Facebook users can be broadly divided into two groups, those who are addicted to playing games on it and those who absolutely hate it. Mentioning the names of games such as Candy Crush or Farmville will evoke a strong response from people, one of either extreme love or extreme hate. But for those who just can’t stop playing Facebook games, they’re not alone.
At the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco Wednesday, Facebook revealed that roughly, a quarter of all its active users — 375 million people — play at least one Facebook connected game in an average month.
Before you get excited, and think of those numbers as eye popping stats on a network of 1.3 billion monthly active users. According to Facebook, around 735 million game referrals are sent out each day. Yes, we are talking about those annoying requests you so often get from friends who religiously play those games.
A lot of these mind-boggling stats seem to come from a study that Facebook conducted internally last November. It has some potentially lucrative revelations for game makers, such as the financial incentive to make your game work on multiple platforms (iOS, Android and desktop), increased advertisement exposure and more. The average user who plays the same game on two or more platforms spends 3.3 times as much money on in-game purchases as people who just play on desktop, Facebook said. Cross-platform players are also far more likely to click on ads.
King has overtaken Zynga as the top Facebook games developer. The top three games at present Candy Crush Saga, Farm Heroes Saga and Pet Rescue Saga, have all been developed by King. In fact, Candy Crush Saga has gone on to become Facebook’s most popular app overall.
