Facebook: We're Going to Have Our 'Halo' Soon
Social gaming set to take off this year, according to Facebook platform manager.
Fans of Farmville, get ready for more gaming action from Facebook this year, as the social networking website plans to become a bona fide platform in its own right - with it's own "Mario", "Halo" or "Sonic" coming very soon.
Speaking with Forbes, platform manager for Facebook Gareth Davis (who looks suspiciously like MySpace's 'Tom') spoke of the future of social gaming, and hinted that PC developers will be on board this year to implement cross-platform play.
Electronic Arts has already announced a Madden Football game to appear on Facebook, while Take-Two is creating a version of Civilisation for the website, reveals Davis. On top of this, "we have thousands of games that have integrated with Facebook Connect. You have games like "Scrabble" where you can play games together whether you're on the iPhone or Facebook--you can play across platforms."
"As developers integrate Facebook across all these devices, they're opening up a new type of gaming we call "multi-device gaming." The first version of this is the ability to play a game together no matter which platform you're on."
Davis then offered an example where a gamer playing a 'war game' on the Xbox 360 is firing rounds in the battlefield, while a PC player can be managing air strikes and an iPhone user organises squad tactics. It certainly sounds like a step up from the closed platform online play we have at the moment - so far, Xbox 360s and PlayStation 3s don't even so much as look at one another.
Farmville isn't the only trick in Facebook's gaming campaign however, as Davis hints that the website could truly make its mark in the gaming landscape by introducing its own killer app. "The language of social gaming is being invented and we have a few of the building blocks, but many more are about to be discovered.
"There will be a killer app for social games in the same way that "Mario" was for Nintendo, "Sonic" was for Sega and "Halo" was for Xbox. We're going to have our Halo, our Mario, soon."
Speaking with Forbes, platform manager for Facebook Gareth Davis (who looks suspiciously like MySpace's 'Tom') spoke of the future of social gaming, and hinted that PC developers will be on board this year to implement cross-platform play.
Electronic Arts has already announced a Madden Football game to appear on Facebook, while Take-Two is creating a version of Civilisation for the website, reveals Davis. On top of this, "we have thousands of games that have integrated with Facebook Connect. You have games like "Scrabble" where you can play games together whether you're on the iPhone or Facebook--you can play across platforms."
"As developers integrate Facebook across all these devices, they're opening up a new type of gaming we call "multi-device gaming." The first version of this is the ability to play a game together no matter which platform you're on."
Davis then offered an example where a gamer playing a 'war game' on the Xbox 360 is firing rounds in the battlefield, while a PC player can be managing air strikes and an iPhone user organises squad tactics. It certainly sounds like a step up from the closed platform online play we have at the moment - so far, Xbox 360s and PlayStation 3s don't even so much as look at one another.
Farmville isn't the only trick in Facebook's gaming campaign however, as Davis hints that the website could truly make its mark in the gaming landscape by introducing its own killer app. "The language of social gaming is being invented and we have a few of the building blocks, but many more are about to be discovered.
"There will be a killer app for social games in the same way that "Mario" was for Nintendo, "Sonic" was for Sega and "Halo" was for Xbox. We're going to have our Halo, our Mario, soon."
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