14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook has revealed that about 375 million people play at least one Facebook-connected game once per month. According to the company, Facebook’s website and mobile apps send an average 735 million referrals to games each day.
The numbers are huge and they paint a pretty accurate picture about just how popular the social gaming industry has become and how it has grown over the years.
“Whether they’re playing games on their phone on the bus, on their desktop at work, or on their tablet at night, people want the flexibility to play games seamlessly across all platforms. We ran an internal study in September that looked at how people play games that connect with Facebook, and we found that cross-platform players tend to spend more time and money on games than single-platform players,” Facebook’s Vishu Gupta writes in a blog post.
The company has provided a bunch of new stats that should make game developers want to take their apps cross-platform.
According to its stats, mobile engagement for cross-platform players was 2.4 times that of mobile-only players. Furthermore, Facebook desktop engagement for cross-platform players was 1.5 times that of desktop-only players.
Lastly, people that play games on multiple devices spend more on the titles they enjoy.
This should, at least in theory, urge developers to make their games compatible with all platforms. Facebook is trying to make this easier for everyone and has provided tools such as the SDK for Unity, which makes it simple to integrate Facebook, tools from Parse and more.
“This growing list of resources is making it easier than ever for mobile developers to bring their games to Facebook desktop and vice versa. For example, mobile games built with Unity, like Glu Mobile's Deer Hunter 2014, Zynga's Castleville Legends, and Madfinger's Dead Trigger 2, have all grown their audience and allowed people to play on more devices by expanding to Facebook.com with our SDK,” Gupta wrote.
In this manner, gamers will have an easier way to know what others want and developers will know which type of requests perform better.