How Facebook is helping to pair up mobile developers with its 375 million gamers

When I need to make friends, I just go on Facebook and start spamming random people. While that strategy isn’t really working well for me, mobile game developers are finding that a similar tactic on Facebook is much more effective for them and their free-to-play apps.

In fact, Facebook is one of the top networks that developers turn to when they need to “acquire users,” which is the clinical term for getting people to download and try a free-to-play game. For games that don’t charge an upfront price (and instead rely on large audiences that make small in-app purchases), finding new people to install the game on iOS, Android, and elsewhere is actually a huge, expensive undertaking. It requires developers to reach out to a variety of different ad networks, but Facebook is striving to rise above the pack according to developers like Nordeus, which makes the popular social soccer-management simulator Top Eleven.