By the Numbers: Facebook Games Says "Cross-Platform Is a Win"

Facebook, as always, wants its version of your identity to go everywhere. At the Game Developers Conference today in San Francisco, Facebook Games engineering manager Aaron Brady told developers that the numbers support that mission, too.

Brady shared the results of two recent internal studies of games using Facebook Connect to link players’ identities between mobile apps and Facebook’s app platform Canvas. According to one study, players who chose to play the same game on mobile and Canvas returned to both more frequently, and spent 3.3 times as much on in-game purchases as those players who only played on Canvas.

Brady declined to share numbers relating to the flip side of that trend — how cross-platform monetization compares to mobile-only monetization.

He also noted that, according to a second study, both platforms supported each other in engagement. That is, players spent 40 percent more time on each platforms’ version of a Facebook Connect-ed game after that game migrated from mobile to canvas, and 21 percent more time on games that went from Canvas to mobile.

“People are connecting from more platforms throughout their day than they have before,” Brady said. “… When people are hopping from device to device like this, they expect to pick up their experiences from where they left off.”

Brady also encouraged developers to run “sales” for virtual goods to drive monetization, and praised Jelly Splash maker Wooga for offering incentives for cross-platform activity such as letting players who’ve lost their lives revive without buying new lives by jumping from the mobile to the Facebook version of the game.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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