14 DAY TRIAL // Peter Moore, the chief operations officer working at Electronic Arts, believes that despite the problems that Zynga is currently having, the video game market can still support social games, as long as they offer the audience a quality experience.
The executive tells Eurogamer that, “The overheating and overhyping of social gaming over the last year-and-a-half has put this thing on the front pages of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and the Times of London, and has made this an interesting focal point for our industry. I think it just got a little overhyped. And now the demise is being overhyped the opposite way.”
Moore believes that Zynga is not representative for the entire genre, despite the fact that the company managed to capitalize on the trend early and has made a lot of money from it.
Electronic Arts itself is well positioned to take advantage of the changes in the social game genre, which is increasingly moving towards the mobile medium.
The executive, who was previously in charge of the EA Sports division, adds, “From your Phone to your PC to your 360 or your PS3 back to your tablet, that is the future.”
According to him, gaming should be seen as a service rather than a product and players need to have the freedom of taking their game to any device they own.
Zynga has managed to hit gold with the launch of titles such as Farmville, which boosted the popularity of Facebook and managed to get a lot of players to pay via micro-transactions.
Since then, the developer has failed to deliver equivalent hits and is currently in financial trouble.
Electronic Arts has recently announced that it is using the resources of the PopCap Games studio for a new generation of mobile-oriented social games, which will be launched in 2013.