I’ve had a Facebook account for ages myself, but never did anything with it until recently. A thread on QT3 about the growing popularity of games on Facebook and the serious sums of money this new niche is generating prompted me to go check it out. It so happens that a few people on QT3 are actively involved in making these games and even established games companies are looking into developing applications for Facebook.

After checking out a few of them, it’s clear that there’s barely enough gameplay in them to actually qualify them for being called games. Two of the more popular games, Vampire Wars and Mafia Wars, both by zynga for example, are basically identical with the main differences being their themes.  Another game I checked out, the relatively new Vikings, Pirates and Ninjas tries to ape fantasy MMOs, except that everything is simplified and doing quests just takes clicking a button. Above all, everything is stupidly repetitive with next to variation at all.

Still, this clearly hasn’t stopped them from being popular or earning a great deal of money, which confirms the suspicion that all gamers really need is to see the numbers on their screen constantly increase. I suppose that aside from their accessibility, the close integration that they have with Facebook effectively means lots of free advertising and allows players to pretend that they’re meaningfully interacting with their friends. These things aren’t really going to hold my interest for any decent length of time, but the really sad part is that most Flash games offer much more gameplay and some are really quite innovative, but none can match the earning power of these Facebook games.