Facebook: Soon to be more Civilized.

Yesterday Games.com reported that Civilization, one of the pillars of the real-time strategy videogame genre, will be launching a version of its long-running franchise on Facebook in the upcoming year.

As I mentioned to fellow classmate katdiogo in a comment on a recent post about Farmville on Facebook, there are very few games available on Facebook that appeal to me. Though I clearly enjoy playing videogames, as someone with regular access to other gaming platforms, Facebook does not tend to draw me in.

However, the news of Civilization coming to everyone's favorite social-networking site, for me, could be a (no pun intended, honest) game-changer. When I grew up, the bread and butter of my videogame experience was half Doom, half Warcraft and Command and Conquer style RTS (real-time strategy) games -- until I was about 8 years-old and started playing online games.

Civilization is a game which defines the RTS genre for many people. Much like something in Farmville, the game is based on progression (rather than say, Pacman or Tetris -- you are generally building off of where you left from. The idea is to take a group of people (normally sorted by nationality) from their start as simple gatherer-hunters, up to their pinnacle as world-dominating superpowers.

I initially heard about this game via Twitter, when all the gaming sites I follow suddenly went crazy as they broadcasted the news. Then, I had gaming friends who similarly tweeted and retweeted the information. I know I just made the point about buzz driving games on social-networking sites, but this is a prime example of what I meant. Already, without having to do anything other than pump their story into the right channels, many people in the target audience (people who have enjoyed past Civ games and would be likely to try out the Facebook version) have this news on their radar.

It remains to be seen if the game would have any more power to retain a player-base than the usual Facebook game-application fare, but given Civilization's (well-earned, in my opinion) good reputation amongst avid gamers and even an older audience (the first Civilization game was published in 1991), I have high hopes already.

World of Goo: Pay What You Can

"Pay What You Can," while not exactly a widespread phenomenon (to put it lightly) isn't a completely new concept. Obviously not-for-profit groups have been executing this sort of donation-based system for quite some time: churches are probably the longest running business in the world, and they've been passing around the collection plate for thousands of years.

More recently "Pay What You Can" has come to private, for-profit enterprises. The ease and relatively minimal cost of transferring certain types of goods over the Internet had allowed certain companies and artists to dabble in giving their content away for whatever the customer feels is an appropriate price. Radiohead is probably one of the most well-known examples of this, and the concept seems to apply very readily to music in particular (likely because it's only very slightly less convenient to obtain albums illegally via torrenting clients).

It's a different story to see pay-what-you-will exchanges for videogames. Unlike some free to download or even free to play games, World of Goo isn't based on micro-transactions after you've started playing like most games which follow such a business model.

How exactly does a year-old game releasing its content for as low as $.01 pertain to pre-game advertising? The question becomes: what is 2D Boy (the publisher of World of Goo) playing at here? It could be -- and is likely -- that they've sold all the copies they believe they're going to sell for the going rate of $5-20, and are just trying to eek out the last bit of potential profit by reaching people who might pay $1, but not $5.

While this certainly has to have some benefit, another possibility -- and one that may be more likely, given how notoriously low the averages raked in using "Pay What You Can" systems tend to be -- 2D Boy is now more concerned with building an audience. World of Goo has been a very successful small game for the PC (as well as the Wii, though that version is not part of this promo), and at this point, it may be more important for 2D Boy to increase their brand recognition as a smaller company that releases really solid games, rather than attempting to sell however many more copies at a fixed rate.

If 2D Boy is confident enough that their gameplay will encourage fans to purchase the games they make in the future, the strategy of giving World of Goo away for a penny becomes its own word of mouth advertisement -- without having to spend anything on a hefty campaign, new insights, or even distribution aside from bandwidth costs.