Inside Social Games

For those who haven’t been paying attention to social gaming recently, the newest hot genre of game is not mafia battles, nor farming, nor pet care, nor even running a virtual restaurant. No, it’s taking care of fish in a virtual aquarium. And if you’re a regular reader, you’ve watched more and more of these sorts of games launch or get revealed in the last couple of months. Now, it’s time for a closer look at the biggest one of them all, and the developer behind it: Happy Aquarium, by CrowdStar.

In the company’s first interview with the media, CrowdStar community marketing manager Yvonne Lee tells us that Happy Aquarium was the first virtual aquarium game on Facebook (although there have been other types of fish games in the past). Launched in early September, Happy Aquarium has quickly gone to 26 million monthly active users and 7 million daily active users, making it one of the largest and fastest-growing apps on Facebook, according to AppData.

The game emphasizes taking care of your fish, more like the many popular pet-caring games on Facebook than the production-focused farming games — it’s “about loving your fish,” Lee says, not just selling them. Besides the usual mechanics of buying and feeding fish, you can name your fishes, train them in an obstacle-course mini game, mate them to create new fish, and enjoy the simple pleasures of being an aquarium owner, like “cleaning” algae off the aquarium with the wave of your mouse cursor. Other fishing games, notably Fish World (and now, Zynga’s new FishVille), tend to rely more on the production and sale of fish.

CrowdStar itself has actually been around for a year and a half, having originally launched a trivia game called Know-It-All Trivia. This year, the company decided to focus on high-quality games that monetized using virtual goods. Happy Aquarium was launched in September and it has spread because people liked it, not because it made heavy use of Facebook’s communication channels, Lee says. “We didn’t even implement notifications at first,” she adds, “users were actually calling their friends and family to talk about it.” If users want to buy more currency for things like new fish or fish food in the game, they can purchase it directly through Social Gold’s monetization service.

San Francisco-based CrowdStar has not officially launched other games, yet, although you can see a number of other ones, like “Sexy City,” in a toolbar on the app. These games are made by developers who are friends of the company, according to Lee. The company plans to keep building on Happy Aquarium, and is also working on “other things” — it is actually still in stealth, and isn’t disclosing funding, its number of employees, and other key details. But we do know a little bit more. The company’s chairman is Peter Relan, who is also the chairman of iPhone app developer Aurora Feint. Given this connection, we asked Lee if the two companies had any plans to work together on cross-platform games, and she says they haven’t made significant plans yet.

We’re interested to hear more, as CrowdStar is planning to disclose more details soon.