Often overlooked by “hardcore” gamers, casual games on the Facebook platform have been making quite a splash lately. A lot of casual games developers have been waiting for a platform of this magnitude to get their games exposure, with a potential audience of 250+ million, and a potential $20 per paying user on a freemium  who wouldn’t put their game on Facebook?

Farmville is one such success story, with about 58 million farms created. That’s almost 10 million more people than the amount that have bought Wii sports! How could we have overlooked this demon that is killing our games industry?

Well, do you think that even half of the people that play Farmville will buy Modern Warfare 2? Sure, everyone and their mother has a Facebook account, but not everyone in a household owns their own Wii, with their own copy of Wii Sports. It’s one of those apples to oranges comparisons that people love to incorrectly cite when they’re having an argument and trying to sound intelligent.

If that’s true, then why haven’t you heard more about these games and how amazingly accessible they are? Well, if you have a Facebook account, you likely have seen (and possibly hidden) the updates that people constantly post in their news feeds, and blocked all notifications from the application.  But that’s the charm of Facebook gaming. The games publish information about achievements into the player’s friends’ news feed, projecting to their friends “Hey, check out this cool stuff I did, you should try too!”

As much as I don’t really care for the current crop of Facebook games, I see a lot of potential for the platform. Most of the games that are currently available on the platform are simple 2D or text based time-wasters. There are, however, a couple of games that use the Cmune engine to get some decent 3D games to the platform. I’d really be interested in seeing more large-scale games having Facebook integration. But for now, I think we’re limited to stuff like Bejeweled and Farmville for the Grandmas that like to lurk their grandchildren’s photos of their drunken antics at college.