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Facebook’s best move in the social network market was to bring in 3rd party applications to Facebook. The move that got them millions more users and now with Facebook groping over 400 millions users worldwide, by 2008, the number of applications on Facebook had grown well over 30,000, consisting of thousands of games.

We’ve already witnessed the rise of developers like Zynga, which now boasts revenues close to $100 million and the sheer amount of apps developed by Zynga is astounding. They are also responsible for one of Facebook’s most popular and my mom’s favorite game, FarmVille.

Looking at the success of Social Networking games, heavyweight publisher EA wanted a piece of the pie which led to the buyout of Playfish, another prominent Facebook game developer. This was no ordinary buyout, EA paid US$275 million in cash and approximately US$25 million in equity retention arrangements. EA has also announced that Madden for Facebook is currently in development and will soon be hitting the Application Directory, on which EA Sports president Peter Moore told Bloomberg:

“We have to make ‘Madden’ more accessible. You’ll see us on Facebook going forward”

Gaming in the 2D environment is by no means revolutionary on a Flash based platform, but with 3D games joining Facebook’s Application Directory like: Paradise Paintball 3D, which although needs Unity Web Player to run, is a pretty decent FPS range game for a browser. 3G Studios, an independent game developer based in Nevada, has announced that they are currently working on a full-fledged 3D first person shooter for Facebook.

I am certain that there is a fair amount of people that play FarmVille on a low configuration laptop or in some cases even net-books. It’s implied that hardcore gamers will probably never accept Facebook as a viable alternative to their consoles/PCs unless we see a service which is similar to Onlive pop up out of the blue but casual gamers and social networking addicts are definitely looking for online gaming with their friends and family, so, with the likes of EA joining in would it be safe to say that Facebook is on it’s way to becoming the next Xbox Live for casual gamers?

Facebook Game Recommendation: Biotronics is a fun & quite addictive Arcade game & Super Mario which is although not multi-player, is still fun to play.