Facebook revises mobile games guidelines

Gamers and non-gamers can now see stories for the titles their friends are playing the most.

It's not the first time Facebook has tweaked its games guidelines. In the early boom years for social games on Facebook, companies like Zynga made hay by pushing messages to non-gamers in the news feed.

Facebook clamped down on this in time and nudged publishers in the direction of paid search and ads.

However, this has skewed the market toward bigger richer publishers. So now Facebook is permitting game stories in the mobile news feed, with the aim of attracting developers to its new HTML5 mobile gaming platform.

The plan is to aggregate messages so as not to overwhelm the feeds with game related stories, showing how multiple friends have joined a specific game. Users can then tap the link to join the HTML5 version, or native app if already installed.

The Facebook blog said: "We’ve recently begun testing aggregated game stories for mobile platform apps to drive traffic from mobile devices to games.  As we gather user and developer feedback from this test, we’ll continue to iterate on the feature as we focus on making feed a strong acquisition channel for developers."