EA announced that it will be creating a version of its Madden football series for the 400 million users on Facebook. I discussed last week that Civilization is also being ported over for Facebook so it is apparent that the growing trend is to bring every game ever made over for play on Facebook. Civilization is a turn-based game that will work well on Facebook but I have to admit I don't really see how Madden will work and find bringing a franchise like Madden over to Facebook a colossal mistake. For starters, since users have to play on both offense and defense, both players would have to be online at the same time similar to Yahoo! games. One of the nice things about Facebook is that you don't need to be online at all times, you go to the site, find out who your friends think they look like/what they are watching on TV/the color of their bra, and you leave - that is the whole point. Would you have to be considered online for users to know you are available to play Madden? If they know I am online, they can chat with me and that is just not going to happen. As a side note, does anyone really put themselves online and available to chat?
Madden is the cornerstone of console and PC football games and its fans are damn dedicated to its attempt at realism and its expansive features. EA explained that they are going to simplify Madden and looking at how Facebook generally works, it will more than likely have be Flash based so there will be all kinds of limitations. Doesn't that defeat the purpose of Madden at this point? Even the first versions of Madden were expansive for their time so stripping down the game and simplifying it seems to go against the core ideology of the Madden series. And, let's face it, a simplified version of Madden sucks - has anyone played Madden on the DS, that one is stripped down and it's painfully boring.
With the plethora of games at EA's disposal, I am baffled why they would try to bring Madden of all games over to Facebook unless they are simply hoping to gain users by the name alone. Yesterday I discussed how the users of Facebook were getting older and that the younger generations were leaving for other social networks. One thing I neglected to mention (since it had no bearing on yesterday's post about Facebook's redesign) was that there are nearly 10% more female users to male users on Facebook. Couple older users with a higher percentage of female users and you begin to lose a great deal of Madden's core fanbase which is generally male, college-age gamers.
Why not bring a form of The Sims over to Facebook? Wouldn't that make more sense? The fanbase is both male and female, it has a simple UI that doesn't require a great deal of tech-savvy, and it could be played task-based like other Facebook games that doesn't require all players to be online at the same time.
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