Console gaming, are you listening? Mobile gaming, can you hear the footsteps behind you? Traditional gaming publishers, move over! Recent research studies have shown that social network gaming has made incredible gains in recent years and the latest figures could be the tipping point for turning the gaming industry on its ear. NPD Group released results of its latest research study on social network gaming last week, reporting that 56 million people in the U.S. have played a social networking game. Say, what??!! That's right. Twenty percent of the U.S. population has been seduced by a social network game.

Meanwhile, PopCap, the successful creator of such casual games as Bejeweled and Insaniquarium recently sponsored a study that found the average player of online social network games is not some 20-something male computer geek but rather a 43-year-old woman who enjoys playing casual games on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace at least once a week and sometimes as often as several times a day. This group of women is likely to play social games with their real-world friends and relatives in sessions that usually last more than a half-hour but sometimes can go longer than three hours. Facebook is by far their most popular destination for social network games, although some play on MySpace and a smaller percentage play on Bebo and Friendster. In fact, when these female gamers go to their favorite social networking sites, they'll spend as much as 39% of their time playing social games compared to chatting (17%) or playing games solo (15%). Almost half of the respondents to Popcap's study admitted that when they connect to a social networking site, they do so specifically to play a social game.

It should come as no surprise that Farmville is the most popular social networking game, with a whopping 69% of respondents saying this is their game of choice, followed by Bejeweled (65%), Texas Hold'em Poker (63%) and Café World (61%). After all, how many times has your Facebook page been flooded by updates of friends who announce they've harvested a crop of corn or planted barrels of strawberries? (To me, it often feels like a million!)

One of the more stunning pieces of data from the NPD study is that 35% of social network gamers are brand new to gaming, which means that the other 65% are people who are moving over from traditional console games. Anita Frazier, an analyst at NPD, said, "Although 35 percent of social network gamers are new to gaming, it's clear that a lot of existing gamers have been drawn into the social network gaming arena as well." She adds, "This impacts both the time they spend with other types of gaming, as well as the amount of money they're spending on gaming. As more players are drawn into these games, the entire games industry is going to feel, and have to adjust to, the impact."

This fact hits home with the gaming industry when they sit down to examine the spending habits of social gamers. According to an article in Daily Variety, gamers on social networking sites say "they've spent 20 percent less on gaming overall since they started playing these types of games." This is because almost all social networking games are free to play. While this serves to get people into the cyber-door to play games, once they're there, they spend almost no money while they play. NPD says that only 10% of players spend actual money on "micro-transactions," which are purchases for in-game upgrades or items. In addition, Frazier says that social network gaming has other challenges it must overcome. For example, she says, "Players are frustrated by slow loading and performance issues and report getting bored by the games easily. Clearly, these types of games will have to continue to evolve if they hope to hold their audiences and incentivize them to spend money playing."

Still, the numbers of people flocking to social network gaming are encouraging enough that several major players have jumped into the social network gaming fold. At the end of 2009, Electronic Arts bought Playfish while Take-Two Interactive Software is working on a Facebook version of its popular game, Civilization. Meanwhile, Google is turning the social network gaming industry upside-down with its recent acquisition of Slide, creator of such titles as Super Poke Pets, and of Jambool, a service which Daily Variety says, "runs a monetization platform that developers can integrate into their games to get paid." And, most recently, Google purchased Angstro creator of such social networking services as Noteworthy News. IDG's Nancy Gohring writes, "Analysts and onlookers continue to speculate that Google plans to release a new social-networking tool, potentially centered on games, to compete with Facebook". Some analysts expect Google to launch such a service later this year or early in 2011. If this happens, social gaming will likely put an even bigger dent in traditional game publishers' bottom lines.

So, gamers, do you play social networking games? And if you do, are they displacing regular console games in your life?