Facebook reveals plan for social games in 2012

At the Inside Social Apps 2012 conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, Facebook revealed their plan for social games and mobile apps in 2012. Carl Sjogreen, Director of Product Management at Facebook said that if developers want to create an app for Facebook's Open Graph, the mobile space creates big opportunity to create cross-platform games. According to Mashable, Sjogreen said that in order to develop apps for Facebook, you almost had to have a PhD in Facebook. However, Open Graph should now make things a lot easier for developers to create cross platform applications. He said that now, if you are building a social app, you have to think cross platform. It's not enough anymore, where you just build an app for iOS or Android. You could have the most good looking app, but if you can't play with your friends, the purpose is defeated.

Facebook wants more games on the Open Graph

Sjogreen says in 2012, he'd like to create a better experience with games on the Open Graph, one without interruptions and lots of opportunities to share. Facebook, of course, shares a special relationship with game developers, one in particular is Zynga. Facebook ammended its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission which provided more insight to the social network's relationship with Zynga. The 26 documents added to the filing show Facebook's stock allotments to external companies. According to Business Insider, the first round of filing said that Zynga accounted for 12 percent of Facebook's revenue.

The ammended document says, "The parties acknowledge that FB desires to enable Zynga to build the Zynga Platform on top of the Facebook Platform, and the parties desire to, amongst other goals set forth herein, work together to increase the number of users of each party’s products and services.

The parties further acknowledge that Zynga is making a significant commitment to the Facebook Platform (i.e., using Facebook as the exclusive Social Platform on the Zynga Properties and granting FB certain title exclusivities to Zynga games on the Facebook Platform). In exchange for such commitment, the parties have committed to set certain growth targets for monthly unique users of Covered Zynga Games."

 

What this means is that not only will the Zynga platform be allowed to grow atop the Facebook platform, but Zynga will also get an assurance of target growth. In return, Zynga promised Facebook exclusivity to its titles on the Facebook platform as well as the promised mobile integration.