Bossa Studios head predicts the future of social games 'will be like the Atari Eighties crash'

Bossa Studios head and co-founder Henrique Olifiers has predicted the downfall of social gaming.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, the outspoken developer voiced his concerns regarding the widespread cloning of popular social game designs.

Olifiers said: "Social games for me were always on the cutting-edge until they became copycat, and after they became copycat I said, 'Well, this is not going anywhere.'"

"The reason I joined Bossa is I looked at social games and I thought, 'These are rubbish.'"

Same old, same old

Olifiers believes that the sheer volume of near-identical social games will lead to a repeat of the market saturation that brought the second generation of home consoles to an abrupt end.

"This will be like the Atari Eighties crash," he says.

"Everybody and their grandmother had a version of Space Invaders, and these guys are going to do the same thing."

Olifiers insists that his own company's social RTS game Monstermind stands apart from the competition, bucking the copy-paste design trend that he believes plagues the platform.

"[Our games] should look and feel like nothing else on Facebook."

"We're working really hard top [sic] use these amazing tools, because there are so many things in Facebook that, if used right, make it better than Xbox Live."

This is not the first time Olifiers has prophesied doom for a platform. In December 2011, he predicted that Sony's upcoming Sony PS Vita handheld would likely "die a horrible and premature death".

He sounds like the life of the party.