Facebook,, Microsoft, And, Farmville, Revolutionise, Online, Gaming

Games producer Zynga has announced plans to launch its blockbuster FarmVille on Microsoft websites Windows Live and MSN Games portal, two of Thailand’s most popular websites (second and eight respectively).

The deal has enormous potential for Facebook in Thailand. Further information is from Social Times.

[The] partnership with MSN Games [will] allow users to play FarmVille on the site using Facebook Connect.

Farmville, Zynga’s largest game with 75 million monthly active users, will be playable through the MSN Games area of the MSN network, and its use of Facebook Connect means that gamers will be able to interact with all 75 million other players no matter which site they log into.  This is the first time that FarmVille will be available anywhere other than Facebook and the FarmVille site itself.

Additional Zynga games will be made available on MSN Games and Windows Live Messenger.

The two sites will bring new members to Facebook by exposing Microsoft users who are yet to join the social network to one of its most influential features: social gaming.

The power of online gaming in Thailand cannot be underestimated as Siwat Chawareewong, managing director mInteraction, told me recently. Facebook games are “the biggest trigger for the Thai market” and “the reason for Facebook’s emergence in Thailand”, he says.

Siwat argues that games like FarmVille, playable on Facebook or the Zynga site only, encouraged new users to flood to join Facebook (membership increased from 200,000 in January 2009 to 2 million in Januar 2o10) just for gaming. As they invited friends to play, and critical mass developed on Facebook, the new found their friends, built communications networks and began using other features, leaving  old social networks, like Hi5, behind.

With new reach from these sites, this process will begin again. At the smallest level it  may be enough to see Facebook beat Hi5 and become the Kingdom’s most popular social network, though in the long-run game playing in Thailand may be radically revised.

Further analysis from Social Times is below – it is worth bearing in mind that the deal will affect Thailand more than most as Windows Live and MSN receive huge amounts of traffic per month AND Facebook is still growing in the country.

The implications of this on Social Gaming are huge.

If gamers are able to play Facebook games seamlessly from MSN Games, this could be the start of Facebook Applications spreading to other popular game destinations like Yahoo and more.

Other game developers could also jump on board, like Playfish and Crowdstar, and the Facebook games that were once just a small diversion will begin to eat into the casual gaming market, which is massive as well.

Microsoft has been making moves to work with Facebook for a while, recently partnering with Facebook to enable Bing-search from within Facebook, and now this.  This was expected after they invested $240 million into Facebook in 2007.  Rumors about about the future partnerships and potentials between the two companies, and this type of integration follows suite.

Microsoft’s Mike Ybarra, general manager for Windows Gaming stated “As hundreds of millions of customers continue to enjoy social gaming, we’re excited to partner with Zynga to add FarmVille to our broad portfolio of games on MSN Games”.

A question that remains unanswered here is what type of Live Messenger integration are we going to see?  Does this mean that Messenger users will be able to play the game from within their Messenger chat windows?

If so, this could lead to a more integrated experience for MSN Messenger users who access Facebook. It’s feasible that perhaps Microsoft intends to centralize Live IDs with Facebook IDs, which would be a very far-reaching identification, and could help them in their web battle against Google and Apple.