Gaming Is Extremely Important for Facebook, Executive Says

Seeing as how games have become an incremental part of the Facebook experience, the social network's director of platform partnerships, Ethan Beard, highlights that gaming will actually drive the service forward in the next couple of years.

Facebook is the most popular social network in the world, but much of its massive growth in usage is owed to games like FarmVille or CityVille, coming from companies like Zynga, which keep people hooked on their experiences and, by doing so, to the Facebook network.

Ethan Beard knows this, and confirmed that the company realizes that gaming is now one of the core Facebook features.

"You know, in many ways, gaming, we think, is leading the way,” said Beard to Gamasutra. “It's going to transform lots and lots of industries and experiences by making them social at the core."

While social gaming is quite evolved nowadays, the Facebook platform still has lots of room to improve and make the whole experience that much simpler to get into.

"I think it's still early days. I think there's a lot more that we're going to see. The space is moving quickly. We're definitely not at an end game. What's going with mobile is completely different. In two years, the type of games we're playing on a mobile phone is going to look really different from what we're playing today," said Beard. "We find that users that use us on mobile are more engaged than users who only use us on the PC."

Social gaming will become the next big trend, at least according to Beard, who promises that Facebook will continue to work together with its partners.

"A lot of the true innovation and genius is happening within our gaming partners. We certainly encourage it and listen to them to make sure that what we build works for that, but I definitely think the like kind of cross-platform coordination and cross-platform platform is a really exciting area. We think we're going to see a lot of interesting innovation take place," Beard added.

Lots of great games are now popping up on Facebook, from the ever popular FarmVille to more strategic titles like Dragon Age: Legends or King's Bounty: Legions, so it's definitely worth paying attention to Facebook's own actions to support gaming in the future.