Inside Social Games

It wasn’t all that long ago that Facebook apps were thought of as another infinite repository of low value advertising inventory that would slowly erode to no one’s great concern. Now, 18 months later, just about every major media company is sniffing around the Facebook gaming leaderboards, evaluating how to get into the virtual goods-based games-as-a-service business.

For media companies interested in getting into the game, it’s not a matter of if, but rather a question of how. As execs and corp dev departments are working to fit together build vs. buy strategies, they’re also trying to figure out how to align all of the parts of the organization to move towards a structure necessary to run a social gaming operation.

Over the course of the last year, it’s become clear that many traditional media companies have gained increased regard for the role of social gaming in their future online monetization plans. Many of these companies have struggled to build significant revenue streams on the web, but now see virtual goods-based social games as one of their most promising opportunities.

As social gaming becomes increasingly mass-market in the US and throughout the west, the thesis basically goes that new IP can only take you so far; existing IP will become increasingly important in separating from the pack of developers vying for consumer attention. As a result, rights holders now want to find the top independent developers to pair with their IP portfolio.

For Facebook social gaming shops, that means good things.

“You would be surprised at the seniority of those with whom we have had regular conversations,” one social gaming executive said recently.

Indeed, we’ve been hearing continued rumors in recent months, the latest of which is News Corp’s interest in Playdom, one of the largest developers on the MySpace developer platform and an increasing presence on the Facebook Platform. Given Zynga’s size and Playfish’s recent acquisition by Electronic Arts, Playdom and fellow developer CrowdStar are two of the more likely acquisition candidates over the coming year. And Fox’s involvement would certainly make the dynamics between it and Facebook even more interesting.

Before Playfish was acquired by Electronic Arts last November, we heard that it had had discussions with multiple large media companies as well before the deal with EA was consummated. However, don’t be surprised to see more small shops being snapped up too, as several smaller developers are showing encouraging vital signs and may be more affordable options or better strategic fits than the bigger guys.

All in all, we expect to see more activity in the space over the coming year from the media companies. However, along with interest in social game developers from Chinese gaming giants, some are concerned that price expectations could be getting too high, slowing down potential deals.

We’ll be going in depth on the future of IP in social apps and games at our upcoming Inside Social Apps 2010, our first conference on the future of monetization on social platforms, on April 20th in San Francisco. We hope to see you there.

For Inside Network’s in-depth research on the social gaming market, check out Inside Virtual Goods: The Future of Social Gaming 2010

There was a lot of hand-wringing by developers prior to Facebook phasing out application-based Notifications on March 1st, especially among smaller developers who relied heavily on them to remind users to come back to their game or application. Making matters worse, the new features designed to replace Notifications had their own issues:

• Proxy email messaging wasn’t fixed until over a week after Notifications disappeared (see the bug) and some developers were caught off-guard that proxy emails have a restrictions on acceptable HTML and FBML tags
• The Games Dashboard and Counters have been extremely ineffective in driving traffic (one developer shared that of 150,000 referenced visits, 1202 were from the dashboard)

Illustrating the immediate impact of the changes, one developer posted this graphic of their application’s engagement metrics, highlighting the relative impact of Notifications versus the games dashboard in driving engagement:

Clearly, no one argues that end of Notifications was going to have a huge impact on traffic, and several developers were phasing out their reliance on Notifications way before the March 1st due to them being less effective as the channel was already overwhelmed with messages. Francis Pelland, developer of several relatively small Avastar applications summed up the debates on the developer boards: “I phased out Notifications in my apps about 3 weeks ago and my DAU is significantly higher than before through creative thinking and alternative viral features. People should sit and think rather than complain. This sort of thing happens every time when Facebook makes a change and consider it to be the end of the world, make threats to quit, and say it will be the end of Facebook.”

So how are the largest developers faring in the post-Notifications world? Clearly it’s not the doomsday scenario that some feared as developers are mostly relying on email or fan page posts to replace application-to-user Notifications, while user-to-user Notifications are being facilitated through creative use of Wall Posts. Here are some highlights by top developers:

Zynga

In the two weeks since Notifications, Zynga’s titles are a mixed bag with PetVille and FishVille down 4-6%, Mafia Wars and Café World flat and YoVille and FarmVille up 3%. Zynga’s use of email is fairly sporadic and limited to a few titles:

• FarmVille and Café World have yet to send an email (based on my observations and discussions with other users). With such a large user base, the cost of email may be prohibitive compared to the effectiveness of fan page posts.
• YoVille has slowly increased its frequency from once a month at the end of 2009 to 3-4 per month and has primarily focused on new item releases.
• Since December, Mafia Wars has sent seven emails, primarily focused on new game features (holiday gift safe house in December, Bangkok expansion release in late January and the revamp of their store in February). Three of those emails have entitled the recipients to the Mafia Wars hard currency, reward points.
• Finally, PetVille sent it’s first email to users as part of the process to accept emails and unlock a pet for your PetVille pet.

Instead of relying heavily on email, Zynga has focused on innovating user-to-user communication via Wall Posts, re-focusing users from sending gifts to asking for gifts and collaborative tasks that require users to plead with friends to send items so they can complete the task.

The only games that haven’t had either consistent emails (YoVille) or the collaborative task mechanism (Mafia Wars, FarmVille, Café World), are the only two games that are down over the last two weeks (FishVille and PetVille).

Electronic Arts

Since Notifications were turned off two weeks ago, there is a noticeable split between what games have been impacted: Restaurant City is up 8%, Pet Society up 3% and Country Story down 7% while the latest titles (Poker Rivals and Gangster City) are down 23-28%.

The biggest of the former Playfish titles (Pet Society, Restaurant City and Country Story) also have been prolific email senders averaging a message every week and focused on touting new decorative items, recipes and the occasional new feature. Poker Rival and Gangster City have yet to send emails out (based on my observations) which in part can be tied to the fact that without a farm, home or any physical place to decorate, there are fewer new things happening in these games each week, making content a bit of a stretch.

CrowdStar

CrowdStar’s Happy Aquarium and Happy Island have been relatively flat since the end of Notifications on March 1st. Only Happy Pets seems to have seen a marked decline (down 12%) and that may have more to do with the continual decline since rival PetVille was launched in early December.

Unlike the other developers, CrowdStar has not explicitly been collecting emails or prompting users to sign up for email Notifications. As such, the developer and has not sent any emails to date (again, based on my observations) about application updates, preferring to use fan page posts exclusively to convey new updates.

With regard to user-to-user Notifications, users in Happy Aquarium can still visit a friend’s tank and click on a button to notify that friend that their aquarium needs to be cleaned or fish need to be feed, but it appears that no notification goes out any longer and the application has not been changed to do a wall post to that friend’s wall.

Playdom

Playdom was a prolific user of Notifications up until the last minute, and while Wild Ones was up 6%, the rest of their biggest titles were either flat or down since Notifications ended March 1st: Sorority Life was basically flat, Mobsters 2: Vendetta was down 5%, Tiki Farm was down 6%, and (Lil) Farm Life was down 15%.

Emails have been fairly sporadic across titles but it looks like this is a channel they’re just beginning to experiment with:

• Sorority Life had two emails in early February around collectible gifts for Valentine’s Day, but none since
• Mobsters 2: Vendetta had one email in February touting their “gang-up” feature, then two emails last week: one providing an email-subscriber only car and the other promoting their new retail card and a potential bonus for redeeming one before St. Patrick’s day
• Tiki Farm: pushed an email (the first I’ve observed) the first week of March touting new decorations

Viral Marketing (and the Facebook Platform) Isn’t Dead

While much of the data above is based on imperfect observation, it suggests that developers can still find a way to drive engagement and viral marketing by 1) leveraging email, 2) continuing to publish engaging fan page posts and 3) innovating with ways to get users to publish to their friends and their own walls (such as the collaborative tasks). Granted managing these multiple channels is a great deal more complicated than Notifications, but it doesn’t mean Facebook as a platform is dead.

Less clear is whether the Games Dashboard can be turned into an effective application-to-user and user-to-user forum. Zynga and Playdom are experimenting with counters, but few others are seriously using the tool because it hasn’t been overly effective at driving traffic. The bottom line is that users can’t find it and/or don’t use it: Facebook didn’t heavily publicize the games dashboard during the rollout of the new homepage in early February, and developers were desperate enough to publish fan page stories in an attempt to educate their users:

Based on developer feedback that the new bookmarks in the left navigation under the Game Dashboard link are static, Facebook’s platform team updated the developer roadmap so that users will at least be able to move bookmarks around in the near future, but this doesn’t solve the fundamental design issue. I firmly believe the games dashboard is a huge opportunity, providing the potential to discover new games and find your existing ones. But further education cannot overcome the fundamental design decision to not have “games” as a persistent part of the site navigation, visible from every page in the top nav, and made useful for user and developer alike with its own notification flag.

Eric von Coelln is a casual games and MMO marketing veteran who focuses on emerging metrics in social games. He is currently a New York based freelance consultant to games and social media companies. You can find his blog here.

Over a year ago, we saw one of the first 3D games on Facebook, Paradise Paintball. At the time, the game was reminiscent of old PC first-person shooters (FPS) such as Delta Force. However, it was seen more as a proof of concept to the Unity Engine’s 3D capabilities on Facebook, and felt unfinished. Well, the game’s been about for some time now, and Cmune’s paintball FPS looks very different — and better — today. And it’s also available on a wider range of social gaming platforms.

Again, the game is an FPS that pits players into synchronous battles with each other in either team matches or free-for-alls. The idea is to rack up as many “splats” (kills) as you can before time expires. Of course, that’s a game 12 months past, and a little bit has changed since then.

Aside from visuals, such as foliage in the game’s tropical settings, looking significantly better, players have a handful of weapons at their disposal. Like the original version, there is still a pistol, machine gun, grenade launcher, and sniper rifle that all players enter a game with. Some weapons still feel stronger than others, but with five maps, as opposed to the original two, none of the weapons feel that much stronger.

The level design, overall, is not too bad. Most of the levels, save Lost Paradise, are small enough and have enough cover that a sniper can’t often sit unopposed, and a grenadier needs to be a surgeon with their shots lest they end up blowing themselves up. More than this, however, is the introduction of random items and power-ups throughout each world.

There are items floating about the various levels that grant users one of two types of power-ups: Player Power-ups or Weapon Power-ups. The former includes increasing movement speed and jumping height, which, by the way, is very cool, a “secret power up,” the ability to walk on water, and, well, ammunition. Each of these add a nice enhancement to play, and nothing is so powerful that an experienced player cannot handle it.

The latter, the weapon power-ups, are another story. These can be frustrating, and include “Old Man,” which slows you down (not a big deal); “Drunken Master,” which blurs the screen, making it more or less impossible to see; and the coup de grace, “Flipper,” which is quite possible the most obnoxious ability ever conceived. It turns the entire player upside down and puts everything backwards, making it not only dizzying and disorienting, but pretty much guarantees that you’re about to die.

That said, if you’re worried about dying, get used to it. It’s going to happen a lot. Most of the games people play – at least among Facebook’s 48,000, or so, monthly active users – are free-for-all games. These are usually unlimited time, and just meant to be fun, but some of the levels are so small that you’d be lucky to live 30 seconds.

Another change is that players can now improve their avatars Battlefield-Heroes style. Every day the user logs in, they earn 500 points which can be used to buy a handful of items to increase their chances of survival in battle… or just look cooler. Each item can be bought for either one, seven, or 30 days and include everything from a shotgun, to special hair and clothing, to body armor. Every weapon and piece of actual armor costs Credits, a virtual currency, that must be bought via PayPal or Zong. Basically, if you want to spend money, you get rewarded, but not so much if you are loyal and play a lot. Furthermore, a recent study by Offerpal Media and comScore, just last week, showed that only 22.8% of players are willing and able to buy virtual currency or goods, yet 52.3% are likely to complete marketing actions for it – something not present in Paradise Paintball. Basically, that means that Paradise Paintball’s monetization methods are limited.

Nevertheless, the game was still fun. Granted, the majority of social network users prefer asynchronous game play – as most do not consider themselves gamers – but Paradise Paintball was good enough to win the award of “Best New MySpace App” during the Game Developer’s Conference, 2010. Furthermore, with the game on Facebook, MySpace, Apple Dashboard, and Cmune’s own game portal, it’s hardly doing bad. Overall, it just needs a few tweaks here and there in the monetization department, but beyond that, if you like free shooters, this isn’t a bad one to try.

Zen Bound 2 Revealed for the iPad – Despite the buzz circling Apple’s new iPad, little has been actually seen regarding games on the coming platform. However, via a post from Kotaku, we’ve been able to catch a glimpse of Secret Exit’s Zen Bound 2, a “sequel and a revision” of the original iPhone application. In a nutshell, the original rendition is about attempting to wrap a rope around an oddly shaped object, with the sequel’s concept being more of the same. However, as you can see, the bigger and more powerful iPad sure does make it look better. A full gallery can be found here.

Frosmo Expands to Asia – Frosmo has seen a good deal of success with its tournament and team-based platform of the same name, in terms for social gaming. Already the company has expanded its collection of titles across Europe and into Facebook, but now the Finnish company is expanding into the Asian game market as well. Currently, the company is slated to let 10 different Asian game companies use its tournament system, and be available through 51.com, China.com, Ren Ren, and Mixi.

Platogo Gets Casual Games Facebook Ready – Though third party firms helping developers socialize their titles is nothing new, a social games platform from Austria, Platogo is looking to socially enable casual games directly for Facebook. Dubbed “Platogo Wrapper” this tool allows developers to integrate their games into Facebook withonly a few lines of code. With this new tool,  apps will be able to take advantage of Facebook friend invitations, leaderboards, achievements, and player challenges.

Game Investments Dropped 29% in 2009 – It would seem like the video game industry has seen some hefty decline due to the recession as VentureBeat reports that of 115 game startups, only $663.1 million in funding was raised during 2009 (discounting those with undisclosed amounts). That is 29% lower than the $936.8 million raised in 2008. In fact, had it not been for Zynga’s acquisition of $180 million deal from Russia’s Digital Sky Technologies, the year would have been down a depressing 48%.

Tapulous Taps Into Kings of Leon – The popular rhythm-game company for the iPhone, Tapulous, has added another new title to its collection of Tap Tap games. The new app is dubbed Kings Of Leon Revenge, and if you hadn’t guessed already, features, well, the Kings Of Leon. In addition to hosting 10 of the band’s top songs, the new game will also include a curious ”Battle Mode” that will allow users to directly compete with each other using the iPhone’s bluetooth capabilities.

Unity Games Gain a Social Platform Through dimeRocker – More and more frequently, social games empowered with Unity3D are appearing around both Facebook and the web. To that end, Overinteractive Media Inc. has announced the launch of a new social platform, specifically tailored to support Unity enabled games, dubbed dimeRocker. Through the platform, games will be able to support microtransactions, achievements, leaderboards, friend invites, challenges, and be deployable on both the Facebook and MySpace networks. Already, around 150 developers have signed up for the service’s beta stages.

Facebook App Penny Drop Teams Up with Kiva – A simple Facebook application called Penny Drop – powered by CircusPop - is out to help the working poor. The quasi, game-like app consists of players using tokens (earnable through logins every few hours and inviting friends) to drop the price of featured items by one cent until someone purchases it. However, working with Kiva, from March 11th to March 22nd, for every token used in Penny Drop, a penny will be donated to Kiva in order to help poor entrepreneurial individuals and businesses grow.

Gowalla Adds New Platforms & Branded Goods – Location-based iPhone app Gowalla has launched its social game on two new platforms this past week: The Android and Palm’s webOS. In addition to this new support, the game is also bringing branded virtual goods to the table from the Travel Channel’s show, Food Wars. With the new deal, players will be able to earn special badges and virtual items by visiting locals featured during the show.

IMVU adds Voices as a Virtual Good – Popular teen-oriented virtual world IMVU announced a curious partnership with Vivox this Thursday. Now, the virtual world will be capable of integrating voice services, but beyond being just another feature, it will also add a new source of revenue. Currently, 25 different voice styles are being offered for the cost of 990 IMVU Credits.

Sometrics Launches GameCoins.com – Social analytics firm, Sometrics announced the launch of GameCoins.com this week - the company’s first direct-to-consumer play. Game Coins will serve as a community site for gamers, allowing them meet new people as well as participate in forums and blogs that revolve around various social games and virtual worlds. More than this, however, the site, per its name, will also be an online marketplace for virtual goods and currencies. From the portal, players can make use of the Sometrics Offer Solution to complete ad offers and earn goods and currency for their MMO, virtual world, or social game of choice. The company tells us it plans to help grow the community through users discovering relevant content in searches. The idea is that by helping people play these games better, its monetization services will get even more usage.

50% of Gamers Will Earn Virtual Currency – According to a survey performed by comScore for Offerpal Media, and released at the Game Developers Conference this week, alternative payment methods enable greater monetization capabilities that one would think. Derived from comScore and Offerpal’s own monetization analytics, 53.3% of players are “very likely” to complete a marketing actions (i.e. completing a survey, watching a video, or shopping online) in order to earn virtual currency for their favorite games. Conversely, only 22.8% of those surveyed stated they’d be willing and able to buy it.

In fact, 29.7% of social gamers actually don’t have the means to buy virtual currency in the first place; at least not with cash options. Curiously, even among those that could, 34.9% stated that they were “very unlikely” to do so.

This week’s AppData list of the top emerging games on Facebook, measured as those still under a million monthly active users, contains an unusually high proportion of games that have gained almost all their users over the past few days. By and large, they’re also from developers with few other applications on Facebook.

Jeux Gratuits comes in at the top. It appears to be a French-language wrapper for a number of casual games, similar to MindJolt or 6waves. But at time of writing, the app isn’t loading properly. It also requires that new users allow it to automatically post to their wall, which would appear to be against Facebook’s latest developer rules.

Here’s the rest of the list:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Jeux Gratuits	844,778	+721,188	+85.37
2.	Music Pets	498,952	+498,952	+100.00
3.	Zoo Paradise	477,274	+427,567	+89.59
4.	Mahjongg Dimensions	881,454	+308,918	+35.05
5.	Towner	695,212	+285,410	+41.05
6.	Ameba Pico	241,337	+241,272	+99.97
7.	Top Stalkers	433,212	+191,491	+44.20
8.	MMA Pro Fighter	710,431	+184,397	+25.96
9.	Jumping Dog	683,774	+167,712	+24.53
10.	Glamble	521,626	+160,859	+30.84
11.	Puzzle Bobble	446,051	+142,732	+32.00
12.	Jewel Puzzle 2	590,053	+126,329	+21.41
13.	Battle Stations	121,550	+121,550	+100.00
14.	Garden Life	653,766	+108,272	+16.56
15.	Capitales del mundo!	721,185	+100,429	+13.93
16.	Bola	359,439	+98,886	+27.51
17.	Farkle 2	624,428	+88,718	+14.21
18.	Alien Attack	179,266	+83,424	+46.54
19.	Live Games	190,796	+78,135	+40.95
20.	Armies	637,496	+77,435	+12.15

Music Pets, coming in at number two, is the first success for Conduit Labs. This game combines the music and pet-raising genres; to raise your pets, you have to play them music that they’ll like. Beyond that detail, it’s pretty similar to Pet Society. We review Music Pets in more depth here.

Zoo Paradise, the latest offering from CrowdStar, offers up a challenge to RockYou’s most successful game, Zoo World. The basic aim is to build a nice-looking zoo, although the game could use a bit more work on its virtual goods system; we  reviewed it here. We’ve also noticed that CrowdStar is advertising heavily for Zoo Paradise on Facebook.

Mahjongg Dimensions, the first Facebook game from casual game publisher Arkadium, is continuing its steady march toward a million MAU. It’s followed by Towner, which is part of the rapidly expanding city building genre on Facebook. As we noted earlier today, Playdom’s Social City may be emerging as leader of the pack, driven by heavy promotion.

Ameba Pico is the first fast-growing game for CyberAgent America; despite the foreign sound of the name, it’s in English. The game revolves around the travels of avatars called Picos, and is based on a Japanese version called Ameba Pigg.

Top Stalkers is actually a social graph app, so we’ll skip it. And rounding out the top ten are MMA Pro Fighter, Jumping Dog and Glamble. Like Mahjongg Dimensions, these are all games that also appeared on the list last week, where we wrote more about them.

Given the success of simulation games like Zynga’s FarmVille, it has seemed a matter of time until social game developers started making social versions of the hit computer game SimCity. And they have, over the last couple of months – and now we have what could be quickly becoming a hit. Playdom launched Social City around March 3rd, and a little over a week later it has grown to 3.23 million monthly active users (MAU) and 1.67 million daily active users (DAU).

Check out our review of the game if you want to get the details — basically, Social City is one of the better titles in the genre, that we’ve seen so far. And other titles are growing, too. Broken Bulb Studios’ My Town is up to 3.52 million MAU, albeit it’s had a couple months to grow. It and a smaller city-building game from an unknown developer, Towner, both made our most recent list of the games that have gained the most DAU in the past week. My City Life, by a developer apparently named City Life, has been cresting at slightly above 4 million MAU.

We assume these games aren’t just growing because people like telling their friends about how much fun they are. Playdom, for example, has been running what appears to be a big ad campaign on Facebook promoting the game; it likely hopes the title will become the FarmVille of the genre before other big social gaming developers build their own. It has also been promoting it across its other applications. So far, the results seem to be paying off.

With each passing month, more casual gaming companies turn their attention to Facebook, despite previous success running their own sites or licensing out games (we listed off 10 reasons why last year). One of the latest to join the exodus is Big Fish Games, a noted developer of downloadable casual games.

Big Fish launched its casual MMO Faunasphere on Facebook in February. Last week, it added a second game: My Tribe, which is something like a cross between Settlers and Gilligan’s Island. After picking a desert island to play on, you start off with a small band of tattered refugees, huddled around a single hut. Your job from there is to build a civilization.

The island premise isn’t unusual for Facebook. But Big Fish has gone beyond the usual fare with the functionality of My Tribe, which actually offers a large number of distinct actions. There are huts and buildings to erect, and later upgrade. Villagers have ages and different skills, and wear clothing, created with dyes and gems, that modify their abilities. There are items to pick up, resources to harvest, and new technologies to research.

My Tribe’s complexity stands out from the beginning, when the game’s tutorial — slyly disguised as “quests” — guides the new player through each action in turn. An hour into playing, when you’ve finally run through all the initial quests, there’s still no shortage of things to do: collecting seashells, managing villagers, planting new crops, visiting a friend’s island. The game also drops a random special item every few minutes that you can search for.

The endless to-do list makes My Tribe noticeably different from the time management games that are currently available on Facebook. Developers using the FarmVille mechanic usually intend for players to dip in and out of the game multiple times throughout the day. Players frustrated with running out of energy or crops to harvest are welcome to play for longer, but it’s only easy if they pay.

With My Tribe, a player could certainly dip in — although it might take more than a couple minutes to tidy up the island. But Big Fish meant to go against the grain with its game. “It was a conscious decision to build a more in-depth game and bring that to Facebook,” says Will O’Brien, the company’s VP of social gaming. “It’s the richest experience on Facebook.”

O’Brien was encouraged by Facebook platform manager Gareth Davis’ call yesterday for “iconic games” that can provide a defining experience for the social network. “I think he’s issuing a challenge and a mandate to the social gaming industry to raise the bar,” O’Brien says.

So that’s what Big Fish is trying to do with My Tribe, a game that it originally released in 2008 as a downloadable. For Facebook, the company added social features, but didn’t dumb down many of the other features. A hardcore gamer might not find the game either complex or engaging; a lot of time is spent scrolling around the screen, picking up seashells and setting your islanders to the same task over and over.

But most Facebook games have all the depth of a rain puddle; My Tribe tries to offer more. What remains to be seen is how far players will want to go with the game — after playing through far enough, it’s possible to build an ark and move to another island with different possibilities. Whether they’ll want to go that far is the only question.

As an open platform, Facebook sees a lot of curious uses. Occasionally, it is an international company looking for a little more freedom, other times it is used to advertise something bigger, like a game, and still other times it is just some bizarre idea. Okay, so what happens when you combine all three? You get a very… ahem… interesting Facebook game called Park Fight.

Created by Mccann Digital (part of marketing conglomerate McCann Worldroup), the application is an extension of an advertising campaign for Goldstar Beer. Apparently, the beer is targeted at men, so the entire campaign is centered around explaining why it’s a man’s beer through a classic battle-of-the sexes parody.

Of course, all of the ads are hyperbolic. Which is where Park Fight comes into play. It is a very simple app highlighting the supposed end-all-be-all difference between men and women: Parking a car.

Unfortunately, the game is all written in Hebrew, so it takes some clicking about to figure out how to pull out into the street, but once you do, the parking contest begins. Oh, and is it ever a tough challenge. This isn’t just any parking; it’s parallel parking, and it’s in traffic no less.

Using the arrow keys, you try to navigate their way into a tiny virtual space, while traffic stops around you with blaring horns grating user concentration and patience. This, of course, leads mistakes such as to hitting the sidewalk or other cars, and should you hit too many, you fail and the game prompts you to post something along the lines of “Man, you’re embarrassing the firm! You could not shop. The average male stands at 0:42 seconds.”

Why someone would post this to their feed is an enigma, but it does point out a key feature. The game actually averages all of the male and female users’ parking time and updates them within the game itself. Out of around 219,000 monthly active users, the average male parking time is 42 seconds, while women are currently at 53 seconds.

Of course, the times are not solely due to parking or video game playing skills. Actually, they feel pretty high for both sexes — and the primary culprit is extraordinarily backwards controls.

The game is actually an overhead view where the car drives right and left. However, the up and down arrows go forward and back, while the right and left arrows turn, well, right and left. It is logical when you think about it, but considering the orientation of the street and car on screen, it isn’t exactly intuitive, and a bit frustrating.

As far as the advertising goes, it is certainly a funny concept, but the game doesn’t offer much in its own right. There are a few logos, but nothing that looks like beer, and they are all in Hebrew anyway. Basically, that means that for anyone unfamiliar with the campaign itself, you won’t get the whole point.

Nonetheless, Park Fight is certainly an amusing concept and if you look up some of the other ads, you might get a kick out of those, too.

April 20 | San Francisco

Inside Social Apps 2010, our first conference on the future of monetization on social platforms, is now only a few weeks away. On April 20th in San Francisco, one day before Facebook’s official “f8″ event, many of the leading developers from around the world will be gathering to discuss the future of monetization inside social apps and games on Facebook and beyond.

Today, we’re excited to announce that Inside Social Apps 2010 will be held at the Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF, located at 1675 Owens St in San Francisco (map).

In addition, today we’re excited to announce 7 new speakers for the event: Rick Thompson, co-founder of Playdom and active social gaming investor; Jens Begemann, CEO of Wooga; Alex Rampell, CEO of Trialpay; Steven Goh, CEO of mig33; Jim Bobowski, Director of Online Partner Marketing at Netflix (who manages Netflix’s social network offers); Eric Goldberg, Managing Director of Crossover Technologies; and Benjamin Joffe, Founder of +8*.

They will be joining our full list of 34 speakers listed below.

• Atul Bagga, VP Equity Research, Games, ThinkEquity
• Jens Begemann, CEO, Wooga
• Jim Bobowski, Director Online Partner Marketing, Netflix
  
• Adam Caplan, VP Virtual Currency, Super Rewards / Adknowledge
  
• Renata Dionello, Chief of Staff to the CEO, eBay, and former Director of Consumer Business Development, PayPal
• Eric Eldon, Editor, Inside Facebook & Inside Social Games
• Dave Etling, VP Product Development, InComm
  
• George Garrick, CEO, Offerpal Media
• Steven Goh, CEO, mig33
• Eric Goldberg, Managing Director, Crossover Technologies
  
• Vikas Gupta, CEO, Jambool
• Sebastien de Halleux, Founder and COO, Playfish, and VP Business Development & Strategic Partnerships, EA Interactive
• Ron Hirson, Co-founder and SVP Product, Boku
• Benjamin Joffe, Founder, +8*
  
• Nick Lawler, Managing Director, Maverick Capital
• Keith Lee, Co-founder and CEO, Booyah
• Jeremy Liew, Managing Director, Lightspeed Venture Partners
  
• Vish Makhijani, COO, Zynga
• David Marcus, CEO, Zong
• Lisa Marino, CRO, RockYou
  
• Dave McClure, Investor, Founders Fund Angel and fbFund Incubator
• Rex Ng, Co-founder and CEO, 6waves
• Jason Oberfest, VP Social Applications, ngmoco
• Mark Pincus, Founder and CEO, Zynga
• Shervin Pishevar, Founder and Executive Chairman, SGN
• John Pleasants, CEO, Playdom
• Keith Rabois, VP Strategy and Business Development, Slide
• Alex Rampell, CEO, TrialPay
  
• Peter Relan, Executive Chairman, CrowdStar
• Justin Smith, Founder, Inside Network
• Kavin Stewart, CEO, Lolapps
• Rick Thompson, Co-founder, Playdom, and Investor
  
• Jay Weintraub, Founder, LeadsCon
• Season Xu, Co-founder and COO, Five Minutes
  

Finally, a limited set of “early general admission” tickets is now available through Friday at a special price of $329. This price will change after Friday, and space will be limited, so we encourage you to register now.

Inside Social Apps 2010 – April 20th in San Francisco

Three years after the Facebook Platform launched in 2007, what started out as sheep throwing and vampire biting has quickly become a profitable billion-dollar industry. Today, social games monetizing through virtual goods have quickly become one of the hottest sectors of technology and entertainment, both in the US and around the world. Where are social apps going, and who is leading the way?

Inside Network is proud to announce our first conference on the future of monetization on social platforms: Inside Social Apps 2010, happening April 20th in San Francisco, is bringing together the world’s leading entrepreneurs all in one place to discuss the future of social applications and games monetizing through virtual goods.

This will be an in-depth one day event geared toward developers on Facebook, MySpace, and the iPhone, senior executives, and investors. At Inside Social Apps 2010, founders and CEOs of the top social gaming, mobile social gaming, payments, and virtual goods infrastructure companies will be tackling the key issues facing the industry. We’re hosting it one day before Facebook’s “f8″ event in San Francisco, so this will be an excellent opportunity to learn about the key issues facing the future of the Facebook Platform and beyond before Facebook’s official event.

Register Now

A limited set of “early general admission” tickets is available through Friday at a special price of $329. This price will change after Friday, and space will be very limited, so we encourage you to register early.

From all of us at Inside Network, we hope to see you on April 20th in San Francisco!

While Hi5 has increased its amount of rhetoric against Facebook, it has made some precise moves to attract game developers — especially from the Facebook Platform. It’s not clear if the moves will work, in part because Facebook has likely grown by the size of Hi5’s 50 million monthly active users already this year.

Hi5 is continuing to aggressively make the social network more of a gaming destination. Last week, it began supporting Facebook’s platform APIs, meaning developers with Facebook applications can more easily repurpose them to Hi5’s platform. Now, it’s announcing a special “Game Developer Program” intended to give third parties numerous advantages in reaching Hi5 users and making money. The catch is that all developers need to apply (here) to get into the program — a way for Hi5 to maintain quality. The specific benefits of the program include special ways for developers to reach users and make money.

Facebook recently took away notifications, a tool that many apps engaged users. Hi5 says it will give games a special one-click game install interface, access to let them send notifications to users in friend updates, and “un-capped invitations.” The last item means that developers in the program will not have apps limited by, say 30, invites a day — Facebook has made limits to help control spammy behavior. Hi5’s solution is to carefully approve and monitor its game developer partners, presumably kicking them out of the program if they get too spammy. Other special access points include APIs allowing games to add items in to user profiles, including user achievements and high scores.

And, Hi5 is going to be providing free banner ads, special appearances on its Games page (which is linked directly from the homepage) and in its games toolbar, recommend games to users, and more it will announce later. The plan here is to give smaller games a boost in users without having to buy advertising — on-site advertising is an increasingly important way for developers to reach users on Facebook.

Regarding money, some developers have been using Hi5 Coins, the site’s virtual currency, in their own games for many months. Now, anyone in the program will be able to, although it’s not saying what payment cut it’s taking. The currency includes 60 payment methods in 30 currencies. Hi5 also runs premium advertising alongside games, and it will share some of this revenue with games in the program.

So, while Hi5’s application platform will still exist, the program is intended to lure developers in to a tighter relationship with the company. New partners include: Detonator Games, Exponential Entertainment and Immortal Games.

Given its size and mature platform, Facebook is still going to be the priority for many developers. The second-largest social gaming platform, MySpace, has also just made big improvements to attract game developers. Hi5, however, is arguably the social platform most focused on games — specialization is a classic business strategy for a smaller competitor, and given where Hi5 is at, we think it’s making the right moves. We’ll see if it will work.