Abstract for: The Player Number Growth in Online Social Games

The steeply growing amount of players of social games on Facebook motivate to analyze the influencing factor, which lead to these successes. This research delivers a model, which qualitatively describes the causes and effects for this development and shows how to simulate a development prognosis. The model uses the methods of System Dynamics and considers the influence of the game design, advertising and supporting processes towards motivation and satisfaction of players. The spreading features of popular browser games focus on viral marketing within Facebook. Players for example report their successes via pin board entry to their friends. Likewise especially rare items are distributed, if players react to pin board entries of their friends. Lastly the donation of in-game items helps the players to motivate their friends to take part in the game. With the potentially high number of players social networks are perfect for the verification respectively falsification of complex dynamic models. Therefore a prototype of an ideal game is in development to be integrated into Facebook and to deliver further knowledge.