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Nicholas Lovell
Home   >   Sandbox   >   Social games market worth $1 billion annually, says Playfish

Social games market worth $1 billion annually, says Playfish

By on September 3, 2009

That’s the bold claim from Playfish co-founder Sebastien de Halleux in an interview with the Financial Times this morning.

His claim is an estimate “based on average revenues of $1 per month from the 20 per cent to 40 per cent of the 500m western users of social networks who play games regularly”, according to the FT.

The interview gives further insight into the company:

  • Most Playfish are released with only 20% of the final features in place
  • Playfish has tripled in size so far this year
  • Playfish is “vastly profitable”
  • The company has 45 million active users each month. (That’s nearly 20% of all Facebook users who play a Playfish game each month)
  • Playfish does very little marketing. (I’ll be posting soon about the contrast with Zynga, which spends a lot of money on marketing.)

About Nicholas Lovell

Nicholas is the founder of Gamesbrief, a blog dedicated to the business of games. It aims to be informative, authoritative and above all helpful to developers grappling with business strategy. He is the author of a growing list of books about making money in the games industry and other digital media, including How to Publish a Game and Design Rules for Free-to-Play Games, and Penguin-published title The Curve: thecurveonline.com