Inside Social Games

While teen-oriented social site Omgpop has long had casual games tied to the Facebook through Facebook Connect, it has just released its first true social game on Facebook itself, Cupcake Corner.

Cupcake Corner is best described as a cross between games such as Zynga’s Café World and Booyah’s Nightclub City. It has a hodgepodge of older game mechanics, coupled with a handful of smaller, newer features. The game is technically sound, but does have some less than perfect features.

Similar to Baking Life, players are tasked with the cooking up fatty, guilt-filled creations of deliciousness. From cupcakes to donuts to ice cream, users cook up treats to turn their little bakery into a successful business.

To make these treats, players purchase an oven and pick something to cook. Higher level items earn more money and take longer to create. Once made, the food is placed on empty countertops for non-player characters to purchase. Each item has a set number of servings and different items require extra counter space.

Selling sweets is the primary source of income. But higher level foods do more than just earn coins; the more expensive treats also affect how much extra coin the NPCs leave behind on a table after they’ve eaten.

Each bakery also has a “Luxe Rating.” This is how luxurious your virtual space is, and the more decorum that is placed, the higher this rating will be. The higher the rating, the greater the tips. Unfortunately, here’s no way of knowing how much a particular item will increase the Luxe rating until it has been placed and the money spent. This moderately annoying for players that like to plan a purchase strategically.

Another statistic, “Satisfaction Rating”, works like most other restaurant games — the higher the rating, the more patrons come through the door. It’s not difficult to keep them happy. Thus far, they haven’t gotten upset during long waits and if there’s no seating, they’ll just pack up the treat and take it home. It seems the only way to lower this rating is by not having any food ready.

But seating is necessary in order to earn the  tips.  Patrons leave tips on the tables, and they must be manually collected, thus the more tables and seating a player has, the greater the potential income.

Tips from friends’ bakeries can also be collected upon visiting them. Other social features include basic leaderboards and gifting. Friends are also necessary in order to expand the physical size of one’s bakery, and they can be hired as employees to man the register or treat counters.

Unfortunately, they are hired Hotel City-style, through a wall posting. In Cupcake Corner, this doesn’t appear to work well. After we added a friend and they accepted the hiring posting, our friend did not appear in the game. There were temporary NPC workers that did the work anyway, but they cost coin, while friends are free. Whether or not the friend-worker feature is broken or we’re did something  incorrectly, we don’t know. Either way, whether the feature is broken or just poorly explained, this is a glaring issue.

The last interesting element is the ability to decorate treats. This activity is not nearly as in-depth as Baking Life, and only consists of changing the topping color (e.g. frosting on a cupcake) and you can only change it once. But you can spend virtual currency to use a color picker and pick a custom color.

Cupcake Corner works reliably for the most part, but it is disheartening to see another game that is merely a collection of previously designed mechanics. Many players are looking for more depth and innovation and unless a new game is significantly different and fresh, it will likely not pull users away from the original concept.

Still, this is just Omgpop’s first attempt on Facebook; Wilson Kriegel, the company’s chief revenue officer, recently admitted to us that the company would have to go through a learning curve to get everything right, with the first game serving as practice. As such, it’s worth keeping an eye on what Omgpop does next.

In a series of announcements today at a press event in San Francisco, Apple made clear that it is planning to build its own social networking features. But how big are its social aspirations? The new version of Apple’s iOS software, 4.1, is due out next week, and it will include the Game Center, a social network service designed specifically for mobile games. That’s been in the works for awhile, and is relatively simple — more surprising is Ping, Apple’s new music social network, designed for iTunes.

Both are analogous to other hardware-based services that have been on the market for years, not social networking sites. But it’s easy to wonder where Facebook is in all of this given Apple’s new social focus — that is, besides the subtle Facebook integration into the new music service. Up through last January, Facebook was getting a lot of attention from Apple, appearing as example services during stage presentations, and consistently reaching the top of the iTunes App Store charts. The trend had been building for a while, as we noted last December.

Is Apple looking to build its own social platform now? Aside from a simple integration in Ping, Facebook is absent in these latest launches, as are all other third party social networking services, like Twitter or MySpace. Here’s a closer look at what Apple is launching, what the moves indicate about its plans for the future, and how Faceboook could be an ally or a competitor.

Game Center: Sort of Social

First up is Apple’s Game Center, a new iOS app and API that lets you play games with friends and strangers, and lets developers add integrated social features to their games. Somewhat similar to Xbox Live, or third-party social platforms like Scoreloop, Aurora Feint and Ngmoco’s Plus, it includes basic features like leaderboards and achievements. While Apple didn’t go into much more detail today on how exactly the social features will work, previous reports indicate that the app will let users sign in with their Apple IDs (what you use for iTunes, etc.), create and identify each other by nickname, send person-to-person notifications and a way to “Find Me by Email” — meaning email invites and requests about games, potentially. It also includes a matching service to let find non-friends to play, and to create multiplayer games.

> Continue reading on Inside Facebook.

Peanut Labs, RockYou and Playdom and about a dozen other social gaming companies are banding together behind offers that let gamers donate to relief efforts for Pakistan’s flood victims. It’s not the first time that social gaming companies have experimented with charitable work; Zynga has offered branded virtual goods on behalf of Haitian earthquake and Gulf oil spill victims in the past, among other examples.

But it is the first time we’ve seen third-party offers attached to disaster relief. It’s also one of the more coordinated campaigns we’ve seen across the industry.

Called Points for Pakistan, the program quizzes gamers on their knowledge of the country’s floods in exchange for virtual currency and could reach up to 200 million unique players, if you total up the partners’ reach. At the end of the quiz, gamers get a handful of links to donation pages at The Red Cross and Oxfam.

The offers, led by Peanut Labs, essentially “prime” — or psychologically influence — social game players to think about or visualize suffering in Pakistan before asking them to donate. The surveys ask questions like whether gamers are aware of the crisis, how they learned about it through media sources or friends and whether they have donated already. The data collected from players’ answers will also go toward figuring out how to best inform the public about the crisis.

Some of the companies participating in Points for Pakistan, which include IMVU, Playspan, NHN USA/ijji, KlickNation, Nvinium Games, Roiworld, 101 Apps, Blue Frog Gaming, and Fish Wrangler, will either match donations, give directly to Oxfam and the Red Cross or create Pakistan-branded virtual goods.

Pakistan’s floods have affected 62,000 square miles of the country — an area that’s larger than the size of England and makes up one-fifth of the country. Some twenty million people have been displaced, but relief efforts and media attention haven’t really matched the levels Haiti attracted in the wake of its earthquake.

Peanut Labs’ chief executive, president and chief operating officer all come from Karachi, the country’s largest city and financial capital. They stepped up with a Facebook-based donation campaign last week that raised $55,000.

While July’s charts finally began showing signs that the continual drop in monthly active users (MAU) was tapering off, this past month has witnessed new falls. Of the veterans to this list, 16 experienced losses, with most well north of a million users. However, while some blame can be placed on Facebook’s constant changes and updates to the platform, the appearance of four new titles — two of which are not from the major social game developers — suggests that social game players may be looking for fresh ideas, and not always iterations on the same concept. From the vastness of Playfish’s Pirates Ahoy to the highly polished clubs of Booyah’s Nightclub City, the games that are trying to raise the bar in both design and creativity have also been the ones that are growing fastest.

It’s important to keep in mind that many of the largest games on this list also launched long ago, like Playfish’s Petville and Zynga Poker. Perhaps we’re starting to see some natural decline among the oldest titles?

As a side note, even with the applications that have lost numbers, it may not be as bad as it appears. Facebook has had a number of reporting bugs that may have skewed MAU counts for some games, giving them higher than normal numbers.

Here are the highlights for the top 25 Facebook Games for September 2010:

• Zynga’s FarmVille sees its first growth in the past few months, gaining 2.2 million monthly active users.
• Of all the other Zynga titles, the only other one to see positive numbers is FrontierVille, which moves up to #3 with a gain of over 6 million MAU. It is also worth noting that of all the Zynga apps, FrontierVille is also one of the more unique ones.
• MindJolt continues to hold at its #8 position, but loses 2,250,282 MAU this month. All the same, MindJolt has fluctuated wildly over its lifespan, yet has almost always remained in the Top 25.
• Playfish sees minor losses for its long running Pet Society, appearing at #9 with just over 13.5 million MAU.
• Another game that is doing well this week comes from casual king, PopCap with Bejeweled Blitz. Having slowly worked its way up the charts since its launch last year, it now reaches #10 with over 12.5 million MAU.
• CrowdStar and RockYou make their appearances at #11 and #12 respectively. The former’s Happy Aquarium walks away with a moderate loss of 380,705 MAU, while Zoo World drops a sizable 1.8 million.
• New to the list this month is Playdom’s business-oriented title Market Street. The app that let’s users create hardware stores, boutiques, or electronics stores comes in at #15 with almost 9 million MAU.
• CrowdStar does get some positive numbers in the form of Happy Pets at #17, having gained just over 400,000 MAU.
• Booyah proves that quality can mean the world as the non-advertised Nightclub City continues to grow, moving up from #25 to #18 with a 2.5 million MAU growth.
• Also new to the list is the sea-faring pirate title from Playfish: Pirates Ahoy. The app reaches #22 with 7.4 million MAU.
• Rounding out the list at #24 and #25 are the simply named Games and Baking Life from GSN and ZipZapPlay respectively. The former earns approximately 6.4 million MAU, while the latter earns 6.3 million.

While the largest games over on Facebook may be riddled with player losses, the MySpace counterparts remain, for the most part, in the positive light. With the exception of only a few applications, most titles have gained new installations from users in the past month. That said, the social network has always suffered from a lack of new and inventive titles, with the much of this list having been present for over a year.

So far, games on MySpace have not reached the level of popularity that they have gained on Facebook but a number of “game-like” applications have. That in mind, we’ve decided to expand the list to encompass a larger variety of applications, avoiding most of the “dating” tagged ones, from long time social developers BitRhymes and RockYou. With the expanded coverage, four new apps make their way on to the Top 25 this month.

Here are the highlights for the Top 25 MySpace Games for August 2010:

• Playdom’s #1 Mobsters sees its typical gains this month, earning over 73,000 new installations; nearly 30,000 more than last month.
• Unfortunately, even blowing up an armored truck wasn’t enough for Zynga to oust the #1 app, as Mafia Wars remains at #2 with approximately 13.4 million total users.
• Playdom’s simple app, Own Your Friends, sees the first loss on these charts. However, the decline is minor, with just under 4,000 lost users.
• As part of our expanded list, Truth Box from RockYou comes in at #6. The social communication app garners 7,844,514 total users.
• Long running Zynga RPGs, Vampires and Street Racing come in at #11 and #12 respectively with Vampires gaining 152,516 new users, and Street Racing losing just over 10,000.
• We introduce RockYou’s SuperHug! to #13. Another simple communication app, the title is currently earning around 4.4 million users.
• Not far behind comes the social quiz title from BitRhymes, How well do you know me? The title has remained, consistently around #16 for some time, with just over 3.6 million users.
• Oxylabs’ title, What is your Street Reputation appears at #17 with a respectable gain of 220,000 new users.
• Conversely, WSOP Poker (Poker Palace) drops – and not merely because of the list expansion, but due to other apps growing faster - to #18 having lost 1,358 users.
• Last of the new apps to be added in is the BitRhymes counterpart to Truth Box, “TruthBox.” The communication application comes in at #19, earning a total of 3.3 million users.
• Rounding out the list is Zynga’s Fashion Wars with 1.9 million users, and Playdom’s Bloodlines with just shy of 1.9 million users. The two come in at #24 and #25 respectively.

Playdom has a new hit on its hands in the form of City of Wonder, a city sim that has pulled in millions of users in its 10 days of growth so far. The game leads this week’s AppData list of fast-growing Facebook games by daily active users.

It’s difficult to tell just yet how much of City of Wonder’s success is due to Disney’s marketing dollars, and how much can be attributed to the game itself. Today, we’re seeing a gain of 438,684 DAU; in a week or two, if those DAUs stick around, we’ll know that the game is standing on its own merits.

One note before the list: Facebook has changed its reporting formula for apps to stop counting likes and comments on stream content toward total users. The most affected category is mobile apps, though, so stats for games shouldn’t change too much.

Here’s the AppData top 20:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	City of Wonder	824,870	+438,684	+114%
2.	FarmVille	17,611,581	+274,271	+2%
3.	Millionaire City	1,294,695	+169,201	+15%
4.	Nightclub City	1,255,333	+144,507	+13%
5.	Car Town	793,697	+103,130	+15%
6.	Pet Society	2,490,160	+86,598	+4%
7.	Kingdoms of Camelot	773,238	+69,188	+10%
8.	Ninja Saga	882,690	+68,624	+8%
9.	開心 Lounge Bar	319,743	+68,225	+27%
10.	Bubble Island	847,314	+67,868	+9%
11.	Mall World	879,190	+63,192	+8%
12.	Backyard Monsters	224,983	+45,888	+26%
13.	על כל הקופה	81,942	+43,251	+112%
14.	Wild Ones	569,029	+43,251	+8%
15.	Okey	765,311	+40,793	+6%
16.	Monster World	467,710	+40,281	+9%
17.	Top Eleven Football Manager	77,810	+38,814	+100%
18.	Bejeweled Blitz	4,198,157	+38,209	+0.92%
19.	Ninja Warz	335,190	+37,394	+13%
20.	Restaurant City	2,584,937	+34,764	+1%

FarmVille comes in at number two, but with a caveat: the game hasn’t really gained any DAU, when considering a time span longer than a week. Several other large, older apps on the list are present for the same reason, including Pet Society and Ninja Saga.

Millionaire City, while a few months old now, has a better story. The Digital Chocolate city building game has kept up steady growth, just like several other strong niche offerings, like Nightclub City, which is the next game down, and Kingdoms of Camelot, which has taken nine full months to reach its current position. Bubble Island also fits in this general slow-burn category.

Car Town, about two months old, is still motoring along. The Cie Games title has been around long enough now for us to trust that its stickiness factor, or its DAU as a percentage of MAU, has really settled in at the 20 percent mark, where most successful games are; this one will probably also be around for a while.

One thing there’s not much of on this week’s list is new games — Car Town is about as close as it gets. However, we should have a whole crop on the Friday list of emerging games.

Editor’s note: The following data is an excerpt from Inside Facebook Gold, our research and data membership service covering Facebook’s platform and advertising ecosystem; it was also previously posted on Inside Facebook.

Nevermind China’s country-wide block on Facebook; the Chinese language is still the ninth-largest language on Facebook, thanks to Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan. Chinese is growing at a steady pace, and it’s beginning to draw the attention of some of Facebook’s biggest players.

Zynga is a case in point. Two weeks ago, the top social gaming company published a Chinese-language version of Zynga Poker, one of its flagship apps.

But rather than trying to reach China with the new game, where Zynga Beijing helped localize the app, the company settled for a release to Facebook’s 11.5 million Chinese-language users.

There were likely several motivations behind Zynga’s Facebook launch. The first is that China is not an easy market to push into, for a foreign company. The Chinese government requires that outside entrants be partially owned by a Chinese company — a hurdle that Zynga may not want to cross until it’s sure the project is worthwhile.

Luckily, Facebook can provide a great litmus test for entering the mainland. Hong Kong is an administrative region of China, while independent Taiwan is still culturally close (and often claimed by China as a province).

On Facebook, Zynga Poker will be competing for this cuturally Chinese audience, with actual Chinese game developers like Elex and Boyaa, which has its own successful poker game. The results should tell it how it might do in China.

There are other reasons to enter Facebook’s Chinese-language market beyond just testing for China itself, though.

The second is that the Chinese-language user group will likely contain more social game players, proportionately, than a similarly-sized group of English or Spanish speakers. Among the 11.5 million Chinese-language users, a large majority are visiting Facebook just to play games, judging both from what we’ve heard and seen in user behavior.

Additionally, these are users who not only play games, but spend freely on virtual goods within their games experience (as a side note, the virtual goods industry is estimated to surpass $5 billion this year). So, the East Asian user base is not only growing but also valuable. Here’s a rough estimate of how the Chinese-language market could continue to grow into next year:

The total population of Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan is around 35 million users, so there will obviously be some upper boundaries to growth; however, localizing existing games looks like a winning proposition from here.

As for the users themselves, our look at the performance of three apps in Taiwan earlier this month shows that there are more differences.

For instance, the average age of users playing the largest three games is around 27. In the United States or another Western country, the average age for a give group of apps would likely be a decade higher.

These youthful users, who have a strong propensity to put their disposable income into online activities, may also be cheaper to acquire than their counterparts in Western markets.

Here’s a look at cost-per-click ad rates across the three big Chinese-language markets:

For developers that do want to move their apps over, a Beijing office isn’t necessarily vital; some publishers in the region are offering localization services to Western developers, including Hong Kong-based 6waves, which we interviewed on the subject in July.

The full Facebook Global Language Report is available through a membership to Inside Facebook Gold, which also includes monthly data on total global audience growth and demographics. To learn more or join, please visit Inside Facebook Gold.

The first app spawned from the launch of Facebook Places is out today: InCrowd, a location-based iPhone game by MyTown creator Booyah.

InCrowd was created by Booyah in under a month, but that doesn’t mean the new game isn’t interesting. Using art from its Facebook game, Nightclub City, Booyah gives players customizable avatars that they can use to virtually interact with each other in their real-life location.

“We stepped back and said hey, we don’t want to just federate check-ins, we want a brand new experience and brand-new app,” says Booyah CEO Keith Lee. “We’re trying to push the envelope in terms of how we can create new experiences or new gameplay based on location.”

For now, InCrowd is pretty simple; Lee compares it to poke apps in the early days of social networking. Users can interact with other people in their location with actions like hi-fives or dropkicks, which are immediately sent to their friend in the app and on Facebook. “One of the things that has been missing on Facebook is real-time social interaction,” says Lee.

Over time, poke apps evolved point systems and a sort of light gaming element (the Vampire series being perhaps the penultimate example). InCrowd is starting out with a similar system. The hi-five, for example, will add popularity points to the receiving user, while the dropkick will take points away.

InCrowd isn’t just a one-off experiment; Booyah will add to it progressively over time. One upcoming feature is customized virtual spaces for different locations, so that a particular baseball park or store is identifiable as the actual location. The store might even include a non-player character to guide or give information about the store. The virtual item system from Nightclub City might also migrate over in some form.

“What we’re really trying to do is build a hub and platform,” says Lee.  “It’s a lot more elegant than a boring check-in app that just has a pop-up coupon.”

The key to the future is in how players use the new app, though. Lee expects a younger audience for InCrowd. “You’ll start to see some really interesting use-cases. Imagine how people in high school or college would use it,” he says. “You have a sense people are from your dorm but you may not know them, so you have a new way of interacting with them.”

Less trafficked places could experience another kind of interesting user behavior, Lee speculates. Since the app will show the last 30 or so check-ins, a place that isn’t visited much could allow asynchronous interaction and discovery of new people. “Besides checking into your office, maybe you check-in to an antique bookstore… in places that aren’t frequented as much, you want to find people who are similar.”

It also remains to be seen how many new users Places will bring to Booyah, which already has over three million users with MyTown, but Lee expects a significant number to appear due to increased virality in the feed.

For more, check out our analysis of the future of location-based games o Places, published earlier this morning.

Once upon a time, Electronic Arts stated that it would be bringing the Madden franchise to Facebook. Now, almost nine months later, that promise has come to fruition with the release of Madden NFL Superstars from EA/Playfish.

With the launch of Madden NFL 2011 and the pending start of the NFL regular season, the release is timed, with EA’s typical marketing savvy, to springboard off of both the popularity of the season start and the console game, which reliably sells millions of copies each year.

EA has some prior experience in placing big sports titles on Facebook, too, having first launched FIFA Superstars, which now has about four million monthly active users. The reuse of the “Superstars” name for Madden suggests that the company is attempting to create a Facebook brand of sports-oriented applications.

Madden, though, is by far the larger of the two EA franchises. Considering the the success of the yearly console releases of Madden, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Madden NFL Superstars head into the double-digit millions during the football season.

Obviously, the central objective to Madden is to build up a championship team and take them to the Super Bowl. However, that’s actually much simpler than one might think. Rather than dealing with drafts, auctions, and trades as one would in the traditional game, Playfish and EA take a trading card spin, asking players to purchase packs of digital football cards, using either the earnable in-game currency or the paid premium virtual currency, Playfish Cash.

Depending on the type of pack purchased, higher- or lower-quality players will be found within them. A Bronze Pack is the cheapest with five low ranking NFL players, while an Ultimate Pack is the costliest (and requires level 20, unless one uses Playfish Cash) but contains the highest ranking players. Furthermore, since EA has licensing rights with the National Football League, these are, of course, all real players.

Based on each NFL players’ statistics (speed, strength, positions, etc.) they will add a set rating to the overall team, represented by one to five stars. However, since the player must build their entire offense and defense of 23 positions, it’s hard to tell just how much a single player can affect a team.

The star rating of the entire team can be improved with practices. This is somewhat similar to practicing in FIFA Superstars, with the teams running some form of drill to improve their capabilities. However, the benefit is only comes into effect so long as the player returns to refresh practice sessions after they are complete, in an analogue to withering crops in farming games.

As far as the football games themselves go, this is where the Facebook title takes the largest departure from its console progenitor. Every game is fully automated and presented to the player as still shots with a Ken Burns pan-and-scan effect and commentary streaming along the bottom. Normally, the higher rated team will win, but players also activate special abilities called “game changers” that have a percentage chance of succeeding (meaning they score some form of points). Purchasable with both Playfish Cash and in-game currency, these consist of plays such as onside recoveries, kickoff returns, field goal kicks, and so on.

As players play and win games, they progress through increasingly difficult seasons. It’s a bit of a slow progression though, as the gating mechanism for number of plays per day are “Game Tickets” that take over an hour to regenerate after use. Typically, one game equals one ticket, but some require more.

The game also has a moderate virtual space element to it, allowing users to purchase amenities for their home stadium — although a nicer stadium doesn’t equal more fans. Those are instead gained through leveling up, purchasing them in the store, or receiving them as gifts from friends. Fans appear to be used for later-game features like going to the Super Bowl or unlocking new teams in a higher level mode called the “Pro League”.

Socially, the game has typical achievements, leaderboards, and gifting among friends, but it also comes with a nice scrimmage feature that allows users to compete against one another without using up a Game Ticket, with a result that’s recorded for posterity. Other than that, there is also the likely addition of playing other users’ teams as part of the main game, which isn’t immediately available, but is probably on its way.

Madden NFL Superstars is, in the end analysis, a very well built game, but compared to other sports management games on Facebook, Madden is nowhere near as in-depth as others we have seen in the past. This is likely because such games almost never do well on Facebook, and as FIFA Superstars has proved, catering to a wider, more casual/social audience can be more lucrative than a small niche.

Playdom has published its latest Facebook title built by an outside developer: Terranova, by Atakama Labs. Atakama is an advocate of “meaningful games,” and this eco-friendly application — complete with environmental factoids — is about using a virtual space to terraform a desolate desert world.

Terranova doesn’t innovate much within the virtual space genre, but it does have an off-beat premise that offers the user a satisfying visual sense of progression. Nevertheless, this the the kind of game we’ve come to expect from Playdom: technically perfect, but repetitive and dull after a while.

Players play the role of a crashed spaceman (or spacegirl) who must transform a wasteland planet into a thriving, livable, environment. To do this, players plant various forms of flora ranging  from simple cacti to tropical palms. The idea is to slowly build up the planet’s “bio health”, as indicated by a gauge at the top of the screen. Different plants will improve bio health rating by different amounts. Each plant must also be watered periodically, costing both energy and water.

The challenge is that there is not a lot of fertile ground in the beginning.  As players level up, more and more of the ground becomes green and lush — this is the visually satisfying part.  Decorating a world is nice, but watching the world transform is gratifying.

However, changing the whole world is going to take a while. It is a big world with a lot of space, compared to most virtual space games. At the lowest levels, there are six sizeable areas to explore and decorate. Many areas have special items that can be placed there.

Items are introduced through a quests, which act as a secondary tutorial in the beginning. For example, the first quest is to find a glacier. Once discovered, players can use the virtual currency Terracash to purchase a machine called a water drill.

Like most games that require players to spend energy to advance, both energy and water generate slowly. However, machines like the water drill will produce water more quickly. Other machines grant similar bonuses such as refilling energy, increasing water capacity, and so on. But every machine the player builds takes away from the bio health of the planet, so a balance must be kept.

Every couple of hours, the user can perform a “Bio Audit.” With this mechanic, a monetary reward is granted based on factors such as bio health, biodiversity (the variety of plants one has), daily bonuses, and how many friends play too.

But money can be earned other ways. Every plant, and some of the decorations, produce collection bonuses. Plants produce a small amount of coin, while items like a beehive produce sellable honey. Like Zynga’s FrontierVille, trash, toxic geysers, and toxic waste from machines fill up the land and must be cleaned up. With the proper equipment, these can be collected and disposed of for coin as well.

The social features of Terranova feel a bit drab. They are basic, standardized elements: leaderboards, visiting friends’ virtual spaces, and gifting.  But the occasional social quests stand out. One involves finding and unlocking a hidden treasure chest and requires friends to send specific gifts (e.g. a key) to help users accomplish it.

Terranova does a pretty good job at bringing the world to life with a number of details that add flair to the world, e.g. insects are attracted to certain items. There is always a gratifying sense of progression, but most of the game is unoriginal. The concept is still plant, water, harvest. The bio health stat helps to mitigate these time-worn mechanics, but it just doesn’t make a big difference. It’s still farming game — only in space.