Facebook executives say that game developers on the social networking platform have generated $2.8 billion in revenue last year. The announcement came during the Gaming Developers Conference. The new figures reveal a remarkable growth in the number of people playing games and buying microtranscations on Facebook.
Facebook has been very vocal about its prospects of adding more mid- and hard-core games on to the platform and the company is looking to make it a place for these committed gamers. "Anywhere in the games business we are investing heavily," Facebook's Sean Ryan said at the conference.
Facebook also released a note detailing a bunch of game related stats (Courtesy: CNET):
- As of February, 55 percent of top 400 iOS apps are integrated with Facebook.
- Last month, Facebook drove 263 million clicks to the Apple App Store and Google Play from its mobile News Feed.
- 20 percent of daily Facebook Web users play games on Facebook.
- Game installs are up 75 percent since March 2012.
- There are about 200 games on Facebook with more than 1 million monthly active users each.
- More than 100 developers generated more than $1 million on Facebook last year.
- Year-over-year growth of the total number of people who pay to play games on Facebook has increased 24 percent since March 2012.
- There are over 250 million users playing games on Facebook every month.
Meanwhile, the executives reveal that a new Timeline section exclusively for video games will be launched on Facebook shortly, The Next Web reports. "The game section will give people a way to express their favourite games on their timeline and About page, and will serve as another re-engagement and discovery channel for game developers," a Facebook spokesperson says.
Although the numbers appear to be quite impressive, Facebook has yet to reach the company's previous peak of gamers in 2010. Around 50 percent of its users were gamers in 2010, which would roughly amount to 250 million gamers.