Interviewed by Forbes magazine in preparation for the upcoming Game Developers Conference, platform manager for social network site Facebook Gareth Davis spoke on the rise and future of the social gaming front. Recently surpassing 400 million active users, the site’s new Facebook Connect platform could be a major game-building platform for major developers.
“Let’s say three of us are each playing the same game but on a different device.” Davis described, “The game will be tailored to the device. So if I’m playing the war game on my Xbox and I’m in the living room, where I have a big-screen TV, a great speaker system, a controller, maybe I’m playing the action sequence. Perhaps my friend is at a desktop PC with a computer screen, keyboard and a mouse, and she’s doing the strategic aspect of the game, like calling in air strikes to weaken the enemy before I get there. And maybe you’re on the iPhone, a touch and communication device, so you’re organizing the squads. Each of us is participating in the same game experience, but in a different way tailored to the power of the devices. We’re going to see really interesting examples of that starting this year. And that will be the future wave gaming: bringing everyone in no matter what device they are using.”
In terms of the site’s gaming future, Davis added, “we’re about to see…the next level of social game play…there will be a killer app for social games in the same way that Mario was for Nintendo, Sonic was for Sega and Halo was for Xbox. We’re going to have our Halo, our Mario, soon.”
Sounds really amazing…. if they can pull it off.
Plus i better not get facebook notifications every 3 seconds about a nuclear strike about to happen.
-Will