Facebook on the hunt for 'iconic' game

Social networking giant Facebook has announced that it is on the lookout for a developer to create an ‘iconic’ game that will become synonymous with the Facebook site.

Over the past couple of years the social networking site Facebook has gone from strength to strength, and now boasts hundreds of millions of subscribers from around the world. Whilst many people use Facebook to post messages or post or view photos there are many others that spend a lot of time playing the various games and quizzes that are available through the site.

As broadband take up improves, and the plans to introduce universal broadband are put into place, a rising number of consumers may start to subscribe to Facebook, so its popularity stands to become even greater. Officials from Facebook have now thrown down the gauntlet to games developers, and with the expected increase in traffic coupled with the popularity of games on the site, wants developers to create an ‘iconic’ social game for Facebook that could become huge like games such as Mario or Halo.

On the opening day of the Game Developers Conference Gareth Davis said: “The next killer game is still out there and this game will come from you. When we look at every major game platform, we see that there is an iconic defining game on that platform whether it’s Sonic or Mario or Halo. And while there are some great games on Facebook today, no one has yet produced the iconic game for [it]. The Facebook Mario is still out there.”

He added that it was difficult to predict what the ‘iconic’ game would look like, but said: “We know it’s going to be built on real identity and around real friends. It is a game that will appeal to everybody across the board and tap into social emotions and generate feelings you have never felt before. It will probably be personal to you because it will tap into all that information you have about you on Facebook.”

Source – BBC