4 reasons we will see 100,000+ apps on Facebook in 2010

Casual Connect Europe in Hamburg brought many leanings for me, but I think the most profound was that the Social Gaming space will explode in 2010.  Here are 4 reasons why:

1. Casual Gaming is on the express train to Social. Every Casual Gaming company at the conference is either boarding or is already on the train to social gaming, and this train in moving fast, because social gaming is eating their lunch.  These are guys from all over the world and in every game genre. Huge.

2. iPhone games will be Facebook games. There are 140,000 iPhone games on the AppStore as of this writing. There are 4 categories of product in the iStore, where the top 25 placement results in reasonable sales. The other 139,900 applications are not making any money. There will be a gold rush of iPhone guys into the space.

3. Facebook is a platform that lets you promote your product! Rather than hope to be in the top 25 on the AppStore, here’s a platform where you can take control over your application’s destiny by buying ads with Facebook.

4. Technical barrier is low.  Integrating with Facebook is no more difficult technically than building an iPhone Game or creating a Flash Casual Game. In fact, it’s probably a lot easier with the introduction of Facebook Connect.

With both the Casual and iPhone Gaming industries all starting to do social, and given the relatively short dev cycles, I expect a gold rush. At the very least, we’ll see 100,000 apps integrating social features. There really is no reason not to.

The big question is, will they know how to monetize on Facebook? Backstage can help.