Zynga, Playfish, Kabam sessions at f8 conference
Games take pride of place at annual Facebook event, Project Spartan unveiling delayed
Social games will be a major focus of Facebook's f8 summit this year.
The annual event takes place this weekend, and two of its four expert panels are dominated by representatives from the social gaming community.
A panel on the crossover between mobile and social apps will feature Zynga general manager and vice president Paul Bettner, and Playfish co-founder Kristian Segerstrale.
Another panel, The Rise of Social Gaming, will ask executives from EA, Kabam, Disney and Zynga to forecast the next big trends in the social space.
However, TechCrunch reports that Facebook's HTML-5 app project - codenamed "Spartan" - will not be unveiled at f8 as expected.
Spartan will expand the reach of Facebook games applications to Safari, Android and desktop browsers, unlocking the mobile market and significantly raising the total addressable market.
Facebook believes that the implications of Spartan are so great it would overshadow its other announcements, so it will be unveiled at a separate event shortly after f8.