If there is one thing Canadians know, it’s winter sports. That’s certainly to be expected considering how long the season tends to be up there, and what’s one sport to do in winter? Oh yeah, it’s time to ski, and that is exactly what this new app for Facebook is all about (well, the freestyle kind anyway).

CatchAir is a crisp and clean looking Facebook game built in Flash that lets players challenge friends and practice various skiing tricks that one might see at an Olympic or National freestyle competitions. Despite how the tricks might sound (“Paramedics Delight” or “Double-Jalapeno Licorice Twist”), they are actually fairly simple to execute.

When players start the game, they can immediately enter practice mode and select a trick to attempt. Doing so shows some live action video of the actual Canadian Freestyle Ski team performing the impressive feats, but after the player gives the game the ok, they press forward to the slopes. Presented in a 2D field, the player skis down the hill to the ramp and completes the trick by hitting falling snowflakes located at the right of the screen in a Guitar Hero-like fashion using the left, right, and up arrow keys. Depending on the accuracy, the player’s score is increased (or they will just fall flat on their face).

Of course, there is more than just scores to achieve with CatchAir. For every challenge made between anyone in the game (up until April 1, 2009), the Canada Post will donate $0.25 to supporting the Canadian Olympic/National Freestyle Team. “Any money that is raised through playing the game will be added to the Canada Post’s ongoing financial commitment to the National Freestyle Team as title sponsor,” says David Brodie, Senior Account Director of the CatchAir team.

The timing is perfect too, as the National Freestyle Championships are coming up later this month from March 28-29 at Cypress Mountain. To further stimulate support for the team, the Canada Post is also sponsoring a contest for all the game users. Everyone that signs up as a fan at the CatchAir Fan Page is automatically entered to win a new laptop signed by the entire Freestyle Ski Team (however, the contest deadline is April 1st – More information is available here).

It is certainly nice to see support for national teams, and it’s even nicer to have it come from a game that is not too shabby. Sure, it can get a little dull once you’ve mastered the controls, but it’s still pretty fun. More than that, it’s different from most Facebook games. Nevertheless, if you’re a Canadian, a winter games person, or you just like skiing, CatchAir is certainly something to check out. Not to mention some of those moves are rather impressive…

“You forgot one very important thing mate. I’m Captain Jack Sparrow.”
- Pirates of the Caribbean

Okay, so you’re not Jack Sparrow, but old World Caribbean pirates have often been viewed in a romantic light. As such, many games have attempted to grant people a portal into this past – some good, some bad – and Zynga has followed suit with the adaptation of their classic RPG game to the realm of Davey Jones.

Pirates: Rule the Caribbean! is a standard RPG in which you loot and plunder the tropical seas in search of gold, power, and wenches. Players begin with a familiar set of resources such as health, energy, gold, etc that are used to manage how much of a certain action they can take. Of course, if they aren’t familiar, the designers have been kind enough to provide new users a quick and dirty walk through the basics.

In order to advance in level, the player must “Plunder!” This is the equivalent to quests or jobs in other titles that require various items and “crew members” (friends) to complete. Any items the player needs can either be found in the Armory for purchase, or sometimes, if you’re lucky, looted as a reward from a quest. However, if this sort of thing is too laid back for your bloodthirsty endeavors, you can always pick a fight with other pirates as you vie for the dominance of your own skallywag fleet.

If this all sounds a bit like déjà vu, and you are looking for something completely different from other RPGs, then you won’t find it here. The key draw to Pirates is the style of the game, but in the end it only comes down to new graphics and names (i.e. instead of being healed in a hospital or infirmary, you get healed in a “brothel”). Regardless, the art is nice to look at and the game is just as entertaining as any of Zynga’s other RPGs.

RPGs are a difficult beast to deal with when it comes to making them different due to tremendous amount of game balancing that needs to be done (leveling, combat, statistics, etc). More often than not, even mainstream role playing titles use very similar elements.

Take, for example, a franchise like Square Enix’s Final Fantasy series. Each game tends to have very similar basic elements (turn based combat, random encounters, party of three), but often very different core mechanics (most noticeably magic and leveling). VIII had the controversial “drawing” system where you stole magic from enemies to strengthen your characters, VII had the renowned “materia” mechanic that let you customize via bejeweled equipment (using any number of combinations that granted countless abilities), and XII had a completely different live-combat system. The point is, these games stood out due to different game play elements. They were all “different flavors of ice cream” but they were all still “ice cream.” As far as the Zynga RPGs go, they are not really different flavors so much as they are the same flavor with different toppings.

The developer of the #1 game on MySpace, and 8 of the top 25 games on the MySpace application platform, is emerging from stealth mode tonight, and we have all the details here on Inside Social Games.

Playdom, formerly known as YouPlus, boasts Mobsters (13.4 million users), Bumper Stickers (10 million), Own Your Friends (9.5 million), Kiss Me (2.8 million) Poker Palace (2.7 million), Heroes (2.1 million), Sorority Life (1.6 million), and Rockstars (1.5 million) in its MySpace portfolio. Poker Palace and Sorority Life are already on Facebook, and more are coming soon – and an iPhone Mobsters game is already in the works.

The company has 37 employees – with plans to be at 100 by the end of the year – and is already profitable. They’ve raised no money, and co-founders Dan Yue (formerley employee #1 at Adify and a semi-pro poker player), Rick Thompson (former co-founder of Adify and Flycast), Chris Wang (formerly a developer at Google), and Ling Xiao (also of Google) say they don’t have plans to do so.

So what have they been doing for the last year and a half exactly?

“We’ve been relentlessly focusing on what we think are killer engaging social games,” Thompson told Inside Social Games. “Dan and his team have put in place an analytics platform for creating and improving these games quickly. We’re doing a lot of testing and listening to our users. 10% of our product development cost goes to originally producing our games, and 10 times that goes into improving them.”

Today, the company says they have 5.2 million daily active users and 21.8 million monthly active users, for a play rate (DAU/MAU) of 23%. Playdom says these numbers are higher for their RPGs.

And as you may expect, the company has been primarily monetizing through the sale of virtual goods – like hot cars, weapons in Mobsters, and the “little black dress” in Sorority Life. 50% of the transactions are done through direct payments, and 50% are done through affiliate (offer-based) marketing. Thompson said the company has optimized the transaction experience for its core purchasers (hard core players who bring in the most revenue), and is partnering with Offerpal Media, Super Rewards, and others.

“Some items are collectible goods, some are purchased for game play advancement, and some are bought because they’re pretty. The motivations are different. For example, we used to have nothing but cars in our racing game. Then one day a user emailed us offering to pay us $100 if we put a picture of his truck in the game. So we put a truck in the game and a lot of people bought it,” Yue says.

The company’s game strategy is to, “Marry things that have worked traditionally in the games industry with the new aspects of the social environment and hope for the best. Everything we’ve come out with could be taken to the next level,” Yue adds.

The company is now focused on improving its line of MySpace games and expanding onto Facebook and the iPhone. Poker Palace is already live on Facebook and is already in the Top 25 games list with nearly 2.7 million monthly active players.

Yue says Playdom is now splitting its design efforts 50/50 between MySpace and Facebook, with some effort going into iPhone development as well. Mobsters will be the company’s first iPhone title, and will connect game play across platforms so that players can log in from their home computer or anywhere with a mobile internet connection.

However, Yue said he is frustrated that Apple has not made it clear what they are going to do with micropayments on the iPhone. Currently, Apple does not allow it, but Yue thinks now is the right time to get into the space.

Finally, Yue and Thompson say the company is actively hiring. Playdom is looking for developers, producers, and product managers.

Now that Playdom is public, expect to hear a lot more about them here on ISG!

Zynga today announced that Brandon Barber, formerly the senior director of global marketing at Electronic Arts, has joined the company as Vice President of Marketing.

At EA, Barber was responsible for the company’s web services business model. He also established entertainment/music marketing functions for EA and worked on distribution partnerships with the film, music, and television industries. Before EA, Barker worked at Napster, where he ran the product team and helped increase the user base from 100,000 to 1 million.

At Zynga, Barber will report to Andrew Trader, EVP of sales and business development.

“We have grown to a point where we needed to add a key marketing position and found the perfect person to fit the bill. Brandon’s combination of gaming and digital media experience makes him the ideal person to lead the charge and help build Zynga with consumers everywhere,” said Trader.

So, you want to develop a social game for the iPhone? Considering the overall success of the platform and the plethora of new games getting released in the space, it certainly seems like a smart move. However, there is one question that should be thoroughly wrestled with by any developer: Should my game be free (hoping to monetize through some combination of advertising revenue and future virtual goods purchases) or not?

According to a presentation by Greg Yardley, CEO of Pinch Media (a company that has been tracking stats on iPhone apps), there have been well over 500 million downloads to date. Nevertheless, most apps experience a staggering drop-off on app retention – only about 20% of users continue to engage after the first day. After 30 days, less than 5% of the users who downloaded the app are still playing it, on average.

According to Yardley, the average paid app goes for $0.70, while the average free app is played around 80 times. So order to earn the same amount of revenue purely from ads, a developer would need a $8.75 per thousand runs – so assuming one ad per session, an $8.75 CPM. Given the state of the ad market, that would be pretty difficult.

For more of Yardley’s thoughts, check out his full presentation embedded below:

So what does all this mean? Well, if Yardley is correct, less than 5% of all apps using ad based models are or can make more money than one that charges initially and states that one would be better off selling the game unless “there is something inherent about the app that screams free….”

[via TechCrunch]

The virtual economy analytics space is certainty white hot, and Palo Alto-based Twofish is announcing today a new platform for social game and virtual world developers to analyze their virtual economies and maximize virtual goods revenue.

The Twofish Elements platform consists of item and inventory management as well as banking and commerce modules, but the focus is on post-purchase analytics. While Twofish is not releasing screenshots to the public, we’ve seen the tools and they’re very powerful. Twofish allows developers to slice the data by currency, offer, seller, and user, and cohort analysis is also built in. The solution works across applications on any platform or social network.

In addition, today the company is announcing several new partners who’ve integrated Twofish’s virtual currency data solution, including Facebook app-vertising company Buddy Media, Pocketville, Star Fever, RevNjenz, and Ignite Skill Gaming.

For example, Star Fever is using Twofish to understand retail dynamics for women, taking advantage of the item and inventory features. Pocketville is using Twofish to track its voucher integration program where players can buy a toy at retail and use it online.

“In the social networking space, a lot of people have been building their own internal systems, but what they’ve built doesn’t scale,” Lisa Rutherford, President of Twofish, told Inside Social Games.

“We’re just delighted to contribute our expertise in post-purchase and economic reporting to such an amazing group of forward-thinking partners. Each of these applications is pushing the edges of its genre, and we are proud of the fact that we can free them to stay focused on their user experiences while we handle their economies.  We look forward to helping them achieve their goals in both user engagement and revenue,” Rutherford said.

Rutherford told Inside Social Games that the company’s business model is revenue share, not transaction, based, starting at 8% (not including transaction fees). The company is looking for new developers – if you’re interested, you can contact the company here.

See Inside Social Games’ previous coverage of Twofish here.

So here’s a new use for virtual goods from GameWager that might seem familiar to some people. Remember the old school arcades and all those tickets that you could win for cheap plastic prizes? Well, GameWager is doing just that, but with virtual coins and sans lame gifts (in fact, the rewards are far from cheap as some include Alienware laptops). The whole idea is acquire users by offering rewards to players for, well, playing.

CEO and co-founder of GameWager Thomas Marriott describes the concept as such: “It’s kind of like Chuck E Cheese’s, only instead of playing Pac-Man you’re playing a game you spend hundreds of hours playing already – Counterstrike or World of Warcraft. The virtual token currency is tied to various in-game actions, like kills, objectives, and team wins. As you complete actions in-game, you get tokens, and you can spend them to get tickets for a raffle-style reward zone.”

Marriott, however, sees the company as a social network and as such, offers a number of ways to earn tokens beyond just the arcade style. Perhaps one of the most interesting methods of doing so will be a wager system, in which players can challenge one another to matches and win tokens from the loser. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg as other methods of earning tokens comes from the filling out of a new profile, the inviting of friends, and eventually the inclusion of various contests.

Marriott also claims that the site will be adding more than just the raffles for rewards as well in the future. Unfortunately, he was unable to say much more beyond that, but did mention virtual goods for customizable profiles such as widgets, which will actually play into the monetization of the space.

Eventually, the site will use the typical free-to-play strategy with a cost for premium memberships, but that the current state of the site will still remain free. Non-premium members won’t miss out on anything critical it seems, but will be denied access to some premium vanity items and features such as special raffle prizes, new wagering features, and greater profile customization. Nonetheless, until such time, the site will be sticking with its main incentive – raffle prizes.

Raffles take place daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly, and the better stuff is always offered for the quarterly drawings. As such, the cost of tickets is equivalently more expensive. The reasoning behind this is, logically, two-fold as it not only means less spending for the company (sorry, but daily Alienware laptops just isn’t going to happen) but it also allows greater chances for new players to win rewards as well.

“We structured the reward zone like a raffle in part to address the extremity between really good players and the new players. We didn’t want only the really good players winning all the time, which is what would happen if you just paid tokens for a prize,” says Marriott. “So even some guy who is just terrible at Counterstrike, they can still buy a ticket and have a chance to win. We have multiple winners who just bought one ticket and still ended up with a prize.”

Currently, GameWager has had 71,000 users who have spent 43 million tokens since July 2008. Once the site had its first raffle (November 2008) 750,000 tokens were spent on tickets within the first 48 hours. Marriott estimates a rather ambitious growth rate of doubling its users every month.

[via Virtual Goods News]

Online games have a number of defining qualities to them, but perhaps one of the most unique features is the opportunity for a developer to give back to the players. Rarely are these rewards something that will dramatically alter game play (though it can happen), but they often provide something unique for the user to help them in some way, or at the very least, show off as a vanity item.

Surprisingly, not a lot of developers create decent rewards as they apply to their games. However, here are our Top 11 favorite player rewards we’ve found in social games.

11.) SuperPoke! – Slide Inc. – Poke of the Day
Okay, so it’s not a “game” so it isn’t really a “reward” (unless you consider it a reward for logging on), but it is something that is a nice addition to the app. Each day, when a user logs on to SuperPoke! they are presented with the “Poke of the Day” which allows them to, well, “poke” their friends in a unique manner, and it’s a nice little extra that Slide has given users.

10.) Fashion Wars & Street Racing – Zynga – Very Sexy Cars
Yes, it is the same concept as the limited edition rewards in their other games. But guys like cars, and these special/limited edition cars are so very sexy. Sure, it’s a shallow reason, but you know that any of you would like these cars in reality (especially the guys), but until that comes to pass, these virtual ones will have to do.

9.) (Lil) Green Patch & Blue Cove – Green Patch Inc. – GreenBucks
Every time a player logs on to any of these titles, they earn $50 GreenBucks. In and of itself, this isn’t much of a reward, but this particular currency works across both titles, thus making it all the more useful. Of course, playing the game does help fight against global warming and the deforestation of the rain forests, and isn’t that its own reward? (okay, sorry, that was cheesy)

8.) Texas Hold’Em & Poker Palace – Zynga & Poker Palace – Chips/Cash
While not uncommon for a card style game, it would be something that would be missed were it not in the game. Each of these games gives players a daily reward of chips or cash respectively based on the number of friends they have recruited. It’s not the most creative of rewards, but is certainly a great addition to a gambling game (especially if you’re a bit unlucky at the tables).

7.) YoVille – Zynga – Gifts
Relatively self-explanatory, but occasionally the developers like to share the wealth and send their players some vanity gifts to place around their house/apartment. First and foremost, YoVille is a social, virtual world, and in this world players can decorate their own personal space. Any item they can use to make it look better is always welcome.

6.) (fluff)Friends – SGN – Limited Edition Items
Here is a game/sim that has you creating some frighteningly cute critters to keep as pets. The point? Spoil them rotten as you buy all sorts of clothing, decorations, food, and so on in order to make them the happiest, and cutest virtual friend on the web. The nice part about it though, is that the game creators often grant the players access to some wonderful limited edition items that are not just limited to items, but even new, ahem, fluffy friends as well. These periodic additions not only show developer involvement, but help keep the app fresh and new as time presses onward.

5.) myFarm – playSocial – Gifts from The King
So for those that don’t know, myFarm is a simple sandbox game where the player builds and manages a farm. There is no real objective other than the open-ended, creative ability to build your farm to look a nice as possible. Occasionally, though, you get a little help from “The King” who will send you a nifty little gift to use on your land. It isn’t much, but it does make for a nice vanity item for the player to use (for example the one of the most recent gifts was a Christmas Tree), and sometimes can even be harvested for money once it grows.

4.) Mafia Wars – Zynga – Limited Edition Loot
Okay, maybe it’s not technically a “reward” since you have to purchase it in some way, but it is something that the developers are constantly changing. Whether it is a bloody chainsaw, a gas mask, or a machine gun, these guys are always useful to the player and is certainly loot the player should watch out for. The best part is it adds a little variety to the game, and shows that the developers are always involved.

3.) Pet Society – Playfish – Level Rewards
This is a very simple idea that any Pet Society player is going to know about. Each time a player levels their little friend, they gain a nice new gift to use in the world that ranges from a simple ball to a brand spankin’ new house (well, a bigger one anyway). Each gift allows the player to unlock new achievements, play new games, or just get more room. Either way, they add a great deal of depth to the game and are always fun to play with.

2.) Vampire Wars – Zynga – Treasure & Limited Edition Abilities
Like with Mafia Wars, Zynga gives the players some nice little rewards with the limited addition abilities. It works the same way as well, providing a little boost to those around to get them. However, in addition, they incorporate a nifty little treasure that players have to log on daily in order to unlock (currently it is three locks). If the player misses a day, the locks re-lock and it’s back to square one.

It’s a simple addition, but the whole mystery of the unknown adds a nice touch to the game, and certainly shows, once again, developer involvement. In fact, the developers even give some new outfits for player avatars as well. While it seems minor, little additions like that goes a long way with players because it allows them more personalization of their game.

1.) FutureGame – FutureGame LLC – Money & Prizes
Yeah, that’s right, definitely the number one player reward for any game: cash, moola, denaro, green, money. This a gambler’s dream as you don’t have to actually wager anything to win. Simply guess the trends (up or down) in stock prices (probably down in this economy), and if you’re correct a few times, you start a streak. The higher the streak, the higher the winnings. Of course, you have to know when to quit, because if you don’t cash out and get a guess wrong, there goes all those wonderful prizes and dollar bills.

Last month we took a look at the new iPhone rendition of the classic sandbox game, SimCity. Complete in its original form, the game is no mere shell of its former glory. Everything you know and remember is still there, but as was found out, very few of the original cheat codes still worked.

The last time the topic of SimCity was touched upon, there were two known cheats. If players shook the iPhone they would be prompted with an input prompt for said codes, and could enter the classic codes of “i am weak” and “pay tribute to your king.” Upon completion, players could enjoy construction costs at the bargain of $0 and access to all extra rewards, respectively.

Well, time has passed and thanks to a find on a little website called GameWinners, two new codes were discovered:

• Having some trouble with excess garbage in your city? No worries, because if you enter the code, “garbage in, garbage out”, you should be fixing that issue right away as you are granted the recycling plant, waste to energy incinerator, and the normal incinerator. Yum, burning garbage.
• Not enough you say? How about some clean high tech industries? Just put in the cheat, “nerdz rule” and the neat freaks will be built in your industrial zone.

Unfortunately, that’s all that’s new this time around, but we’ll keep looking. Of course, if anyone has found any new ones, then by all means share them.