Facebook to deliver 'more hardcore' games for WoW and Diablo lovers

Matt Wyndowe, games product manager for Facebook, has spoken of his company's commitment to delivering "more hardcore" gaming experiences for "less traditionally mainstream audiences".

"Games are extremely important to us at Facebook. As early as 2010 we didn't have a dedicated games team and now we have 40-plus people working full-time on games," Wyndowe revealed in an interview with GamesIndustry International.

Evidence that Facebook is branching out beyond 'casual' social titles like FarmVille can be found in the output of developer Kixeye.

"This is a team that is focused on a more hardcore gaming market. They skew way more male than most of our game developers [and develop] high quality games that drive incredible engagement," Wyndowe explained.

"We showed a teaser of the new Kixeye RPG at GDC and it looked incredibly cool. That trend of taking games and game categories that have not traditionally been on Facebook and putting them there is going to be huge this year."

Given that Zuckerberg's social network now has over 900 million monthly active users, the thinking goes that there must be, at least, one or two so-called 'core gamers' among that giant group of Facebookers.

What Wyndowe hopes to communicate to game developers is that, no matter what focus your game has, there's a huge captive audience waiting to play.

"If you're a game developer and you're targeting some niche of gamers, that group is on Facebook and they're engaged with Facebook," Wyndowe said.

"If you look at huge franchises that are built like World of Warcraft, Diablo, and those types of games, all of those people are on Facebook and want to engage with their friends in these kinds of things."