Why develop cross-platform social MMO games on a single shard ?

The gaming and social media press has extensively written about the transformation of the games industry and the impact of social networks on the demography of active gamers. However, the fact that most ´social´ games are restricted to one platform, such as Facebook, has not received much attention. Many MMO games found on a social network have fragmented communities, which restrict the emergence of true social MMO gaming.

I want more than clickable cows
This may be great for simple casual games with little player-to-player interaction other than the usual social features one would expect from a game on a social network. Developers and publishers who do so would severly limit their potential, though.

Gamers seem to be asking for something different and something more interesting than what is offered by the current crop of social games. Recently, we have seen a great decline in the number of people playing the ´classic´ casual Facebook games. Whether this a statiscal blip or a trend is, of course, difficult to say. Interestingly, a new type of game has been emerging on social networks. Acccording to AppData.com, five  games, that can be considered immersive MMOs, now have over one million active monthly users. These games are becoming more popular on social networks as they gain credibility and popularity with experienced gamers. For us at Gogogic, the emergence of the immersive social MMO is nothing new. We launched Vikings of Thule on Facebook in 2010, with the beta version released even further back in 2009. It has been on a single shard from the very beginning.

Come play with me
MMO games work well with social networks.  The ability to play the game with, or against a friend, adds more fun for gamers and benefits the developers or publishers economically. For the player, it delivers a more meaningful gaming experience. For the developer or publisher, it potentially means a higher amount of loyal players and lower marketing costs when the gamers recruit their friends to join and play.

The more the merrier
MMO games rely on a large number of players to populate their in-game worlds. More players within the game world mean a more efficient in-game market or economy and improved gameplay. In an immersive MMO game, there should never be a lack of players or friends with whom to interact. Most MMO games have more than one game world (or shards), which means that your friend could end up logging on to a different server than you. In our view, that may defeat the concept of the emerging social MMO gaming concept. We, of course, appreciate the need of sharding in special cases. For example, sharding can be benefitial when gameplay preferences and cultural differences are a factor. Sharding, however, can also prove to be very difficult to implement in highly complex MMO games with many interactions.  We would rather bring a good game to our players in a single persistent world.

Go forth into the social space
To maximze the size of a game‘s world and marketing reach, you may opt to have your game on more than one social platform. There are plenty of large platforms to choose from, including Facebook, hi5, Orkut, MySpace and QQ. The geograpchial reach, user behaviour and monetization potential of these platforms is, of course, different accross these different platforms.

Single world Vikings
In December 2010, we launched Vikings of Thule on the hi5 social network. From the very start, the game was on a single shard. This means that someone playing Vikings of Thule on Facebook can fight, trade and chat with players on hi5 and vice versa. He or she can always play with friends, regardless of how those friends access the game.