There are more applications available on Facebook every day. People, gamers or not, are playing Farmville or City of Eternals during class, at work, and at home. This vast audience has made Facebook a platform the Big Guys believe is worthy of investment.

The past year has seen companies like Namco Bandai, Ubisoft, and Electronic Arts devoting various resources to the social networking site. Of course, most companies have fan pages on Facebook—allowing them to keep in touch with gamers about new releases—but several developers and publishers are taking their commitment one step further and creating divisions solely devoted to the social networking behemoth.

Getting involved in different ways

The biggest investment, of course, seems to have come from EA. The publisher got a lot of attention last year when it acquired social network game developer Playfish. EA was willing to spend almost $300 million (and possibly pay another $100 million if performance milestones were met) on games for Facebook and MySpace; but the news was dampened when it was revealed that the company was willing to cut approximately 1,500 jobs from other departments to do so.

While Playfish was the force behind popular title Pet Society, EA hasn't had much to show for its sizable expenditure yet. That said, it was recently revealed that the company has plans to create a Facebook-friendly version of its Madden football games.

Meanwhile, Namco Bandai has taken an approach that has a lot of appeal for both the company and its consumers. The publisher has published free-to-play demos of several classic games on Facebook; gamers can then purchase copies of the titles and have them downloaded to their phones via the site. It's a unique plan, but one that took a fair amount of work to accomplish.

Creating such a setup wasn't too hard for devices like the Droid and iPhone, but making it compatible with non-smartphones was a bit of a challenge. "There was no actual assistance from Facebook in the development of our solution for the feature phones," said Rob Schoeppe, senior director of production and deployment at Namco. "So there were some technical hurdles we had to overcome to get it to actually work on those devices. There was a little bit of work and a bit of difficulty, but ultimately we feel we were able to provide a great user experience."

Of course, this isn't Namco's only plan for Facebook. Schoeppe confirmed that the company will use the site for tie-in apps with future game releases, but couldn't comment on specific plans for that or new IP that the Namco wants to launch.

Ubisoft, meanwhile, is quietly beginning the process of establishing its presence with Facebook. Over the summer, the publisher unveiled TickTock, a trivia game that quizzes users on friends' status updates. Ubi is taking things slowly because it plans to create quality games and tie-ins in the future.

According to Ubisoft producer Omar Abdelwahed, the company doesn't want to pump out Facebook apps until they manage to score a hit. "We measure success in our quality of games," he said in an interview with Ars. "We don't have our Farmville... we're not doing the typical model of social games; we're interested in which mechanics will make really awesome games that we can translate to our core brands."

An attractive market

It isn't surprising that so many companies are getting involved with Facebook. The site's population of close to 400 million users is certainly a powerful motive to start creating content that's compatible with the website.

"You can't ignore the hundreds of millions on facebook," Abdelwahed observed when he was asked about why the site appeals to publishers.

Facebook definitely has a much larger user base than game companies even dreamed of accessing in the past. Case in point: the newly-released Facebook MMORPG City of Eternals, which launched last week, had roughly 40,000 players participating in its private alpha build before the game officially went live.

Ohai's vampire-themed MMO—which is admittedly a great deal of fun—allows players to engage in a fast-paced action story involving a civil war amidst a number of undead houses. For those of us who see no appeal in strategy games like Farmville of Mafia Wars, it's a welcome alternative that plays like a cross between Diablo and World of Warcraft.

The game was built over the past year, and seems like a great demonstration of just how versatile titles can be when implemented on Facebook. Ohai's CEO, Susan Wu, explained that the company plans to put out multiple MMOs each year, and Facebook is an ideal platform for such a business plan because games on the site can implement all of a user's account information and won't force them to spend hours figuring out how they want to make their characters look and play.

However, Wu admitted that—in spite of what a fan she is of using the site to house games like City of Eternals—it can be challenging to create an application that is exclusive for Facebook. This is mainly due to the constant updates made to the website. "You never know what's going to change and how it's going to affect your game. You're almost captive to Facebook's rules and regulations," she explained. "The basic issue is that with using their system, there's an inherent amount of volatility that makes it difficult to figure out what your [development road map] looks like with great certainty."

Where's the profit when the product is free?

How does one turn a profit when there isn't a physical product to sell? For Namco, the answer is obvious: Facebook serves as a demo center that allows gamers to try, and then buy, the mobile versions of some of the company's best-known games.

Ubisoft, meanwhile, plans to use microtransactions to fund its Facebook presence. "We're interested in microtransactions on virtual goods," said Abdelwahed. "If you look at any of the research out there, virtual goods are the path to a good revenue model. That said, this has to come after a really great game. We're gonna do a high-quality game first." Electronic Arts, meanwhile, has yet to reveal an official plan for upcoming games/applications or revenue generation, but it seems safe to assume that the publisher will follow a similar path as Ubisoft.

Ultimately, though, Facebook is providing game companies with a unique opportunity to connect with a vast audience of users that they might never have had access to before. Whether or not putting out casual games on the site will prove profitable enough for long-term implementation remains to be seen. However, the immediate appeal is that Facebook allows publishers "to reach people who were previously unattainable," according to Schoeppe. "It's wide open for us, to tap into everyone."