Sparkle, a new virtual world from Tokyo-based Genkii, is about to make it easier for iPhone users around the world to connect and interact. Rather than connecting people locally like most apps, Sparkle is taking the MMO approach and hoping to connect thousands of users across the globe.

At the moment, the app is nothing more than a communication app (Sparkle IM) that connects users to Second Life and OpenSim grids (chat, IM, etc), but this is only the beginning. The final version of the game will be a full 3D world complete with its own internal economy, virtual goods, games, and support for multiple languages.

CEO Ken Brady states that the company is looking beyond just the Apple platforms. Genkii may be looking to integrate Sparkle 3D into non-mobile platforms as well, including PlayStation Home and the Nintendo Wii. There are about 40 million iPhone and iPod Touch devices in the market, and about 48 million Wii’s worldwide and around 21 million for the PS3. Nevertheless, expansion to other platforms is not the top priority for Genkii. It is certainly something they wish to do, but are currently more focused on the iPhone and optimizing the viral potential with the Apple system in order to increase monetization (i.e. through virtual goods sales).

Already in production for about a year, Genkii is also seeking investors to raise a round before increasing product development.

[via TechCrunch]

China’s TenCent social network recently announced it’s Q4 earnings for 2008. Total revenues came in at over $1 billion, marking an 87% increase from 2007. According to the company, $719 million came from virtual goods on the web, $204 million from mobile virtual goods, and $120 million from ad revenue.

Though China has always been a huge market for virtual goods, TenCent’s virtual good totals alone show a 95.5% increase in only one year, and a 75% increase in the mobile department. In fact, the former nearly covers all of the company’s profits for 2008.

TenCent also reported that the amount of virtual goods sales through games had also increased by 18% since Q3 due to the launch of three new games (Dungeon and Fighter, Cross Fire, and QQ Dancer). What is important to point out, however, is that this percentage would have been higher had their existing games not dropped in revenue. “It shows that users aren’t tiring of virtual goods, just the old virtual goods. Add a new game and new products, and sales continue,” says VGN.

“In 2008, TenCent delivered strong financial and operating results, leveraging our diversified, platform-based business model which is unique in China’s Internet market,” says Ma Huateng, Chairman and CEO of TenCent. “We are also excited to see that, during the year, China has become the largest Internet market in the world by number of users and that Internet has increasingly become an indispensable part of everyday life for people in China.”

Despite the success, TenCent is still looking to do better with 2009, as there is not only a long winter break for students (a major demographic of virtual good purchasers in China) during Q1, but there is also Chinese New Year. While this time has always been fairly poor for advertising revenue, it tends to be a significantly stronger time for virtual goods sales (something to certainly make a note of).

After the holidays, TenCent has also stated that it will be expanding to include virtual good sales offline, as well as launch three new MMOGs and a new casual game. The company will also be continuing into 2010 with an equally busy schedule as it attempts to launch up to six more MMOGs. However, the specifics of these later titles is yet to be written in stone.

[via Virtual Goods News]

Offerpal Media announced today that it is bringing its offer platform to Outspark, a portal that combines free to play games with “personalized social experiences.”

Outspark will now enable its 4 million users to purchase SparkCash by participating in sponsored offers. Users can then spend their SparkCash in any of Outspark’s games, like Fiesta, Wind Slayer, and Project Powder. Outspark has garnered its greatest usage from users 15-25 in the United States and Europe.

Offerpal recently also announced a new partnership with Aeria Games (creators of titles such as Last Chaos and Shaiya). Aeria caters to around 5 million players who are offered their own unique virtual currency dubbed “Aeria Points.” Much like SparkCash, players can earn Aeria Points by participating in offers.

Incentivized virtual currency is proving to be an increasingly successful way to monetize social applications. Because players don’t have to go through a payment flow, incentivized offers from leading managed offer providers like Super Rewards, Peanut Labs, and Offerpal give more players access to more virtual goods and thus they return to play more often – and that’s a good thing for developers and advertisers.

While traveling can often be a bit of a headache, here’s a new iPhone app that might take a little bit of the edge off. The game is called Gowalla by Austin-based Alamofire (the developers of PackRat for Facebook) – makes great use of the iPhone’s location awareness, effectively mixing the virtual with reality.

First and foremost, Gowalla is a collecting game. The objective is to collect various badges (icons, stamps, and pins) from locations around the world. (Well, eventually it will be international, but not just yet. For now, it is live in San Francisco and Austin.) Whether you are in your own city or a new place altogether, if you log onto Gowalla, you can find a Google Map of wherever you are with pinpoints for each badge location.

As you have probably guessed, when you travel to the location, you acquire the item “there” for your virtual passport. Of course, the game is not limited to just individual locations. The developers have included two other features for a little extra collection.

Alamofire has created an achievement system (dubbed “Trips” in this case) in Gowalla as well. These are fun special badges that can be earned by visiting all the places on a particular list (i.e. bar hopping in Austin). Heck, the makers even include special events from time to time to allow for those in attendance to earn special rewards too.

Beyond Trips, however, comes the most interesting feature: Users can add their own locations. If there are lots of players in an area, they could then find your badges. It could be a really fun way to create scavenger hunts for your friends, and Gowalla becomes much more interesting when thinking about it as a way to organize mobs.

Currently, Gowalla is only available on the iPhone, but the developers have said they have plans to support other GPS-enabled phones including Blackberries and Android phones in the future. We’ll let you know when they’re released!

Not too long ago, a legal skirmish between the creators of Scrabulous, Rajat Agarwalla and Jayant Agarwalla, and game-maker, Hasbro, ultimately led to the voluntary shut down of the Facebook application. The suit centered around Hasbro’s intellectual property rights, as the app was claimed to too closely resemble the popular board game Scrabble. Nonetheless, the Agarwallas brought Scrabulous back as Lexulous, and ironically the game has been quickly nipping at the heels of Hasbro and Mattel’s official Scrabble apps.

It’s a little confusing, but there are now two versions of the official Scrabble game. Hasbro owns the rights for the U.S. and Canada (which is built by Electronic Arts and dubbed “Scrabble Beta”), and Mattel owns SCRABBLE® Worldwide. The former currently has about 600,000 active users per month, while the latter around 370,000. However, neither is as popular as Scrabulous once was. The geographic split has certainly hindered both games.

On the flipside, however, Lexulous has been growing rapidly since its rebirth late last year with approximately 570,000 active monthly users. The game is still growing, and  it does not geographically isolate players. Furthermore, Lexulous also made use of Facebook’s new communication features such as the chat invite system, allowing you to send game invites to anyone logged into the chat service at that time.

The biggest irony of this whole situation is that Hasbro and Mattel actually looked into buying out Scrabulous before the suit. At that time, the app was receiving 500,000+ users a day. Long story short, Lexulous continues to rise as both Scrabble apps struggle along.

A while back we reviewd a new iPhone game by the name of Aurora Feint: The Arena. This puzzle game can be a bit difficult at times, so we did some digging around the web and found some tips and solutions for many the Tower puzzles. There’s a lot to cover in this guide, so let’s get too it!

Wind 1 – Eastern Breeze: 1 Move
- Swap the middle fire and wind marbles.

Wind 2 – Western Breeze: 3 Moves
- Tilt right.
- Swap the top row water and shadow marbles.
- Tilt left.

Wind 3 – Southern Breeze: 4 Moves
- Swap the bottom row’s earth and fire.
- Swap the bottom row’s earth and water.
- Swap the bottom row’s earth and wind.
- Move the right earth over to the other two.

Wind 4 – Northern Breeze: 2 Moves
- Move the top wind marble left.
- Move the water marble right.

Water 1 – Summer Rain: 1 Move
- Swap the middle fire and water marbles.

Water 2 – Winter Rain: 2 Moves
- Tilt right.
- Swap the middle fire and water marbles.

Water 3 – Spring Rain: 2 Moves
- Move the bottom left water marble one to the left.
- Swap the two top earth and wind marbles.

Water 4 – Fall Rain: 2 Moves
- Move the top water tile over to the right by two fields.

Earth 1 – Natural Growth: 1 Move
- Move the top shadow marble one field to the left.

Earth 2 – Sand Storm: 2 Moves
- Swap the bottom row earth and fire marbles.
- Move the remaining top wind marble to the right.

Earth 3 – Majestic Mountain: 2 Moves
- Tilt right.
- Swap the bottom earth and fire marbles.

Earth 4 – Rolling Hills: 4 Moves
- Swap the top middle earth and fire marbles.
- Tilt right.
- Tilt left.
- Swap the remaining earth and fire marbles.

Shadow 1 – Moon Shadow: 3 Moves
- Tilt right.
- Swap the wind and shadow marbles.
- Swap the fire and water marbles.

Shadow 2 – Shooting Star: 1 Move
- Swap the middle water and fire marble.

Shadow 3 – Black Nothingness: 3 Moves
- Move the bottom water marble left.
- Move the bottom earth marble left.
- Move the top fire marble right.

Shadow 4 – Silver Moon: 4 Moves
- Tilt up.
- Tilt left.
- Swap the middle water and shadow tiles.
- Move the remaining top water tile to the right.

Fire 1 – Wild Fire: 2 Moves
- Swap the first, left water with the fire tile.
- Swap the second, left water with the fire tile.

Fire 2 – Volcanic Ash: 4 Moves
- Tilt left.
- “Drop” the two fire marbles on the bottom one.
- Tilt right.

Fire 3 – Scorching Flame: 3 Moves
- Move the left-most water tile one field to the right.
- Swap the leftmost earth tile with the water tile next to it.
- Tilt right.

Fire 4 – Original Molten Lava: 2 Moves
- Tilt up.
- Tilt right.

[via Pixelcoma]

Last month, Bebo announced the launch of its mobile virtual gifts service to Canadian users. The company says that, since growing by 43% in Canada in January, they have seen good traction on mobile virtual gifts around Valentine’s Day in February and again last week around St. Patrick’s Day. However, no hard numbers were announced. Bebo has said that they plan on rolling the service out to more countries in the future. Currently, Bebo works with O2 in the UK – in the four weeks after the program’s launch, local Bebo traffic increased by 60%.

Meanwhile, MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe said in a memo announcing the departure of company executives earlier this month that the company is working on virtual goods monetization plans for 2009: “We’re at the tip of the iceberg with the Open Platform and in the coming year we expect major new launches including payments and virtual goods,” DeWolfe said. However, the company has been tight-lipped around any specific launch dates since.

No, it’s not the onset of impending invasion. No, it’s not another bad Sci-Fi serious either. Actually, The Attack on Glowbuleville is the third release (currently in beta) from Facebook game developer Gogogic. The company has previously released very simple games Stack’Em and Who’s Your Friend?

Glowbuleville is a simple, high production value game with a familiar mechanic that emulates the well known arcade game of Whack-o-Mole. When starting up, the player enters the “cutesy” town of Glowbulevile and must enter each hut to defeat the Gorbs. Upon entering the hut, the are presented with a 3×9 grid in which Gorbs appear and the player must beat them down with their trusty stick (using the mouse or the number pad) before they run off and you start loosing health.

At first the game is actually quite easy, but as expected, each level comes with increased difficulty. As the player progresses, the Gorbs become tougher, “hostages” (so-to-speak) appear, and bonus items sprout out of the ground like candy. What is curious, however, is that the tougher Gorbs aren’t tougher in the sense that they need to be hit more often, but that they actually use simple abilities to make timing more important (i.e. some have shields, and you can’t hit them with shields up).

The only real problem with the game is that the effort to proceed becomes a bit tiresome (due to the fast and constant twitch reactions needed to win). However, other than the changing enemies, you are simply repeating the same action over and over again. To a casual gamer, this might not be a bad thing, but such repetition usually lies in puzzle based games (like Bejeweled) or at least games a little slower paced than this one.

In the end, all you get for your efforts is a higher score, and some money to buy new whacking tools, which, for all intents and purposes, do the same thing as the original stick. Even with the original Whack-o-Mole, you could win tickets (usually) in order purchase fun little plastic prizes. However, the game is still in beta, and there are some grayed out items in the game’s shop that look like they could add some depth. The only question is: Will these rewards be enough to compensate the effort it takes to earn them?

The Attack on Glowbuleville is okay right now, but its quality after beta will hinge directly on how well the player will be rewarded for their extraneous efforts in defeating the Gorbs. Will Gogogic add more items to the shop? Perhaps different game modes? Or maybe they could even make swatting the baddies more gratifying. Regardless of the path they choose, it will certainly affect the longevity of this application.

PlaySpan announced recently its first consumer insights report of one of its major payment options, the Ultimate Game Card (UGC), which allows users to purchase virtual goods or games without the use of credit cards. The survey polled over 2,500 customers and yielded some rather interesting results.

According to the survey, a staggering majority of consumers, 75%, said that they actually log in more than two hours a day in virtual worlds or playing video games. Furthermore, 20.9% claimed to have received the card as a gift, while the remainder purchased it as a “gift” for themselves.

In terms of viral growth, the report stated that 51.9% of users had recommended UGC to a friend and 29% to over ten. In addition, 35.8% said they had purchased the card over four times thus far, and that 80% would likely buy the UGC again. Of these same participants, nearly half, 48%, were within the primary age demographic for game cards (14-18).

Current predictions say that by 2010 the Chinese online game market will be worth approximately $3 billion. However, recent developments within the Chinese government have caused a bit of a stir that could possibly slow this growth. The General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP) recently stated that it will “tighten approval criteria for online game imports in an effort to protect the development of online game enterprises and avoid the excessive penetration of foreign culture among Chinese youth.” The government said it seeks to “control [the] playing time” of minors as well as remove anything that could be deemed, “too scary.”

This is not the first time such restrictions have surfaced.  In the past, foreign online games have had to incorporate what has been dubbed a “fatigue system.” This feature is meant to grant half experience after a period of time, then zero after another period. Through this, play time is limited for those under 18 to a maximum of five hours per day.

Even China’s licensed operator of World of Warcraft, The9, seems to be struggling – it has attempted twice now to gain approval for the latest expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, without success. As it stands, the game has been had to remove all skeletons (which is huge considering the title is all about the undead as the chief antagonist), implement the fatigue system, and even remove the chief selling point of the expansion, Death Knights (a character class that controls the dead). Nonetheless, this still has not been enough. As China’s JLM Pacific Epoch reports, “the applications were rejected due to content that didn’t meet requirements, including a city raid and skeleton characters…”

It is hard to say whether or not most online and social game developers should be worried, but the GAPP recently held a meeting with many game companies and operators regarding its new approval processes and import polices just last Wednesday (March 18th). Unfortunately, the specifics of this do not yet seem to be public knowledge.