Players of Ngmoco's We Rule game can purchase virtual game speed-ups with "Mojo." The company told CNET that one user spent more than $12,000 on Mojo purchases. "If you assume the world of We Rule has a sense of real-world scale to it, people have laid enough roads to wrap around the Earth three times," Ngmoco's vice president of marketing Clive Downie said in an interview. More staggering than these numbers is the size and economic force these virtual worlds now command.
The current average time spent playing the game is 45 minutes per user, per day-well over FarmVille's 15 minutes. They've spent 2.2 billion minutes harvesting crops, erecting buildings, and sending jobs to fellow players. We Rule, an iPhone and iPad-only game developed by San Francisco-based Ngmoco long after Zynga's FarmVille took hold, now has more than 3 million registered users. Katie also said that she plays a handful of other online games including PopCap's Bejeweled Blitz, which can also be played on Facebook and as of April had an average play time of 43 minutes a day by its users.įarmVille's dominance of the social-farming games world hasn't gone unchallenged. It wasn't even fun-just addicted clicking," she said. "I justify this as being my only source of entertainment, and I'm forgoing movies and dinners out, so it's OK," she told us.īefore playing FarmVille, Katie said, she spent 18 months playing Zynga's Mafia Wars game before quitting cold turkey. And she's spent about $2,000 on in-game currency expenses-roughly $100 a month. Since beginning to play the game last August, she's reached an unusually high level 111 in the game-40 levels beyond where the game offers incentives in the form of newly unlocked features. if a new feature is out, and I'm excited about it," she said. "I've been known to stay up all night until at least 5 or 6 a.m. and proceeding to play the game until well past midnight, though her sessions can often go longer. She told CNET her daily FarmVille routine consists of waking up around 10 a.m. One of those players in the small percentage we'll call Katie S.
"The large majority of our players never pay anything to play our games," Zynga told CNET, and that those who do account for only a "small percentage." With the virtual money, people can accelerate play or purchase goods that otherwise would take longer to acquire. Farm cash and farm coins can be purchased for anywhere from $1 to $50 in real money via credit card, PayPal, and Facebook's Credits currency platform. The game can be played for free, but players can get an edge by paying. Typical activities for these users involve planting and harvesting crops, reorganizing, and helping to tend friends' neighboring farms. More than 63 million active users each month spend an average of 15 minutes a day in the game, Zynga told CNET News. One of the most popular social-gaming titles is FarmVille, a game designed by San Francisco-based Zynga that users can play in Facebook and on iPhones. alone and projected three times that revenue in 2011. A research report from eMarketer in June said social games generated more than $725 million last year in the U.S. The companies behind these titles are raking in millions of dollars from people who toil on land that doesn't even exist, and that number continues to grow. Indeed, one individual who CNET spoke with said that it's all she does between waking up and going to bed-and that's every every day of the week. On average, the users of these types of games are spending anywhere from a few minutes a game to the greater part of an hour. They can be addictive: many users come back at least once a day to micromanage their farms and deal with other users' requests. People spend not just real time but also real money growing these crops in virtual farming games that combine the allure of both games and social networking in what is usually a cute and deceptively simple package. Now we have magic cauliflower and super berries, too-and even though they can't be sold at market, some people still toil from dawn to dusk cultivating them. Last century's cash crops included tobacco, cotton, and sugar cane. Ngmoco's "We Farm" virtual farm game for the iPad.
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