Facebook Inc. made a series of changes Friday to its online-gaming platform, a day after its biggest rival in social media, Google Inc.'s Google+ site, launched online games.
Facebook posted an update on its blog late Thursday announcing it would roll out a live game ticker that gives updates on friends' recent moves. The company also increased the size of its gaming screen and now allows users to bookmark their favorite games on the home screen.
The moves are an attempt by Facebook to quell the concerns of game developers, who have had an increasingly tense relationship with the social network over the last year.
"Fundamentally, we want to have a relationship with developers on our platform where our values are aligned," said Carl Sjogreen, Facebook's director of platform products. "We've been cleaning up some of the incentive misalignment."
Social gaming has become an increasingly important part of Facebook's business. Research firm eMarketer estimates that social-gaming companies generated more than $500 million in revenue from selling virtual goods last year.
Facebook says it has over 200 million users who play games on its site.
Last September, Facebook began cracking down on "game spam," or the amount of game-related updates that show up in a user's news feed. But game developers have complained that since then, their visibility on the site has plummeted.
As of July 1, Facebook requires game developers to accept payments through its virtual payment system, called Facebook Credits. Through credits, the company takes a 30% cut of all game-developer revenue.
The announcement on the Palo Alto, Calif., company's Facebook page came just hours after Google announced that it will begin offering 16 games from 10 game companies on its competing social network, Google+.
Those offering include Rovio Mobile Ltd.'s popular "Angry Birds" game and Zynga Inc.'s Zynga Poker.
The offerings will expand over time, the company said.
In sharp contrast to Facebook's fee, Google+ will offer a "promotional rate," initially taking only 5% of any payments made by Google+ users to the game companies for the remainder of the year. A Google spokeswoman declined to say what the share of revenues would be in the future.
Sean Ryan, director of game partnerships at Facebook, said that the revenue split is just one factor that game developers consider when deciding where to build their products.
Article Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904823804576504624079447138.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
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