If you’ve ever bothered to check out games on Facebook, you’re certainly familiar with social network gaming giant Zynga.

One wouldn’t be too amiss in saying that Zynga is damn near running a monopoly on the game development side of social networking apps.

Having acquired at least 10 companies in its existence, the corporation now operates across several continents, creating new games and continuing to run the ever-popular “CityVille,” “FarmVille,” “CastleVille,” and “Texas Hold’em,” among many others.

Over the past half-decade, while the rest of the world economy has been struggling to get out of a recession, Zynga, as well as the social gaming market as a whole, has been enjoying incredible gains. But recently, Zynga’s financials have indicated the company has had some issues attaining and retaining customers.

A recent figure has been circulating showing that after blowing $120 million on marketing, Zynga acquired 400,000 new customers, which averages to about $300 spent per new user; to put that into perspective, the average customer spends around $150 in the 12-15 months they typically play. Carry the two, and it’s not hard to see why Zynga is suffering massive losses this year.

Of course, the Zynga bubble is bursting under the pressure of its own weight. A business can only get so large, and now that the growth of Facebook users is declining, it seems like common sense to take a less aggressive strategy.

In fact, one might even say that Zynga is in an advantageous position because it has so many areas from which it can amend its approach to the market. First off, the company would be better off if it refrained from spamming our news feeds with requests to slaughter each other’s pigs or whatever it is you do in “FarmVille.”

I personally refrain from playing those games just because I don’t want to be that guy clogging up my friends Facebooks.

Secondly, it needs to stop ripping off games from other developers. You may not have noticed that there existed a “Mob Wars” that predated Zynga’s “Mafia Wars,” but during a legal dispute, the prosecuting attorney stated that it “copied virtually every important aspect of the game.” $9 million lawsuits such as this cannot be helping the company in the long-term.

And finally, Zynga would do well to do the one thing that actually causes economies to grow in the first place: innovate. And I don’t mean innovate new ways of how to spread ads from one user to another like the herpes of social networking either.

Whenever I’ve messed around with their games, or any games played via Facebook, I’ve never actually felt like I was playing anything.

The games tend to amount to nothing more than clicking the next button over and over, while waiting for a timer to count down to give me more turns.

It’s tough to see a company that was having such a great run start to fail so rapidly, especially when they employ more than a thousand people.

Yet it’s also hard to feel bad for one whose core business practice revolves around speckling our social networks with ads that are harder to get off than glitter.

For Facebook to continue to be used as a platform for gaming, developers like Zynga are going to have to learn that just because something worked once doesn’t mean it always will.