While companies have been advertising within social networking games like Farmville for awhile now, it seems the next evolutionary step for companies is to create their own games for SNS. Indeed, in recent weeks we’ve witnessed three big Japanese corporations launch their own games free of charge on Facebook, indicating that this area might see some significant development in the months to come.

Probably the most impressive of the three new game releases was Toyota’s Social Network Racer, a pro racing game in which users compete against each other on a virtual track. You can soup up your ride by racking up points, but the ultimate goal is to win a ticket to the Tokyo Motor Show. Made to promote Toyota’s FT-86 II Concept model, which is due to be unveiled at the show in December, a billboard above the track advertises the new model. The graphics for the game are pretty impressive, but unfortunately it takes awhile to load and you’ll need a high spec computer to run it.

Though Toyota’s game is probably more engaging over a longer period of time, games such as  Toshiba’s Smart Community Game are more immediately gratifying. Linking to your Facebook page via Toshiba’s Smart Community YouTube channel, the game simply involves dragging and dropping necessary resources onto photos of your friends. Launched on Oct. 20, the game aims to advertise the fact that the company have their finger in many pies and these industries are represented by the different resources players supply to friends. Its fresh futuristic look is uncluttered by excessive amounts of overly technical information, but allows interested users to easily go deeper and discover more about the company. Unfortunately game play, though simple, is not really that engaging and we found ourselves bored after a couple of tries.