Frisky Mongoose

The casual gamer who was once lost in the world of AOL, Pogo, MSN Zone, Yahoo and Bigfish may have transitioned into what is known as a social gamer. The rates that people are playing on these traditional casual gaming sites is consistently dropping while the rates that people are playing Facebook game such as FarmVille are going up.

In early 2009, there were 14 million people playing Yahoo Games, today that number is significantly lower at 9.9 million. Similar services such as Pogo and AOL have experienced the same level of drops. The drop is mainly to players moving on to more social offerings.

Facebook games have a wide variety of play styles and have one secret ingredient that the other casual gaming services miss: the social community. The advantage of social games on Facebook is actually just Facebook. Players already have a profile with their friends and information already in it and the games usually make it easy to connect with those friends. With the social community only growing, it’s easy to see why more and more users move to the social side of gaming.

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