Mark Zuckerberg Credits Games Companies as Force Behind Facebook Growth

Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg has acknowledged the role of the game developers in the growth of Facebook as a platform.

Speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Zuckerberg said that a lot of the early buzz about Facebook came from its games.

He compared the platform to the PC and iPhone, saying that games are “usually the first big vertical market” and that “if you go back to the early PC, some of the first things that got people excited were games.”

Companies such as Zynga, CrowdStar, Playfish and Playdom had their games played by 200 million users every month, something that could only truly happen with Facebook as the centralised hub.

“Those are four [listed above] really good game companies that are built almost entirely on Facebook,” Zuckerberg said. “[Zynga has] made a structural disruption to the game industry,” he noted, saying that the FarmVille dev has a bigger market value than Electronic Arts, who bought Playfish for $300 million.

It has been a bit of a love/hate relationship for Facebook and the game developers who use the social network’s vast userbase to get people playing their games. If it’s not disputes over advertising (Facebook blocked games like FarmVille spamming non-players with information about their friend’s activities), it’s the Facebook Credits system, which sees Facebook take a 30% cut of goods sold in-game.

Yet despite all of this, Zuckerberg’s recent comments confirm what was known already: Facebook needs devs and devs need Facebook.