I recently came across a very interesting report published by the Altimeter Group. “The 8 Success Criteria For Facebook Page Marketing” compares the Facebook pages of high profile brands and gives them a rating. They’ve researched 8 criteria which highly affect the success of a Facebook page, created a scorecard and evaluated each of the 30 pages, giving them a score from 1 to 5 for each criteria. After seeing the criteria and the result, I could well imagine that Facebook pages of well known MMOs (published and in development) might not score too many points as well. I was curious and put together a pool of 17 MMO Facebook pages, half of them subscription based, the other half Free2Play/Fremium client or browser based MMOs (incl. Facebook games). For a detailed description of all the criteria and and methods I recommend reading the actual report on Slideshare but read on for my observations on those 17 pages.

• Flying Labs opens a casual MMO division (“family-oriented”)
• Games Convention Leipzig is cancelled, but Games Convention Online will take place there from 31/07 to 2/08, dedicated to online games and especially browser games.
• Internet in 2008 in numbers.
• Study from Pew Research shows 35% of all US internet adults have a social network profile. For 18/24 years old it’s 75%. 50% of the US adult socnet users have a profile on MySpace, 22% on Facebook.
• SOE partners with PopCap for casual games on the PSN.
• WOW to have accounted for 50% of Activision Blizzard’s earnings last fiscal year according to analyst.
• Console manufacturers impacted by recession.