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Are we at the end of the line for social online games?

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 4 min

social games

Social games were a phenomenon that transformed the way we looked at games, firstly with Facebook, but later also on mobile.  They provided a way for companies like Zynga and OpenFeint to burst onto the scene. But as we know, in recent months Zynga’s share price tumbled, and now Gree has announced that they are turning off the servers for the mobile social game network OpenFeint (which Gree paid $104 million for last year) in mid-December. Does this mean that social gaming has failed? Was this an experiment that went too far?

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.