The Rise of Gaming on Social Networks

As of December 2011, the social network game company Zynga, responsible for a majority of social networking site Facebook’s games, has over 240 million active members. Compare this with the current total number of active Facebook members, over 800 million, and it makes Zynga a powerful member of the rapidly expanding social network gaming market. Social networking sites have been growing rapidly in the past decade; Facebook went from 1 million active users in December 2004 to 750 million by July 2011. This rise has directly facilitated the staggering rise of social network gaming. This paper will seek to understand the reasons behind this dramatic rise and also discuss the issues surrounding this, such as the ever present worry of security and the methods of collecting revenue from these forms of games.