Feedback loop
Emerging platforms aren't just new ways to make money - they're also changing the way games are developed.
The reason for this is that the platform on which they're working, Facebook, is a two-way street. They aren't simply pushing game content to their players - they're also receiving details of all of those players' interactions with that content.
In the untold gigabytes of data which move through the servers of games like Farmville, Pet Society or Mafia Wars on a given day, there is a mind-blowing level of detail about player behaviour.
With the right tools, developers can dig into the data and discover how long players spend on each page, which buttons they click and which they ignore, whether different social groups or nationalities play the games differently, or whether there are serious bottlenecks in any of the game processes which seem to stump players.
Even more powerful is the potential to essentially "focus test" new ideas in a transparent way. With a few million players, it's possible to test small changes - perhaps subtle differences to the colour scheme, designed to lead the eye more naturally through a layout, or alterations to how a game mechanic is presented - by rolling them out quietly onto the accounts of a couple of percent of your active players.
The feedback from those players then tells you if your tweak is successful, giving you the data required to make a proper decision on whether to roll it out to everyone - a far cry from the stabs in the dark to which developers have become accustomed.
You could even focus-test a dozen variations of a game change, and use the data gathered to find out which is the best of the lot - a surprisingly organic and evolutionary approach to game design which has been used to great effect by some of the world's biggest web game developers.
Facebook game designers are on the vanguard of this movement - joined, in some cases, by MMO developers, who can theoretically access the same kind of data, although I'm consistently surprised by how few of them actually invest in building great data-mining tools for the wealth of information their servers hold. However, developers on all platforms are starting to wake up to the potential of this approach.
What has changed, of course, is connectivity. PCs have been connected devices for years, and platforms such as Steam have greatly enhanced that situation. Consoles are now also seen as connected devices, players' experiences even in single-player games now being connected to the rest of the world through Xbox Live or PSN.