No question the US economy isn’t helping a model where you have to pay to play past the one hour demo, but I would expect to see growth in the free flash game portals and MiniClip and Addicting Games are down while Kongregate is pretty flat.

I recently posted an interesting report on monetizing Freemuim games. You can check it out here:

http://socialmonetization.blogspot.com/2009/09/free-to-pay.html

As with everything on the internet, things change. If you have great content, why not port?

The key is to architect your games for portability – it takes more time up front, but their is a big pay-off in two key directions:

1) You can build additional games more easily based on your initial “backbone” architecture.

2) You can more easily port your games to a new platform.

So if something replaces Facebook next month, you will still have products to sell. If a greater phone than the iphone appears, you’ll be ready.

Certainly, there are people choosing to game on Facebook rather than Big Fish / Pogo / whoever. Sounds to me like casual games better start innovating their games or get their butts on Facebook.

I agree BFG and others will move to innovate. Dana’s point above about using Facebook Connect to pass along achievements in download games is a definite short-term possibility. Some of the MMOs like the new Atari Champions Online are already doing this, although I’m seeing users turn it off because it spams the Facebook account too much.

I think the hard part for developers though is supporting this individually and believe that there is a great market opportunity for someone to provide APIs for developers to integrate in their games, so the devs can focus on building the game (and the marketers on the messaging/content strategy) and not having to build the infrastructure from scratch.

PS – Thank you for sharing with us all your data from March on your metrics (http://thefloggingwillcontinue.com/); it was great to get another perspective to benchmark how we were doing at Power Challenge.

I could also see the big portals you mentioned using their fan pages to build their Facebook communities around the download games they offer via their portal. Imagine if the new Women’s Murder Club game, for example, offered ways to not only share your your findings, achievements and actions within the game to your news feed, but MSN Games got an exclusive build where users could post comments about certain mini-games or levels right to their fan page. Then other fans who visit the page see fans interacting not just with ‘MSN Games’ but with other fans playing and sharing information about a specific game in real time that is connected only to the MSN brand. Would that incentivize more downloads, and in turn purchases? What if a full-version purchase enabled you to interact more on Facebook than you can in the trial version?

I’m sure there are some untapped possibilities in download gaming that could make it more social and developers/portals could still make money from purchases.

The real difference here is that social mass market games on Facebook have the ability to continually change and keep users engaged – sort of the mash up of MMOs and casual games. PC Download, Flash and iPhone games can’t really do that.

Enjoying your