Stealing Farmville's thunder one player at a time. 1 down, 80 million to go.
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David Barnes
Zombie Farm iPhone Game Adds Social Features, Shoots Up Top Grossing Chart
Zombie Farm (Social Update) —Zombie Farm is another older, and popular app that also received a significant update. Currently ranked at #12, the game, which allows users to build a farm and grow their own army of zombies, is now social. Updated July 28th, Zombie Farm lets users connect and play with their friends viaFacebook, email or username. Beyond visiting one another’s farms, players can now send gifts, receive daily rewards, and even engage in a game of “zombie tag” with their friends’ zombies. Monetizing through in-app purchases, Zombie Farm is developed by California-based studio, The Playforge, told us they have more than 20 million players for Zombie Farm.
Adding social features to an already successful game (with enough players for social to make sense) pushed this free to play hit to new heights.
Facebook's Game Chief Sean Ryan: "take a single player category and make it social".
He points to Playdom's hidden object game Gardens of Time as a good example of a game that targets the casual Facebook audience in a surprising way. "These guys are killing it. Absolutely crushing it on DAU, monetization, engagement, virality, because they took what was formally a single player category and made it social."
Facebook is clearly taking off as a broader gaming platform, and his hope is that it will bring success to smaller developers with more targeted offerings. "I'm so excited to see the developer community starting to realize that, and that's my mantra is, 'Push something that you really, truly believe in,' and, as well, get better at monetization. You should be able to have a successful smaller game company on us."
Sean Ryan commends Playdom for taking a single player genre and making it social. The challenge is to rethink the established genre from the ground up, finding compelling ways to make it social and free-to-play, rather than just a single player game embedded in Facebook.
