You’ll know how serious virtual farm business is, when you hear that even celebrities are using alarm clocks to wake up at ‘4 in the morning’ just to harvest their crops to prevent those virtual farm thieves from stealing their hard-earn revenues. The new-age online games, mostly flash-based or html-based are becoming million-dollar business. No wonder Google buys Zynga.

The runaway success of FarmVille and other counterparts’ social games on social sites like Facebook, such as Zoo World, Happy Aquarium, Pet Society, Restaurant City, Nightclub City, and Wadeva City has spawned an industry that generated an estimated $725 million in the US alone in 2009, and is expected to triple by 2012, just before the world goes ‘ka-boom’.

However, not everything is sweet ‘honeymoon’ ride for some. Social gaming industry has faced serious hurdles, as some parties calling them as Internet scams due to the marketing tactics used that are awfully similar to malicious sites that use your email to send spams.

Further, recent tensions between FarmVille publisher Zynga and Facebook brought to light the fragile equilibrium that binds the developer community with the largest social gaming platform. Although the two parties averted a full-out war, any future skirmishes could derail this emerging industry from its forward course.

The next few months will be critical in determining how the social gaming industry can weather these challenges and continue to attract tens of millions of players to its virtual farms, restaurants, cities, zoos, aquariums, card tables and kitchen sink.

SOURCE via Research and Market