Hey Facebook, there's a Game Request in my Notifications Bar!

One of the biggest areas of scrutiny with games on Facebook is just what happens to gift requests when they are sent from user to user to be redeemed in a specific game. The Gift Requests page has long been the standard, regardless of its positioning on the site, allowing users to pick and choose which request they'd like to respond to at any one time, but at one time, users were also notified about game requests and activities via their Notifications bar.

For the past months, the Notification bar has been reserved solely for Facebook-specific "news" related to your account, alerting you when you've had a comment on your status, photos or wall posts, whether someone has written on your wall (even if this was for a game), accepted your friend request and so on. Over the last 24 hours, however, something very different has started to appear in this same space.

While playing your favorite Facebook games, you've likely come across a situation where you've received a notification bubble dealing specifically with in-game gift requests. These notifications are released after you've received a block of game requests, and show you one specific notification for just one game.

You'll see something along the lines of "John Doe, Jane Doe, and 3 other friends sent you requests in FarmVille," replacing "FarmVille" with any game you happen to have received requests from. The image above shows you what you can expect to see, but we have removed user names and profile images for the sake of their privacy.

The folks at Inside Facebook have been able to confirm that this is a test being performed by Facebook proper, in an effort to analyze the effects of these notifications on users. Facebook hopes that with these changes in notifications, they may be able to help developers with general app discovery and the retention of players. We can see how the latter purpose would easily come into play, as users would be able to receive frequent reminders that they have requests waiting for them in games, which would hopefully make them check back in more often than they would have otherwise.

Either way, this is definitely something to keep an eye on, as figuring out how to sustain the viral nature of app installations and keep players logging into their games are two issues that developers have been highly focused on since the removal of third-party notifications back in March.

Since this is sure to be a heavily discussed topic in the coming weeks, we'd like to know what you think about game notifications in general. Have you started receiving these test notifications for your games yet? Do you like the change, or do you think that you will quickly be overwhelmed with notifications?

Disney-branded Facebook games coming in 2012, Playdom head says

Can we all just say, “finally?” During a panel named “The Rise of Social Games” at the f8 Facebook Developers Conference in San Francisco, Disney Interactive and Playdom head John Pleasants revealed that two to four Facebook games surrounding Disney xd brands will hit Facebook in 2012. The general topic of the panel was the fact that branded social games are taking off.

Pleasants was joined on the panel by Kabam CEO Kevin Chou, EA Interactive head Barry Cottle and Zynga CBO Owen Van Natta. Facebook director of games partnerships Sean Ryan moderated the panel with the preface that branded games will take over the Facebook platform. And he might be right: EA just released The Sims Social, Zynga will soon re-brand its new Adventure World with Indiana Jones and Kabam recently announced The Godfather: Five Families.

Playdom, which Disney acquired in July 2010 for a whopping $740 million, is ahead of the pack with two branded games on Facebook: ESPNU College Town and ESPN Sports Bar & Grill. Both games performed well, thanks to advertising through the ESPN TV network. While Disney owns the ESPN brand, notice how neither of those actually involve the insanely popular Disney characters we’ve come to love.

Honestly, we’re surprised this didn’t happen sooner. Consider this: Disney has its own cable TV channel through which it could, in theory, advertise whatever it wants. Pleasants didn’t get into why it’s taken this long for disney channel games to throw its cast of characters into Facebook games, but did reveal the power of the Disney name.

Gnome Town, which Playdom launched in the summer–and we enjoyed quite a bit–peaked at 530,000 daily players. But just plopping the Disney logo on top of the existing one made users more likely to spend in the game just through trust of the company’s name, according to Pleasants. “We think it’s an advantage, if you put game play first,” Pleasants said.

It’s comforting to hear this emphasized by these developers. (Kabam’s Chou shared the same sentiment.) Branded games on Facebook are OK in my book, but the last thing anyone wants to see is the genre become a branding machine.

Disney-branded Facebook games coming in 2012, Playdom head says

Can we all just say, “finally?” During a panel named “The Rise of Social Games” at the f8 Facebook Developers Conference in San Francisco, Disney Interactive and Playdom head John Pleasants revealed that two to four Facebook games surrounding Disney xd brands will hit Facebook in 2012. The general topic of the panel was the fact that branded social games are taking off.

Pleasants was joined on the panel by Kabam CEO Kevin Chou, EA Interactive head Barry Cottle and Zynga CBO Owen Van Natta. Facebook director of games partnerships Sean Ryan moderated the panel with the preface that branded games will take over the Facebook platform. And he might be right: EA just released The Sims Social, Zynga will soon re-brand its new Adventure World with Indiana Jones and Kabam recently announced The Godfather: Five Families.

Playdom, which Disney acquired in July 2010 for a whopping $740 million, is ahead of the pack with two branded games on Facebook: ESPNU College Town and ESPN Sports Bar & Grill. Both games performed well, thanks to advertising through the ESPN TV network. While Disney owns the ESPN brand, notice how neither of those actually involve the insanely popular Disney characters we’ve come to love.

Honestly, we’re surprised this didn’t happen sooner. Consider this: Disney has its own cable TV channel through which it could, in theory, advertise whatever it wants. Pleasants didn’t get into why it’s taken this long for disney channel games to throw its cast of characters into Facebook games, but did reveal the power of the Disney name.

Gnome Town, which Playdom launched in the summer–and we enjoyed quite a bit–peaked at 530,000 daily players. But just plopping the Disney logo on top of the existing one made users more likely to spend in the game just through trust of the company’s name, according to Pleasants. “We think it’s an advantage, if you put game play first,” Pleasants said.

It’s comforting to hear this emphasized by these developers. (Kabam’s Chou shared the same sentiment.) Branded games on Facebook are OK in my book, but the last thing anyone wants to see is the genre become a branding machine.