Facebook's Triumph

The second group which Facebook needed to appease was its own accountants, because despite its enormous size, Facebook still fundamentally lacks a business plan which can monetise on all of those clicks and eyeballs.

One promising move towards a solid business plan lies in using Facebook's ubiquity to deliver a key piece of internet infrastructure which the world has been waiting for since the mid-nineties - micropayments. At present, even tiny transactions must be carried out on a credit card, leading to a proliferation of sites which offer "wallets" full of pre-purchased credits, most of which only work for one company's products.

Facebook's opportunity is to become the central wallet for all microtransactions, allowing you to top up a wallet of Facebook Credits and spend them on in-game items, game time cards, watching videos, downloading music, reading articles on pay-sites and even buying small physical items.

Yet if this is to succeed, Facebook must first put its own house in order - by convincing games and other applications on Facebook itself to adopt Credits instead of using their own currency systems. Many of those providers will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into Facebook's system, not least because of the hefty amount which will be skimmed off the top of each transaction - but with Zynga wrangled into submission, it's likely that others will see themselves as having little choice but to follow.

This short-term pain, however, is likely to lead to long-term gain for everyone involved. Love or loathe Facebook, there's no question but that it's in the interest of the games business to have it healthy, thriving and profitable, providing a powerful platform for social games, exporting a social graph for developers to utilise and creating an unrivalled channel for game discovery and peer recommendation.

Moreover, Facebook Credits themselves could turn out to be manna from heaven for the online game development industry. Credit cards provide an enormous barrier to transactions - customers still don't entirely trust sites which ask for their credit card details, fearing security breaches and recurring bill payments that they didn't ask for. Moreover, the simple action of entering your card details makes it quite clear just how much money you're spending, and what you're spending it on - a degree of transparency which is laudable, but perhaps not particularly good business sense (Microsoft Points are a good example of the "credits" system working incredibly well, for example).

A wallet full of Facebook Credits, perhaps topped up by a simple, cheap subscription each month, is a different proposition. It will encourage people to make microtransactions, to experiment with new games and products, and allow the emergence of revenue streams made up of a torrent of tiny transactions - a few pence at a time - rather than a trickle of larger ones.

Of course, this all relies on Facebook being a trustworthy business partner for those with whom it works, not to mention on Facebook Credits actually getting off the ground as a payment channel. However, it's likely that Zynga's decision to back down from its confrontation with the platform holder is largely based on precisely such an optimistic vision of the future, as well as a pragmatic view of the present.

One thing is certain - even those companies who believe that Zynga has achieved unassailable dominance over the Facebook games platform will want to watch very closely to see what happens next, because if this relationship works out in the coming months and years, it will have immense implications not only for Facebook, but for online gaming and entertainment business models across the board.