Facebook Jumps into Mobile Gaming World

The juggernaut of social networking is positioned to make a tremendous splash in the mobile gaming world. Facebook recently announced that they are starting a new pilot program to help small and medium-sized mobile gaming developers expand their reach through the network’s global audience.

Increasing competition among mobile gaming companies has caused user acquisition costs to skyrocket, leaving many talented game developers flailing in the doldrums. Facebook’s solution to the app store discoverability conundrum involves leveraging their 800 million strong mobile audience and target the 260 million professed gamers using the social network every month.

10 mid-sized game developers have already come aboard to participate in the initial roll-out of the program and hundreds more are bound to join in the coming months.

According to TechCrunch, “Facebook is embarking on mobile app publishing at a time when it is trying to figure out how much revenue it can wrest from the app ecosystem it supports with access to the social graph and ads. The company said 41 percent of its advertising revenue in the most recent quarter came from mobile platforms — or about $656 million. This is up from virtually nothing in the same quarter a year ago, when Facebook only started to turn on sponsored stories in the mobile news feed. If you annualized that, Facebook’s mobile ad business is now worth at least $2.6 billion per year.”

It is a common saying among developers that “building an app is the easy part, marketing it to drive download is the toughest job”. As an experienced iPhone app developer in Las Vegas I couldn’t agree more. Tens of thousands of quality apps are stuck drowning in an abyss of mediocre products, never to be discovered by the audience that craves them most.

The iPhone app developer community understands and appreciates the problem Facebook is attempting to solve with their new publishing platform for games. App publishers using Facebook’s app promotion and developer tools have gained a powerful foothold in the network. As the company continues to turn their core focus towards mobile, expect to see a steady increse in announcements of this sort.