There’s no question of whether or not social games are big money, but breaking down the user demographic has been a long-time effort of many studios and research firms. Arkadium, a game development studio, has provided one of the latest dissections of which types of social gamers spend what.

Here at Gamezebo, we get a lot of press releases. As I type this to you right now, I’m swimming in press releases. Wearing a bathing suit made of press releases. In all seriousness, though, not everything can make the cut. But when the already fast-growing game startup by the name of Peak e-mailed to tell us that they were in fact growing explosively? I took notice. Why? Because now they’re outpacing Facebook themselves.

A new month is upon us and that means it’s time for AppData to let us know what the most popular games are on Facebook. There are two separate breakdowns, Daily Active Users (DAU) and Monthly Active Users (MAU). We’re not going to provide the full lists, but how about the Top 10 games by DAU to whet your appetite?

Peak Games, which has offices in Istanbul, Ankara, Amman, Barcelona and Berlin, is the fastest-growing games studio for emerging markets, including Turkey and Middle East North Africa (MENA). It's about to grow a little faster thanks to its recent acquisition of Kammelna Games, a social games company that's based in Saudi Arabia.

Love them or hate them, it seems pretty certain that social games are here to stay. Over the last few years, we’ve seen more and more traditional gaming companies embrace the world of social gaming – though I don’t think any of us expected to see this company make the jump. Cave – the developer behind crazy “bullet hell” shooters like Bug Princess and Deathsmiles, have just announced that they’re going to focus less on their hardcore audience and more on a social one.

In a study where the results should be a forgone conclusion, Mocospace unveiled the results of the latest survey on just who is playing and paying to play social games.

And the answer is . . . pretty obvious. More young people are playing social games, with 25- 35 group spending the most time playing social games.

We don’t care about those freeloaders! Who is paying for virtual items in social games? The answer is, older people. 50% of players 35 – 50 and 70% of all gamers 45 and older have bought virtual goods in social games, compared to only 10% of 18 – 25 year olds who have ever bought a virtual item in a game.

This is an obvious result, since older people have more disposable income than youngsters. But here’s another theory.

Playing games is one of the first known “social” activities of humans. We’ve been playing for thousands of years, using games as a mechanism to learn and share, and at the heart of this has always been community. These “social games” – think bridge, poker, tag, and even dice games from 4,300 years ago – drive camaraderie, community and competition.

Recently, we’ve all seen a lot of invectives lobbed back and forth between hardcore gaming shops and social gaming insiders. Both have claimed the death knell will soon be rung for the opposite side. For the record, I think that both sides are completely off the mark. Social games and hardcore games will all continue to do quite well in their respective realms of the gaming world. Here’s why:

According to TechCrunch, Facebook is merely weeks away from launching a new gaming portal to make it easier to find and play social games within Facebook.