MySpace Bets on Gaming For a Comeback

(MoneyWatch)  MySpace, once the 500 pound gorilla of social networking, has been in retreat for over a year. Outmatched by Facebook on the outside, and faced internally with executive departures and creative squabbles, the Fox subsidiary has struggled to define exactly what it wants to achieve.

Now a new plan is taking shape under co-presidents Jason Hirschhorn and Mike Jones, who took over after the recent resignation of CEO Owen Van Natta. Today at the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco, Jones showed off a new design that heavily promotes games.

Games are just one type of application that can run on today's social networks. When Facebook initially pulled ahead of MySpace, its main strength seemed to be better design -- the two social networks did essentially the same thing, but Facebook felt classier and more exclusive. Yet it wasn't long before Facebook had another advantage: apps created by outside developers, that attracted millions of new users.

MySpace has an app platform of its own, but Facebook has been more successful at attracting both developers and users to its platform. One way to read the MySpace redesign is as an attempt to one-up its arch-rival; while Facebook's most successful apps have mostly been games, MySpace now emphasizes them more, having replaced a tab marked "Apps" with a new one simply called "Games".

Monomaniacal fixations are nothing new to MySpace, which secured its earlier victory over Friendster by focusing on music. But even if the social network pours all its resources into gaming (Jones says he wants half of all MySpace users to also play games soon), it may not have an easy time beating Facebook.

In fact, Facebook is already showing signs of an increased focus on games. At the same conference Jones used to announce the MySpace redesign, Facebook platform manager Gareth Davis put out a call to game designers to create an "iconic, defining game" on the social network.

The request has some game designers scratching their heads. After all, the hit Zynga game FarmVille already has over 80 million players on Facebook alone, and has become something of a cultural touchstone, picking up thousands of media mentions in 2009 after its mid-year launch. That smashing success has certainly made the game an icon to a generation of hungry young developers.

But Jones, like many others, expects social games to become much larger yet. FarmVille is already one of the world's largest games, but there are billions of people who have never been exposed to online gaming -- and those people are rapidly joining social networks. And FarmVille, despite its success, it still a fairly simplistic game, as are almost all other games on social networks.

Given the size of the market, and the passion that new users (most of whom have never played an online game before) are showing for games, it is certainly a smart move for either MySpace or Facebook to emphasize them more.

But it's also possible that in their haste to outdo each other, the two social networks will end up creating a new competitor. It's easy for developers to also host their games on their own websites. So if the social network users spend all their time playing games, then why visit the social network at all?