Sure, most of us have played Angry Birds in the past, probably on multiple devices, but even if you’ve grown tired of slingshotting birds at pigs, the arrival of the blockbuster action-puzzle game on Facebook this week is worth watching as an experiment in modern video-game economics.

As expected, Angry Birds on Facebook makes liberal use of the social network, allowing gamers to see their Facebook friends’ Angry Birds scores and invite others to play the game.

But the interesting part is the Angry Birds Shop, which allows users to buy anywhere from $1 to $40 in extras — such as sling scopes, super seeds and Mighty Eagles — using Facebook Credits.

It’s a big test for free-to-play games, the increasingly popular approach in which publishers make most or all of their money theough sales of extras to the most engaged users. And Facebook’s status as a public-company-in-waiting means that we may get a glimpse of the financial impact of Angry Birds, over time.

It might sound crazy, but keep in mind that Zynga — maker of FarmVille, Mafia Wars and many other Facebook games — was responsible for 12 percent of Facebook’s $3.7 billion in 2011 revenue, through its advertising purchases and Facebook’s cut of Zynga’s sale of virtual goods to Facebook users.

Angry Birds is just getting started, but as a sign of its existing Facebook fan base, the Rovio game is starting with more than 15.4 million likes on its Facebook page — 1.7 million more than Zynga’s flagship FarmVille game, for example.

Bottom line, the ultimate indication of Angry Birds’ impact may come in Facebook’s future earnings reports.

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