Facebook has been experimenting with mobile gaming publishers by offering distribution to studios in exchange for a cut of the social networking site's revenue. On Tuesday, Facebook formally announced at the Casual Connect Conference in San Francisco they're putting a call out for developers looking to participate in their next venture into mobile gaming.
According to TechCrunch, Facebook is calling its experiment "A new pilot program to help small and medium-sized developers take their mobile games global." The company believes it's in a very good position to help developers break into the main stream. Facebook has more than 800 million users every month and more than 260 million of those users are active in the gaming community on the site. The thinking is that since it's become so polarizing for a low-level developer to find an audience at the top grossing charts, Facebook can help more indie developers get some traction.
Facebook has already gotten about ten developers on board including educational game maker Brainbow, Kiwi and U.K. Space Ape. While the company is mostly out to help indie developers, Gameloft, which is a publically-ttraded French gameing company worth $652 million, was also in the program with a game called Kingdom & Lords.
Facebook is hoping to tap into the rich in-app purchase revenue that game developers who work with Android and iOS generate regularly. Apple and Google control the two most popular app stores and take a 30 percent cut on digital transactions. Facebook plans to ask for a revenue share up-front in exchange for distribution through ads, giving it a way to indirectly tap into the lucrative app market.
Facebook is approaching mobile gaming on applications with the same business model that developers have for console games. However, this would be from game developers who wouldn't be able to compete on the console market.
