While there is currently a cool 32 million people regularly playing FarmVille on a daily basis on Facebook, the social network has made a plea to games developers to create 'iconic games' such as Mario, Halo or Sonic for the platform.
Facebook Platform Manager, Gareth Davis, speaking at this week's Games Developers Conference in San Francisco, reminded devs that the next killer game was out there and that Facebook was ready to help to host it and popularise it.
Research suggests around three quarters of Facebook's 400m users regularly play social games on the site.
"The next killer game is still out there and this game will come from you," Gareth Davis told a room of designers in San Francisco.
"When we look at every major game platform, we see that there is an iconic defining game on that platform whether it's Sonic or Mario or Halo.
"And while there are some great games on Facebook today, no one has yet produced the iconic game for [it]. The Facebook Mario is still out there," added Davis.
FarmVille leads the charge
"[FarmVille] has grown to $1bn from nothing nearly three years ago. It is definitely a mass market phenomenon across the board and represents a change in the way people play games and interact with their friends," said Justin Smith of research firm Inside Network.
This is just the beginning of Facebook's move into the game space, according to Gareth Davis.
"We are going to see multiple games with more than 100m people playing each one. That is as many people as watched the recent superbowl, the most watched TV programme in American history.
"The growth we are seeing is amazing and in a short space of time we have developed a brand new mass market audience for gaming."
Namechecking Battle.net, Xbox Live and games like Rock Band Davis reminded the developers in San Fran this week that: "The most profound revolutions, the most significant disruption, is how social games are designed. They are made for social interaction - people want to play with their friends."
"Social games are the past, present and future of the games industry. Someday soon all games will be as social as they were in the past - and we won't call them social games, we'll just call them games again."
