With News Feed changes, Facebook issues a friend request to social game makers
Months after it hurt social game publishers by taking away some of its best viral methods for spreading apps, Facebook is hoping to make amends. — The company is planning to announce today it will make changes …
Context & Ripple Effects
Earlier in 2010 Facebook stripped out several of the viral mechanics that had made social games grow explosively on the platform, and publishers felt the hit immediately. On September 21 the company convenes a special press event at its Palo Alto headquarters to announce News Feed changes explicitly framed as a way to help game makers regain that lost distribution — a rare instance of the platform publicly repairing damage its own policy caused.
The story travels widely on day one: TechCrunch live-blogs the event while Facebook's own Developer Blog carries the announcement under 'Making Games on Facebook Better.' A week earlier Facebook had also added a 'Not Now' option letting users defer friend requests, signaling that the company is trying to balance restored virality against the request-fatigue complaints that drove the original crackdown.
First-order effects
- Social game publishers get back viral surface area in the News Feed, directly reversing the growth slowdown caused by Facebook's earlier removal of key app-spreading methods.
- Users regain some control over the resulting flow, since the recently added 'Not Now' option lets them defer game-driven friend requests rather than accept or ignore them outright.
Second-order effects
- Publishers who had started hedging toward other distribution channels have an incentive to re-weight growth spend toward Facebook, since the platform controls both the viral loop and the rules that govern it.
- The commentary circulating this month that people's real social graph lives in their phone contact list rather than online networks puts pressure on Facebook to show developers that in-feed virality still beats mobile-native distribution.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Facebook's News Feed algorithm becomes the de facto regulatory body for the social-game industry: a single internal tuning decision can create or destroy entire publisher businesses, forcing developers to build around policy risk rather than any external standard.
- Each cycle of tightening and loosening teaches the developer ecosystem that platform access is conditional, pushing serious game companies toward diversifying across multiple platforms rather than betting on any single feed.
The trend: Platform owners are discovering that their distribution algorithms function as economic policy, and the app industries built on those feeds will keep rising and falling with each recalibration of the rules.