Inside Social Games

hi5 announced today that Playdom has launched its popular Poker Palace game on the hi5 Platform. Poker Palace is also the second major game to incorporate the social network’s virtual currency, hi5 Coins, into game play. RockYou was the first to announce integration with hi5 Coins last week with RockYou Pets.

Playdom’s Poker Palace ranks 12th and 22n respectively on the MySpace and Facebook gaming charts. Players will be able to find Poker Palace on the hi5 Games page, and users purchase of poker chips using the site’s variety of payment methods.

According to Playdom CEO and co-founder Dan Yue, the company hopes to monetize hi5’s worldwide user base. “In addition to leveraging hi5’s virtual currency,” says Yue, “we gain prominent placement in the hi5 Games channel and hooks into hi5’s viral marketing system.”

hi5 says that the use of hi5 Coins has increased rapidly since their launch last December. This is hardly a surprise, consider hi5 has been trying hard to make acquisition of its virtual currency as convenient as possible through partners such as Paymo and Playspan (mobile payments and game cards).

“Direct user transactions are central to our social entertainment strategy, and Poker Palace provides a logical monetization hook with integration to hi5Coins,” says Ramu Yalamanchi, founder and chief product officer of hi5. “[It is something] every major social network is talking about… but we are doing it today.”

While the details are still unannounced, hi5 has stated that it is working with more game development partners and that Playdom will be bringing other popular titles into the hi5 fold.

Maybe we’ll be seeing some Mob titles soon?