EA Playfish’s John Earner, general manager and vice president of London studios, has left the company to join Accel where he will be an entrepreneur in residence, according to TechCrunch. Earner joined Playfish in 2008 and lead the company through product development for hit social games like Pet Society, Restaurant City, FIFA Superstars and The Sims Social.

The move is just the latest in series of executive level losses at EA. Earlier in the month EA lost Barry Cottle, its EVP of EA Interactive to Zynga, and Earner’s departure now means most of Playfish’s original executive staff have now moved on to other ventures.

Margaritaville Online is a new cross-platform game for Facebook and iPad. It was developed by Exploding Barrel Games and published by THQ.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, Margaritaville Online currently has 30,000 monthly active users and 20,000 daily active users.

Margaritaville is described as an “everyday escape to a virtual tropical paradise.” The game is inspired by the song “Margaritaville” from singer-songwriter Jimmy Buffett, and takes the form of a role-playing adventure game. Taking on the role of a custom avatar, players begin in a bookstore on a snowy night and find themselves sucked into the tropical paradise of Margaritaville after finding a dusty old book written by Jimmy Buffett. Once safely on the island, players are then given a series of quests to introduce them to the main gameplay elements — exploring and collecting items; completing tasks for the island’s residents; building up the player’s business, a bar known as The Oasis; and taking part in a variety of minigames.

Rather than taking the form of a 2D citybuilding game, Margaritaville Online takes place on a predefined map, rendered in 3D using the popular Unity game engine. The mobile version is also built in Unity, which a contributing factor in the near-simultaneous launch on Facebook and iPad. An iPhone companion app is soon to follow.

Players explore the game map by clicking or tapping, and can click on various items to interact with them. Progressing through the game’s quests rewards the player with additional tools, which allow them to interact with more diverse objects. Acquiring a hammer, for example, allows the player to break crates and barrels to retrieve the objects inside, while a machete allows for overgrown bamboo to be temporarily cleared, opening up new paths for exploration.

Many areas of the island are initially inaccessible, requiring the player to gather raw materials to rebuild bridges over rivers. As the player explores, they will find more items and characters to interact with, as well as a selection of minigames to play alongside the main exploration gameplay. These include a rhythm-based limbo game; a first-person shooter “pirate attack” game; a Bejeweled-style “match three” puzzler when resting in a hammock; and numerous appropriately-themed challenges. All actions cost Energy to perform, with playing a minigame costing three units at once.

A Facebook account is required to play, even on the iPad version, but this means that a player can start playing on their home computer then take their iPad with them to play on the go. In-game, players will see their friends’ characters wandering around their own Margaritaville island, and interacting with them grants a bonus of coins and items. Friends can also be hired into various positions in the player’s “Oasis” bar business, helping to increase income. There’s also the usual facility to send energy-restoring gifts to one another.

Monetization is largely handled through the sale of the game’s hard currency: Beach Bucks. These can be purchased on Facebook using Facebook Credits; earned using Facebook Offers; or purchased using in-app purchases on the iPad. Beach Bucks can be used for a variety of purposes — acquiring premium avatar customization items; purchasing energy restoration items; or gaining additional soft currency. THQ also offers a premium membership option for the game, known as becoming a “Parrothead,” which provides players with an increased energy limit, a cash bonus, special items and a variety of benefits promised in the future.

THQ’s plans for the future of the game are ambitious, with user acquisition strategies stretching far outside just Facebook and the App Store. Speaking with VentureBeat, THQ’s vice president of global brand management Michael Lustenberger said that the game would be promoted at Jimmy Buffett concerts; on the Las Vegas Strip; various restaurants and resorts; and also through the upcoming iPhone app, which encourages players to share real-world “Margaritaville Moments” in exchange for rewards in the game. A lot is riding on the success of the game for THQ, whose stock price has been plummeting recently thanks to disappointing sales of a number of its key titles in the console market.

You can follow Margaritaville Online’s progress using AppData, our traffic tracking application for social games and developers.

EA’s Risk: Factions remains in the top spot on our list of emerging Facebook games this week by nearly doubling its monthly active users.

World Mysteries, Miscrits and Bingo Bash meanwhile, have all slowed in growth as they edge closer to breaking 1 million MAU. It’ll be interesting to see if Zynga Bingo‘s closed beta and impending wide release impact Bingo Bash’s growth in the short run.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	RISK: Factions	650,000	+280,000	+ 91%
2.	World Mysteries	680,000	+130,000	+ 24%
3.	11×11 – Online Football Manager	430,000	+120,000	+ 39%
4.	Fruit Ninja Frenzy	850,000	+100,000	+ 15%
5.	松崗遊戲登入	330,000	+100,000	+ 43%
6.	麻將─神來也麻將	710,000	+90,000	+ 15%
7.	GameGround	760,000	+80,000	+ 12%
8.	Press Your Luck	240,000	+80,000	+ 50%
9.	Miscrits of Volcano Island	940,000	+70,000	+ 9%
10.	Atlantis Fantasy	230,000	+60,000	+ 35%
11.	Clickfun Casino	390,000	+60,000	+ 18%
12.	Go Fishing	440,000	+60,000	+ 16%
13.	Triviador Mundo	740,000	+60,000	+ 9%
14.	Wild West Town	440,000	+60,000	+ 16%
15.	Zombie Island	900,000	+60,000	+ 7%
16.	Bingo Bash	940,000	+50,000	+ 6%
17.	Pirates Poker	210,000	+50,000	+ 31%
18.	Total Domination: Nuclear Strategy	490,000	+50,000	+ 14%
19.	War Commander	690,000	+50,000	+ 8%
20.	麻將─新明星3缺1網頁遊戲 免費的麻將遊戲	300,000	+50,000	+ 20%

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Come back next week for our top weekly gainers by monthly active users on Monday, our daily active users on Wednesday, and the top emerging apps on Friday.

Social game developer Kabam announced the acquisition of Fearless Studios this morning, scoring ex-LucasArts developers and Fearless founders Haden Blackman (pictured, left) and Cedrick Collomb (pictured, right) as part of the deal.

Specific terms of the deal were not disclosed. The entire Fearless team now joins the Kabam workforce in its San Francisco office. Kabam CEO Kevin Chou indicates in a press release statement that the team will be introducing 3D technology to Kabam’s games lineup.

“Their skills in game design, emerging technologies and proficiency in making the transition from 2D to 3D on consoles mesh perfectly with Kabam’s strategy,” his statement reads. “We’ll significantly strengthen our industry leadership as the online gaming market transitions to higher fidelity, 3D gameplay with our acquisition of Fearless Studios.”

Kabam’s VP of Brand Marketing and Communications, Ted Simon, clarifies that the team will be introducing streaming 3D to new titles and possibly to existing IP. As for branching out to new platforms, Simon says there are no plans to get into consoles — where Blackman and Collomb have a great deal of experience — but that Kabam is looking to go beyond Facebook and Google+ to international SNS platforms like Hives and VZNet with 3D games.

Fearless Studios was founded in October 2010, not long after Haden Blackman departed LucasArts and just months before the release of The Force Unleashed 2. Though the developer at one point had up to six projects in development, including a horror title, no games were ever released. Simon tells us that Kabam has not picked up the horror project. Fearless Studios last made the news in June 2011, when the developer was quoted in an HP press release, singing the praises of the TouchPad and the webOS platform.

Facebook now displays genre categories below game names in News Feed stories.

The change is mostly a cosmetic one as there is no way to view Facebook games by category. Even so, just seeing the word “Puzzle” below a game may help users navigate toward new games that they have a higher chance of liking because they know what to expect from it.

Game genres are a tough subject for some game developers as some descriptions are too broad to accurately target a game at its intended audience. For example, in the screen above, both CastleVille and Zoo World are tagged as “Simulation” — but the two games play very differently, to the point where it might make more sense to call the former a role-playing game and the latter a simulation. Another challenge is that some games fall under more than one genre; like how Zuma Blitz is both an arcade game (because it’s based on speed of reaction) and a puzzle game (because players have to match colors).

Hiring in the social gaming industry was up again this week, with 10 companies reporting 11 recent hires. According to data from LinkedIn and other sources Zynga had this week’s highest profile hire, bringing on Ken Weber to lead its charitable Zynga.org arm as executive director.

If your company is hiring new people or making a notable promotion, please get in touch with us. Email us at: mail (at) insidesocialgames (dot) com, and we’ll get your news into an upcoming post.

If you want to know who else is hiring, the Inside Network Job Board showcases current openings with the industry’s leading companies.

Cie Games

• David Bresson, Systems Engineer – A single hire at Cie Games begins our roundup this week. Bresson was previously a systems engineer at Disney Interactive Media Group.

Disney Playdom 

• Faiz Kamarul Baharin, Lead Concept and Production Artist - A single move for Disney Playdom this week, which promotes Baharin to lead concept and production artist.

EA Playfish

• Ke Ren, Technical Lead – Ren makes our roundup with a promotion from his position as server developer.
• Tom Pearson, Lead Platform Developer – Pearson moves from an executive level position at Morgan Stanley to join Playfish’s UK team.

GSN

• Maneka Mahajan, Administrative Assistant – Mahajan was previously a business analysis intern at the American Institute of Physics.

Kabam

• Kevin Ligon, UI Artist – Ligon was formerly a graphic designer at Cardinal Health.

Kixeye

• Maximilian Herkender, Flash Engineer – Herkender comes to Kixeye from 6waves Lolapps, where he was a software engineer.

Nordeus

• Jasmina Jović, Customer Support Specialist - Jović starts her career at Nordeus this week.

Peak Games

• Can Ozcer, Assistant Intelligence Analyst - Peak brings on Ozcer from Esit Electronic where he was an R&D intern.

Tetris Online

• David Veltri, Legal Extern – Tetris Online makes a rare appearance this week. Veltri completed his education at the William S. Richardson School of Law at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.

Zynga

• Ken Weber, Executive Director, Zynga.org – Finally Zynga snags this week’s highest profile hire, appointing Weber as the head of Zynga.org. Weber was previously the chief operating officer at The ONE Campaign.

Galactic Allies is the latest offering from Australian development studio 3 Blokes, who were acquired by RockYou last June. 3 Blokes were brought on board to the RockYou family to produce Facebook-based strategy combat titles that would appeal to the core gamer market, as well as offer some competition to other combat-heavy games such as Zynga’s Empires and Allies.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, Galactic Allies currently has 30,000 monthly active users and 1,000 daily active users.

Galactic Allies is, in 3 Blokes’ words, a casual take on the real-time strategy genre popular among core gamers, and an episodic story-based experience. Players follow an unfolding plot concerning humanity’s struggle against a mysterious alien race, and must gather allies from around the galaxy, build up their forces and engage in combat against both the computer-controlled enemies and other players.

Players control their fleet of ships in combat by clicking on them and directing them to attack specific enemies. Ships can be moved in formation or directed individually, allowing for either concerted efforts to attack strong enemies or splitting up to deal with lesser threats. Different styles of ships are better against certain other types in a “rock, paper, scissors” arrangement, and the key to success in combat lies both in understanding this system and keeping ships upgraded with the latest technology.

Alongside combat and ship upgrading, players can also explore the galaxy, sending mining probes down to planet surfaces to collect resources. This provides players with soft currency, items for trade and experience points.

Social features for the game are varied. There’s the usual facility to visit friends’ bases and earn bonus energy, but there’s also a trading system where players can put various resources up for sale as well as create a “wish list” of items. Alongside this, players can compete against one another for ranking on the Combat Leaderboard in asynchronous combat — the computer takes control of a player’s fleet on their behalf when someone challenges them.

Monetization is handled through the sale of the game’s hard currency, Galactic Points. These are purchased using Facebook Credits and can be exchanged for additional soft currency, used to bribe enemies (effectively skipping combat sequences), used to acquire Research Keys (used for upgrading the player’s ships), exchanged for Energy (used for mining and other actions such as exploration) or used to purchase Power Cells (required to enter into combat sequences).

Galactic Allies launched into open beta last September. Its MAU figures have been declining over the course of the last month, but its DAU took a sharp upswing in early January 2012 that lasted almost an entire week.

“In general, the decline of Galactic Allies’ user base came as we paused our standard user acquisition efforts while in development on game changes,” explained RockYou’s senior vice president of publishing Josh Grant when we asked him about the fluctuating numbers. “Reduced acquisition efforts on top of natural attrition will find a game at lower user levels.”

There hasn’t been any official communication from RockYou on the game’s official Facebook page since November, but Grant attributes the increase in daily users this month to “exploratory testing of new features in the game,” meaning that new player acquisition had been opened up for a brief period.

Judging from comments left on the official page, the player community appears to be somewhat disgruntled with the relatively recent addition of the Power Cells mechanic, and some blame the decline of users on this along with what they see as a lack of communication with the developer.

“RockYou continues to be excited about our entry into the mid-core genre of social gaming,” says Grant in response. “We expect Galactic Allies to play a significant part in this channel. We are currently undergoing development changes that will drive a more robust combat and strategy game.”

Exactly what the future has in store for the game isn’t clear at this time, then, but despite the silence on the official channels, it sounds like RockYou and developer 3 Blokes have a long-term plan in mind for the game.

“At this time, 3 Blokes is solely focused on making a best of breed real time strategy game out of Galactic Allies,” explained Grant. He did not, however, elaborate on the specifics of exactly how this would be achieved.

Zynga kicks off a closed beta today for the next title in its Casino franchise, Zynga Bingo.

The game is a recreation of the classic gambling game where players receive cards with numbers placed along a grid and each column is identified by letter. A “caller” draws numbers at random from a pile, calling out the letter and number while players search for the corresponding spot on their cards. Should a player find the number called, they place a “dauber” token on the number; if they fill an entire line of numbers with daubers, they have a “bingo” and can claim a prize. Other winning conditions include filling up an entire card with daubers, placing daubers on each of the four corners of the card or completing specific number sequences that have been marked for prizes by the organizers.

Zynga’s main update to the game comes from power-up and bonus items, which are either bought, earned or gifted from friends. The power-ups are unlocked and used during the actual game of bingo; a boost bar fills up with each play, and once full, the player can click it to activate whatever power-up item they have queued. The power-ups available at launch are limited to placing down a dauber on certain numbers as if they had been called in normal play or increasing the number of bonus items received at the end of a game. Bonus items include soft currency, tickets (which are used to purchase bingo cards), mystery crates and keys to unlock said crates. The crates can contain power-ups, soft currency or tickets.

Other features in Zynga Bingo include real time chat, themed rooms that sometimes draw from Zynga’s own games and a Zynga Casino navigation bar above the canvas that presumably allows players to jump easily from Zynga Bingo to Texas HoldEm Poker or other Zynga Casino games as they are released. During a press demo, a Zynga spokesperson declined to discuss any upcoming features related to the Zynga Casino interface beyond what had already been revealed at Zynga’s 2011 Unleashed preview event.

Among social games, bingo has been slower to catch on than other casino titles like poker or video slots. It wasn’t until the beginning of 2011 that Buffalo Studios’ Bingo Blitz began to gain traction, hitting 2.8 million monthly active users and 930,000 daily active users before the end of the year. Other bingo games have since launched on Facebook to more modest success and some virtual casinos have added it to their lineup of games.

Zynga Bingo is the developer’s second Facebook title of 2012. Its first 2012 game, Hidden Chronicles, launched in the first week of January and currently enjoys 12.5 million MAU and 6.1 million DAU as recorded by our AppData traffic tracking service.

Galaxy Life is a new space strategy combat game from Digital Chocolate. It launched on Facebook at the end of November 2011 and has seen steady growth in both MAU and DAU since then.

According to our traffic tracking application AppData, Galaxy Life currently has 290,000 daily active users and 1,500,000 monthly active users.

Gameplay in Galaxy Life revolves around the player acting as a protector for a band of small, cute creatures known as Starlings after their planet was destroyed. Tasks the player must take on include building up a base and its defenses; defending against attacks from rival players and enemy non-player characters; and attacking and looting rival bases.

The style of play is somewhat similar to Kixeye’s popular Backyard Monsters title. Players can upgrade buildings on their base, which in turn allows them to store more resources and currency, eventually enabling them to construct stronger and stronger fortifications. Like many other games of this type, the player is provided with a seven day grace period in which they cannot be attacked by other players, giving them a chance to thoroughly get to grips with the game mechanics and prepare their base for potential assault.

Social features in the game include a real-time chat facility, the opportunity to spy on or attack other players and the ability to form alliances with other players to cooperate. Posting game events to their Facebook wall allows players to share free resources and currency with friends, assisting with the viral promotion of the game.

Monetization comes through the sale of the game’s hard currency, known as Galaxy Chips. These can be spent on purchasing additional resources or soft currency, speeding up time-consuming construction projects, or on purchasing special “collection” items. The latter items, which can also be found by clearing debris from the play area and exploring, can be used to craft special weapons with which to assault other players’ bases, bonus experience point and coin packages and special decorative items.

So far, the AppData figures for Galaxy Life indicate strong, steady growth, with no signs of slowing down. Digital Chocolate CEO Trip Hawkins attributes the success of his company’s games, including Galaxy Life, to his belief in what he refers to as the “discovery business model,” offering a compelling experience to players for free with a robust monetization infrastructure underpinning it.

“New creations that have relevance will develop brand power at blinding speed,” said Hawkins, writing on his blog for Digital Chocolate in December. “As an illustration, when a great Digital Chocolate game like Tower Bloxx was only available on feature phones through the primitive merchandise systems known as the carrier decks, you could do a Google search for that game and would only get 10,000 page hits. Then we put out a free browser version of the game and later adapted it to Facebook and today it has over 2,900,000 page hits. That’s a brand. Our new game, Galaxy Life, is only a few days old and it has 270,000 page hits already.”

The Inside Network Job Board is dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities across social and mobile application platforms.

Here are this week’s highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at TubeMogul, Inc., IMVU, Addmired, 6 Waves/Lolapps, Funcom Games Canada, Identified, Plumbee, Mobile Deluxe, Game Show Network, Stealth Mobile Startup, Tapjoy, LolGames, GREE International, Inc. and Spooky Cool Labs.

• Sr Java Developer
• Systems Operations Engineer

• Senior Software Engineer

• Technical Recruiter
• Senior Operations Engineer
• Acquisition Manager/Mobile Ad Buyer
• Business Intelligence Analyst
• 3D (Isometric) Environment Artist
• 2D Digital Painter/Illustrator
• 3D (Isometric) Character Artist – Modeler/Animator
• Build/Release Engineer
• Tools Engineer
• Scalability Engineer
• Erlang Infrastructure Developer
• C/C++ Game Developer

• Senior UI Designer
• UI Vector Artist
• Interaction Designer

• Senior Java Programmer
• Senior GUI / Flash Developer Social Games
• Lead Designer Social Games

• Core Software Engineer

• Head of Mobile/Senior Mobile Producer

• Art Director
• Senior Programmer

• Senior QA Engineer-Mobile Games

Stealth Mobile Startup

• Senior Android Engineer

• Inside Sales Representative

• Social Media Business Development Lead / Internet Guru

• Director of Business Development

• Marketing Director
• Software Engineer – Games Front End / Unity

Listings on the Inside Network Job Board are distributed to readers of Inside Social Games, Inside Facebook and Inside Mobile Apps through regular posts and widgets on the sites. Your open positions are being seen by the leading developers, product managers, marketers, designers, and executives in the Facebook Platform and social gaming industry today.