Wed, Nov 17, 2010 | 09:06 GMT

Zuckerberg credits games for Facebook’s quick growth

zucker

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has credited games for the social site’s swift rise to dominance.

Speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco – via Venturebeat – Zuckerberg said that games generated a lot of early buzz for the network.

Titles such as FarmVille, Mafia Wars, and Zynga Poker are a big part of why Facebook has more than 500 million users. More than 200 million users play games on Facebook each month.

“Those are four really good game companies that are built almost entirely on Facebook,” Zuckerberg said, talking to conference co-host John Battelle.

“Zynga’s market value is bigger than Electronic Arts. [Zynga has] made a structural disruption to the game industry. If you look at a lot of platforms, games are usually the first big vertical market.

“That’s true for the iPhone. Even if you go back to the early PC, some of the first things that got people excited were games.”

Plenty more through there.

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2 comments

Uncontested
17/11/10, 10:41 am

Er.. except that MySpace had games and all that other stupid shit long before facebook did.. lol.. games won’t keep people on Facebook while it continues to degrade itself, soon enough people will migrate to the next social networking fad, just like they did from Livejournal to Hotornot to facethejury to classmates to MySpace to Facebook.. etc lol

metamorphic
18/11/10, 2:17 am

@1 As much as I hate Facebook, that’s just not what the statistics say. Facebook is continuing to grow, and whatever crap Zuckerberg comes up with in these pointless seminars, the main reason why people will not leave it is because all of their friends are on it and the main reason they stick to it is to keep in touch with each other. It’s not just going to die overnight.