If you have been following Facebook games, you know that the latest popular genre is fishing games. And if you read this site, you’ll know that CrowdStar, the developer behind the largest of these, Happy Aquarium, is exploring several other games as well. Now, the company appears to be starting a happy game line, judging by the early results from its new virtual pet-caring game, Happy Pets.

The app, launched last week, has grown from 0 to 870,000 monthly actives by today — not bad by any measure, but especially impressive given that this is the company’s first follow-up to Happy Aquarium.

Similarities and differences from other pet games

In Happy Pets you adopt kittens and take care of them as they grow into cats (puppies are coming soon). In some respects its game play is similar to Pet Society as it gives you experience points for feeding your pet and keeping their litter box and food bowl clean. But less like Pet Society and similar to its other game Happy Aquarium, the focus seems to be on caring for and loving your pets rather than production for sale. In fact, the game-play discourages pet sales by giving you fewer coins for selling your kittens then you paid for purchasing them.

Other notable factors include high-quality graphics, and a real-life feel. The kittens behave more like real kittens, rather than human-like cartoon characters that look like cats (as is the case in Pet Society). For example, a Happy Pets kitten moves towards your touch when you pet it.

Limited social and stickiness features

At the moment there are very few actions that a user can engage in besides adopting and feeding kittens or cleaning their litter boxes. While they can furnish the living room where pets live, the kittens only interact with a few of these items. Also there is very little reason to invite friends other than stealing daily piggy bank coins from their living rooms. While you can pet your friends’ kittens (and gain experience points), these actions aren’t shared with your friends via notifications or newsfeed postings.

However, it is still very early in the life of the game and Crowdstar is probably working on these and other improvements. It will be interesting to watch the game over the next few months to see what improvements they make and how those impact stickiness.

Acquisition channels

Like other popular Facebook games Happy Pets makes significant use of the invite friends and gift giving viral channels. Gift giving is currently only limited to three decorative items. However each time you access the gift giving feature, the game asks for permission to recruit friends by posting a non-gifting note about the game into your newsfeed. It also uses the newsfeed for other in-game actions like announcements of leveling up in game, adoption of new pets, as well as photos of the your pets doing cute antics. Once the new Facebook redesign goes into effect these game stories will become less obvious, so Happy Pets must quickly develop in-game announcements that users are not only likely to share but also interact with if it wants to maintain user growth from the newsfeed.

Happy Pets is being promoted in a toolbar that runs on Happy Aquarium, an older CrowdStar quiz app called Know-It-All Triva, and other, relatively small apps made by “friends” of the company. Happy Aquarium has more than 25 million monthly active users, so that game alone could be driving a lot of people to Happy Pets.

Overall, Happy Pets has shown significant potential but to develop engagement and further capitalize on the social graph it needs to create more socially expressive and engaging features in the game. That being said, in the short time it has been around it has appeared to demonstrate how smaller can gain significant growth by developing engaging content and using cross-promotion.

At this growth rate, Crowdstar is looking like a serious contender for Zynga, Playfish, and other social game developers.

Sana Choudary works with traditional game developers who are having the challenge of understanding how to build social games. She helps them understand how to use and optimize viral channels and social media marketing to build popular social games. She blogs at Traffichoney.com.

Last week, we analyzed each of the five virtual aquarium games we’ve previously covered — Top Fish, FishVille, Happy Aquarium, Fish World, and My Fishbowl. But there’s another one, that’s been out for some time. From Clipwire Games, it’s called Fish Life and it has a significant 1.4 million monthly active users.

Players start out just like any other fish game, buying fish, feeding them, selling them at adulthood, and decorating their virtual tank. Frankly, at first glance, there isn’t too much that is different, with many elements (especially the interface) feeling quite similar to Fish World — although we’re not sure who launched first. So just what is so special?

Perhaps one of the most curious aspects to Fish Life is it’s “Mission” system. This is how the player actually learns to play the game and progress beyond it. The game will actually ask you to “Buy a Fish” or “Clean Your Tank.” Doing so will complete the mission and earn you some extra cash and experience towards a new level. Some competing games have this feature, but they don’t make it such a prominent part of the interface.

As with other virtual aquariums, higher levels mean better items and fish…. Right…? Surprisingly, no, levels do nothing for the player directly. Luckily, the developers have stated that more benefits will be added, but as it stands higher levels only allow greater access to more gifts that can be sent. Frankly, this isn’t that big of a deal as the better fish and items still cost a lot of money, and it is actually kind of nice to have the option of buying nicer stuff early on (even if it isn’t a fiscally viable one).

Another nice element is that the fish never actually die. If there is one complaint to be had about some of the other games, it is that if you are not around to feed your fish, you‘ll be making a few flushes when you get back. Not all the games have an automatic fish feeder like Happy Aquarium does.

Furthermore, in Fish Life, the fish look fantastic, and really do feel like real fish (except the whole… on the computer thing). Sadly, this leads to one of a few big complaints. Yes, the visuals are fantastic, but only independently. While the number of artists on this project isn’t known to us at the moment, it does look like there is some need for more style direction. The fish are fairly detailed with smooth gradients, a shimmering sort of look, and very brilliant colors. However, the decorations are very flat looking, almost cel-shaded, and don’t really fit. This is made worse by the heavy shadows and highlights mixed and blurred together in the background to give it an almost water-color feel. Each are good in their own right, but none look like they belong together.

One of the other issues is that the overall inventory of purchasable items felt significantly smaller than other virtual aquarium games. This is mitigated slightly by more ways to earn currency, an amusing Fly Ribbon-style mini-game, and, a personal favorite, a fortune telling fish. However, the point of these types of games is creativity, and a lack of options limits Fish Life, compared to some of other competing titles. Furthermore, any perks are quickly forgotten by the constant intrusion of pop ups reminding players to bookmark and add friends (though the latter only seems to be when you first log on, thankfully). If the player likes the game, they will bookmark it. Brute forcing it with constant reminders is only going to irritate them — although this is something that many other games do, as well.

Overall, Fish Life is a decent virtual aquarium title. It has its creative perks but also a handful of shortcomings. All the same, however, these deficiencies are far from the end of the world and are mostly simple fixes. We expect the game to continue improving, and to be a significant competitor to other fishing titles.

Twitter and Facebook coming to Xbox 360 this week — Microsoft’s console is getting more social on November 17, when the two social services launch as a software download. You’ll be able to do things like access Facebook and Twitter from within the machine. Sony’s Playstation 3 is also getting Facebook integration, it appears.

Xbox 360 console game Assassin’s Creed gets virtual goods — You can now buy outfits from the game in the Xbox Live Marketplace using Microsoft Points. Ubisoft‘s Italian Renaissance first-person action game is the latest to appear in the virtual store and use Microsoft’s virtual currency to make money.

Social gaming so big it’s starting to get billboards on 101 — The main highway running down the San Francisco Peninsula is lined with billboards, making for some prime offline Silicon Valley advertising. Hot, or at least well-funded, tech companies use the space to make statements — Google has run math puzzles, for example. So what does Zynga have? So the ad is so minimalist that there are no words, just the picture of the company’s namesake, the dog Zinga. Via Hiten Shah.

Apple hiring engineer, potentially for in-house games — “The interactive media group is looking for a skilled software engineer who wants to work as part of a small highly motivated team to work on interactive multimedia experiences on the iPhone and iPod Touch,” according to the listing. “The position on the team is to help design and implement interactive multimedia experiences on the iPhone and iPod Touch.”

China’s Tencent brings in even more money — The company reported revenue of $493 million an increase of 17% quarter-over-quarter and 66.4% year-over-year. Virtual goods revenue made up $384 million and mobile “value-added” services brought in $65.3 million. The rest was ads. More on Virtual Goods News.

Companies that “mine gold” in World of Warcraft are advertising with virtual corpses — MMOP.com and others are creating multiple accounts, then killing off those characters to align their bodies to spell out company URLs. Clever, but we have to wonder how game-maker Activision/Blizzard feels about it. Image, and more, via Virtual Economics.

Vivity gets into social gaming platform services — The 3D virtual world company is offering features it has already built itself to social game developers. These include “virtual economy management, content management, points and leveling, social features (e.g., badging, gifting, emoting), chat and friends lists, social network integration, analytics and many more,” according to the company blog.

Social Gaming Network readies Skies of Glory — VentureBeat has an early look at the iPhone/iPod Touch multiplayer fighter game, in the video below. As you might expect, it is free to play and includes virtual goods, in the form of items like better planes.

Day in and day out, most of us work for someone else. But just what would it be like to be your own boss? To be the one that is in charge? Well, the folks over at Challenge Games have made that possibility a reality (sort of) with its newest game Ponzi Inc. This satirical tycoon-style game has players hiring quirky employees, upgrading offices, and completing jobs as they try to get ahead in a virtual business world.

It’s been quite a long time since we heard from Challenge Games. The last game we looked at was Nobility back in November of last year. That game’s design was well-done and so is the new one — to some effect, as AppData is showing that Ponzi already has than 26,000 monthly active users.

When starting out, there isn’t much of a tutorial other than asking you for the name of your business. From here on out, everything you need to do is presented in the form of your business “Agenda” (a quest log, of sorts), granting rewards for each completed item (rewards include cash as well as extra benefits called “Perks” that grant bonuses such as faster job completion).

Obviously, any budding business first requires employees, and so that’s your first task. Players are able to hire their friends as well as generic workers, each of which have their own curious, and cliché, personality traits (like the one person at work who is obsessed with Facebook… wait… ). Anyways, workers are needed to complete jobs in Ponzi, which is one of the primary elements of the game. The more workers one has, the more jobs can be done, and as expected, more money can be earned.

This really puts Ponzi into a sort of RPG category, as each job earns a fairly small amount of income but take sa period of time to complete. The lengthier the job, the more money is earned. The key difference, however, between this title and, say, a mafia-style RPG, is the satirical visual presentation.

Visuals are perhaps the greatest draw for this game. Everything in this game pokes fun at big corporations; be it the Dilbert-like characters, the backgrounds wrought with odd animations (such as “Godzilla” traipsing through the city), or the dialog used to explain a job. For example, a personal favorite is an early one called “Update Passwords” that says: “New passwords must have twelve consonants, numbers in the third and eight characters, and at least one comma.” For anyone that hasn’t worked in a corporate setting… yes, it is about that obnoxious.

As players complete jobs and earn rewards from agenda items, they are able to start building up their office. At the start, players begin with the basics of the basics, working out of the garage with a 1980s computer and a flea market desk. However, the more they play, the more they can upgrade that office and all of its content. To this end, the game is “almost” a virtual space type of app, but since players are not allowed to rearrange what they purchase and upgrade, there isn’t any real creativity. Nonetheless, there is some satisfaction in watching your business grow and evolve.

Quite frankly, there isn’t a whole lot to complain about. Other than a few usability issues, such as not being able to go back to your office from the Perks menu (you have to go to another menu and close that one to return), the game is rather amusing. If you are a fan of this type of game, or satirical, Dilbert-like humor, you will probably enjoy it. Who’d have thought that corporate life would make for such an interesting concept, right? Then again, one wouldn’t think city planning (SimCity) would be much fun either, now would they?

[In the latest post from guest author and social gaming consultant Eric von Coelln, he compares the growth patterns of new games from big developers to try to spot where Facebook advertising has been having a significant impact.]

With the launch of Zynga’s FishVille, I’ve been watching to see if the developer could again eclipse records for user growth. The last Zynga hit, Café World launched a little over a month ago, gaining 1.1 million new users on day two and an additional 1.4 million users on day three, eventually passing rival Playfish’s Restaurant City and reaching more than 5 million daily actives in just a week after launch. In its first week, the numbers for FishVille are strong: 1.6 million daily actives after five days, whereas top rival fish game, CrowdStar’s Happy Aquarium took more than two weeks to hit that level. But the growth is not quite as meteoric as Café World.

With all of Zynga’s promotional muscle and ability to cross-promote games across an even larger installed base of players than a month ago, what happened? Are users already mega-engaged with existing titles? Unlike Café World, FishVille is competing with three games and trying to tackle a much more established base: Happy Aquarium, TwoFishes Interactive’s My Fishbowl and TallTree Games’ Fish World collectively have 11.3 million daily active users and over 39.1 million monthly users. In aggregate, these games only trail Zynga’s FarmVille.

In addition, the launch was marred a bit. One of Zynga’s offer providers was running scammy offers, so Facebook took it offline for about 36 hours. With that caveat in mind, I decided to look at the launch trajectories of recent titles by Playfish and Zynga to see if we could discern any trends to benchmark the performance of FishVille:

While there are some definite rocket trajectories here, they are not happening across the board. Instead, one of the major take-aways from this graph is that it appears to identify the impact of advertising on launch velocity. To be very clear, I have no data available to identify when and how much either developer has spent advertising to grow their user base, but I believe you can look at gradual growth trends and see massive disruptions in that trend that point to advertising. Roller Coaster Kingdom (the light purple line above) is the best example of this.

• Launched August 1st, it gradually grew to just under 1 million DAUs within the first month. This is similar to Playfish’s Country Story, which launched at the same time and had a slightly higher trajectory in the first couple days, followed by gradually flattening growth.
• Zynga did a lot of work during September to improve the overall churn of the game, including a pretty major change in the game mechanic to include a more “appointment gaming” style.
• Then, on October 4th, you can see a dramatic increase in traffic from 821,000 DAUs to over 1.67 million DAUs in a single day. After this huge growth spurt, things again start to grow somewhat gradually. The huge increase really looks like an ad-fueled growth spurt. It would also suggest that while the cross-promotional toolbar is a big component for growing a new title, it pales in comparison to the impact of ads.

Now, look at the huge launch velocity of Café World. Note the initial huge spike in daily active users from 250,000 to nearly 1.4 million also began on October 4th as it did with Roller Coaster Tycoon. This suggests that Zynga pumped advertising in during the first four days (October 4th to 7th) to help it bypass rival Restaurant City during the first week.

Likewise, you can infer other instances of potentially ad-fueled spurts by looking at daily active users:

FarmVille shows dramatically vertical growth that pushed it past 10 million. Only after Café World launched do you see the trajectory drop a bit, but it’s hard to pin that solely on a shift in ad dollars to these new titles – it could also have been cannibalization of its FarmVille base as some moved on to Café World (a trend we’ve seen in the past when Restaurant City ate into the DAUs for Pet Society).

Country Story looks like it also had an ad-induced spurt in late August, growing from 676,000 DAU on August 26th to 1.23 million DAU on August 29th – after that the DAU numbers grew gradually, similar to the pace prior to the ad buy

Regarding the launch of FishVille, the temporary suspension have temporarily reduced its initial growth. But I imagine Zynga will continue to use its launch playbook of heavy advertising to help grow the game to a critical mass, much like it did for Cafe World and FarmVille. There are still questions as to whether Zynga can muscle its way through and beat out the most crowded field yet in a specific genre — if it can’t, we’ll see a less steep launch trajectory.

Big picture here, developers and investors can begin to look at launch trajectories and pinpoint when another developer is spending advertising money to push up its market share. While the blatant spending at launch is fairly apparent, what is less clear is how much ad money is being spent on a continual basis to prop up growth.

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 is now a New York based freelance consultant to games, e-commerce and social media companies — including some of the largest social gaming companies on Facebook. While Mr. von Coelln does write about some companies for which he has done paid consulting from time to time, this post is based on publicly available information and in our view is an unbiased analysis of the industry. You can find his blog here.

Earlier this week, game giant EA announced the acquisition of social game developer Playfish in a deal valued up to $400 million, that we first reported on a few weeks ago. The move was a watershed event in the young history of the social gaming space, marking the first major acquisition of a leading social gaming company by a large developer/publisher.

Kevin Comolli has been on the board of Playfish since the middle of last year, when Accel led Playfish’s $17 million Series B round along with Index Ventures. Accel is also, of course, an early investor in Facebook, where the firm’s Jim Breyer sits on the board. We spoke with Comolli about the investment and the future of social gaming.

Justin Smith: Does the thesis that led you to invest in Playfish still hold today?

Kevin Comolli: We got interested in online gaming a few years ago. We were attracted to Europe because it didn’t have the same console penetration that the US did, and we really thought there were some good opportunities in both online and social games. A lot of people entering the market are coming through online games.

When we originally met Kristian he was working with Glu Mobile at the time, and we got excited about his vision for Playfish. Ultimately, though, Playfish is a content play. What distinguishes them from others in the space who have really strong internet backgrounds is that they also come from a great gaming pedigree.

Today, the industry is still very much emerging, and very dynamic. There is still a lot of room for innovation, and there are a lot of platforms. Facebook has been the dominant platform to date, but mobile is just starting to grow.

JS: How are social gaming companies like Playfish being valued?

KC: It’s a combination of using comparable financial metrics, and strategic premiums. Part of EA’s interest is their need to move online, and onto social platforms, and sooner rather than later. There’s a strategic premium because you’re not only paying for the existing titles and pipeline, but for the team. You’re really buying into a platform of people and talent that you can really leverage.

So ultimately it’s really not formulaic. You have to take a lot of objective and subjective issues into account. The team, the scalability of the team, their track record, the user numbers, the monetization numbers. Companies like Playfish in a very hot space don’t get traditional valuation metrics.

JS: What is your view on the state of the payments ecosystem right now?

KC: It’s an incredibly fragmented industry. Gameforge has something like 90 payment providers around the world. You go from scratch cards in one country to premium SMS in another, like Russia, where the carrier fees can be 70%, to PayPal. There will be a combination of innovation and consolidation.

However, despite all the inefficiencies in the ecosystem, it’s encouraging to see that good games are still monetizing and we’re still making progress. There are interesting companies with interesting metrics even with all this friction.

JS: What do you think role of advertising will be in monetizing social games in 2-3 years?

KC: That’s a tough question; it’s still evolving a lot. Playfish experimented with advertising early on but quickly pivoted to almost entire reliance on microtransactions and in-game purchases. Gameforge is also totally microtransaction based. So for us, it’s been very much a virtual goods driven monetization model. Having said that, it would be foolish for me to think that advertising would not play a very large role going forward, partly in game, and partly through clever non-scammy techniques.

JS: Any final reflections?

KC: The idea of spending $30 million, $40 million, $50 million on a game, putting it on a truck to Wal-mart or Best Buy, and not knowing who your player is, is all kind of flawed. The emergence of the Playfishes and Gameforges of the world is exciting, but the industry still has long way to go. Playfish is all about the quality of the team and the quality of the games.

This week’s up-and-coming games list is pretty full of ones our readers won’t find too interesting — quiz apps, gifting apps, etc. However, there are a number of interesting games, too, if you look a little deeper, including a few casual and role-playing ones, and a nascent virtual world.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Addict	601,398	+601,360	+99.99
2.	WHAT IS YOUR PURPOSE IN LIFE?	256,515	+206,430	+80.47
3.	Which Zodiac Sign Are You Most Compatible With?	910,660	+202,711	+22.26
4.	The Hierarchy	188,685	+178,264	+94.48
5.	Moment Of Truth	361,659	+62,411	+17.26
6.	Poker Texas Hold’em	406,872	+50,642	+12.45
7.	Gift Creator	499,421	+49,000	+9.81
8.	Which Classic Hollywood Actress Are You?	109,046	+45,585	+41.80
9.	Kamu cocoknya punya pasangan orang mana ?	214,232	+44,646	+20.84
10.	Social Friend Interview	105,418	+42,065	+39.90
11.	Do you think…?	247,436	+39,181	+15.83
12.	Fish Wrangler	626,648	+35,559	+5.67
13.	Happy Harvest	696,372	+31,812	+4.57
14.	World Poker	996,323	+29,875	+3.00
15.	Word Island	234,239	+26,244	+11.20
16.	Doorbell	565,562	+25,268	+4.47
17.	Friend Block	597,611	+21,045	+3.52
18.	Tarjetitas	978,146	+19,977	+2.04
19.	Dogbook	772,348	+19,211	+2.49
20.	Spot The Difference	268,399	+18,726	+6.98

Before we dig in, an important note: This list is created by sorting AppData’s rankings of the fastest-growing apps over the last week by both size (apps with between 100,000 and 1 million users) and by genre (games). The games genre is self-selected by developers when they create apps on Facebook — so developer-readers, if you want to make sure your hot new app shows up on this list, make sure to categorize it as a game in the first place.

At the top is one called Addict, a simple app that calculates how “addicted” you are to Facebook based on your recent activity, the completeness of your profile, networks you have joined, your number of connections (friends), and your number of groups, pages and events. Sounds sort of neat, right?

Unfortunately, as we noted over on Inside Facebook this morning, the app generates a ranking of your friends without providing any transparency into how it arrived at that number. So, it could be making up any old percentage for each user. And in case you click around trying to figure out exactly what the app is telling you, you’ll find that the “Continue” buttons you thought might take you to answers are actually quiz ads. Basically, this developer doesn’t seem to be too serious about building a high-quality application, but does seem to be optimizing for some short-term revenue. Having gained almost all of its 601,000 users in the past week, this app might be pulling in a little money.

Moving on… the list, as has often been the case in the past, also has a bunch of other simple apps — mostly quiz apps, based around questions like “WHAT IS YOUR PURPOSE IN LIFE?” and “Which Zodiac Sign Are You Most Compatible With?” These sorts of apps live and die pretty quickly. There’s also a “Farmville Gifts” simple gifting app. As its page notes it’s “[a]n application that sends FarmVille gifts! However, these gifts can’t be sent to FarmVille.” We expect Zynga will send the developer a take-down notice if it gets much bigger.

However, there are some legitimately interesting apps, too. This list is based on filtering AppData to only see the apps that grew the most, that have between 100,000 and 1 million users — the purpose is to find a few promising ones that are on track to become serious hits.

The Hierarchy, a spy role-playing game from Serious Business, continues its climb. It has nearly doubled from when we noticed it at the beginning of the week, reaching 189,000 monthly actives today.

There are a whole bunch of notable social games that appeared on the up-and-coming list, overall, but don’t appear on this list because their developers chose not to categorize these apps as games. Here they are.

Two other role-playing games are also growing fast, and although neither lists a developer, both appear to be made by LOLapps. While both have the same underlying interface components (more on that over on ISG), each one has surprisingly striking, unique-looking graphics. One, Asian mafia-themed Yakuza Lords, grew by 155,000 users to reach 930,000 monthly actives. It is on its way to graduating from this list. The other app, World War II RPG Band of Heroes, is smaller but growing relatively more quickly. It gained 161,000 to reach 269,000 monthly actives.

Other notables on this week’s list include Ice Climber-style game Icy Tower, which grew by 98,000 to total 833,000 monthly actives. It’s a simple, arcade-style game. So is COLLAPSE!, which gained 83,00 to 178,000 monthly actives. So far, we haven’t seen many casual games of this sort become big, with Popcap Game’s Bejeweled Blitz being the one exception. Perhaps, though, these games show that the arcade style is in the process of becoming a lot more prominent on Facebook?

And finally, and quite interestingly, Slide’s new magical virtual world app, SuperPocus, is starting to catch some air. It grew by 77,000 to end up at 183,000 today.

Advertising scams have led to lawsuits plenty of times before, and now social gaming may get its turn in court. The firm Kershaw, Cutter & Ratinoff LLP is “investigating” a possible class-action lawsuit against Facebook, MySpace, and a range of social gaming, offer companies, and advertisers, according to a post on its web site. The firm has a track record in this area.

Here’s one victory, as quoted (its emphasis) from the firm’s web site:

KCR served as lead counsel successfully resolving a class action case on behalf of approximately 11 million AOL subscribers who were double-charged subscription fees through a misleading pop-up advertising scheme

Sounds somewhat familiar. The firm is apparently pretty interested in pushing things forward, as its web page suggests that readers “[r]ead more about this practice” on the Gawker article that broke the news about the lawsuit today.

Here’s the current list of companies that KCR is investigating:

• Zynga
• RockYou
• Offerpal Media
• Super Rewards
• Tatto Media
• Double Ding
• Gambit
• SendMe Mobile
• Video Professor
• Facebook
• MySpace

Playdom, the largest social game developer on MySpace and one of the larger ones on Facebook, has confirmed a couple purchases we’ve been hearing rumors about recently. It has bought Facebook game developer Green Patch, as well as iPhone developer Trippert Labs, both for undisclosed amounts.

The company announced yesterday that it had raised $43 million in a first round of venture funding, so it is not wasting much time in putting that new capital to use. Green Patch is a mid-sized Facebook app developer company that has grown from its first game, (lil) Green Patch, to a whole line of games with “(lil)” in the title. The largest today is (lil) Farm Life, a virtual farming game that has more than 6 million monthly active users on Facebook, and 1.27 million daily actives.

“We’ve been close to Green Patch since almost the beginning [of the Facebook platform]. We actually work about three blocks from each other,” chairman Rick Thompson tells us. “We’re mutual admirers.” Both companies have pumped out new titles in popular genres of social games.

So this is a direct move against Zynga’s FarmVille, and other the range of other farming games on Facebook. While Playdom has managed to grow some games on Facebook’s platform since it began an aggressive foray this spring, like role-playing game Mobsters 2: Vendetta, it has not achieved the same success as it has had on MySpace. At least not yet.

Overall, the Green Patch purchase will push Playdom up our AppData developer rankings, going from #12 overall by un-deduplicated montly active users, to #9 — and the #5 spot among Facebook game developers. By monthly active users across all of its games, that’s up from 14.7 million to 22.8 million. By daily active users (a more interesting measure, as it more directly indicates a game’s ability to monetize) Playdom will go from 2.08 million to 3.51 million. It still trails Zynga, Playfish, and others on Facebook, but the combined games and developer resources make it a more formidable opponent. Also of note in this purchase: Playdom and Green Patch have both been sued by Zynga.

Thompson wouldn’t comment on the lawsuits, expect to say that they didn’t hurt the relationship between Playdom and Green Patch. Cue the jokes about Green Patch joining Playdom’s mafia.

Meanwhile, on the iPhone, Trippert Labs has had a few successes. Its titles include MobRacer, The Godfather II Crime Rings, Fighter Jets, Armada and Bug Olympics. Playdom expanded its Mobsters series to the iPhone this summer, so the purchase shows the company is getting even more serious about spanning platforms. Trippert chief executive Omar Siddiqui is joining Playdom’s management team as its vice president of game production. The Mobsters iPhone game, called Big Apple, already lets users log in using their MySpace identities, but the company says it has another version pending approval from Apple that also includes Facebook Connect.

Future Plans

And being cross-platform is what any potential acquirer or public-sector investor wants to see. What are Playdom’s plans? Zynga appears to want to go public at some point, and Playfish just sold to Electronic Arts in a deal worth up to $400 million. Tim Chang, a principal at Norwest Venture Partners and now an investor in the company, had this to say in an interview yesterday:

Our view of social gaming is it’s a pretty big space. It should be a market large enough to support multiple winners. The first was Playfish. Each of the big three should be able to get a pretty good outcome. The (remaining) big two could reach an IPO. One dynamic we like is that there are not that many companies reaching this kind of scale.

We asked Thompson if he thought Playfish sold too early. “I think they’re a great company, and it was a personal decision,” he replied. “But would I have sold? No, our choice is to take it all the way.”

Playdom has been hiring fast — it’s at 190 employees and 75 contractors not counting the purchased companies — and it is looking to increase that number, it says. Green Patch and Trippert will continue to exist as studios within the company.

Investors are staying optimistic about the future of online gaming, judging by funding news this week. Three more companies have announced venture rounds, including Wooga, Playfire and Six Degrees Games. We covered the biggest one yesterday: Social game developer Playdom’s $43 million first round.

The optimism is not surprising, given the revenue estimates for online gaming in general. For example, the virtual goods business model will bring in $1 billion in the US alone this year, according to our Inside Virtual Goods report. But venture investors want exits, not just revenues — and there was a watershed one this week, when Playfish announced its sale to Electronic Arts in a deal worth up to $400 million.

Berlin, Germany-based Wooga, the creator of popular Facebook quiz game Brain Buddy, announced today that it has raised €5 million in funding in a new round led by Balderton Capital, with existing investor Holtzbrinck Ventures participating. Brain Buddy launched in July, and currently has 5.65 million monthly active users and more than half a million daily active users. The company also says that it plans to launch two more games in the coming weeks, presumably on Facebook.

Playfire, a United Kingdom-based social networking service for console and PC games, raised £1.3 million ($2.1 million) earlier this week, from Atomico Ventures and some high-profile angel investors. While many traditional video games don’t contain many social features, Playfire features include a profile, in-game player statistics, a way to track favorite games, and notifications about relevant news stories, videos and site discussions.

Back here in the US, Marina Del Rey, Calif.-based Six Degrees announced a $7 million round led by Time Warner investments for its ActionAllStars.com sports game. Founded by entrepreneurs with experience in mobile gaming and sports television, the company’s game lets you create virtual athletes to compete against each other in a virtual world. The company also plans to begin selling virtual goods, like sport items or avatar customizations, according to VentureBeat.