14 DAY TRIAL // I loved Dragon Age: Legends when the game first landed on Facebook, mainly because it seemed to be the first social game based on a solid franchise that could sustain my interest in the long term and deliver some solid gameplay without forcing me to look around for others to play with.
I played the Dragon Age spin-off for more than six months on and off and launched it again as recently as three weeks ago, but it has now failed to keep my interest engaged enough to make me start it up again each day.
I liked CivWorld, mainly because it was created by Firaxis and there was talk of Sid Meier being directly involved, and I played it every day for about one month, trying to see whether the mechanics really could produce an experience that was related to the core Civilization franchise.
They could not and I never plan to run CivWorld again.
I played The Sims Social for about two weeks and struggled from the beginning with the necessity to recruit more and more friends in order to keep progressing and, again, I never plan to fire it up again.
The most recent Facebook game I tried to play was RISK Factions and it managed to hold my interest for even less time, maybe a full week, also because it relies too much on recruiting other gamers for menial tasks and because there were no clear mechanisms to keep players going in the longer matches.
My own experience might be the clearest example of why the long-term prospects of the social game genre are rather bleak: it’s easy to capture attention for a short while and then pump out content and rewards to keep someone interested, but what’s needed for real long-term engagement is creating compelling mechanics, something even the best of the recent crop of social titles fail to do.