nicksmith July 27, 2009 Features, Industry 424 views Comments Print This Post  Email This Post

Six years ago the social networking giant known as MySpace was launched. In the years following, seemingly everyone had their own page on the site (including PWN or DIE) and the term “MySpace’ing” was synonymous with contacting someone online. In October of 2008 MySpace reached its peak of success in the United States with 76.3 unique monthly visitors. That was almost one year ago.

Fast-forward to today, less than one year later and the scene is much different. No longer is MySpace the place to be to connect with people, in fact it may be considered “uncool”. Now Facebook is the top spot to follow your friends, boasting over 200 million active users and over 300 million unique visitors in the month of April this year. Also on the rise is Twitter, another growing platform that everyone seems to be giving a test run (including PWN or DIE… again).

MySpace is no longer the top destination to meet with your friends, so a new gameplan was in order to try and find a new niche for the platform. The economy and sagging traffic forced a shakeup from the top down including the ousting of co-founder CEO Chris DeWolfe and the laying off of 30% of the staff. The strategy for the new owners News Corp was to turn MySpace into an entertainment destination. One problem with that strategy is that YouTube is well ahead in the user-generated video segment, HULU is dominating licensed television content, and numerous music portals battle over the market for music. That leaves video games as a possible opening.

“None of the traditional media conglomerates are also significant video game players, so to speak, and I think that that’s the missing piece of the equation, particularly when you see how much time is spent playing games online,” News Corp’s Chief Digital Officer Jon Miller said at the Fortune Brainstorm: TECH conference.

It is clear that Miller sees an opportunity for gaming to resurrect the dying platform. “If you look at the big activities online, games right now is number
three,” he said. “Communications, search, games. So it’s clearly going to be a major focus.” MySpace already hosts casual games much like their competitor Facebook does, so it is unclear what MySpace intends to do to stand out in the space. Facebook currently has several million users that play their casual games already.

Analysts suggest that MySpace may have to make some acquisitions to move the needle in the gaming space. This may include either other existing online gaming portals, game creating studios, or maybe even existing libraries of games. Perhaps if MySpace strikes strong deals with major gaming publishers like Electronic Arts and Activision, they may be able to bring high quality exclusive titles to their community that is still far bigger than most.

Depending on how far MySpace is willing to take this idea, maybe they become major players in the next generation of gaming that might be based in a web browser rather than on a console. It would be far easier to launch a browser based gaming platform to a large audience rather than from scratch.

“MySpace is and will be more in the future a gaming platform, a space for people to meet and play games,” Miller said.

So can video games breath new life into MySpace? What do you think?