Recap of Facebook’s Gaming Announcement

Earlier this week, Facebook held a special event focused on updates being made to games / apps within Facebook. At the event, CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed a pretty impressive statistic: more than 200 million people play games on Facebook each month.

However, those users that don’t play games on Facebook tend to have a negative reaction to the notifications that show up in their news feeds. Facebook has recognized this and they want to have as few people as possible have a negative experience while using the social network.

The biggest change is that Facebook is altering how the news feed will work, so that users who don’t play games will no longer see news feed application stories from those friends who do play games (like FarmVille, etc.).

In addition, Facebook will be introducing a new news feed story about games. For example, let’s say  4 or 5 of your Facebook friends start playing Madden Superstars, you would see a story within your news feed listing your 4 friends have started playing Madden Superstars. This will help in decreasing the clutter of your news feed (if you don’t play games), but still let’s you know if you’re friends are playing certain games.

Invites and other application requests will move from the right-hand column of the home page and appear as a line within the left-hand navigation column (See screenshot below). Facebook will also be automatically bookmarking apps that you use, sorting them based on your usage in the last 30 days. This will be a nice update for those who play games and often have a hard time pulling them up when they log-in to Facebook.

What do you think of these updates to games? If you don’t play Facebook games, are they helpful?

Below is the replay of the event, complete with all the announcements: