Playfish, one of the leading social game developers on Facebook, has announced that they’ve raise $17 million in funding. While the company didn’t even launch it’s first game, “Who Has the Biggest Brain?” until October of last year, quickly grew to be come a leader in the social gaming space. Today, the company’s top four games have between 2.48 and 2.9 million monthly active users (as pictured below).

The company continues to find success with their fifth game, “Geo Challenge”, rapidly climbing the charts, soon to surpass 600,000 monthly active users. This is a large round of funding to take place in the middle of economic uncertainty. Accel Partners and Index Ventures are betting hard that this company is going to continue to find success, providing it more money than Social Gaming Network, which has received $15 million to day.

Zynga, the largest competitor for the company, has raised $39 million in funding so far (one round for $10 million and a follow-on round for $29 million). What is the company going to do with all this funding? My guess is that we will quickly see the company move into new platforms, such as the iPhone, while continuing a successful trend on the Facebook platform. I had the opportunity to interview Sebastien de Halleux, Chief Operating Officer for Playfish back in August.

This sounds like a great investment to us because even in poor economic times, consumers still play games. We will continue to track the growth of Playfish and other social gaming companies as this space continue to heat up.