Being a "Hardcore" gamer I always kinda laughed at these Zynga games like Mafia Wars and FarmVille. I never really saw the fun in them but after playing Frontier Ville for the weekend I have to say I was surprisingly hooked. I have never really had the ambition to be a farmer in the old west but even after my first play threw i was hooked. The simple and repetitiousness aspect of planting crops and clearing land in the game were very captivating. You had to preform these tasks in order to start a little farm and complete missions that were given to you by the game. The challenging part was that you only had so much "energy" or number of actions that you could do. I found this very frustrating because the only way to get more energy was to visit your friends farm and help them out or pay Zynga real money for the goods. If you already helped out your friends once that day then you couldn't get more energy from them untill the next day. It really limited the amount you  could play to basically once a day.

The brilliant part of this game is how they rely on micro-transactions to make a profit. If you ran out of energy like i did then you are able to pay a certain amount to Zynga in order to get more energy, supply's, and special items to decorate your farm. This will allow you to further advance in the game and save yourself the time you would have to wait instead. This has been extremely profitable for Zynga because they have maid Millions off of just little 60 cent transactions. This is often seen as the future of profiting in the video game industry. MMO's and console games are putting out DLC and extra content for small transactions all the time now so we can see that it is a really profitable way to structure your business in the video game industry. The one thing that I found frustrating( and i know many others did as well) was the constant pop ups, and asking to publish things on friends walls or news feeds. It was annoying while playing and is annoying to see in the news feeds. the only problem is that you can really have the games social aspects work any other way.

So do you think this is the future of Video Gaming? Have you ever paid for items in a game like this? or will this be just  a fad?