The state of the Facebook ecosystem looks quite different from Europe, Criminal Case developer Pretty Simple told Gamasutra last week. It's a view held up by Facebook itself, revealing in its annual Games of the Year list this morning that European and independent studios have come to dominate an increasingly diverse ecosystem. "We are definitely seeing more and different studios getting into the platform," says Facebook's A.J. Glasser, who credits the spread in part to the growing accessibility of Unity and HTML5 on the platform in the last year. "In addition, many of these games are cross-platform, hitting both web and mobile. Some [like King's games] launch first on Facebook and then spread to mobile, and for others it's the reverse." Of its 23 highlighted titles, eight of the entries on Facebook's Games of the Year list are cross-platform, and 10 arrive from studios based in Europe or the Middle East. While the list sees a marginal uptick in the success of casino and slots games, the majority are prototypical free-to-play social games -- and many are designed with a hardcore or middlecore audience in mind. "We wanted to highlight games not simply based on traffic, but user ratings and quality as well," Glasser explains. "These are the games we honestly, truly loved." The full list of highlighted titles follows below.

Best New Games of 2013

Staff Favorites

2013 Hall of Fame

Game of the Year 2013

Criminal Case by Pretty Simple (France) From Facebook: "This hidden object game from a French indie studio combines crime scene investigation with engaging sharing mechanics to create the most successful Facebook game of the year." You can read our recent interview with Pretty Simple's Serge Versille here.