Online Gaming

Social Media Online Gaming

Social Media Online Gaming

Introduction

The video game industry is exploding worldwide. DFC Intelligence defines the video game and interactive entertainment industry as including console hardware and software, portable hardware and software. PC game software, online game subscription revenue, digital distribution of games and advertising revenue for games are part of video game industry. In 2006 this market passed $30 billion in worldwide revenue and is forecasted to reach about S4 billion by 2012. This will make the video game industry about as large as the global music business where consumers are usually billed in much smaller increments. It may surprise some people to learn that the largest market for online games has been South Korea. With social media, circulation is a crucial and defining measure of meaning and import. A third complicating parameter is introduced by on-line games, for example MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games) in which the texts are extraordinarily dynamic, the social networks are crucial to the substance of the game, and the interactions of players with one another are actually constitutive of the gaming experience.

When it comes to online games, most consumers think of the expensive subscription games like World of Warcraft. However there is growing interest in business models like the ones found in East Asian markets such as China and Korea (Reeves 2009). In a country of 47 million people, a single game, called Lineage, has been known to attract as many as two million users in a given month. This is six percent of the country and would be comparable to 18 million people playing a single game in the United States.

The National Geographic Society (NGS) has also set a gaming department on its site for different age groups. Among the most popular games listed in it are Cosmic Card Challenge, Zipper's cave maze, Pluto's Secret and Brainteasers.

The Global Trend of Social Media Games

Following the Korean example, China's online game market has emerged as one of the worlds largest, spawning several companies listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange. The Chinese market has largely followed the same path from pay-to-play MMOG to virtual item purchase-powered games. Chinese games are also notable for their sheer size.

The country's most popular game, NetEase's Fantasy Westward Journey, has been known to draw over one million users at the same time. Social games are also much broader than the social network games (IBM 2007). Many social media sites have taken on several of the properties of games: YouTube, LinkedIn, and Facebook are three examples that use some of the same elements that make games work so well. Amazon has reinvented electronic commerce by incorporating social and game elements (Jenman 2008). Companies can adapt similar techniques to create your their social media games that deliver business results, harnessing the power of social relationships and emotion.

Since the early twentieth century, online gaming has become a massive cultural phenomenon, both domestically and globally, establishing itself as a huge Internet-based leisure activity and a popular and expanding form ...