Inside Social Games extends a big thank you to our fantastic sponsors for supporting the continued growth of Inside Social Games. Check them out below!

Social Gaming Network (SGN) is a leading global development platform for social game distribution.

Zong is a leading mobile media monetization service from Echovox.

Cafe.com is a leading developer and distributor of social casual games.

Offerpal Media is a leading managed offer network for social applications and online merchants.

Kramaley Games is a leading developer of social games on Facebook.

Okay, okay, be honest. How many of you played drinking games in college? If that is the case, then you might recognize this game: Presidents & Assholes. Well, now there is a version on Facebook as well and it comes complete with cards, tables, and a virtual buzz.

For the benefit of those that don’t know, the object of this card game is to get rid of all of your cards as soon as possible. Normally, you play with four people and deal out an entire, standard, deck of cards, and the first one finished is the “president” and the last one is the “asshole.”

Playing the game, both in reality and in this application, is fairly simple. When a player puts down a set of cards (such as two fours), the next player (moving clockwise) must put down the same number of cards at a higher rank or be forced to pass. The game continues as such until someone is declared the “asshole.”

Seeing as how this is a drinking game, the developers at Webware Group, have incorporated a charming little feature that equates to a virtual buzz (or worse). When players create a game, they have the option to make it a “normal” or “drinking” game. Should it be dubbed a drinking version, those rules come into effect. Each time a player passes a turn during the game, they have to take a drink. Well, what happens when you drink? In this app, it becomes harder and harder to see each time (hmm, does this sound familiar to anyone?), thus making the game more challenging for the drunkard. Furthermore, should anyone play four of a kind, everyone ends up drinking.

It may seem minor, but little bits of polish like this in games goes a long way, especially in social games. For example, when you drink in World of Warcraft,  the game becomes blurry, players get tunnel vision, their characters don’t walk straight, and they slur their words. It’s not much in the grand scheme of things but it’s a ton of fun, and such a feature for Presidents & Assholes could go a long way as well.

Of course, the game also contains other elements beyond “alcohol.” Advanced players can become “High Rollers” when they start to acquire large numbers of chips, and also lets players earn rewards and trophies by playing and winning. All of this is displayed in a profile section for each player, and can be shown off amongst friends, in-game buddies, as well as your standard leader boards.

So far, the game seems pretty solid, but seeing as it is a new game, it has one serious flaw. In order to start any game, you need four players. This wouldn’t be an issue once the game starts to get traffic, but until then it will cause some issues for initial growth. If people can’t play when they check it out, they may not come back. As such, bots would be nice in order to fill that void until such a time that player count is not an problem.

Again, the game is new, so low traffic is expected. The game is made nicely, and looks clean and polished. Furthermore, it adds a nice change to the more common poker games out there, and one can only hope for more card game varieties that look as nice to arise in the future.

hi5, one of the largest and fastest growing social networks in many countries around the world, is launching a new casual social games section today called hi5 Games that’s deeply integrated with the rest of the hi5 experience.

hi5′s games library contains dozens of arcade, card, casino, sports, and strategy games created by developers like Arkadium and others. However, unlike other Flash portals on social networks, hi5 has integrated the games directly into the site’s communication channels and virtual currency system.

For example, each game has built in leaderboards, and hi5 is making it easy to play with friends by integrating messaging, challenge and invite features.

In addition, hi5 users can use “Coins” to purchase advanced gaming features. hi5 also says it will also be offering new advertising options on hi5 Games.

“For our target audience of 15 to 24 year-olds, social gaming represents a major expenditure of time and money around the globe.  hi5 Games is just one of a range of immersive features that will further engage our users, both keeping them on the site longer and driving them towards new forms of monetization for our business,” said Ramu Yalamanchi, founder and CEO of hi5.

hi5 has taken a unique approach to monetization, combining advertising and virtual goods sales in a deeper way than many other western social networks. We’ll be keeping our eye on hi5 games as 2009 progresses!

If you talk to any person developing an application for the Apple iPhone you’ll often hear the same complaint, “It’s not like it used to be.” That may be a strange thing to say about a product that hasn’t even hit its second birthday, but there’s a dawning realization that it’s tough to market to a potential audience in the iTunes store without a heavy duty brand, or a viral sensation.

And it’s all about the marketing. While there’s lots to love about the iTunes experience as a customer, if you’re a publisher you only have very limited ways to connect with your audience. There’s the main page, some top ten lists, and even a bit of advertising scattered throughout the app store experience. Heck, there’s even a “What We’re Playing” list, although how you go about getting on it is something of a mystery, and it makes you wonder who “we” is actually supposed to be. But that’s it. There’s no social community to reach out to, no viral thought leaders, and no magazine or blog where you can really reach the players who “matter”.

And that’s mostly Apple’s fault, because no matter how you try and slice it, at the end of the day it’s still all their audience. Ask any third party Mac developer and they’ll tell you: once you’re in the borders of their empire your bound by all the rules and limitations that come with simply being another subject in the kingdom. And those laws can change, often, and a lot. That doesn’t often seem like a problem in those heady early days where beer, flatulence, and lighter applications are selling like hotcakes, but once the initial euphoria wears away it’s often replaced by the same cookie cutter licenses clogging the best-seller charts. Once that happens, it can become almost impossible to capitalize on the innovation that made the market seem so attractive in the first place. And when the buzz and venture capital have burned away, only the biggest remain, along with a few new brands that have managed to become established enough to sell on name alone. Meanwhile everybody else has already moved on to the next bigger better thing.

Is there a way out of the downward spiral? Possibly. But for a variety of reasons, including lack of support from Apple itself, what we’re seeing on the platform currently looks far more similar to a last generation Casual portal than a forward looking social community. Because Apple disallows Micropayments for example, the iPhone can’t power true virtual goods. And it seems that a variety of limitations on the phone as a product platform that have held back the development of a mobile multiplayer gaming experience like the one you get with Xbox live, not the least of which is the lack of any kind of official SDK out of Cupertino.

One thing that you’ve seen in the rise of the social media platforms such as Facebook and MySpace is that they’re willing to share the love in a way that Apple isn’t. If you’re going to truly connect with your audience then you need a platform partner who’s willing to let you actually try some innovative new things and directly connect with your customer from time to time. That may mean having to act as a policeman and change the rules if the exploitation get too egregious, but just as your audience will misbehave from time to time, so will your developers. And it’s better to be giving out the occasional slap on the wrist to your over-achievers than have no achievers at all.

To paraphrase McCluhan, it has to be a medium, not just a message.

Andrew Mayer is a Social Gaming and User Experience Consultant with over seventeen years of experience in the games industry.

Here’s a benevolent little application by the name of Willy’s Sweet Shop. The game is developed by Mob Science, and is rather similar to their previous title, Sea Garden. However, what is so generous about this app is that the more you play, the more the developers donate to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. In fact, the game so far has generated (according to developers) approximately $7000+ in charity.

Like its predecessor, Sweet Shop lets players buy and send various virtual candies as gifts to use in their very own candy store. Each day you are allotted a small amount of “sweetbucks” and presented with a little maintenance issue for your store.

As with anything else, you have to take care of what you own, and every so often, you will come back to the store to see some new form of challenge to be handled (i.e. giant ants). As such, you need to purchase tools that can get rid of the issue. Each tool has a set number of charges, and can be used for not only your store but for the stores of your friends as well.

This is where the bulk of the game play comes into play. One objective of the game is to arrange your sweet shop and make it look great so you can show it off, but to do so you need something to decorate with. In order to do that, you need money, and the way you get money is rather slow unless you have friends. As was mentioned before, you can purchase tools to maintain your and your friends’ shops, but doing so earns you some extra cash. Thus, the more friends you have, the more potential income is available to you, and the more income you have, the cooler store you can create. Of course, having more friends also equates to more gifts as well, and who doesn’t love that?

Regardless, the game is very simple, and those who enjoy games like Sea Garden will likely enjoy Willy’s Sweet Shop as well. Granted, the game is a little bit more of the same, and it can be a bit slow to get started since you need a lot of friends to join in order to really get going, but the cause is honorable and it is still fun.

Startup2Startup is a fantastic monthly “geek entrepreneur” dinner in Palo Alto organized by Dave McClure that brings experienced entrepreneurs, startup “rookies,” and VC’s together under one roof for a night of networking and discussion.

Last week, Amy Jo Kim, CEO of social gaming startup ShuffleBrain (the makers of PhotoGrab), gave an excellent presentation on “Applying Game Mechanics to Social Media.” In it, Kim talks about the key ways game developers and social application developers can employ similar game mechanic concepts to create better experiences.

The full slides are below:

If you can’t see the slides in your RSS reader, click here to view.

The MySpace numbers are also in for February! Here are the Top 25 MySpace games as of February 2, 2009:

As you can see, there are new faces this time around as the lower tiers of the charts continue to shift and churn. Furthermore, the Top 10 applications still remain strong, but it is likely that changes there will also occur soon.

• Curiously, and as with last month, Zynga‘s Mafia Wars is growing at a slightly faster rate than the #1 Mobsters. While the gap between #1 and #2 is still pretty wide, it would be far from surprising should Mafia Wars take the top spot in the app gallery sometime soon.
• YoVille worked its way back up towards the Top 10, coming in at the #12 spot with a gain of 441,879 users.
• Beyond YoVille knocking almost half the list down a peg, Fashion Wars and Pirates – Rule the Carribean! swapped places as the swashbuckling title gained a mere 8,003 new users, compared to Fashion’s 128k.
• Two new titles also showed up this time around: Coming in at #23 was Overdrive with it’s “Fast and the Furious” concept. However, spotted at #21 was a new title called “Cheers!!” Don’t let the name fool you, because anyone that has been following Facebook games might recognize the “Drunk-o-Meter” in this app. Strikingly similar to Pass A Drink on Facebook, is it not? Should that be the case, then it can be expected that this app will rise very quickly.

In the end, Zynga is still the dominant developer on MySpace, as the RPG genre is certainly the most popular here. However, this month has shown that new titles can make there way up the rankings, and while there hasn’t been a major shift in the Top 10 as of yet, it is unlikely that it will stay that way forever.

The charts are in, and here are the numbers for the Top 25 Facebook Games for Febuary 2009 by monthly reach.

This month was certainly a positive one as almost every game in this list saw gains. However, that same fact is what makes a number of the changes in this list interesting. Converse to last month, many games shifted rankings not due to losses, but significant gains.

• Pass a Drink skyrocketed with approximately 1.8 million users jumping on board this month. Though less than the 2.1 last month, its rate of growth is astounding, and could dethrone Texas HoldEm Poker from the #1 spot by next month.
• Classic game Pet Society got some love as it knocked Lil Green Patch down a peg, moving up to #3 from #4. However, Green Patch‘s other app (Lil) Blue Cove gradually continues to climb (up to #13 from its previous rank of #16) with a gain of 357k players.
• World War, a new title from 6 Waves that pits players against other countries across the globe debuts at #16.
• New game Willy’s Sweet Shop from Mob Science reaches almost 2 million users for the #17 position.
• Minigolf Party, finally joins its other Playfish brethren with nearly 1.8 million users.
• Poker Palace appears this month at #16, displaying the strength of card games.
• Last, but not least, Scramble finds its way back onto the boards (by Zynga) with the #22 spot.

Overall, it was a great month for everyone. Maybe everyone is now back from the holidays – or more people just have free time – but hopefully the upward trend will continue!

Engage! Expo (formerly the Virtual Worlds Conference) is happening March 10-11 in New York City, and Inside Social Games readers can save $100 by using the discount code INSIDEVIP.

The conference is focused on helping social media, games, entertainment, youth brands and toy companies engage their audiences and build new revenue streams inside virtual worlds. FremantleMedia (American Idol) and Sulake (Habbo) will be giving the keynote together to talk about their recent partnership and the new ways one of the most popular TV brands is interacting with its audience online.

ISG readers can get $100 off the registration price by entering discount code INSIDEVIP. Click here to register!

Full list of speakers:

Tucker Aaron, Lead Strategist, Animax Entertainment
Larry Andreini, ZEO, RIDEMAKERZ
Jan Andresen, CEO, Weblin
Maria T. Bailey, CEO, BSM Media
Chris Bergstresser, Co-founder and CEO, Webcarzz, Inc.
Lauren Bigelow, General Manager and SVP Marketing, WeeWorld Inc.
Dr. James M. Bower Ph.D., Founder, Chairman, and CVO, Numedeon Inc.
Daniel Buelhoff, Head of Business Development & Community Management, sMeet
Yuanzhe (Michael) Cai, VP of Research, Video Games, Interpret LLC
Timothy Chang, Principal, Norwest Venture Partners
Ro Choy, Vice President of Business Development, RockYou
Lee Clancy Jr., VP of Product Management & General Manager of Direct Revenue, IMVU
Jorian Clarke, CEO, Circle 1 Network
Jesse Cleverly, connective media
Benjamin T. Duranske, Attorney, Pillsbury
Jared Freedman, President, Code4Software LLC
Barry Gilbert, VP & Research Director, Strategy Analytics
Richard Gottlieb, President, Richard Gottlieb & Associates, LLC
Neil Harris, Executive Vice President, Simutronics
Julie Hochheiser, Senior Web Editor, Seventeen.com
Steven Hoffman, CEO, RocketOn, Inc.
Charles Edward Hudson, VP of Business Development, Serious Business
Teemu Huuhtanen, President, North America & EVP Habbo Business, Sulake Corporation Ltd.
John Hwang, Director of Products, Automotive, RockYou
Nabeel Hyatt, Founder and CEO, Conduit Labs
Joe Hyrkin, Vice President, Sales & Business Development, Gaia Online
Dan Jansen, CEO and Co-Founder, Virtual Greats
Sean Kane, Attorney, Drakeford & Kane LLC
Marta Kagan, Vice President of Marketing, Viximo
Jouni Keranen, President, iLemon
Thom Kidrin, President/CEO, Worlds.com Inc.
Daniel Kruchkow, Head of Digital Strategy, Crush Management
Pierre Le Lann, Co-CEO, Tribal Nova
Dr. Andreas Lober, Partner, SchulteRiesenkampff
Kenneth Locker, SVP Digital Media, Cookie Jar Entertainment
David Lord, President, CEO of Knowledge Adventure
Sean McGowan, Managing Director, Equity Research Department, Needham & Company
Karl Mehta, Co-Founder & CEO, PlaySpan Inc.
Ravi Mehta, Vice President of Publishing, Viximo
Nic Mitham, CEO, K Zero
Philippe Moitroux, CEO, TAATU
Sergio Monsalve, Principal, Norwest Venture Partners
Dell Monson, Vice President of Marketing, Hidden City Games
Izzy Neis,  Senior Community Manager, Six Degrees Games, Inc.
John L. Nicholson, Senior Associate, Pillsbury’s Global Sourcing
Jason Oberfest, Vice President of Business Development, MySpace
Jerry Paffendorf, Co-Founder, Wello Horld
Matt Palmer, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Stardoll
David Perry, Chief Creative Officer, Acclaim
Laurie Petersen, General Manager, Minyanville Family Media Inc.
Michael H. Pinkerton, COO, Metaverse Mod Squad
Joi Podgomy, VP, Interactive Development, Ludorum
Ken Ruck, VP of Global Digital, HIT Entertainment
Sean Ryan, CEO, Meez
Sabri Sansoy, Chief Technology Officer, Animax Entertainment
Sally Schmidt, Executive Producer, Circle 1 Network
Andrew Schneider, Co-Founder and President, Live Gamer
Joey Seiler, Editor, VirtualWorldsNews.com, Virtual Worlds Weekly
Christopher V. Sherman, Executive Director, Founder, Virtual Worlds Management
Anu Shukla, CEO, Offerpal Media
Adrian Si, Interactive Marketing Mgr, Scion
Ted Sorom, CEO, Rixty, Inc.
Reuben Steiger, CEO and Founder, Millions of Us
Sibley Verbeck, CEO, The Electric Sheep Company
Margaret Wallace, CEO, Rebel Monkey
Regine Weiner, Service Game Director, NR2B Research, Inc.
Jeff Weiser, Head of Analytics, SGN (Social Gaming Network)
Dan Yue, CEO, YouPlus
Jeremy Zorn, Vice President of Product Development, myYearbook

This is a guest post by Charles Ju, co-founder of Playmesh, the developers of iMafia – one of the first “mob” games on the iPhone and iPod Touch. After launching last week, iMafia became so popular that Playmesh had to scramble to upgrade its servers to keep the service alive. We asked Charles to share Playmesh’s experience here on ISG – and go into detail about the company’s virtual goods model.

ISG: What has happened since iMafia went live in the app store?

We built a pretty robust platform that was built to scale to a certain degree but we did not expect the kind of user engagement and enthusiasm from the iPhone community. When we launched we were instantly growing at an exponential rate. Every 4 or 5 hours we would have to reoptimize our code and server configurations to give us another 4 or 5 hours to make the next optimizations. At one point I became so desperate that I had to go into IRC (it’s a chatroom for computer nerds), to beg for someone to come help us, and someone actually drove from Fremont last Sunday within the hour to fix our servers (that gave us 12 hours instead of 4, so I got a little bit of sleep). After 3 restless days of adding indexes, optimizing queries, and learning about memcache we were able to finally stabilize our servers through the help of some awesome gurus at Engine Yard.

This week has been the craziest most exhilarating week of my life, and I know that we have only begun. But now that we have our servers in a position to scale out to 5-10 times the current usage rate we can finally focus on gameplay design choices and looking into other ways to improve the game-flow and overall user experience.

The lesson is this: if there was any doubt in your mind that the iPhone is the next disruptive viral platform, it is.

Discovery is a huge problem on the iPhone. There are really only two options for the initial iPhone distribution right now. Press and advertising. Since we’re bootstrapped, we opted out for press.

Being the ambitious and reckless young entrepreneurs that we are, we decided to do a “press release” (I still don’t know what that entails) by contacting a lot of the big press members that we have read and worshipped for the last couple of years. We got into a couple of blogs and I think that really started the exponential growth rate that we have experienced in the last week.

Then as we got onto the Top 100 list for games and then subsequently the Top 100 overall, the app store quickly took over to give that extra order of magnitude push forward. Right now we’re mainly growing from the app store and just casual users finding us through those top 100 lists in free apps and free games.

To alleviate this problem we’re trying a lot of interesting things within iMafia like free SMS text sharing, e-mail, twitter, our virtual goods store, but we still have no idea what works and what doesn’t.

We had to come up with an interesting twist to what we were doing. While we are one of the first MMORPGs on the iPhone, there are certainly a lot of similar gaming models online. We are not in the business of cloning games, we want to innovate and change landscapes. As such, we created an interesting never-before-seen (still not seen, we’re stabilizing servers first) method to monetize through virtual goods on the iPhone in such a way that is unique to the iPhone.

The difference between our virtual goods store and those traditionally found online is that we encourage players to download fun games with real value instead of coercing them into useless subscriptions or credit cards. So for instance, if you download our Chess game for $0.99 on the iPhone app store we will give you a cool gun in iMafia. This has never been done before and we are excited to show everyone how it works.

PlayMesh, the parent company of iggyGames, made its debut with the release of Chess Puzzles, a top 25 application with over 200,000 downloads. The company vision is to bring the power of social gaming to the casual iPhone game developer.

As a prepubescent teenager I was enthralled by Everquest (MMORPGs are strangely addicting), and every time my mom would come to tell me to turn off my game I would tell her I’m doing research for my future job as a game developer. So naturally, being a man of my word, I had to start PlayMesh.

Silly antedoctes aside, it comes down to something very simple. The iPhone is a disruptive platform that is going to change the way we think and act. It is the first mobile platform to hit critical mass (I’m guessing around 50 M units with phones + iPods), it is the first platform with an embedded monetization channel (app store), the first platform that is a fashion icon, and all the other cool geeky specifications that make it a really powerful and fun device.

Furthermore, I have to point out that while we are excited about the iPhone itself, what is even more exciting is what the iPhone represents. It represents the dawn of a new era of devices that are going to beg on hands and feet (ie. $150 M Blackberry Fund) for developers to populate their ecosystems, a set of operating systems that will want to be as developer friendly as possible (ie. Palm Pre), and a era where we count revolutions by the months not years. It’s an exciting field and I’m really happy to have caught the wave at such an early stage.

I started PlayMesh with a couple of friends from Jr. High, we all went to engineering schools for college and decided to come back to Silicon Valley afterwards. As you may know the economy is in the gutter and we were not particularly fond of the idea of going out and finding jobs so we decided to make video games instead. It has been one heck of a ride and it was the best decision of my life.