Two Reasons Facebook Games Are About to Change Forever

Tired of gaming friends who've sent you dozens of invites to join their favorite Facebook game and they still don't seem to get the hint that you're not interested? Well, you'll love the new changes that are coming to the popular social networking service before the end of the year.

First, application bookmarks will move to the left-hand navigation area. Games will get a new sub-area, broken down by "My Games" and "Friends' Games" section. Once clicked, a new Games area will display a user's more recent games played with game-specific categories that track all the updates and notifications that currently get mixed into several of Facebook's communications areas. So instead of receiving notifications from each player's acheivements in Cafe World, Pet Society or FarmVille, a user would go to the new Games area to find out. Sadly, there's no word on whether invites and gifts will be handed though Facebook, or if those would be managed inside each game.

Another big change will be that Facebook will allow third party game developers to ask you for your real email address (not just send info to your Facebook Inbox). As such, players will also be able to control how those companies will contact them, similar in the way that bigger web sites allow you to limit the marketing messages.

While game developers just received word about the changes, getting the new rules into bigger games before the end of the year may produce many unexpected challenges.

[ via TechCrunch and Business Insider]