Social Games Ported To Social2Web To Avoid Facebook Tax

Facebook games are an extremely popular way to waste time. Whether it’s Farmville, The Sims Social or Empires and Allies, Facebook games have become an excellent revenue source for developers who are managing to turn addicting games into profit. However, many of these developers are soon going to find a loss in profits, since from the 1st of July Facebook Credits will become mandatory for all games on the social network. Facebook takes a 30% cut of all Facebook Credits sold.

Tomio Geron over on Forbes is reporting that Adknowledge is taking advantage of this upcoming Facebook tax by offering to host Facebook games on their Social2web service. This way they avoid Facebook’s 30% tax, and they would gain other revenue sources such as in-game advertisements. Players would also gain in-game bonuses known as “incentivized invites” by inviting their friends using Facebook or Twitter.

The idea behind this is not to remove the games from the social networking giant, but instead to offer game developers an alternative platform. As Bobby McFarland, the director of Social2Web, says “We expect developers to maintain a presence on Facebook, but we want to provide an alternative solution as the cost of operating on Facebook increases”.

Having a version of your Facebook game also opens it up to those who aren’t on Facebook, and it allows you to make full use of the space offered by a web browser. Whereas Facebook forces a game to take up a segment of the screen, the game on the Social2Web platform can take up the whole screen allowing for better advertising, and a bigger screen area for your game to make full advantage of.

This is an option for game developers to try, and if it becomes successful we could see some games jumping ship from Facebook. Could this be the first crack in the social giant’s armour? We’ll have to simply wait and see. For more information, check out the Forbes article.