King.com: From tournament gaming to No. 2 on Facebook (video interview)

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King.com has made a big transition in the past year, shifting from casual tournament games on the web to offering social games on Facebook.

In less than a year, King.com became the No. 2 game company on Facebook with more than 52 million monthly active users, according to AppData. Riccardo Zacconi, chief executive of King.com, says the company credits its rise to the popularity of arcade-like casual games (like Bubble Witch, pictured above) on the popular social network, which was previously dominated by Zynga’s “simulation” games.

Rather than go head-to-head against Zynga, Zacconi said the company went for the “blue ocean” of the arcade-like, tournament-style games that were fresh territory on Facebook. The strategy is working, with 3 billion King.com games being played a month.

Here’s a video interview between Zacconi and Dan “Shoe” Hsu, editor-in-chief of GamesBeat, at our recent GamesBeat 2012 conference. Zacconi also did an on-stage interview at the event with A.J. Glasser, editor of Inside Social Games.