In its latest report, Neilson reports that 10% of online time is spent playing games, second only to social networking which clocks in at a whopping 25% of time spent online. Email and instant messaging have a less predominant role in our time management since the same time last year.
And this makes a lot of sense given the way games and social networking are evolving. Facebook, the behemoth of social networking, has integrated both email functionality and IM-ing into it's site, allowing an all-in-one communication portal to known friends. Blizzard, the standard-bearer for the other rise in popular online usage, released RealID, allowing cross-game messaging between friends, status updates, basically all the staples of social networking.
Social networking and gaming are slowly coming to the same conclusion, that integration of more singular online mechanics into a social hub draws in more traffic than the summation of its parts ever would. And the two major competitors for our online attention will continue to mesh together as time goes on. Zynga's dominance of casual gaming attention should be a trigger to the computer gaming industry that the advertising (not to mention peer invites) have major potential to reel in new players to their games.
Imagine in the near future the current RealID facebook app links you into not only your RealID friends, but also all your facebook friends online, allowing you to IM and change your status while playing WoW. Achievements all pop-up on your status feed, with small bonuses (much like farmville and the likes) for your connected facebook friends who click the links, all the while advertising to your non-WoW playing friends all the benefits of logging in. Other big gaming companies, Valve and Bioware come to the forefront of my mind, could very well follow suit. If Google comes out with the rumored GoogleMe, there could be integration wars between them and facebook, much like the current console wars.
It may not happen to an extreme degree, but where social media sites are taking away from the more "classical" computer gaming industry's potential list of players, the onus is on the game companies to find ways to garner more interest, and involving themselves more heavily into the #1 online activity seems like the easiest solution. Cross-platforming between social media and online gaming means that the attention spent on both would sum up to about a third of our time spent online, and that is nothing to sneeze at.
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