Years ago, if someone said to you that they were playing an online game on a social network and you could farm, buy livestock and purchase special items for your farm with actual money to get fake money? You’d probably more then likely think they had a screw loose.

However, those of you that are on Facebook know of Farmville and Café World and they are as many others are now becoming the wanted list in the digital media industry.

Big companies are realizing that there is big money to be made in social network gaming and it isn’t just money, it’s in the billions of dollars arena of big money. Take for instance Walt Disney they just announced that it is acquiring Playdom which is one of the bigger social game manufacturers and they paid $563.2 million plus for the rights to this company. Game Stop as well just last winter purchased Kongregate which is a smaller yet still money making market area.

There are such virtual reality games as Second Life and World of War Craft which continue to have almost a cult following in the virtual reality gaming world. There are even rumors that Google is going to make its mark in the social media as well. They have been begun to venture into the social networking service areas for many years. It is also rumored that Google has invested quite a bit of cash in Zynga to the tune of $100 million dollars. This would be Google’s attempt to gain a bit more on Facebooks now thriving social gaming network. Games such as Farmville are proving so addicting that over 500 million users log onto Facebook to exclusively play the game and to top it off these crazy people are putting money into the virtual game.

Zynga is currently handing over a 30 per cent cut to Facebook for the transactions that are being done on their games.  Zynga has ties to Google and Disney has Apples’ CEO Steve Jobs as well as Facebooks COO Sheryl Sandberg on their board of directors. This huge show of industry powers as well as the hit driven way that the titles are being pushed out is making many independent developers down right nervous and overly frustrated.

You should expect to see more media companies such as Viacom and the Asian gaming giants to start rolling up their sleeves if they haven’t already started to and make their show of power. Viacom MTV Networks as already started with their launching of a tie in game to Jersey Shore their reality show where you can throw virtual pickles at people

So I believe this to be the beginning and no even close to the ending for the online social network games. It definitely will be interesting to see where everyone ends up.