Farmville is more popular than racism, and Zynga knows it. The studio is making shedloads of cash from Facebook and iOS, but will it ever come to consoles? Apparently not, since chief game designer Brian Reynolds believes Farmville is too big for the meager likes of Xbox Live.
“The thing that seems to make social gaming and networking magical is the fact that all my friends are potentially there and they might see the things that I’m posting or doing or expressing,” he said. “[Xbox Live’s] too small a demographic … 20 or maybe even 30% of my friends might have an Xbox 360, but effectively 100 percent of them have Facebook and effectively 100 percent of them have a mobile phone. Of them, probably 90 percent have a smartphone.
“So when you think about the social potential of a platform … if we made a game on Xbox Live, I think — forgetting about the fact that I might have an artificially high percentage of friends that do it because of what my profession is – the number of anyone’s friends that’s going to be able to participate in the social experience is going to be a very small number so the amount of social capital that there is isn’t going to be very high.”
Seems to me that the biggest problem with Xbox Live is it’s harder to spam all your friends and co-workers with requests for turnips, which seems to be the driving force of the game. Still, the idea of a game developer, even Zynga, calling Xbox Live “too small” is pretty freaky stuff.
Xbox Live ‘Too Small’ for Zynga [Industry Gamers]
