socialmedian: Spore launches on Facebook as EA tries social games expansion

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Spore launches on Facebook as EA tries social games expansion

Source: VentureBeat

Nov 05, 2009

Summary

Rumors persist that Electronic Arts plans to buy social gaming startup PlayFish to break into the fast-growing market of Facebook games.

In the meantime, EA continues to expand into social games on its own. Today, it launched Spore Islands, a spin-off from the create-a-creature Spore game in launched on the PC last year. It will be interesting to see if the game can get traction. Spore hasn’t set the world on fire as originally expected in the last year, though it has sold in the millions and EA is investing heavily in Spore sequels.

But the Facebook audience — as many as 300 million users — hasn’t fallen in love with brands. The top games are titles such as FarmVille, Cafe World, Restaurant Society, and Pet Society. Those games are from social game startups such as Zynga and Playfish. The games spread from friend to friend in a viral way, so advertising and brands don’t seem to matter so much — at least so far — on Facebook. The audiences, meanwhile, are huge, with more than 100 million active users among the top 10 games alone.

Spore Islands from EA’s Maxis st