If you believe that no one is interested in making a fun Facebook game, you are dead wrong.
Didn't say no one was. Corporations like the one we're talking about aren't, however.
I didn't even say that. There is a clear difference between "there is a new audience that we had not appealed to before and now we have a new medium to do so" and "there is design space that is left unexploited and can improve our games". Both are happening on to Facebook but, in the case of my Mass Effect example, it's the latter. It's become quite clear that social interaction improves gameplay and Facebook games are just a proof of that.
You say these games introduce non-gamers to games in a good way. So what are you trying to tell me, that they're introducing non-gamers to new games like these? It's not that the games are appealing, it's just that they're there, as I've been saying. My friends were all playing Snake back when cell phones started coming out with two to three mini-games installed. I was curious about exactly what introduces them to more complicated games here.
Just because they happen to be there and the people surfing the site have nothing better to do than sit and chat with some friends, they might as well play the game while doing so. Nothing to lose, to say the least. I'm hoping that Tetris game gets a ton of attention, because it sounds a whole lot better than the games I'm talking about.
It's not a fun in the same manner than, say, BioShock is but it's a different type of fun.
I won't argue much about that. I do enjoy some flash games, as well as various types of games myself. It's just that I can't justify the quality produced in many of these so called Facebook games, but the people behind them still earn money on them.
No, it's not different. You're simply making them be different for no justifiable reasons.
No, it's you who are saying they're the same.
On the one side we have a game with an infrastructure. On the other side we have a social networking site with various games. You simply can't say they're the same.
A good social networking site can have a good game or a bad game available to its clients. A good game can have good or bad infrastructure. In both cases, it's the first part everyone is participating in, and the second is in various degrees optional. (Of course, you need to be able to chat in an MMO, but that's not the point. Stuff like that Twitter function would be an optional improvement to the game, while Facebook games are an optional improvement to the site.)
No, that's false. If two games who appeal to the same audience coexist, have comparable advertising and share the same business models, the best game will make more money and will get the more play.
If you talk about different audience, different business models, etc., that's only normal (and an orange/apple comparison).
And what I've consistently been writing here is that Facebook games, being available to a huge mass with no effort from the user-end is at a huge advantage here, so the quality of the games don't matter much until someone reinvents the model so that it allows proper games to be marketed the same way. Unless Facebook starts out a shop similar to Steam, I don't really see it happening anytime soon.
