ABSTRACT
The gatekeepers for a mobile game are Apple and Google. Larger companies often have a competitive advantage because they have direct relationships with the platform holders. Part of Activision’s competitive advantage has long been its great relationships with physical retailers and with advertising channels. The first is that players started to realise that this was a ju-jitsu move, an unwelcome harnessing of a positive social relationship. Players realised that these were not real gifts. The donor had lost nothing in the giving. It moved from feeling like a gift to feeling like spam, an unwelcome intrusion and the creation of an artificial obligation. Farmville’s competitive advantage—its ability to spam Facebook better than others—went away. Before long, Facebook was full of people sending each other fences and cherry trees and lost brown cows, and the Facebook wall disappeared under a sea of Farmville messages—for a while at least.
