Facebook: We want to take game devs to mobile

Facebook has been criticized for being caught behind the eight ball when it comes to making the tricky transition from desktop to mobile. As Facebook as a whole comes to grips with the mobile market (Zuckerberg and company are off to a pretty good start), so must Facebook games. At a Gamasutra-attended "whiteboard session" at Facebook's Menlo Park headquarters, executives talked about how it's steering the choppy waters. "Increasingly going forward, mobile is part of our strategy for games," said Dan Rose, who runs Facebook's partnership team. Sean Ryan, the company's director of games partnerships added, "It's not about 'either/or', it's about 'and.' With the platform we've deployed on iOS, and certainly Android as well, we now have the same platform available across all three channels, and that's where we're focusing. "We have over 600 million people accessing Facebook through mobile devices," Ryan said. "As our developers move to mobile, we move with them." Games on mobile are primarily native apps, of course. On mobile, said Ryan, "It's about using Facebook as the glue -- our identity, our login, our experience." "We're sending, already, hundreds of millions of clicks a month to the iOS or Google Play stores, organically," he said, adding that this will only grow as the company better promotes games on these devices, including through paid ads. For mobile app installs, Ryan said Facebook has "the highest conversion rates in the business." On another hot topic, real-money gambling games, Ryan demurred comment as best as he could. "It's a very hot topic, but a very small part of the business," he said. "It's early days for this -- it's only one developer in one market."