Building upon their financial success as well as investment in free-to-play gaming development studios, Chinese megalith Tencent has recently started testing the waters of Facebook gaming. Perhaps appropriately titled “Treasure Hunter”, Tencent execs say that this is not a full fledged move into the Facebook space, but rather a “market research” project.
The game itself is not entirely new to the North American market, as Tencent released the game last year funneled through AOL’s AIM instant messenger service, a method that’s proven extremely successful for the company in the domestic market via their QQ messenger product. According to Eric Eldon from insidesocialgames.com, Tencent’s US representatives, Leon Kitain and Brad Bao state that the move to Facebook is a preliminary one; one that will study the dynamics of gaming within the popular social network. Both commented that Treasure Hunter is a market research product, simply because the company can “only learn so much from reading about what other people are doing on the platform.”
However, the Treasure Hunter project will focus on a slightly different, method of social gaming: synchronous gaming. Most of the popular games within the Facebook offerings are turn based player vs. player, or player vs. environment titles in combat titles, or generally involve raising and nurturing virtual pets, or the highly popular farming games. Snychonous gaming on the other hand, involves two or more players playing against in each in real time. The most successful of this genre thus far might be Zynga’s Texas Hold’em Poker.
This in itself is quite interesting. As Tencent clearly isn’t short on cash, they’ve got all the time in the world to sit back and really dig deep into not only collecting data, but analyzing it, making appropriate changes, and then rinsing and repeating the process until they’ve really nailed what just might be the next ‘big thing’ in social gaming. Is it synchronous gaming? Perhaps, but we’ll not really know until others start investigating the possibilities, and it looks like Tencent is already on point with that one. And since Treasure Hunter isn’t a ‘specifically developed for Facebook’ application, Tencent always has the option of bringing over a whole host of their other games (aka it’s AOL offerings).
Tags: Facebook, qq messenger, social gaming, tencent, treasure hunter, Zynga
