Last December, social network Hi5 began turning itself into more of a gaming site. Today, the results are starting to show. The company has a redesigned site in testing now, complete with 3-D avatars called Hi5 Stars. And, it has made games and its virtual currency the primary focus. Meanwhile, the past year’s worth of product upgrades are boosting gaming engagement and revenue numbers. Partly as a result, the company is now profitable.

It has some not-so-positive traffic numbers, from what we can tell. The company web site says 60 million monthly uniques, but that’s a number that is months old. But, Hi5 has been executing well on its gaming strategy; that’s in contrast to most other social networks, many of whom have discussed gaming but don’t have much to show for it. If the company keeps up in this direction, it could pull off a rather interesting turnaround. And, given the strong interest among traditional gaming companies in social game developers like Zynga and Playfish, we wonder how Hi5 might look as an acquisition target in the next year or two.

Anyway, enough speculation. Here’s what Hi5 has done, and how its latest moves fit in.

Last December, it introduced a gift store and a virtual currency called Coins. Then, in early February, Hi5 introduced a gaming site — separate from the developer platform it had previously launched. But things got rough in early April, when the company laid off a large portion of its staff; from our understanding, that was the result of its advertising-sales strategy not bringing in hoped-for revenue. More on ads in a moment. Last spring, Hi5 also cut new deals with gaming companies to get Flash-based casual games from companies like Mochi Media and social games from companies like Playdom and RockYou into its gaming section. It also rolled out payments services, such as a deal with Boku for mobile payments and Playspan’s pay cards. It has kept cutting deals over the past year, like introducing downloadable games from RealNetworks in July.

Pieces come together

The company’s executives tell us that the company is profitable, and not from cost cuts but through revenue growth. Payments for Coins have only become fully implemented in games on its gaming site within the last five months. Purchases of Coins now amount to 15% of all revenue — revenue that is coming in not just from a few rich countries but from all over the world, through some 60 different payment service providers. This is crucial as most of the company’s users are mostly located in Latin America, Asia and parts of Europe. It charges different prices in different places to match the spending ability of its users. Hi5 has also started experimenting with advertising offers from companies like Offerpal, Super Rewards and Playdom.

More importantly, when it comes to advertising, the high engagement that these games are generating means Hi5 can charge more for the ads around the games, including things like video pre-roll ads. For developers reading this, the company says it accepts games onto not just its developer platform (a separate part of the site that makes use of the Open Social standard), but the gaming portion. It asks developers to integrate Coins, and splits revenue 50-50 unless otherwise negotiated.

Versus other social networks with games, Hi5 also points out that it helps promote third-party games heavily in its friend update streams, promotions on its homepage, and other locations on the site.

Hi5 first told us about the 3-D avatar plan last January, a product it hoped to launch by the end of this year. The avatar system, as well as a revamped site emphasizing games and coins in the top navigation bar, are now in live testing and will shortly roll out to users. The avatar system is especially interesting because the company built it in-house to run on Flash. As Adobe’s media player software is already installed on 93% of browsers around the world, most of Hi5′s users won’t have to install anything to use the new site. Hi5 also built the software to work on low-bandwidth internet connections and weak-CPU computers — what many of its users are on. The system also integrates the chat-presence technology from its Picsverse acquisition earlier this year. This coming quarter, Hi5 also plans to roll out a new set of premium decorating features for avatars, sort of like what companies like IMVU do (although with no download).

Of course, it remains to be seen how many of the company’s users are going to want to become this game-focused. Although looking at top social networks Facebook and MySpace, it at least appears that social network users do want to spend a lot of time playing games. But the company appears to be ahead of schedule with its gaming strategy, and that is a very positive sign, all things considered.

To dig deeper into the virtual goods market, check out our new report: Inside Virtual Goods: The US Virtual Goods Market 2009 – 2010.

In recent weeks we’ve been hearing rumors about gaming giant EA looking to acquire social gaming companies — specifically Zynga and Playfish. Both social gaming companies have denied the rumors, so assuming there are no deals that are about to be inked and announced, here’s what appears to be going on.

EA, as many in the gaming industry have expected, is starting to look around for acquisitions. If anything, we’re surprised we haven’t heard rumors about other gaming giants, like Activision/Blizzard and Ubisoft doing the same.

Zynga, as we wrote a couple weeks ago, has to our knowledge spurned funding earlier this year, and since grown revenue to possibly more than $200 million for this year. At some point recently, it was having “preliminary” talks with EA, according to multiple sources, with one person saying that the asking price was $1 billion. Zynga has flatly denied everything. We believe that Zynga could look to go public as soon as March, once its 2009 financials have been audited.

We have a few more details on what has supposedly been happening with Playfish. A reliable industry source says EA may have even acquired the company several weeks ago, with an announcement possibly happening in the next few weeks. We believe that Playfish could be on track to make as much as $75 million this year.

These companies have only gotten any serious traction in this past year. On Facebook, Zynga has grown from 60 million to nearly 150 million monthly active users in just the last three months, while Playfish has grown from 35 million to nearly 60 million in the same period, according to AppData. Those numbers do not include usage on other social networks nor on mobile devices. Zynga has a notably strong presence on MySpace. And, also, these numbers double-count users who have installed more than one game from the same company. So actual traffic is not totally clear. For what it’s worth, Zynga announced 129 million monthly unique users last month across all of its sites.

The third of the “big three” developers on Facebook is Playdom, which we recently heard is on track to make $50 million this year based on its 28 million monthly unique users on Facebook, MySpace and other platforms. It is in the process of raising more funding at a reported $100 million to $200 million valuation.

Fast Evolution

All in all, this growth has surprised the traditional gaming industry, which had not expected the primary revenue model — free-to-play games with virtual goods — to be nearly so popular.

The market dynamics at play are changing quickly. Besides cross-promoting new games with old ones, an effective means of growth has been advertising and especially on Facebook itself. Zynga is on track to spend $50 million on Facebook ads alone, we’ve heard from several industry sources. Ads have helped power the growth of farming simulation game FarmVille to more than 56 million and restaurant simulation game Café World to more than 10 million users in the week since it launched.

One reason for EA to move in and buy a social gaming company would be to use its financial power to spend money on advertising. If it were to buy Playfish, for example, it could start pumping money into advertising Restaurant City — Playfish’s months-old game that inspired Café World. Without as much advertising, Restaurant City has grown from 6.54 million monthly actives three months ago to 16.2 million today.

An EA acquisition of Playfish would also help validate many successful social gaming companies, as would a successful Zynga IPO. There have been no major liquidity events yet for social gaming companies, just purchases of small developer teams by larger shops.

There are other reasons why acquisitions may not happen quite yet. The holiday season is coming up, and social gaming companies are gearing up to introduce holiday-themed games and goods, especially virtual gifts. They may be hoping to execute especially well for the rest of the year, and push their user numbers, revenue — and valuations — up from what they’re at now.

Some risks have also not been allayed. Facebook itself is getting ready to roll out a new redesign to its homepage, which could slow down gaming app growth. The redesign the company introduced in March featured a raw stream of recent updates, including updates from apps. It may have helped fuel the explosive growth that some apps have been seeing. Now, Facebook is moving back to an algorithmically-tuned feed that may or may not de-emphasize apps. However, let’s say EA were to buy Playfish. This would mean potentially more ad revenue for Facebook, and a massive validation of its platform. For this reason, we would hope that Facebook will handle significant site design changes carefully so as not to damage the overall social gaming ecosystem.

Meanwhile, aspects of the virtual goods model are still not entirely proven. Advertising offers, which Zynga and Playdom have relied on for substantial parts of their revenue, may not sustain the relatively high rates that developers have enjoyed in the past year. Fraud, user exhaustion, and other factors may come into play too. For these reasons, we hear that Wall Street is most concerned about revenue sustainability for social games.

In sum, Zynga, Playfish, Playdom and the rest of the industry are frantically trying to grow and make money (sustainably) in order to prove themselves. Now still appears to be the time for execution, as the companies are hoping to increas their asking prices for any sort of purchase or public offering down the road. While EA or another big company could certainly swoop in now, we expect these companies to delay any liquidity event until next year, at least.

To dig deeper into the virtual goods market, check out our new report: Inside Virtual Goods: The US Virtual Goods Market 2009 – 2010.

A long time ago, an Ohio-based games developer called Blue Frog Gaming released a simple football-based RPG dubbed Football Tycoon. Frankly, it was a decent game, but in the past seven and a half months since then, they’ve been hard at work improving their craft with a new release: Starfleet Commander.

Essentially, the game is a marriage of both RPG (role-playing games) and RTS (real-time strategy) elements, in a space-age setting, and powered through both Facebook and Twitter. When just starting out, the player is presented with a in-game currency bonus for simply logging in (a bonus that increases with each consecutive day you play – up to three days), and 15 menu items of merit. This is a bit daunting at first glance as there is no tutorial to ease a new player in. Thankfully, however, one begins to pick things up extremely quickly by just clicking around (and without the FAQs or Wiki!).

This comes down to the fact that the game has a built-in “tech tree” like most RTS titles. Unlike many of the Facebook RPGs out there, each menu item tends to be dependant upon another. For example, you cannot build a fleet until you have ships, which require a shipyard, which requires resources, which requires buildings to gather them, which requires power supplies to actually function. Each successive structure is dependent on a previous one, so players end up just moving up the hierarchy until they are building the items needed from the menu item needed, allowing for a very natural learning curve. The more the player plays, the more options are available, and thus more complexity.

As expected each building requires resources to create. In this case, the resources are Ore, Crystal, and Hydrogen. Each item takes X amount of time to build that may range from two minutes to over an hour. Furthermore, in the case of buildings, players must also build energy producing structures to actually make them work (think Command & Conquer power plants).

Once a player has gotten past this slow start, they can then begin bolstering defenses, building fleets, and garnering allies as they expand throughout the universe. Also, like in a mafia-style RPG, players can fight one another for profit, plundering areas, destroying fleets, and taking over colonies. Of course, such attacks can be mitigated by significant defenses. Fleets can also be saved by sending them on missions (which garner rewards like RPG style missions). The missions take hours to complete, but keep the ships from being threatened by enemy raids. Nevertheless, there is one key phrase worth repeating: “Taking over colonies.”

This is actually one of the cooler parts of Starfleet Commander. Players are not limited to just their own home world. As a matter of fact, they can colonize up to eight more planets in order to increase production of war machines, resource gathering, or whatever else they might have planned. Unfortunately, that requires a bigger fleet to protect them all, but thankfully players can form alliances with other commanders and ban together for mutual protection.

As for your friends, they too can be brought on as a crew and work as a builder, miner, scientist, or captain. Like the majority of RPGs in circulation, this grants you “Crew Points,” that are required to run tougher missions. However, players can increase these ranks with droids as well, for a cost, even though friends are free, and add extra benefits (i.e. 4% faster build times from Builders).

There is a lot of information to absorb when it comes to this game, but it is definitely worth a go; especially if you are a fan of strategy or RPG games. It has more than enough familiar elements to get any Facebook veteran started and enough new features to keep them going for a while. Granted, it is a bit slow starting out, but all this is merely the tip of the iceberg (advanced play includes multiple fleets, gifts, tech research, and more), and once one does pick up some headway, Starfleet Commander is actually quite fun.

And, while the game is still tiny, according to AppData, it seems to be on an upwards growth curve.

In what can only be a gut-wrenching moment for the developers of aquarium simulations games like Happy Aquarium and My Fishbowl, Zynga received a trademark to the name “FishVille” last week. This almost certainly means that Zynga will launch a version of the game, and quite likely grow it quickly.

The trademark comes as the company enjoys the successful launch of Café World, a restaurant simulation that directly challenges Playfish’s Restaurant City. Café World grew by 10 million users in a week, through Zynga’s methods of cross-promotion with its other games, advertising on Facebook, and building increasingly high-quality game-play.

Café World itself follows Zynga’s launch of FarmVille, a farm simulation game that copies others, like Farm Town. And, before that, Mafia Wars, which copied Psycho Monkey’s Mob Wars, which itself was part of an intellectual property dispute with SGN. Copying is how things go in social gaming these days.

As spotted first by Trademork, the trademark for FishVille covers:

“computer game software, video games, online games, and game related applications; interactive video game programs; electronic games and game related applications that may be accessed via the internet, computers and wireless devices; computer software to enable uploading, posting, showing, displaying, tagging, blogging, sharing or otherwise providing electronic media or information regarding the fields of virtual communities, electronic gaming, entertainment, and general interest via the Internet or other communications networks with third parties” as well as “entertainment services, namely, providing computer games, enhancements for computer games, game applications, reviews of computer games, and information relating to computer games; providing an Internet website portal in the field of computer games, gaming and social networking; Entertainment services, namely, providing social games and information regarding social networking via the Internet”.

This is not to say that Zynga is the least original developer. FarmVille and Café World both use some original dynamics. If anything, improving quality is now a key part of Zynga’ strategy.

Which is why the aquarium threat is so real. At this point, it’s not clear what exactly will slow down Zynga. It is at least twice as large as the nearest developer on the platform — Playfish. Maybe something big, like a severe design change by Facebook, or the entrance of a well-funded competitor.

Happy Aquarium is made by a developer called CrowdStar. The app was just added to AppData, which shows CrowdStar’s other games totaling only 324,000 – Happy Aquarium alone has 10.2 million monthly active users. We’ve been tracking the progress of My Fishbowl lately as it has climbed up the charts. It’s a product of Chinese-language developer TwoFishes Interactive.

[Fish image from Zazzle via John Battelle]

Bad news for Chinese entrepreneurs and the international investors who want to support them: The Chinese government has “banned foreign investors from operating online games ‘in any form’ in the country,” according to state-run media.

The rationale is being vaguely described as bringing games in line that were offering somehow illegal content. “The new rule is a good beginning in approving the online games in accordance with laws and will be conducive to the regulation of online gaming businesses,” said Kou Xiaowei, vice director of China’s General Administration of Press and Publication’s technological and digital department.

That statement seems like a circular argument to us, but hey, it’s not like we have a say, either.

Among the things international entities cannot do: Set up “wholly owned enterprises, joint ventures and cooperatives,” or contract “relevant agreements” or offer “technological support.”

We had been hearing rumors from sources in China about American investors looking at some Chinese social gaming companies.

[Update: In fact, one of those sources pinged us from Beijing to say that there's a lot more to the story:

This is actually not a new policy. It is a reiteration of something that has been on the books, and appears to be part of a major bureaucratic battle between GAPP and the Ministry of Culture. The MOC has recently claimed that, with backing of the central government, it is now the main regulator of the game industry. The GAPP issued a flurry of announcements in last 2 days; no coincidence that they came while the MOC-backed China GDC conference is underway

As for foreign investment, all of China's listed game firms are technically foreign invested. (investors are buying shares issued by offshore firms, which in turn have contractual relationships w the domestic firms that actually run the games) So this "rule" is either unenforceable, it will have to be applied against Shanda, Changyou et al, or it will be selectively enforced to discriminate against foreign investment, which would be blatant protectionism and likely a major WTO violation.

You might also add that at USD 3.5b in 2009 the online game business is by far the biggest Internet market in china, and is several times bigger than China's film market. The only reason Hollywood issues have taken prominence in US-China relations is that the MPAA is a very effective lobbyist, while so far the ESA has not made China protectionism an issue in DC. But given that the major chinese game firms are not just investing in US game companies but also setting up their own operations in the US (perfect world had USD 3m US revenue in Q2, Netdragon, Kingsoft, Tencent etc), the discriminatory nature of China's policies are even more clearly contrasted against the wide open US market. It is total BS.

Wow.]

Domestic companies were also affected: “[The new rule] stated that no organizations or individuals could run online gaming business without permits from the GAPP and online games without a prior approval from the administration would not be allowed to go online,” according to the Chinese media report. The result, it seems, is a pounding for publicly-traded Chinese gaming companies like Changyou and Shanda. Both took massive hits from Wall Street this morning, as the news got out.

Shanda, which IPOed just last month, had already been struggling. Today did not help:

Meanwhile, Changyou — a much stronger stock — also got hit. However, it seems to have recovered much of its losses since this morning:

Twitter and Facebook capabilities could be just around the corner. As soon as November 17th, to be exact. It was back around E3 that Microsoft revealed many of its social endeavors for the online gaming platform, Xbox Live. Among them, was the addition of Facebook and Twitter connectivity. Well, in August we learned it was coming sooner than expected, but at the time, according to Microsoft Marketing Executive James Halton, it was only stated to be coming out “before Christmas.”

That statement was given to Eurogamer, and this latest date also came from a European Xbox site; more specifically, from the United Kingdom. Over the weekend, the splash page of the site had a nifty little graphic stating that the service would be launching on November, 17 of this year.

Unfortunately, it looks like the date was a bit of a slip up on somebody’s part, as other regional sites were not as specific. Suffice to say, Microsoft has since removed the specific date, replacing it with a more ambiguous statement of: “Coming soon. Service launches Autumn 2009,” for both social platforms.

The only question that yet remains is whether or not the new features will indeed appear on the aforementioned date or not. In all likelihood, the release date is probably November and someone just didn’t get the memo on how specific their banners should be. Either way, be looking for this Xbox Live update in a month or so.

The story of last week on Facebook’s platform was the growth of Zynga’s Café World social game, and it easily took the number on spot on our list of the top 20 fastest-growing gaming application. It launched on October 2nd and by today has reached more than 10 million monthly active users through a combination of cross-promotion, advertising, and, well, being a solid iteration on the virtual restaurant game concept.

		Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %	Developer
1.		Café World	10,098,584	+8,598,277	+573.1	Zynga
2.		FarmVille	56,122,407	+2,422,800	+4.5	Zynga
3.		Pet Society	19,512,235	+623,927	+3.3	Playfish
4.		(Lil) Farm Life	4,737,693	+419,702	+9.7	Greenpatch Inc
5.		YoVille	18,917,129	+381,688	+2.1	Zynga
6.		My Fishbowl	5,143,462	+374,545	+7.9	TwoFishes Interactive
7.		Country Story	7,425,779	+373,398	+5.3	Playfish
8.		Restaurant City	16,200,404	+321,128	+2.0	Playfish
9.		開心農場	3,761,044	+264,965	+7.6	ELEX
10.		Bejeweled Blitz	7,688,337	+229,411	+3.1	Popcap Games
11.		Friend Facts	3,467,673	+217,380	+6.7	Topzy
12.		Texas HoldEm Poker	18,092,599	+201,301	+1.1	Zynga
13.		Brain Buddies	5,378,231	+193,344	+3.7	wooga – world of gaming
14.		Jungle Jewels	900,423	+179,730	+24.9	GameDuell
15.		Animal Paradise	3,310,592	+167,284	+5.3	Rekoo
16.		Sunshine Ranch	2,030,705	+149,484	+8.0	Rekoo
17.		Mobsters 2: Vendetta	2,966,508	+135,239	+4.8	Playdom
18.		Friends For Sale!	6,558,440	+107,961	+1.7	Serious Business
19.		Hug Me	3,409,953	+107,455	+3.3	RockYou!
20.		Quiztastic!	833,167	+104,032	+14.3	Playfish

It grew by 8.60 million fans since last Sunday, although Facebook does not appear to have updated the last few days’ worth of data so growth could be even higher now. Indeed, Facebook’s platform has experienced a number of technical issues over the last couple of days that appears to have delayed reporting on many apps. The problems may have also made it so users weren’t able to access apps at all, in some cases, thereby depressing numbers on this week’s top 20 fastest-growing list.

In any case, coming in second is FarmVille, Zynga’s previous big hit. Until Café World launched, its growth was setting industry records — and it is still going strong, having gained 2.42 million users to reach 56.1 million monthly actives.

Zynga does not own all the growth on the site, of course. Playfish’s Pet Society title continues to do well, having gained 624,000 to reach 19.5 million monthly actives to come in at number 3.  (Lil) Farm Life, a virtual farming game from Green Patch is growing despite FarmVille’s dominance. It gained 420,000 to reach 4.74 million, and the number 4 spot.

To dig deeper into the virtual goods market, check out our new report: Inside Virtual Goods: The US Virtual Goods Market 2009 – 2010.

Well, for those not hooked on Fantasy Football – and even for those who are – comes another “fantasy” sports application for those avid athleticism viewers. Called Last 2 Left, this collection of apps are broken up into the categories of baseball, college football, pro football, hockey, and basketball.

Built on Facebook, players are able to create a game with one objective: Guess which teams will make it to the Championship Game of that sport. Hence the name “Last 2 Left.” When a game is created, the user is prompted with the selection of three deadlines for picking the final two. The game is greatly automated so it makes suggestions as to what those deadlines should be. The game creator or “Game Manager” can change these deadlines up until the date in question.

Each game created can be made private or public and the winner is the one who picks the two teams to reach the Championship. However, if no one picks them, then the winner is the player to predict the Champion. If no one picks that, then whoever picks anyone in the final two and has the lowest “Combined Ranking Score” becomes the winner.

Though these games are exceedingly simple they do make for a decent extra addition for a Sunday afternoon. However, beyond the social Facebook outlet it provides, participants are currently eligible for a Last 2 Left contest worth $1,000. Suffice to say, a few are unavailable. For example, baseball season is coming to an end so those picks are out of the question but pro football, hockey, and basketball are currently open. Also, since there is no fee to play, it’s not gambling in any way; just some fun with added incentive. That said, if you have five spare minutes, be sure to be check back and join/create a game before the contest deadlines to be eligible. The dates are posted below:

• Basketball – Thursday, Dec. 31, 2009
• College Football – N/A (Friday, October 9, 2009)
• Pro Football – Saturday, October 31, 2009
• Hockey – Friday, December 4, 2009
• Baseball – N/A (Sunday, September 20, 2009)

Beyond the sports game, the developer (of the same name) also offers a version for reality-based television shows, where users pick the remaining show contestants.

Digital Chocolate adds OpenFeint’s Social Platform — Digital Chocolate is a profilic iPhone game developer, and now its going to be integrating OpenFeint‘s social platform. OpenFeint lets game developers add leaderboards, achievements, lobbies, and profiles, all of which are still hosted by parent company Aurora Feint. It also includes features for sharing on Facebook and Twitter. More here.

Asian export gaming portal ljji.com gaining more users — Ljji.com takes popular freemium games from Asia and localizes them in the US, and the plan seems to be working. The company has grown 40 percent over the past year to reach 9 million registered users, as Virtual Goods News reports.

Indians protest for national flag in FarmVille — If anyone was wondering how global social games have gotten on Facebook, here’s the latest indicator. Zynga’s FarmVille lets users decorate their farms with their country flags, but it doesn’t offer the one for India (and presumably for many other countries). But thousands of Indian FarmVille players have mobilized, and the movement’s getting some news coverage. Given Facebook’s growth in India — up 220,000 to 4.23 million monthly actives last month, according to our latest Global Monitor report — the country is an increasingly important market for developers to accommodate. And anyway, there’s no reason for Zynga to not give them the flag.

Yes, the iPhone is a Gaming Platform — Ben Lorica crunches some numbers over on O’Reilly Radar and finds that “68% of the Top Paid, 67% of the Top Free, and 50% of the Top Grossing apps were Games” on the iPhone. As with social networks like Facebook and MySpace, games are the sorts of apps that people want the most. From the report:

[Marketing and gaming veteran Eric von Coelln weighs in on recent implementations of "appointment gaming" in this blog post that we're republishing from his personal site.]

When 36% of American households have a DVR, the age of “appointment television” – being home at an appointed hour to watch a show live – is clearly waning. Yet with recent changes to Roller Coaster Kingdom and the launch of Café World in the last week, Zynga appears to be doubling down on the “Appointment Gaming” mechanism of FarmVille.

Roller Coaster Kingdom is a simulation game where you run an amusement park somewhat similar to Rollercoaster Tycoon, although without the fun of building the coasters yourself. It came out July 31st in beta, went through a great deal of fixes, and then on September 23rd rolled out a change to the basic game mechanic. Instead of guests coming to users’ amusement parks randomly based on park popularity, they had to “book tours,” wait for the buses to arrive, and greet them at the park or, according to the post by the developers, “If you do not meet and greet your guests in a timely fashion, they will become crabby and leave.”

Similarly, with the release of Café World just last week, you have to select dishes to serve to your restaurant patrons, prepare it and wait (anywhere from five minutes to two days) for it to be cooked. If you don’t serve it in a timely fashion, the food spoils (the 5 minute to make bacon cheeseburger lasts about 5 minutes before it goes rotten; the hour-to-make Tikka Masal Kabobs last about an hour and 15 minutes).

This is not hugely different from the game mechanic of FarmVille, where crops spoil if not harvested in time. So while it’s hard to argue with the success of FarmVille, it’s also hard to ignore the response from the users of Roller Coaster Kingdom since the game was modified:

• “I think the whole booking a tour bus is stupid.. now you want me to plan my life around a game… I gotta be here at certain times just so i can keep playing…”
• “I get bored waiting for the tours to get to my park because I didnt schedule them correctly. Needs to be a way of getting guests while you are waiting for tours.”
• “Its no longer fun now that you have to book things. What made it fun was getting more people to come to the best park”

This takes the game from a more casual play, to a much more involved one. On TV, users see what is on and if nothing good is on, they go to their DVRs to find something to watch; Using Facebook is somewhat similar, where users see what their friends are up to, and then might dive into a quick game. For the most part, the social games offer that release, but with these sim games, you are forced to check in within a certain time.

In addition there doesn’t appear to be anything to do in between waiting for things. While you wait for dishes to cook, customers come in and leave in Café World; in Roller Coaster Kingdom the amusement park just sits there empty, with no one riding or walking through the park. Compare this to Zynga’s other big hit, Mafia Wars, where you may have to wait a couple minutes to get more stamina to fight, or for energy to rebuild, but you can pretty much count on being able to do something if you happen to log in every 3 or 4 hours. Even in FarmTown there are often trees to harvest or animals to collect things from while you wait for crops to grow.

If appointment TV is dying, why is Zynga putting marketing muscle behind two games that require this scheduling? Both games got placed in the Zynga toolbar atop FarmVille and Mafia Wars over last weekend weekend, driving huge increases in traffic: Roller Coaster Kingdom jumped from 860,000 to 1.67 million daily active users in a day while Café World (with a healthy dose of Facebook ads) jumped from 250K daily users to over 2.7 million and into the top ten applications on Facebook in just two days. Café World has since gone on to reach more than 10 million monthly active users.

I can only guess that when Zynga compared the monetization metrics of a more free-flow Roller Coaster Kingdom experience to those of the more scheduling-based game play of FarmVille, the users who ended up really investing time in scheduling were the ones that Zynga could better monetize. While an engaged user is in most cases easier to monetize, I think it’s equally important to ensure there is some joy there whenever the user can spare 15 minutes to go check on the game – otherwise you may only end up monetizing a small niche of users and hurt your opportunity to reach the masses.

Eric von Coelln was the vice president of marketing at Oberon Media, a leading multi-platform casual games company, and most recently the vice president of Marketing at PowerSoccer.com. He now is a New York based freelance consultant to games, e-commerce and social media companies — including some of the largest social gaming companies on Facebook.  You can find his blog here.