Social network sees more integration with game consoles, other devices

Just three years old now, social gaming on Facebook has come a long way, attracting millions of mainstream players. Top third-party game developers like "FarmVille" creator Zynga, which reported more than $100 million in revenue last year, are growing rapidly and gaining buzz.

Gareth Davis, a platform manager for Facebook who oversees games, gave Forbes a preview of his keynote speech at the big Game Developers Conference this month. Davis discusses where Facebook's game platform, and social games in general, are heading.

Forbes: What are some interesting statistics you can share about where Facebook and Facebook games are at now?

Davis: Facebook just passed 400 million monthly active users, and our engagement stats are incredible more than half of our users show up every single day. Games are one of the most popular activities on the site. We have well over 100 million unique game players every month.

How is the game developer community evolving on Facebook?

In terms of the industry we've seen game developers grow up building games for Facebook. Now we're going to see a lot of the traditional game industry entering the space, like EA [Electronic Arts] buying Playfish.

Will we see any big game franchises on the Facebook site itself?

EA just mentioned that "Madden Football" is coming to Facebook.com, and Take-Two Interactive, which created "Civilization," said they were creating a version for Facebook.com. This year you'll be seeing some more major Triple-A brands console and PC brands come to Facebook.com.

How about Facebook Connect? What developments are going on there?

Facebook Connect enables any game experience to integrate with Facebook.com on mobile phones, on game consoles and on the Web. Last year the game consoles started going social, so we integrated into the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and the Nintendo DSi. We're working very closely with the console makers to build better integration, and so this year you're going to see a lot of the major game franchises integrating with Facebook in a really interesting social way.

On the iPhone, we have thousands of games that have integrated with Facebook Connect. You have games like "Scrabble" where you can play games together whether you're on the iPhone or Facebook you can play across platforms.

We're about to see a bunch of desktop PC games too. You'll have to wait and see what they are doing.

What else can we expect to see from Facebook Connect-enabled games in the coming year?

As developers integrate Facebook across all these devices, they're opening up a new type of gaming we call "multi-device gaming." The first version of this is the ability to play a game together no matter which platform you're on.

The next step is going to be even more interesting:

Let's say three of us are each playing the same game but on a different device. The game will be tailored to the device. So if I'm playing the war game on my Xbox and I'm in the living room, where I have a big-screen TV, a great speaker system, a controller, maybe I'm playing the action sequence. Perhaps my friend is at a desktop PC with a computer screen, keyboard and a mouse, and she's doing the strategic aspect of the game, like calling in air strikes to weaken the enemy before I get there. And maybe you're on the iPhone, a touch and communication device, so you're organizing the squads. Each of us is participating in the same game experience, but in a different way tailored to the power of the devices.

We're going to see really interesting examples of that starting this year. And that will be the future wave gaming: bringing everyone in no matter what device they are using.

What's in store for the future of social gaming in general?

What we're about to see is the next level of social game play. The language of social gaming is being invented and we have a few of the building blocks, but many more are about to be discovered. There will be a killer app for social games in the same way that "Mario" was for Nintendo, "Sonic" was for Sega and "Halo" was for Xbox. We're going to have our Halo, our Mario, soon.

That's not "FarmVille"?

I think FarmVille is a great game, but it is a light simulation that has mass appeal. I think that we will see a new kind of game that people have not really seen before. It may have a traditional IP on it, it doesn't have to be completely out of left field, but we're expecting those great experiences to show up.

Facebook launched a new feature, called the Games Dashboard, in early February. Can you talk about the motivations behind that?

Since games are so popular on Facebook we wanted to create a place where people who are interested in games can discover games to play. One of the cool things Facebook has is what we call social distribution a lot of people discover what to play because their friends are playing a game and invite them to play together.

The second thing we wanted to do is have a place where people can come back to see the recent games they played and get new information about the game. The idea here is just to raise the profile of games, and help users discover new games and re-engage with the games they've already played.

Will Facebook ever produce its own games?

I don't anticipate us building Facebook-branded games. The reason we created the game platform is to enable third-party developers to come up with the great ideas and experiences on their own. And games are a very challenging product to build. We are not setting out to create game content, but more to create the best social experience.

So Google Buzz just came out. With more players in the social networking market, are you worried about the competition getting more serious about gaming at some point?

To me the social gaming activities happening on Facebook.com are difficult to replicate on other platforms, unless you use Connect. We have over 400 million users with real-world identities, and we have hundreds of thousands of apps. It's hard to take that anywhere else. I don't think you're going to have Facebook games showing up elsewhere in that area.