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1. Introduction
Due to viral spreading, social network sites have attracted huge numbers of application users, which has allowed information to spread on them through social networks. The popularity of SNS games is still continues to grow. According to a new statistic from Parks Associates, revenues in the social games market will increase by 500 percent from 2010 to 2015 ([38] Parks Associates, 2011). The distinctive features of SNS games are that they are simple and easy to play and that they encourage social interaction among players, so players can have the most fun in the least time. These characteristics have caused this type of games to be called "casual games" as well as "social games." They are also called social networking services (SNS) games, because they are used on social networking platforms, such as Plurk and QQ. One of the most famous SNS games is "Happy Farm." In Asia, from 2009 to 2010, "Happy Farm (Chinese Version)" had over 20,000,000 players, according to Facebook statistics. On average, one in eight people have played the game in Taiwan, which equals approximately 3,500,000 players ([27] Lai, 2009). This indicates that such games have become very popular in recent years.
However, popular SNS games are not necessarily accepted everywhere. The following two examples will show how two similar SNS games have been accepted in areas with different societies and cultures. For the first example, according to the statistics from Facebook in 2009, internet users in Taiwan constituted about 80 percent of the 3.70 million worldwide members of "Happy Farm." This evidence sparks a marketing issue about how "Happy Farm" was successfully popularized in Taiwan. These statistics also indicates that although "Happy Farm" is successful in some countries, it is not popular in areas such as Texas, USA and Siberia, Russia. In 2009, Lai ascribed the popularity of "Happy Farm" to the social culture and consumer behavior in some countries. Countries, such as Taiwan and China have a similar background of agricultural development, so many people in these areas are particularly attracted to "Happy Farm," recollecting the pleasant life of their agricultural society, while spending little or no money to play the game ([27] Lai, 2009). For the second example, in contract to "Happy Farm," "FarmVille," which is...