How did social-network games such as FarmVille expand the audience for electronic games?

Social-network games like FarmVille expanded the audience for electronic games by leveraging the explosive growth of social media platforms such as Facebook and Myspace in the early 21st century.12

These games reached a broader demographic by utilizing animation programs like Flash to create accessible, web-based experiences that featured simplified gameplay and cartoonlike graphics, making them comparable to home consoles while remaining easy to play. Furthermore, these titles were designed to maximize engagement and growth by offering incentives for players to recruit additional users into the game. By integrating directly into existing social networks, developers successfully transitioned gaming from the relatively closed environments of earlier MMOGs into a mainstream cultural activity, eventually matching and exceeding the player numbers of traditional online games.12