The Gamers Developers Conference is going on in San Francisco right now, so we'd expect to hear a lot of news in regards to gaming platforms, and integration options for existing social networks. We even got a taste of it last week when Zynga and The Social Gaming Network announced their platforms, extending developing opportunities to game publishers that want to reach the Facebook crowd, and others across those social networks that support third-party applications.
Today, one of Zynga's chief competitors, is making another announcement: The Social Gaming Network (SGN) is expanding its Social Gaming Hub, thanks to the addition of a slew of Facebook apps. These include the Jetman Game, Free Gifts, Mobile Weapon: BattleStations, Pirate, and The Dot Game. That's a good amount of games added to the SGN platform, quickly growing the bulk of its portfolio and spreading its reach across some of the more popular game applications on Facebook.
What's it all mean?
The promotion, reach, usability and marketing of applications that delve into social networks through developer platforms is a consolidating process that a lot of third-party platforms are building upon. This effectively strengthens the overall market, even though we've seen little evidence providing optimal justification for some of the prices that are being thrown around in terms of valuations or even hopeful acquisition numbers.
What remains to be true, however, is the fact that the platform-on-top-of-platform approach is a quickly growing sector, reaching across games, advertisements, and every other form of integrated application.
Despite the surrounding drama currently going down in regards to Zynga and SGN, the ongoing conversations that merely consider the popularity of such games and their effectiveness for gaining attentive and valuable users is one that can be heard for more than just integrated gaming platforms.