From an article at ICO Partners, a game consultancy, comes their list of predictions for the trends of online games in 2009. The first bullet point explains why they think most games are going to trend towards being browser-based which I agree with completely. Here’s their list:
- Increased accessibility
- more and more users are reticent to downloads
- more fluid and more flexible user acquisition and viral funnel (can be propagated instantly just with a link)
- Runs on every OS and most hardware (when laptops and netbooks are growing the fastest)
- Runs in schools, offices, libraries, etc : more accessibility, less issues with installation of applications, and more social occasions to spread to schoolmates, colleagues, etc watching you play behind your shoulder.
- Opportunities for around-game advertising, which has more standards and is easier to integrate than in-game advertising
- Better opportunities for game/web integration
- Opportunities for mobile ports (iPhone, Android, etc)
- Less bandwidth costs to download huge clients, no need to send users to Fileplanet, hosting sites, etc…
- Generally cheaper to develop and test, allowing for better ROI and easier to recoup.
- More and more general applications are browser-based (Google Docs, YouTube, Hulu, emails, etc) and web habits taken now will influence game playing patterns in the future.
- For the same reason, as a very large part of kids’ game playing already happens on web-based games, there is little evidence that they will return to client based games in the future.
Those are pretty much all the same reasons I’ve recently been investing a good deal of my own time into Flash based technology. I’m excited and curious about monetizing small online games and what kind of market/audience it takes to have building a larger title make financial sense.