Meteor Games Plans a Switch to Deeper Gameplay

With the latest Facebook games progressively becoming deeper experiences, plenty of developers are considering whether they should really stick with city building, restaurant management and other standard genres. Meteor Games, best known for the standard-issue island management title Island Paradise, has already decided that the answer is no. When Meteor was founded three years ago, the company was actually working on a 3D, massively multiplayer game. That concept died by degrees as Facebook gaming, with its overwhelmingly simple mechanics, took hold. Now there's a trend in the opposite direction, according to Zac Brandenberg, who came on earlier this month as Meteor's new CEO. "We believe consumer tastes are moving toward what we've seen in the console gaming world before. The way we've seen gaming evolve across every platform to provide a richer experience for the user," Brandenberg says. "What you're seeing now are games that appear to have more resources focused on their development, like Kingdoms of Camelot and City of Wonder." Although Brandenberg isn't giving away much about what Meteor's new games will look like, he says the aim is to build fantasy-based titles with RPG elements and character growth. It's still early days for deeper titles on Facebook; Kabam (formerly Watercooler) is the best evidence anyone has to hold up, with Kingdoms of Camelot having recently passed six million monthly active users. Kabam, also, plans to work on deeper titles in the future. But Brandenberg think there's a hidden demand. "We published a game in 2008 that was not widely embraced, and had to move backwards to make an easier to play property. Now we see users looking for more advanced options within the game, more detailed game mechanics, something more to do, an experience that they don't have available to them yet," he tells us. Facebook itself isn't the only option now, either, says Brandenberg. "We've developed games up to this point, in many ways, exclusively for the Facebook audience, but that's not our plan from here on out," he says.

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Meteor Games Plans a Switch to Deeper Gameplay

Chris Morrison

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