Image by Getty Images via @daylife
Games are serious business for Facebook, Facebook games product manager Matt Wyndowe made clear at his talk at the Games Developer’s Conference.
Facebook paid the staggering sum of $1.4 billion into games and other app developers in 2011 alone.
Games have sort of snuck up on Facebook, going from a curious side business to one of the mainstays of their revenue in just a few years: as their IPO filing revealed, fully 12 percent of their revenue comes from games.
“As early as 2010, we didn’t have a dedicated game team,” said Wyndowe at his talk. “Now we have 40 full-time people on games. We meet weekly with Zuck.”
Facebook is working on ways to streamline their gaming experience by using the new timeline app and re-thinking the way that games operate differently than normal social interactions. Going forward with the industry, it seems clear that Facebook’s trend towards games isn’t slowing down: $1.4 bn could be just the tip of the iceberg for the social network.
It’s not surprising: while advertising will likely remain the meat and potatoes of any social network, games are not only one of the best monetized corners of Facebook but also an avenue towards getting users to spend hours on the site when they might previously have only spent minutes – a trend that can only continue as more and more developers bring more extensive experiences to the platform.
But the days of Facebook as the de facto ruler of social games may be coming to an end. Zynga announced that it would soon be launching its own platform, and while it faces an uphill battle, it could soon become a formidable enemy to Facebook if it starts to siphon off games traffic.
One thing is clear, between the numbers that Facebook is throwing around, the announcement from Zynga, and the development of new, high-budget social studios. The social games space is going to start getting a lot more competitive, and there’s a pot of gold waiting for companies that make it out alive.
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