By Owen Reyes · Originally reported by Richard Horgan (2011) · Wayback archive →
In July 2011 Deadline.com partnered with Paramount Digital Entertainment and Liquid Entertainment to launch a Facebook game letting players experience the equivalent of running a Hollywood studio.
Then
The pitch was a Facebook-platform game built around the studio-mogul fantasy genre — managing a virtual studio, greenlighting projects, navigating the kinds of decisions Hollywood trade-press readers were familiar with from Deadline’s actual coverage. The Facebook gaming era was, in 2011, at its commercial peak. Zynga had just gone through its hyper-growth phase, the Facebook Credits virtual-currency platform was the dominant social-gaming economy, and brand-partnership games were a recognized category.
The original FishbowlLA framing was a bemused pickup. The conceit of a Nikki-Finke-adjacent Facebook game was structurally funny, with the explicit disclaimer that ALL-CAPS emails were not part of the game mechanics.
Now
The Facebook gaming era ended substantially before most observers in 2011 predicted. Zynga’s stock peaked in 2012 and crashed in 2013; Facebook itself deprioritized the gaming platform across the mid-2010s. The Deadline / Paramount Hollywood Game has not been an active property for over a decade.
Paramount Digital Entertainment was reorganized multiple times across the post-2011 period and no longer exists as a distinct division. Nikki Finke left Deadline in 2013. The brand-as-game category the partnership represented was, in retrospect, one of the small documented moments when trade publications were trying to convert audience into platform engagement via Facebook. The newsletter-and-subscription model that subsequently emerged is structurally a very different conversion mechanism.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.