When talking about gaming giants, people will most likely name drop Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, and sometimes Capcom, Sega and Activision. All makers of “triple A”, mainstream games. Very rarely d o people think of casual gaming as a “true” gaming market. The numbers tell a different story.

Conventional wisdom will lead you to think that the largest platform for games is the Nintendo Wii (67M units sold) or Xbox Live (20M users) and that the average gamer is a white American teenager.

Nothing could be further from reality.

Today’s average gamer is a 43-year-old woman. There are about 100M social gamers in the US and UK combined, most of them being active on Facebook.

Most people still think of Facebook as a social network with applications built on top. When compared with gaming platforms such as Steam, Xbox Live or PSN, the site holds up pretty well:

– Several thousands of games 
– All your friends are already there 
– Social features: (challenge friends, message, invite…) 
– Post achievements to your Wall 
– Facebook connect 
– Centralized Applications page 
– Easy to dev, publish and distribute virally 
– Facebook wallet

Of course, one may argue that this is not a valid example, as these games deliver lower revenue and quality than titles such as World of Warcraft.

This is no longer true, as demonstrated by Quake Live and the arrival of cloud gaming technology such as OnLive, which make it possible for triple A games to be delivered in web browsers.

Yet this market is so new that very few companies have been able to build a strong brand and lineup of games. Enter Zynga.

The maker of FarmVille, Mafia Wars, Zynga Poker, YoVille reaches 200M users monthly, including 70M unique active players.

YoVille has 17 million residents, making it the largest virtual world operating on a social network.

This makes Zynga the leading game developer on the world’s largest gaming platform.