Inside Network Research’s newest report, Facebook Games: Increasing Consumer Engagement, finds that almost half of Facebook’s games-playing audience are daily active users.

The study, on sale now, surveyed 1,418 adult Facebook users in the United States between August and September on their games habits. Of those, 31 percent played games several times per day while 18 percent played at least once per day. This highly engaged audience seems to be enjoying the games that bring their friends into the experience either in turn-based games (e.g. Words With Friends) or competitive games (e.g. War Commander).

Not surprisingly, Inside Network Research also found that niche games and those with coherent cross-platform experiences like Candy Crush Saga increased retention better than Facebook-only games aimed at a broader audience. At our Inside Social Apps conference in New York earlier this month, we heard developers on the monetization panel say that their philosophy toward game design has increasingly become a quality discussion, with platform coming at a much later point in a game’s development cycle.

You can find this report and others from Inside Network Research here.