Gamers need to pressure developers to ask for the feature

Oct 9, 2012 19:31 GMT  ·  By

Matt Wyndowe, who is the product manager linked to apps and games at Facebook, has announced that his company is interested in adding synchronous gameplay to the platform in order to expand the range of gaming experiences that can be offered on the social service.

Speaking to Gamasutra, the executive stated, “We'd love to help enable synchronous gameplay. Remember I mentioned that to-do list of things that we would love to help enable? That's absolutely one of them.”

He added, “Obviously, developers can do a lot on their end, but there's a lot of features that we'd love to put in their API to help enable that kind of stuff. That's something that's just such a clear win for users and developers; it's absolutely something that we'd love to do.”

It seems that Facebook only adds features when enough developers ask for them so players themselves need to make sure that more companies are interested in synchronous gameplay.

Most games on the social network rely on the player interacting with the game essentially in a separate game space from anyone else and synchronous gameplay would mean that the games would be closer to those traditionally offered on the PC or on home consoles.

Much of the early financial success of Facebook was linked to its gaming offerings, especially those coming from Zynga.

The titles were easy to play and quick and usually allowed most players to game for free while a minority was driven to pay for the experience.

Since then, Facebook and Zynga have grown apart from each other and are launching separate gaming websites.

The financial health of both companies has been called into question recently.

Facebook has been encouraging developers to create more complex games that have social elements and it might add synchronous gameplay in order to boost its player numbers.