Microsoft’s upcoming social gaming play
I was prompted to write this post after reading Mary Jo Foley’s post suggesting Microsoft might acquire Linden Labs to get in on the social gaming market before Google + Zynga eat it up. I had been tweeting about Microsoft’s upcoming social gaming moves for a while, but as it is not my primary interest, I avoided writing a post on it. Now, however, I feel the need to say a little more.
Firstly, Microsoft will not acquire Linden Labs. The company’s primary product SecondLife has been on it’s last legs for a while now, and that type of gaming is not the direction Microsoft is aiming at anyway. There is also the fact that Microsoft is getting out of a lot of things that it has been working on for years but did not gel well with its core strengths and were bleeding money. Case in point, the recent nixing or separation of various game studios, less popular Windows Live services, research not leading toward products etc. Microsoft is parternering up more often with companies who are good at what they do, like Wordpress, Google (Youtube), Facebook, etc. This does not mean that the company is not interested in social gaming. It continues to pursue things that it believes are strategically important or which have huge potential customer bases or which are natural extensions of its core strengths without spreading itself too thin. That is precisely why Microsoft is going to go hard at social gaming very soon, with many homegrown projects geared for launch. One only has to see Eric Schmidt’s recent interview with WSJ to understand why this segment is an important growth area for the bigwigs of the tech industry.
To that end, Microsoft’s Rare studio is solely producing social-oriented casual games, primarily for KINECT. Then there is Robot entertainment which is revamping Age of Empires to be social, and of course Flight will be rebooted as well soon. Besides that, the company is working on a social gaming portal for the web for which hiring is on at full steam. MGS mobile has been set-up to get the social going with Zune and Xbox Live enabled social games on WP7. There is that Facebook platform game which is in incubation right now.
Frankly, Microsoft has its plate full with social gaming projects right now, and I would be very comfortable guessing that they will enjoy a lot of success very soon as these projects launch. Microsoft has had a strong history in gaming for ages (quite unlike media favorites Apple and Google). It has the only successful social gaming service right now that people are willing to pay for. And it is positioned well for tremendous growth in customer base in the near future with what it is developing now. No need for a Second Life rehash then.
