Well, will they?
The final panel session of the first day of the MEM conference in London focused on social gaming, and its likely impact on mobile entertainment.
Social games firms like Zynga, Playfish and Playdom have built big businesses on Facebook, but it remains to be seen how the model transfers to mobile.
The panel included Aaron Rattue, business group director of telecoms at GfK Retail & Technology; Tim Harrison from The Mobile Consultancy; Andy Travers from Jumbuck; and Aaron Johnson from Vodafone.
Rattue kicked off by saying that 1% of the global population has played Farmville on Facebook, showing the scale of social gaming.
However, Harrison said that the market for mobile social games is "still in its infancy", and that on Facebook Farmville is head and tails above its rivals, so not necessarily representative of the overall market.
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He also pointed to the difficulties in making truly cross-platform social games for mobile, as opposed to games that just run on the iPhone.
"There's a happy marriage between games and social media," said Travers. "But I'm not sure if we as games developers or marketers truly understand it."
Johnson made the point that traditionally, people who have played mobile games have had to identify themselves as 'gamers', whereas on Facebook that's not the case - millions of people who are playing Farmville wouldn't think of themselves as gamers.
So what does social gaming mean in the mobile context? Harrison said that as iPhone develops, more social gaming models will come through - "Of course, Farmville has just been announced for iPhone," he said, while also citing Japanese company DeNA as an important firm to watch in this space.
Travers said that Jumbuck is considering "dusting off an old business plan" for something called Jumbuck Island, which offered a blend of social networking and casual games - in response to the changing market.
Rattue highlighted the differences between the social gaming demographic and traditional gamers. "On Farmville, 65% of players are female," he said. "You're turning a lot of people onto playing games online, even if they're not what we would think of as games."
Ironically, the most successful mobile game ever is, as Harrison (a former EA exec) noted, Tetris. "Probably the most unsocial game that's even been invented!"
Johnson said that he thinks that social games on mobile will be more expensive to develop and run than Facebook social games. He also thinks mobile may have a role as a spin-off for online social games.
"Maybe you play your football game in a Flash environment online, but you train your team in the mobile client of the online game," he said.
The conversation moved on to pricing models for mobile social games - will they spell the end of the paid download model, in favour of free downloads and a focus on in-app payments and offers?
"The concern I have is that for a mobile operator to participate in something like virtual goods - something that disintermediates the real value of what a customer is purchasing - we'll have a requirement that it is really clear. If we're going to put something on a customer's bill, it has to be really easy to understand."
For that reason, he thinks mobile social games developers shouldn't focus on virtual items as their business model in the early days.
Fragmentation was also discussed as a barrier to mobile social gaming - people playing with friends on different handsets and operators.
"At the moment it does leave third-party players like Facebook in a very strong position," said Harrison. "The extent to which handset manufacturers and operators want to cede that opportunity to Facebook remains to be seen."
Could social gaming be a bubble - a fad that will die away as fast as it rose?
"It might have peaked," said Rattue. "The vast majority of what you're looking at is fad or fashion driven. But the social element will remain as part of the games. That will stay."
