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Since September 2014, i have been playing Destiny on a regular basis. Destiny is an online shooter on PS4 and Xbox one that was sold as an MMO shooter. As you guys know, an MMO is considered a social network as well. But how social is Destiny?.

MMO stands for Massive Multiplayer online game, which means that multiple players can play in the same virtual world at the same time (Wikipedia, 2015). Most people are familiar with the game World of Warcraft which is an good example of an MMO. Bungie however, was the first one to make an MMO which was also a shooter. I was very excited when bungie announced destiny and bought it at day one. Unfortunately, i was kind of disappointed in the promises bungie made.

A MMO isn’t just a virtual world where people can play together. It’s also a platform that connects people. For instance, if you want to play a certain part of a game that requires three people, the game would make sure that there is matchmaking, which connects you to two other random people. This is what’s makes a MMO fun and Destiny lacked it.

The biggest part of Destiny, and the part that made people come back to the destiny universe, was the raid. A raid is a type of mission in which a number of people attempt to defeat one or more bosses. In Destiny, this raid was meant for 6 people and believe me, you could not do it with any less. Bungie decided to not implement matchmaking in the game which led to a lot of criticism and a lot of people quitting the game. I was lucky enough to have 5 other friends playing the game but without them, I would have stopped for sure.

How is it possible that you sell something as a social network, but you don’t give people the possibility to connect with each other. That’s like making a Facebook profile but not being able to share something with other profiles.

Bungie’s argument for not implementing matchmaking is that the raid would be too hard to complete with just random people and that communicating is the most important thing. That’s why they believe you should just do it with friends.

Nowadays there is a website called Destinylfg.net which proves Bungie wrong. LFG stands for Looking For Group. This really is a social network because it connects people who are in the same part of the game and who don’t want to do it by themselves. I’ve used this website multiple times now and within minutes i was connected to other people. Off course, sometimes it’s harder to communicate because some people lack English. Sometimes I even quit because the people are just not good enough and wasting my time. But in the end it’s your own choice if you want to play with them or not and bungie should have given the opportunity to do so.

I know it’s hard for you guys to give your opinion about this matter, because you never played it.  But what do you guys think Bungie should do. Some people where even saying that they want their money back, because Bungie sold them  something that wasn’t  as promised.

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Nowadays most of the people are using social media every day, and because of that, social commerce will be a part of their lives as well. This blog will summarize my main founding’s from the literature about the future of social commerce, and the possible shortcomings of it. The blog will start with a general explanation of social commerce and how to implement it. Next, I will discuss the disadvantages of using social commerce. Finally, I will provide you with some examples of future social commerce.

 

Social commerce is a subset of electronic commerce that involves social media, online media that supports social interaction and user contributions to assist online buying and selling of products and services (Wikipedia, 2015).

So where do you start when you want to implement a social commerce strategy? According to Marsden, one should start by listening. Search for examples from bigger companies and watch how they use social media. After this comes the experiment part. When you have results, you can start applying the strategy and keep on developing.

Darrell Rigby discusses how retailers should catch up on social commerce. Rigby states that retailers should follow tree steps to catch up with social commerce. 1. Retailers should face reality. 2. Retailers should think like they are starting over. 3. Retailers should use social networking. (Rigby, 2011)

Rhonda Abrons states a few things that are inconsistent with the statements of Rigby. Social commerce is time intensive. This raises the question whether a sole proprietorship can afford to spend so much time on social media and whether the advantages out weight the disadvantages. She also states that the costs of social advertising are high and therefore not every company can afford it.

One of the reasons that people still like to shop physically is because people like to shop together and interact. It’s not just the buying part but also the experience and social aspect that makes shopping together a nice alternative for online shopping. In the future, many companies using social commerce are providing customers with ways to shop online together.

As a result of this development in online shopping Zhu, Benbasat and Jiang conducted a research about shopping online together focusing on navigation support and communication support. Results showed that shared navigation decreased the amount of decoupling (the loss of coordination with one’s shopping partner.

One interesting development is the introduction of the buy button on many social platforms. For customers it will be easier to buy, and social platforms and third parties will get more profits.

Another interesting development in social commerce is Snapcash, a brand name of Snapchat. Snapcash has a totally different goal than Snapchat, namely: transferring money. With the use of Snapcash you can send money to another person just by typing in their name and the amount of money you want to send.

‘’If you bought something offline which you weren’t able to buy online, we are probably working on that right now’’

http://smallbusiness.chron.com/disadvantages-advertising-social-media-18746.html

http://smallbusiness.chron.com/disadvantages-using-social-networks-marketing-tools-20861.html

https://www.reevoo.com/news/social-commerce-bad-reviews-are-good-for-business/

Marsden, P. 2010. Social commerce: Monetizing social media. Syzygy Group. White Paper

Rigby, D. 2011. The future of shopping. Harvard Business Review 89(12) 64-75.

Zhu, L., Benbasat, I., and Jiang, Z. 2010. Let’s shop online together: An Empirical investigation of collaborative online shopping support. Information Systems Research 21(4) 872-891.