Technology

Are you a happy farmer?

FarmVille screenshotEven if you’re not a Farmville player yourself, chances are you’ve come across the extremely popular Facebook farming game courtesy of updates from your friends about cows, fields and farm buildings appearing in your Facebook newsfeed.

However, for all Farmville’s impressive popularity, with nearly 58 million active users each month, it is a minnow in the online farming stakes. The big player is Happy Farm with around 23 million users each and every day. But unlike Farmville, Happy Farm is big in Asia and in particular China, where the bulk of its users come from.

That makes Happy Farm one of a new wave of online services which dominate the global stage but do so on the basis of Asian usage rather than American usage. The Chinese instant messaging service QQ is another one, as illustrated by the recently updated Map of Online Communities.

Some aspects of the game are familiar to Western eye – its addictive nature, the use of an online service to keep software piracy at bay, the spin-off fandom such as the real-world restaurant designed to look like Happy Farm, and fears that it is encouraging anti-social behaviour. (You steal other people’s food in the game so guess what got the blame when a player stole some real food in a recent incident).

A major difference, however, is the ability of Chinese-based social networks in particular to earn revenue, helped by a culture where very intrusive online calls to action are far more acceptable than we are used to. As TechCrunch put it last year,

Like during the American gold rush in 1849, where Chinese merchants prospered while most prospectors went bust in search of striking gold, it appears that building viable, scalable businesses for Social Networking sites may still be an ancient Chinese secret for Westerners.

 

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