Facebook @ GDC: Developer Day Recap

Earlier this month, the Facebook games team hosted a Developer Day at GDC in San Francisco, where we connected with about 250 game developers building games for desktop, console and mobile. For those who could not join us, we've provided a rundown of the day, as well as links to videos and code samples.

Facebook outlook: driving growth for developers of all sizes

Matt Wyndowe, product manager for the games team, gave opening remarks on the games ecosystem and our 2012 focus on mobile, Open Graph and high quality games.

Wooga's Jens Begemann and Kixeye's Will Harbin shared their own experiences building with Facebook with the crowd. Begemann discussed how Facebook's viral channels drive nearly 2 million visitors to the Diamond Dash iOS game each month, while Harbin shared his company's vision on building high quality, hardcore games that drive high retention and monetization.

Watch the video

Five steps for making your web or mobile game successful on Facebook

Kicking off the deep-dive sessions, Constantin Koumouzelis, games partner engineer, and Christine Abernathy, mobile partner engineer, presented five essential steps to get started building a social game with Facebook platform, featuring live coding examples for native iOS, desktop and mobile web development. The talk touched on how to authenticate the user, access the Graph API, personalize the user's game experience, utilize Facebook's social channels, and drive more engagement with scores.

Watch the video . iOS code sample . Web code sample

How to leverage Open Graph as the distribution engine for games

Next up, Gareth Morris, games partner engineer, emphasized the distribution, engagement and identity benefits of Open Graph and walked the developers in the audience through the details of implementing Open Graph — starting with the games report on Timeline, scores and achievements, and then custom actions, objects and aggregations.

Watch the video

Growing monetization and engagement on Facebook.com

Daniel Schultz and Fred Fang, games partner engineers, gave a talk on advanced features for games on Facebook.com, such as fluid width and wMode, and discussed how to use payments to monetize games. This talk also featured live coding examples of how to implement these features.

Watch the video . Code sample

Facebook's social distribution for mobile developers

My colleague Christine joined me later in the day to discuss the traffic Facebook drives to mobile apps and how to take advantage of Facebook's mobile scale by implementing SSO, deep-linking, social channels, and monetization.

Watch the video

How console games can reach the Facebook audience

Finally, Constantin highlighted how console games can take advantage of personalization, social channels, and Open Graph to grow engagement. Micheal Dunn from Xbox Live and Jon Webb from PlayStation joined us during this presentation to discuss their own experience of bringing friends into the game to personalize the experience, publishing Open Graph and feed stories to help drive game discovery, and authenticating console users, while showcasing integrations from Uncharted 3 and Kinnect Sports.

Watch the video
Download the entire presentation

Thank you from the Facebook games team

Thank you to our partners and to everyone who attended. We appreciate the feedback we heard and look forward to more events where we can connect with the games community.