I have been a console gamer since I received my first console, a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), from my dad. It was the start of a life of long days with little sleep, gallons of cola, wires, NTSC / PAL problems and an empty wallet.

About half a year ago I got the chance to make a living of my passion, by joining TribePlay as a lead developer. This job opened a new world of gaming to me, the world of social gaming. Different definitions about what social gaming is circulate on the internet. At this moment social games are the games that can be played on a social network. Although the industry is still in its baby shoes compared to the console gaming industry, the userbase of it already outgrows the console gamers. Everybody has a Facebook account. There are 100,000,000 players playing every month on Facebook alone. Farmville has more unique players (80 million) in a month then all the sales of biggest selling console game of all time, Wii Sports (75 million copies). Everyone, including me, wonders: “Where is this industry going to be in five years”?
Atari 2600

Neil Vidyarthi, posted an interesting perspective (3 Ways the Social Gaming boom Is Imitating The Atari Gaming Boom) that the social gaming boom is imitating the gaming boom of the Atari 2600, which is considered as the godfather of modern console gaming. He was able to draw a few parallels between that era and the current era.

• The most popular games are inspired by traditional games
• No centralized review publications
• Graphics are dramatically improving with each game

Graphics were and will always be important in games, and it is always a race by developers to see how much visual firepower they can generate with the current technologies. I think this race really has started now for the social games. In the newest generation of games fully animated cutscenes, real-time Flash gameplay and more can be found.
However, for console games, the graphics attract the players, but the gameplay keeps the players and sells the game. Every console generation has its little gems (like REZ (Dreamcast), Katamari Damacy (PS2, see video), Patapon (PSP)) games that offer the player a unique and creative gameplay experience, although they might lack the visual display. I think gameplay will become more important for social games to compete on, especially if more and more centralized review publications of these games will show up on the web.

I have not seen this social-game gem yet, but as a player, I look forward to play this social-game gem, and as a developer, I hope it will say “created by TribePlay” :-)
Bart, Lead Java developer