喜欢与同龄人一起玩游戏。这意味着什么呢？实际上，与不认识的人一起玩游戏的过程就是一个交友过程，而人们一般都更倾向于同龄人。该报告还指出，70%的玩家都会在玩游戏的过程中结交新网友。

Facebook has the wrong social Graph for synchronous games

就这一情况来看，Facebook并不具备针对即时同步游戏的社交图谱，人们如诺想在Facebook社交网站进行即时同步社交游戏总是会遭遇“三缺一”的狼狈境地。目前，平均每位Facebook用户拥有好友130名，一般在线的仅有5到10名，其中愿意玩游戏的可能仅仅只有2到3名，而与玩家默契十足愿意同时进行同款游戏的好友几乎为0。

这也正是为什么Facebook社交网站前25款热门游戏中仅有1款是即时同步游戏。如诺要真正地适应即时同步游戏，正确的社交图谱应侧重于“想要结交的人”而不是“已经结识的人”。

据游戏邦了解，myYearbook的社交图谱恰恰与Facebook相反，汇集着许多“想要结交的人”。myYearbook拥有2500万用户，随时都有10万用户在线。myYearbook的社交图谱更为广泛，这也就意味着当您想玩某款游戏时总是能找到同伴。

当然，拥有近5亿用户的Facebook不会轻易陷入危机，但要将其打造成“游戏交友”平台并不容易，首当其冲的就是各种用户隐私问题。

游戏邦认为，在未来的1至2年中，Facebook内外的即时同步游戏可能面临重大的创新变化。社交游戏不再单纯依凭病毒式传播渠道。未来，社交游戏将变得更加有趣，社交游戏将真正实现“社交化”而不是“病毒化”。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，转载请注明来源：游戏邦）

Only five of the top 100 Facebook applications are synchronous games – enabling users to interact in real time – and, of these, only one is in the Top 25 – Zynga Poker. Every week, it seems, a new “social” game comes out with yet another take on the same asynchronous mechanics that we’ve seen a hundred times before: whether it’s plow land, choose seeds to plant, wait for seeds to grow, sell vegetables in Farmville or clean the stove, choose a dish, wait for the meal to cook, serve customers in Café World, there’s a reason so many Facebook games play like different versions of the same game.

Because it works. Or does it?

Just about every Top 100 game has multiple Top 100 clones. From Farmville, Farmtown, and My Farm to Zoo World, Zoo Paradise, and Zoo Kingdom, every developer is copying the same mechanics, and sometimes the same game, over and over again.  What’s more, these games all optimize for the same two things: virality and monetization.  Or put another way: get 2 percent of your users to pay you and convince the other 98 percent to spam their friends in search of more “whales” to pay you. And while it’s a great trick, it’s also on the way out.

Facebook has shown only one trend with respect to its viral channels: choking them off.  Traffic has fallen in half at Farmville in the last year, as Daily Active Users (DAU) dropped from 32 million to 16 million according to Appdata.com.  Those users aren’t on new Zynga games either; they are gone. Overall Zynga DAU, across all of its applications, peaked at 70 million in February of this year. Since then, activity on Zynga games has declined 39% to 43 millions users. The last nail in the coffin for virality may have been Facebook’s recent move to suppress game feed stories from appearing in the feeds of non-players – effectively removing the News Feed as a viral channel.

If that weren’t bad enough, the other pillar of the social games growth engine – paid marketing – shows a less-than-favorable long-term trend too. In certain maturing Facebook markets, like the U.S., Facebook will soon have signed up everyone who could possibly want a Facebook account. As this happens, page view growth must flatten out, eliminating the dramatic increases in the supply of new advertising impressions each month. At the same time, demand for Facebook ads will only grow as advertisers are just beginning to reach this gigantic, data-rich audience, pushing advertising rates up and putting marketing-dependent social gaming strategies under water.

But of course Facebook knows this too. It knows its most popular games are not optimized for things that must be important to them – like time on site and human interaction. And for as much money as these games make, who would doubt that Facebook could find another way of making billions of dollars with its audience instead of continuing to nurture these asynchronous, asocial games?

Which is why if I had to bet on any trend in social gaming for the next 12 – 24 months, I would bet on synchronous games. The space is wide open and has a lot of favorable dynamics.

One of the more enduring trends is that humans are social – and they like to play games together. Whether it’s around a pool table, a basketball court, a monopoly board, or a card table, people like to meet each other and often form deep relationships out of the serendipity of gaming: whether it’s a random pairing in a pool tournament or a person who happens to be on the basketball court at the same time. And while we may not explicitly think of eight-ball, basketball, monopoly, and cards as synchronous games, that’s what they are.

Many in the industry don’t appreciate just how much users enjoy playing games online with people they don’t know in real life. Recent research from the Information Solutions Group’s study of Popcap gamers found that the #2 and #3 most popular groups of people to play social games with are not people they know in “real life,” but instead “online friends” and “online strangers.” What’s more, 76 percent of people prefer to play with others of around the same age. Why? Because the point of playing with people you don’t know is to make new friends, and people generally make friends around their age. The study also found that more than 70% of people made new online friends by playing games together.

But at the moment, at least, Facebook has the wrong social graph for synchronous games. Facebook users simply do not have enough friends to always find someone ready and waiting to play a game with them right now, and Facebook has not shown an interest in helping people to connect beyond their real-life social graph. The average Facebook user has 130 friends, only 5-10 of which are online at any given time, and only 2-3 of which are likely to want to play a game right now. When you consider how many of your friends want to play the game you want to play right now, with you, the answer is roughly 0. So it’s no surprise that only 1 of the top 25 Facebook games is synchronous today. The right social graph for synchronous games isn’t the people you know but the people you want to know.

The myYearbook social graph, on the other hand, is the people you want to know – people of a given age, gender, and location. With 25+ million members and 100,000+ online at a given time, our social graph is much wider, which means there are always people who want to play the same game as you at the same moment.

It was this difference in social graph that led us to the key insight behind our own gaming platform: that WHO you play is as important as WHAT you play. Our gaming platform, myYearbook Live, blends real-time video with social games. It’s a synchronous gaming platform to meet new people where the person you play against is as important — or more important — than the game itself, as you can see in the video below. Our goal is to create relationships through social game play. myYearbook Live is currently in a limited Beta and will be rolled out to a wider audience in January.

Of course, with 500 million users, no one can rule Facebook out of any market, but transforming a network founded on private sharing with friends and family into a place to meet new people through gaming would not be an easy task. The incumbent privacy questions and concerns would probably be the most significant Facebook has ever faced, not to mention that Facebook has shown it doesn’t want to clutter up its core asset, your social graph of real-life relationships, with people you happened to meet in the context of a game.

In the next 12-24 months, I expect to see dramatic innovation in synchronous games – both on and off Facebook. As social games stop being rewarded for exploiting viral channels and as CPI arbitrage evaporates in the face of increasing acquisition costs, games will become more interesting. They will be optimized for retention, for time spent, and for human interaction, and for the first time, the most popular social games will be the most social – not the most viral. （Source：businessinsider）