Is There A Place For Games On Facebook?

I wanted to take the time this morning (before a good amount of you guys settle in for Super Bowl 44) to address a fast-growing trend that didn't hit me until just recently: Facebook is becoming a gaming platform. I say that knowing games on Facebook have been around for a long while now, but in very limited form. Add-ons and applications such as Drug Wars (and the similarly premised Mob Wars), Cafe World, Farmville, and more have taken the Facebook crowd by storm, and it seems that the wheel doesn't stop turning there.

The one thing in common that all of the aforementioned titles share is the fact that they're not so much games as they are point-and-click stat managers (the Wars games) or strategy-based offerings that offer a bit more substance, but not more than what you could find on your favorite flash arcade site. It's hard to dismiss the growing popularity and fanbase that has grown for these games thanks to the social networking giant, who remains the number one most popular platform for social networking fiends (and one of the most visited sites on the internet, second only to web-technology pioneer Google).

Just recently, we reported on a new Hip-Hop centric game called Platinum Life, an experience that will likely rise to the top as one of the most used "applications" on all of Facebook. The targeted demographic certainly exists, the genre is very approachable, and the premise is interesting enough to get people curious (alongside a fresh helping of invite requests from your friends enticing you to join them in playing). Everything that surrounds this game is a foresight for success, and no one should be surprised if it becomes one of the most talked about games period. The user base of Farmville, housing at least one-million players simultaneously at one point, can attest to that claim very sternly, as well as an alarming rate of adults and "old folks" getting into games like it and Cafe World. There have been countless stories of people signing up to Facebook just to play these games, which tells a story about just how effective the platform can be  in ushering in a new era of web-based gaming.

There's no doubt in my mind that Platinum Life will take off, and so will many other titles that bring something fresh to the Facebook space. One might argue that, from a technical standpoint, these games are doing nothing different from sites that offer flash-based games or games on mobile phones: and they'd be absolutely right. The caveat comes in to play when you think about Facebook as a whole: a targeted advertising model, millions of users worldwide, and (for the most part) the free distribution of these properties all come together to make Facebook one of the most attractive platforms for developers to set their eyes on.

Honestly, I believe it to be only a matter of time before the major publishers start doing some market research (if they haven't already) and begin brewing up some supplementary titles for the Facebook community. It'd make sense, from a marketing standpoint: instead of promoting your game by images and words to the audience, they'd be better served with a more permanent hands-on impression in one form or another. Facebook gaming is evolving in more ways than one, though, as we learned today that the first game in the first person shooter genre would be launched on the platform.

Brave Arms looks like your run of the mill shooter (with understandably dated-looking graphics) but it offers one thing that others don't: mass appeal and reach. Think of the many times you wished friend X had Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 for the Xbox 360 while you were playing it on the PlayStation 3, or friend Y had Team Fortress 2 for the PC and you wanted to 'get your engineer' on for the Xbox or PlayStation 3. While these scenarios would still ring true for a game on Facebook, it introduces another arch: what about getting someone, who aren't into games or may not yet have experienced other genres in some form or another, into first person shooters? What about role playing games? The idea here is that Facebook makes these types of games easily accessible to those who may not have had any prior desire to play a first person shooter on their own.

It extends its luster to those who wouldn't willingly go out and buy a console to try these things out for themselves, or would build a capable gaming PC to support some of the latest titles out there. Using the web, Facebook makes these problems transparent in that it eliminates the foreground associated with playing most "core" games, as well as taking advantage of tech-illiterate computer users that may not know their PCs are powerful enough to try out experiences such as these (pushing them to explore their systems even further and possibly get them more actively involved in gaming).

These are just some of my thoughts in regards to how Facebook can be, should be, will be, and is looked at seriously as another gaming platform for publishers and developers to take a look at. Deploying games to the massive audience that Facebook houses is cost-effective, thoughtless, and in some cases, can be very profitable (just ask the developers behind Farmville, who enjoy a nice 60-million user fanbase across three games for the platform, which effectively generates profitable revenues of around $200 million, annually).