The point of doing a portal instead of just a game on Facebook is to get users coming back for the long term. The social element is the meta layer that binds all of the games together in a role-playing game experience where you level up and customize your avatar. Will O’Brien, vice president of social games at Big Fish Games, said, Treasure Quest is the intersection of casual and social games. The games include Daily Detective, L.O.B.E., Fairway Solitaire, Unwell Mel, Riddle O’ Day, Plunder, Thunderbolt, and Snowglobe Slots.
Challenges let players earn virtual currency that they can spend in any of the games or use to enhance their Treasure Hunter avatar, or virtual character. The portal itself adds an extra layer on top of Facebook games, letting players acquire virtual currency that can be used across all of the games. Still, just as other casual game companies are crowding into Facebook, Big Fish Games is adapting titles that have proven popular on its casual games portal.
Zynga’s big advantage here is that it has more than 252 million monthly active users on Facebook that it can cross-promote new games to. With Treasure Quest, Big Fish Games is showing it can attack the likes of Zynga on their home turf of Facebook even as Zynga targets Big Fish Games’ audience on the web. Such games are well established on casual portals such as the one operated by Big Fish Games, but they are relatively new on Facebook.
