MySpace is turning to video games to help the former social-networking king recoup its share of Internet relevancy that it lost to Facebook.
At the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, MySpace Inc. co-President Mike Jones launched a new “MySpace Games” strategy designed to showcase online games on the site and to draw more developers.
Social games are becoming a big component of the company’s overall strategy to refocus itself on being a social entertainment destination for its core 34 and younger audience.
“Just as MySpace made a real commitment to music, to have the best musicians and have the best content, we’re now making the same type of commitment with games,” Jones said.
MySpace, a unit of media conglomerate News Corp., saw its lead in the social media world obliterated in the past year by Palo Alto’s Facebook Inc., which now has more than 400 million active members worldwide.
And some MySpace observers began writing off the Beverly Hills firm as a social network has-been last month following the surprise ouster of chief executive Owen Van Natta after just 10 months, with Jones and Jason Hirschorn assuming an unusual dual-leadership role as co-presidents.
“I haven’t seen very many companies that go from being the talk of the Internet to the dog of the Internet and back again,” said Debra Aho Williamson, senior analyst for Internet research firm eMarketer. “That’s not to say they can’t, but there’s a lot of work to be done.”
But in an interview, Jones countered that while MySpace had lost its way, the company still has more than 100 million users, about 80 percent of whom are in the United States.
“If people want to write it off, that’s fine, but the reality is we have a massive amount of audience in the U.S. and globally,” Jones said. “We generate crazy amounts of page usage, we have huge brand advertising relationships and people use MySpace for a lot of different purposes. It’s hard, in my mind, to write it off.”
Music – specifically singers and bands – originally helped build MySpace’s popularity and is a reason members still log on, so the company is now refocusing on entertainment.
And social gaming has become one of the hottest uses of social networks. For example, the Facebook-exclusive game FarmVille, from San Francisco’s Zynga Inc., spread virally and in less than a year has about 83 million players.
About one-third of MySpace members play games each day and play about 1 billion minutes per month. Jones said he believes MySpace can boost those numbers by year’s end to 50 percent of the audience and at least 2 billion minutes per month.
The company is also working on a site redesign, although that isn’t expected to roll out until later this year.
Analyst Augie Ray noted that MySpace wasn’t the only social network to announce a new game strategy Wednesday. San Francisco-based Hi5, which has more than 60 million members, also announced a game developer platform.
Yet Ray said it’s unclear whether either company can line up the type of exclusive games that will become big enough hits to attract members. Even one game that MySpace highlighted, Paradise Paintball, already has 50,000 players on Facebook.
But Ray said MySpace can still remain relevant even if it never catches Facebook as long as it can carve out a solid niche like entertainment.
“The truth is MySpace doesn’t want to get back into the game,” Ray said. “What they want to do is be a specialty social experience.”
MySpace has been talking about a social game focus for several months, but part of the turmoil that forced Van Natta out was because “they couldn’t seem to get things out the door,” Williamson said. “To see them getting something out the door is refreshing, but it still feels like they’re playing catch-up.”
“Are they going to be as big and as powerful as Facebook? No one really knows now, but maybe they don’t have to be anymore,” she said.
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