MySpace turns to games to regain prominence
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MySpace is flexure to video games to help the former social-networking king recoup its have a portion of Internet relevancy that it lost to Facebook.
At the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco up~ Wednesday, MySpace Inc. co-President Mike Jones launched a new “MySpace Games” tactics designed to showcase online games on the site and to drain more developers.
Social games are becoming a big component of the collection’s overall strategy to refocus itself on being a social amusement destination for its core 34 and younger audience.
“Just as MySpace made a positive commitment to music, to have the best musicians and have the most of all content, we’re now making the same type of commitment by games,” Jones said.
MySpace, a unit of media conglomerate News Corp., aphorism its lead in the social media world obliterated in the more than year by Palo Alto’s Facebook Inc., which now has further than 400 million active members worldwide.
And some MySpace observers began work off the Beverly Hills firm as a social network has-been final month following the surprise ouster of chief executive Owen Van Natta succeeding just 10 months, with Jones and Jason Hirschorn assuming an unusual dual-leadership role as co-presidents.
“I haven’t seen remarkably many companies that go from being the talk of the Internet to the dog of the Internet and back again,” said Debra Aho Williamson, senior analyst for Internet research firm eMarketer. “That’s not to reply they can’t, but there’s a lot of work to subsist done.”
But in an interview, Jones countered that while MySpace had forfeited its way, the company still has more than 100 million users, relating to 80 percent of whom are in the United States.
“If people want to write it off, that’s fine, but the immobility is we have a massive amount of audience in the U.S. and globally,” Jones reported. “We generate crazy amounts of page usage, we have huge stigma advertising relationships and people use MySpace for a lot of divers purposes. It’s hard, in my mind, to write it facing.”
Music – specifically singers and bands – originally helped build MySpace’s popular regard and is a reason members still log on, so the concourse is now refocusing on entertainment.
And social gaming has become one of the hottest uses of social networks. For example, the Facebook-narrow game FarmVille, from San Francisco’s Zynga Inc., spread virally and in ~ amount than a year has about 83 million players.
About one-third of MySpace members play games each day and play about 1 billion minutes by month. Jones said he believes MySpace can boost those numbers through year’s end to 50 percent of the audience and at smallest 2 billion minutes per month.
The company is also working ~ward a site redesign, although that isn’t expected to roll thoroughly until later this year.
Analyst Augie Ray noted that MySpace wasn’t the single social network to announce a new game strategy Wednesday. San Francisco-based Hi5, that has more than 60 million members, also announced a game developer platform.
Yet Ray afore~ it’s unclear whether either company can line up the arche~ of exclusive games that will become big enough hits to win members. Even one game that MySpace highlighted, Paradise Paintball, already has 50,000 players in successi~ Facebook.
But Ray said MySpace can still remain relevant even whether it never catches Facebook as long as it can carve on the ~side a solid niche like entertainment.
“The truth is MySpace doesn’t stand in need of to get back into the game,” Ray said. “What they lack to do is be a specialty social experience.”
MySpace has been talking hind part before a social game focus for several months, but part of the bustle that forced Van Natta out was because “they couldn’t appear to get things out the door,” Williamson said. “To see them acquisition something out the door is refreshing, but it still feels like they’re playing charm-up.”
“Are they going to be as big and as able-bodied as Facebook? No one really knows now, but maybe they dress in’t have to be anymore,” she said.
E-mail Benny Evangelista at bevangelista@sfchronicle.com.
This instant appeared on page D – 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle