With the rising popularity of games like Zynga‘s FarmVille and CityVille, social gaming has become one of the leaders in the gaming field and is expected to increase 5 times through 2015 to a sizable $5 billion industry, according to research company Parks Associates. The company estimates that more than 250 million people play Zynga’s games every month.

With social gaming continuing to see profit from in-game purchases and gain advertising revenue from things like sponsored items, the potential for increased success seems likely for the burgeoning industry. Zynga, for example, has seen steady growth and has been able to both gain interest from investors and even assimilate other developers through company acquisitions.

“The most powerful asset of social game developers is the quantity of behavioral data that they can obtain from their games,” Parks Associates research analyst Pietro Macchiarella said. “The abilities to measure the efficacy of different gameplay mechanisms, to tweak game design in near-real time, and to test new models are advantages that traditional gaming companies will never have.”

As developments in technology continue to gear more and more towards the social Web, it’s easy to see how this $5 billion mark could easily come to pass. Right now, the sky is the limit for the social game industry and I have plenty of free time and attention for their products to take away from me.