Are Facebook Games Free MMOs?

As Facebook gets bigger and bigger (it’s currently the second biggest website on the internet) more and more games will launch on it. Some of the most popular Facebook games these days are Farmville, Mafia Wars and Petville. For the most part these games aren’t MMOs, but they do have cooperative elements, so it wouldn’t be unfair to classify them as free to play MMOs. After all, they are all free and they are online. I actually started playing these “social games” on Facebook pretty recently, and I’m not quite sure what to think of them. It’s not exactly fair to compare them to full blown MMORPGs like Heroes of Might and Magic Online from TQ Digital and Digimon Battle from WeMade, but there are fair comparisons out there.

YoVille for example is a social Facebook that plays a lot like Gaia Online or even OurWorld. Both Gaia Online and OurWorld would be considered traditional free to play browser MMOs, so there is room for comparison amongst these games. As is, Facebook games are absurdly popular. Farmville for example has some 30 million active users on Facebook. That’s on par with mega popular MMORPGs like LaTale from OGPlanet and MapleStory from Nexon. Though it doesn’t quite surpass RuneScape from Jagex yet. Still, 30 million active users. Wow. That’s quite a number. The thing about Facebook Games is that they only started popping up a year or so ago, so within a years time they exploded in popularity and became mainstream!

As I said earlier, I really don’t know what to think of these games. I tried playing both Treasure Isle and YoVille yesterday and neither kept my attention for long. Treasure Isle did keep me entertained a bit longer, but meh. To be fair, I did like Farmville, but that’s only because I’m a fan of the Harvest Moon games. I remember playing the N64 Harvest Moon game for at least 50 hours! The game boy advanced one – Friends of Mineral Town was also a good one. Aside from Treasure Isle and Yoville though, I also gave Social City a try, which was basically a Sim City style city building game. It was a bit too basic for my liking, but the concept behind it was pretty neat. I did get bored of it in an hour though.

I guess Facebook MMOs just aren’t my thing, at least the ones available today. Maybe they’ll get better in the future. Who knows. For now though, I think I’ll stick with my client based MMORPGs. On that note, I just finished re-downloading Lunia from ijji. Since I first played the game a year or so ago, the game has went through a bunch of major updates, so it should rock now. Anyway guys! Later!