Inside Social Games

We’ve seen a number of casual gaming companies try to take their games from the web and desktop clients into Facebook, and one is standing out as a clear winner: Bejeweled Blitz, from Popcap Games.

The game, already popular in web and download form, has been steadily growing, and recently reached more than 10 million monthly active users, with around a third of those people coming back every day. It’s now the tenth largest game on Facebook, according to AppData. What’s the secret?

Partly, of course, it’s that a lot of people already know and love the game from its non-Facebook versions. The Tetris-like game mechanics are basically the same as the other versions. On a two-dimensional board, you try to line up three sets of the same-colored gems, either horizontally or vertically, to make them disappear, and attempt to clear the entire board before time runs out.

But Popcap has also done a good job of making the game increasingly social, since it first launched earlier this year. There’s a very obvious leaderboard showing how you stack up against your friends. There’s a tournament that happens every weekday, which the company has told us accounts for its increase in daily active users in the middle of the week. There are also options to play against friends — just click their name on the leaderboard.

There’s also a contest based on team scores. Teams are calculated by adding together the total number of points between you and your Facebook friends in the game. But you have to sign up individually — with the individual winning, and receiving things like free access to more complex, for-fee, “deluxe” games on Popcap’s home site. There are tiers of prizes, with teams needing to reach a certain total point threshold to be eligible for the better ones. The top prize is a free laptop computer loaded with Popcap games.

And, of course, you can share your activities from the game into your  news feed and on to your profile wall. All in all, the game’s success is a good example of how other casual games can help spread their games on Facebook. Popcap also recently raised $22.5 million, the first outside funding in its decade of making casual games, with the intention to focus more on social games. The company is clearly on the right track.