Nearly a month ago, we first reported that gaming giant EA (ERTS) was looking to acquire large social game developer Playfish. Today, the deal was made official: EA is acquiring Playfish for $275 million in cash plus up to $125 million more in earnouts and equity retention bonuses.

For those wanting validation of the future of virtual goods-based business models inside social games, your wait may now be over. Free to play social games represent the largest and fastest growing segment of the US virtual goods market, which will top $1 billion this year and will grow to over $1.6 billion next year.

Today is a symbolic day in the young history of the social gaming “space.” When we started ISG in early 2008, we wondered just how quickly social gaming would grow. Now, it’s clear that the whole games industry is taking note. Now that EA has acquired Playfish, the evolution of “social games” across platforms will accelerate even more quickly.

We just spoke with Playfish COO Sebastien de Halleux about the deal, the future of virtual goods monetization in social games, and what the acquisition means for the industry.

Justin Smith: Congratulations on the announcement. From the beginning, why was EA interested in acquiring Playfish?

Sebastien de Halleux: EA has believed since the beginning that social games would be an important part of their future. This is also apparent based on the titles they’ve released themselves. We’ve known each other for a long time – our team comes from the game industry. At Playfish we have always strongly believed in IP creation, and this is the kind of approach that resonates very well with EA. The one thing that excites me the most is the combination of really strong IP. We now have access to bring it to the social space now. There are also big cross platform opportunities too – as you know, EA is very strong on the iPhone and other platforms.

Why did you decide to sell now, vs waiting for some other option down the road?

The space right now is extremely new and a greenfield. All companies are focused on pure growth. But you’ve heard me say that there will be an S curve around taking care of our audience and building IP. EA gives us more resources to grow right now – more marketing budget to reach new users in new ways – but over the longer term this is the best way to secure the dominant position that we’ve been aiming for. EA is one of the most formidable players in the world in terms of games overall.

How will Playfish be working with EA on its other social gaming efforts?

We will drive this as aggressively as we can by using the best IP [EA's] and our experience. It’s too early to see what that will look like exactly. Our goal will be to own the social gaming experience over the long term by delivering the highest quality social gaming experience.

Does today’s acquisition validate the model of social games monetizing through virtual goods?

This is the biggest validation this industry has had, and I can guarantee you this transaction would not have happened if there was not some sustainable value. But value is easily confused with maximum revenue in the short term. We want to create the most valuable IP over time. We want to create the Star Wars of social games, or whatever franchise you can think of. Lets face it, there’s only so many people on earth, and at some point you move out of hypergrowth and into how well you nurture your audience and take care of them. Every industry has cycles, and as we move there in social gaming, EA is a great fit for that.

There have been a lot of people harshly criticizing the idea of virtual goods inside social games, as though players are buying nothing. Let’s take a step back. There has been a confusion between the marginal cost of production, $0, and the perceived value. Think about what you buy when you buy a movie ticket – you buy the right to experience some emotions. What do you “have” afterward? Even when you buy a physical flower, you don’t have anything very long afterward, but rather you are buying the emotion it creates in the receiver. That is how that good is priced. When you buy a birthday cake, you’re not paying for the cake, but the emotion the receiver gets.

It’s the same with virtual goods. It’s a value that’s very, very tangible. It’s maximized around social emotions and social expression, and often time sensitive like birthdays. Think about the fashion industry – your fashion is a statement about what kind of person you are to your social group. When users decorate their virtual home in games like Pet Society, which sold 8 million pumpkins for Halloween, our users tell us the reason they buy those things is they want their friends to check out their Halloween decorations. But how many friends can go to your real house vs. check out how you’ve expressed yourself in a game on Facebook or MySpace? So the value of a virtual good can be in some cases higher than that of phyiscal goods.

There has been some misunderstanding that most social gaming revenue comes from offers. What role have offers played in the monetization of Playfish games to date, and what role will they play going forward with EA?

Yes, there’s a bit of a misunderstanding here that needs to be dispelled. For Playfish specifically, the vast majority of our revenue is direct transactional revenue from end users, i.e., not involving an advertiser. The bottom line here is that we are trying to create high quality products, and the ultimate test of quality is do users want to pay for the product. There’s no such things as a low value player, there’s only low value experiences. There should be a game that appeals to everyone. The potential for direct transaction revenue is very large – there is a lot of room to grow.

Myth #2 is that all offers are bad, or that all advertising in general is bad. We have been using offers very conservatively because we believe advertisers have a role to play in social game monetization. There are some types of game play and experiences that can be monetized through advertising in the form of sponsored games, in game advertising, or offers. We have been working with TrialPay on some high quality offers that have meaning to users, for example some items on Valentine’s Day. We work with advertisers where there is a very well defined process and value for advertisers and users.

We are also working with Super Rewards/Adknowledge because they were the first to enable publishers to fully control quality. We categorically refuse to work with anyone that doesn’t give us offer level control. From day one we have scanned every offer from our providers. We had to remove many offers from our system because we believe user protection is very important for the long term.

We do believe there is a future for CPA in social games. The industry needs to mature. It’s like the early days of internet advertising – it’s all about quality control. Ultimately, we need to grow the advertiser base. But it has to be done with the utmost guarantee around quality. I do think the debate over the last couple weeks has been very healthy. Through this the industry can hopefully self regulate and improve, but this is not something we have been involved in. Some people call it the most conservative view, we call it the most long term view around high quality offers.

So how would you describe advertising’s role in social games in the long run?

The long term promise of this industry is to attract a new audience to play games. It’s to bridge the gap between the 1.6 billion web users and the 200 million consoles out there. To do that will take the ability to deliver the right game at the right price in the right way. This brings up IP – whether the IP comes from inside the space (like Pet Society or Restaurant City), or outside the space (like in sports, which hasn’t happened yet today), this is where there’s a lot of excitement about being a part of EA. Now have access to IP to make a lot of new social games to reach large new audiences that may not have been reached by many of the existing games.

So what’s in it from an advertiser’s perspective? You can address friends whether you are a food brand or a car manufacturer – there are ways to augment your brand in experiences that are a good fit for the user. Even with just direct transactions, social games will be a multi-billion dollar industry in just 2-3 years. If we can tap into advertising dollars as well, it will be the first time the games industry has been able to do that, and it could become a meaningful complement to revenues overall.

How are you going to increase your marketing efforts now that you have the additional resources from EA?

This will require a lot of work. It’s hard enough in one country, but it’s another thing on a global basis. We will accelerate this, whether it’s advertising or IP. There is a big part of the global audience that we’ve yet to reach.

How will the acquisition affect Playfish’s product strategy? Particularly cross-platform.

I don’t think this will affect our product strategy. It will not change our high level process of design. We will be focusing on quality.

We are leaders in cross platform social games on the iPhone. EA has 7 of top 10 iPhone titles. Our view is that social games will come to all platforms – everyone has friends, no matter what platforms you are on. No one is better tooled to deliver on that perspective than we are.

How will Playfish fit into the EA organizational structure?

We will remain operationally independent. Our teams and studios are proceeding according to plans. This will just accelerate our goals to build value in the social gaming space. Users will see very little change – just us being able to execute faster.

We will be becoming a part of EA Interactive, along with EA Mobile and Pogo. As you saw from the deal structure, we are all 100% committed. We think this deal is the best way to accelerate our goals for the industry.

This is a big event in the history of the social gaming “industry.” What’s the significance of the acquisition today more broadly?

To me, personally, this is just the beginning. The first two years have been about getting started.  Everyone, beyond just gamers, has a desire to play with their friends. They were just waiting for the right products, which needed companies with the right business model to create them. With 1 billion people online, there is a huge market here.

EA’s acquisition validates this space, and shows how big this is about to become. Now, this is going to grow on a really massive scale. Everything that happened before this will be remembered as the early birth stage. Now, things are really going to get interesting. This will become a multi-billion industry over the next couple of years.

For whatever reason, some of the biggest games on Facebook seem to be growing slower this week versus last week, according to AppData. Specifically, the past few months have seen Zynga’s FarmVille — and then Café World — gain millions of new users each week. But on today’s list of the top 20 applications with the most new users, FarmVille comes in at number 5 with 781,000, and Café World at 13 with only 395,000. “Only” is relative, as these are still the largest games on Facebook. And Zynga’s other games, like Mafia Wars and Roller Coast Kingdom, are also on today’s list.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Mafia Wars	26,764,060	+1,094,482	+4.09
2.	FarmVille	63,704,394	+781,298	+1.23
3.	Mobsters 2: Vendetta	4,493,661	+559,275	+12.45
4.	Bejeweled Blitz	10,635,910	+401,424	+3.77
5.	Café World	28,372,852	+394,972	+1.39
6.	Sorority Life	7,728,334	+326,556	+4.23
7.	Castle Age	1,905,213	+244,560	+12.84
8.	what are you born to do?	1,031,395	+225,366	+21.85
9.	Forever Friends	1,625,516	+209,026	+12.86
10.	Animal Paradise	4,361,060	+180,854	+4.15
11.	Restaurant City	18,188,206	+175,990	+0.97
12.	Which Zodiac Sign Are You Most Compatible With?	787,280	+169,492	+21.53
13.	Barn Buddy	7,195,681	+129,706	+1.80
14.	Texas HoldEm Poker	18,877,827	+122,381	+0.65
15.	WHAT IS YOUR PURPOSE IN LIFE?	135,179	+101,650	+75.20
16.	Pillow Fight	2,650,652	+96,044	+3.62
17.	Graffiti	3,048,534	+88,502	+2.90
18.	The Hierarchy	99,114	+88,049	+88.84
19.	UNO™	2,612,336	+85,105	+3.26
20.	Online People	1,140,444	+84,688	+7.43

But why did none of them gain the millions they had before? Did Facebook’s switch from a raw news feed to an algorithmic feed a few weeks ago make it harder for Zynga (and other developers) to engage users? Perhaps Zynga has cut back on running ads in Facebook in the past week?

Growth among the top games does appear to have slowed down this past week, versus the week before, and more noticeably than growth of top applications, overall. Not on the list — because it does not identify itself as a game — is Happy Aquarium, by CrowdStar. It came in at number one on the overall list of the top 20 growing apps, as we covered over on Inside Facebook this morning. This virtual aquarium decoration game gained 2.37 million users to reach 25.1 million total, making it the fifth-largest app on the platform.

Playdom also shows up, with Mobsters 2: Vendetta and Sorority Life making the list. So does Bejeweled Blitz, from Popcap Games.

There are some other interesting new apps on the list, from game developers we haven’t seen much. One is virtual farming game Island Paradise, from NeoPets creator Meteor Games. Another is fighting game Little Warrior, from an independent developer team. And another is Caste Age, a nice-looking fantasy role-playing game that’s also from an independent developer team. There’s also Fish Life, another virtual aquarium game, from Singapore-based Clipwire Games. However, neither Island Paradise nor Fish Life show up on this list, for the same reason that Happy Aquarium doesn’t.

On today’s game list, there are a few other notables, like the official Uno Facebook app, made by Gamehouse, and The Hierarchy, from Serious Business.

Nearly a month ago, we first reported that gaming giant EA was looking to buy Playfish. Today, the deal is official. The purchase price is $275 million in cash, with $25 million in “equity retention arrangements,” according to the press release, as well as “a maximum of $100 million” based on meeting performance milestones over the next two years.

The significance is that EA, one of the largest video-game makers in the world, believes that its future is tied up with social gaming. Playfish has distinguished itself by creating well-polished social games and gaining tens of millions of users.

In fact, as Inside Social Games readers know, we broke the story around a month ago. From our first article:

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.

We and others had heard the deal was for $250 million at the time, but we heard a couple weeks later that it might be more. From our second article:

EA has been doing due diligence on Playfish, we have heard from multiple sources, meaning it has been going through the company’s financial reports and other information to determine that it indeed does want to make the purchase. We do not know if the deal has fully closed yet. Our understanding is that Playfish has been in a “no shop” period, meaning it won’t talk other potential acquirers as EA completes its review. However, some sources have previously said that the deal may have already closed. We have also heard that Playfish’s banker is J.P. Morgan….

One reliable industry insider we spoke with believes the amount is “north of $400 million.” But we have also heard that the number was “less than $200 million.” Hmm. Perhaps the “north of $400 million” number includes some sort of earn-out plan? For sake of comparison, kids virtual world Club Penguin sold to Disney in 2007 for $350 million, with the possibility of earning another $350 million based on performance over the next years.

It’s not clear when the deal closed. EA is announcing its earnings today, and it is has been in its quarterly quiet period until now — which explains the company’s silence on the rumors over the last month.

Most of Playfish’s games are on Facebook, and the largest one is virtual pet-caring game Pet Society, which has 21.5 million monthly active users and 5.24 million daily active users. The second largest is virtual restaurant game Restaurant City, with 18.1 million MAUs and 5.30 million DAUs.

Like most social gaming companies, EA makes the vast majority of its money through direct payments. While it does run some advertising offers, the offers are from TrialPay, a company that focuses on running high-quality ads from major brands. Many offer companies have been running low-quality offers like mobile ringtone subscriptions, and they’ve have been coming under heavy criticism for it. But Playfish’s reliance on direct payments and high-quality offers means it has not and will not be much affected by these issues. Indeed, the biggest way it is affected from that issue is that many people outside the industry have come under the mistaken impression that social games make most if not all of their money from offers.

The bigger issue, now, is that Facebook is introducing a wide range of changes to its developer platform, getting rid of notifications and other features that apps currently use to reach users. Playfish is likely to be less affected than some other game developers, as it has focused on making its games fun, first; instead of users getting tricked into sharing the game with their friends, they happily do it. Now, with EA’s money and large pool of gaming talent, Playfish will be especially well-positioned to compete against market leader Zynga. For example, Zynga may spend up to $50 million this year on Facebook ads, to help it gain more users. With EA, Playfish can easily do the same.

This is also a nice exit for a couple venture firms: The company has raised $21 million from Accel Partners, Index Ventures and Stanhope Capital.

Last month, Aurora Feint Inc added a developer spotlight that showed select third-party games on OpenFeint.com. In the company’s latest effort to help other iPhone developers better market their games, the social platform has introduced the “OpenFeint Gold Program.”

Chosen iPhone titles will be “extensively promoted by Aurora Feint Inc. on OpenFeint.com, on the OpenFeint dashboard, in other games, and on partner websites.” The recognition program will be on a monthly basis, and the company is taking submissions for December.

In fact, the first game to showcase, for November, on OpenFeint Gold is the award winning title, Fieldrunners from Subatomic Studios. Deceptively, simple in its design, it has been described as the Tetris of tower defense-style games. It features beautiful visuals and easy to learn game play, it is easy to see why it was awarded the “Best Mobile Game” and the “Excellence in Art” awards for the 2009 Independent Games Festival; not to mention it has nearly 9000 five star user ratings. The game developer has also stated that it will be “refreshing” the title with more “platform-specific features and content” this holiday season.

Zynga, the largest Facebook game developer and one of the largest on MySpace, has taken offers out of all of its games — a reaction to the appearance of scammy offers within Zynga’s new game, FishVille.

This is the latest blow to offer companies in social gaming. Zynga “has not been able to control the ad content as it is managed by the offer companies that we work with,” chief executive Mark Pincus wrote on his blog today. The company has previously said it works with six offer providers, with offers making up around a third of its revenue overall.

“[We] are removing all CPA offers across Zynga games until we can control their inclusion and presentation ourselves,” he says. ” This will be effective by end of day today. This move is worth it for the long-term user experience and value to our partners like facebook and myspace.”

Zynga launched FishVille last Friday, and when we covered it we noted the presence of mobile offers. The ones we saw looked legitimate, but TechCrunch found some that weren’t. Offer provider DoubleDing said it had included these offers by mistake. But the mistake came at a terrible time, as much of the industry has been already tarnished by the presence of scammy offers in games.

The result is that Facebook has taken FishVille offline. While Zynga has been running these offers in its games for many months, it is no surprise to see the company decide to take all its offer providers offline now. More, from Pincus:

Yesterday’s mobile offer issue was particularly painful as we had helped fund DoubleDing earlier this year in the hopes of cleaning up the space and raising the bar on user experience. We intend to influence them and others to improve their ad content and be long-term focused for the success of the social gaming and social networking industries.

A baptism of fire for social gaming – Last week, Facebook told large developers and offer providers that it would be cracking down on scammy offers. This was followed by a TechCrunch article over the weekend that blasted the industry for mobile quiz ads and other forms of scammy direct-response advertising that all too often have appeared in offer walls within social games. Although the severity of the scam problem is still not known, offer companies have been pulling out questionable ads, and a number of others have been making public pronouncements about their own scam solutions. And this week, leading offer company Offerpal got a new chief executive, George Garrick. In a company blog post, he wasted little time in admitting that a number of problems had occurred. Meanwhile, word also leaked out that Offerpal founder and departing chief executive Anu Shukla is in court with a former cofounder over ownership of the company. Social gaming is a tough, young little industry and this week was especially brutal. But most gaming companies make most of their money from direct payments, from virtual goods that users are more than happy to buy — and not all offers are bad. The increased scrutiny and criticism of the past week will end up helping social gaming prove its legitimacy.

Cyworld gives up on U.S. — Apparently North American and South Korean gamers are slightly different. Cyworld, a virtual world owner, spent three years and $110 million trying to crack the U.S. market, and now it’s closing its operation. The service also warns that current U.S. users better not use their acorns.

Ngmoco picks up Miraphonic — Miraphonic makes “Epic Pet Wars” for the iPhone, in which players level up pets to fight each other. More on touchArcade.

Storm8 sued for collecting phone numbers – The developer of iMobsters and Vampires Live is accused of illicitly pulling user’s phone numbers, according to a class action suit filed in Seattle by one Michael Turner. Storm8 said in August that a “bug” was causing it to collect numbers; the suit says that doing so requires “very specific and specialized software code.”

Glu Mobile still working on iPhone monetization — Glu Mobile reported $500,000 in revenue from next-generation cellphone platforms for its third quarter, out of total revenue of $19.6 million. The company lost $4 million.

Electronic Arts is taking yet another step into the social realm this week with a brand new Facebook title, Spore Islands, developed by the EA studio, Maxis. Already, we have seen the efforts the console developer has put into social games, virtual goods, and so on through miscellaneous social features in a handful of its mainstream titles, virtual goods transactions, and freemium play. Now, such lessons are being applied to its Spore universe.

Spore, the PC game, not the Facebook app, already has social elements, allowing users to connect to other players’ universes and incorporate their races into your worlds. This, in turn, would allow interaction with the different player species based on how each race was evolved, and it is this same concept that hinges together Spore Islands, except the Facebook app has a much more social focus.

Players begin by selecting the type of environment their island should be, followed by a simple creature creation screen that allows them to pick a different physical attributes such as mouth, eyes, body, legs, etc. Sadly, the level of customization is nowhere near as enticing as the full game, but it’s still not too bad, all things considered.

Each physical feature also has survival attributes associated with it such as ferocity, speed, stamina, and so one. This makes the player choices a little deeper as the best looking creation may not be the most efficient one when it comes to Darwinism.

Once a creature is born, it appears along with two other, randomly generated, “wild” creatures, and the evolution game begins. The primary currency in Spore Islands is, well, DNA (which is generated passively every couple of hours, but is also purchasable). By clicking on the “Evolve” button, players can redistribute a creature’s statistics to make it faster, sturdier, add abilities, and more. In order to discover just what stats are needed, there is actually a feature that allows you to observe how your island’s residents interact.

This view actually works like a science observation, putting the player in a top down view that automatically plays out all the happenings on your island. From here, you can see how long your creature lives, how many times it gives birth, how it hunts, and so on. Each time you observe, you earn points that can be used to open new creature slots so you can make more creations, as well as move yourself up in the leaderboards.

As is to be expected of Maxis games (they are the developers behind The Sims, after all), Spore Islands really is a nice and well made app. If there is any one complaint, it is that the customization was one of the most fun elements in the original game. Nonetheless, Maxis does do their best to circumvent the limitation by adding a few new concepts such as nifty hats and animations (at the cost of DNA), in an attempt to create greater personalization.

It remains to be seen if users will want to play this lighter version of the PC game. As with any social game, the challenge now is to continue improving the game based on how users respond to it.

[It looks like not all of the bad offers had been taken out of FishVille's offer wall, we are disappointed to say. In the latest embarrassment to the industry, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington took a closer look at some of the offers in the FishVille offer wall provided by DoubleDing, and noted some apparently scammy ones. He also discovered that his account was blocked from seeing these offers, while others weren't.

Here's what Zynga told him in response: We asked all offer provider networks to remove the mobile category. Upon learning today that one provider was still showing 6 ads, we asked them to remove these too. They told us they hadn’t realized this was still in their testing queue and immediately removed them.”]

Zynga, the largest developer on Facebook — and one that has come under increasing scrutiny recently for its use of scammy advertising offers in games — has just soft-launched a new title called FishVille.

The company trademarked the name “FishVille” recently, so the launch is perhaps no surprise. But the move was very quiet, as the app currently has 61 users — and no, we didn’t forget a few zeros in that number.

The game is what you get when you cross the very popular new genre of Facebook apps built around the virtual aquarium idea, together with Zynga’s ruthless ability to take popular genres and create its own hit to compete against entrenched leaders.

The company has done the same with Mafia Wars among role-playing games, with FarmVille among virtual farming apps, and most recently Café World among virtual restaurant apps. Those titles are now at or near the top of our leaderboard of the largest apps overall on Facebook’s platform.

FishVille, in particular, is taking aim at recent winners like Happy Aquarium from CrowdStar. That game has recently surged past a number of big Zynga titles to reach 24.0 million monthly active users, and it is now the fifth largest app on the entire Facebook platform, according to AppData. Others, like Fish World, have also gotten millions of users. In fact, we’re not quite sure how many big fish games there are on Facebook — there are a few significant ones made by Asia-based developers, for example. Virtual aquarium games, from our understanding, first got big in China, before they got big as apps on Facebook.

Fishville itself is pretty straightforward. You start with a virtual aquarium, with a few fish in it. You harvest the fish, sell them, use your earnings to buy fish eggs, then feed the fish. If you’ve played FarmVille, you’re probably familiar with this dynamic. Other features include the ability to invite friends, and earn additional coins and experience by visiting their tanks. As with other games, Zynga has users wait certain amounts of time as their fish grow — a good method of keeping people coming back for more.

And, of course, if you need some extra coins in order to buy more fish, you can purchase them through the usual variety of direct payment methods, or earn them through offers. A look at Zynga’s offer wall shows that things are pretty clean now — yes, there are mobile quiz ads, for example, but these are actually allowed by Facebook if the offers do not mislead users about what they’re getting into.

Growth to come?

Zynga, no doubt, plans to cross-promote this app with its other popular titles, as well as buy ads on Facebook to help get it in front of more users. Those two strategies have been key to how it has grown other games.

But Zynga has also excelled at optimizing “viral channels” to reach new users,  Before Facebook changed its news feed from a raw stream to a slower, algorithmically-tuned one a couple weeks ago, Zynga had mastered the art of getting users to share information from games into the stream. This means users were seeing massive amounts of stories about FarmVille, etc. — and now they’re not, so much. Zynga’s games seem to have done fine since the redesign rolled out on October 23rd, from the little data we have available to work with (see more, here and here).

	Name	MAU
1.	FarmVille	63,304,313
2.	Causes	35,209,300
3.	Café World	28,477,669
4.	Mafia Wars	25,782,246
5.	Happy Aquarium	24,002,808
6.	Pet Society	21,468,688
7.	FamilyLink.com (formerly We’re Related)	20,522,599
8.	YoVille	19,735,219
9.	Texas HoldEm Poker	18,757,583
10.	Farm Town	18,380,105

So we’re very interested to see if Zynga can pull off a repeat of Café World, which launched at the beginning of October and since then has grown to be the third-largest app, with 28.5 million monthly actives as of today.

The wild card — or actually, a lot of wild cards — will be the changes that Facebook is planning to introduce to its platform this month. Features like notifications will shortly be folded in to users’ inboxes. For example, the app currently uses the one-line feed item story to automatically share user actions back to their profile walls — a practice that users sometimes find surprising, and one that won’t be available for too much longer.

A range of emerging games are in this week’s up-and-coming list. The list is based on sorting which applications with between 100,00 and 1 million users grew the most over the past week on AppData, that identify themselves in the “games” category of app on Facebook. A close look at this sometimes reveals promising new games that are getting traction, as is the case this week.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	JibJab	896,201	+190,506	+21.26
2.	what are you born to do?	913,576	+189,108	+20.70
3.	Which Zodiac Sign Are You Most Compatible With?	707,949	+153,073	+21.62
4.	Do you think…?	208,255	+98,426	+47.26
5.	Tarjetitas	958,169	+85,017	+8.87
6.	Word Island	207,995	+52,987	+25.48
7.	Moment Of Truth	299,248	+48,263	+16.13
8.	Halloween Pumpkins	253,923	+42,134	+16.59
9.	Fairyland	538,711	+39,807	+7.39
10.	Write In Pictures	632,279	+36,230	+5.73
11.	Name Analyzer	682,290	+34,008	+4.98
12.	Kamu cocoknya punya pasangan orang mana ?	169,586	+27,534	+16.24
13.	Status Cloud	288,300	+25,327	+8.78
14.	Çete Savaşları	770,856	+23,877	+3.10
15.	Ma Ferme	375,230	+22,639	+6.03
16.	Manda un Beso Sexy!! Besame!	249,158	+21,594	+8.67
17.	Gift Creator	450,421	+20,627	+4.58
18.	World Poker	966,448	+20,166	+2.09
19.	Hatching Eggs	279,968	+17,999	+6.43
20.	Benim Çiftliği	304,933	+17,700	+5.80

At the top is animated e-card creator JibJab, sort of. The app lets you create and share these cards with your Facebook friends — although the company has apparently taken the app offline, because when you try to add the app you’re taken to a landing page telling you to visit JibJab’s main site. JibJab has been big on using Facebook Connect, and apparently it decided its home site was a better venue for its business. We’re not sure how the app is continuing to post growth: It gained 190,000 new users to reach 896,000 monthly actives.

Other notables include Word Island from MetroGames, a Scrabble-style game that gained 53,000 users to reach 208,000 monthly actives this past week. The next two apps have appeared on the up-and-coming list in the past, and have continued to inch their way up. One, Fairyland, is a simple sort of virtual gardening game; it grew by 40,000 to total 539,000 monthly actives. Poker game World Poker grew by 20,000 to reach 967,000 monthly actives — it’s about to hit 1 million and graduate from this list.

There are a couple other games not on the list, apparently because the creators don’t identify the apps as “games” in Facebook’s app category directory (the directory that we use to index games in AppData). But we noted them over on Inside Facebook this morning. One, Icy Tower, an Ice Climbers-style game we covered recently, grew by 135,000 new users to total 735,000. Another game we recently reviewed, called Goobox – Free Games, is also seeing a solid surge. It grew by 85,000 to end the week at 526,000. The game is actually a collection of mini-games, with each one having a goo theme.

This week’s list saw the usual mix of simple quiz and gifting apps as well, that for some reason identify themselves as “games.” We’re ignoring them, especially as some look spammy and maybe scammy.

Social games often blur the lines with virtual worlds, and here’s a teen-focused example of that worth a closer look: Planet Cazmo.

This free to play game, of sorts, puts young players into an alien world full of talking, humanoid aliens, but what makes it most interesting is that it is a curious mix of MMO (massively multiplayer online) features, exploration, customization, and innovation.

When starting up, players are able to customize their own personal avatar, which can look either human or alien. Customization is a big part of Planet Cazmo. As one might expect, a myriad of clothing exists, a lot of which is branded (such as Dwight Howard from the pro basketball team Orlando Magic). Obviously, this alone adds a great deal of user creativity, but is something further embellished by the ability to also decorate a virtual home, purchase a pet (for paying members only), and even get a personal vehicle.

Rhe first vehicle users start out with is a skateboard, moving about the world in point and click fashion. Which brings up another point. Everything within Planet Cazmo is saturated with the underlying premise of being “hip” and “cool;” everything from how an NPC (non-player character) speaks, to the style of clothing and hair.

Hip or not, everything in the game costs a bit of in-game currency. Each day, players earn a small allowance for logging in, but are also able to earn the in-game coins through competing in a myriad of in-world mini-games or completing World of Warcraft style quests for the memorable denizens of this alien planet. As a means to entice players to convert to paying users, however, many of the virtual goods are limited to only full members.

Perhaps, it is left to wonder what is so special about Planet Cazmo at this point. Frankly, the virtual world is a bit simplistic, and the controls a bit obnoxious, but this isn‘t why it caught our attention. In the past, virtual worlds have made generic claims along the lines of “throw a party.” However, Planet Cazmo very much has this, in the form of virtual concerts. Yes, concerts.

The most recent was on Halloween by the band Weezer from Geffen A&M Records. Evidently, such virtual shows have been going on for some time as Cazmo has hosted a number of arists such as Sean Kingston, Jay Sean, Jordin Sparks, Kristinia DeBarge, Ciara, and more. The concert is hosted in a rather sizable virtual in-game arena with the artist appearing and singing in an avatar format. The avatars are synched up to streaming music mixed in with recorded, personalized shout outs from the performers.

As it turns out, this features has shown to have been exceedingly popular among the users of Planet Cazmo. They very literally pack the space with there avatars, chatting, dancing, spinning, and… well… having a good time, with each “instance” of the concert fitting hundreds of avatars. In fact, it has become popular enough that the average time spent at them is well over 30 minutes, and Cazmo has recently added a backstage area for members, allowing them to virtual meet the celebrity and get their “autograph.”

In regards to a business perspective, the events are often riddled with virtual, as well as real, goods for sale. The concept might be working well, as the site has also recently made a deal with Tommy Mottola, in the hopes that they will bring more celebrity content into virtual worlds as both a form entertainment and virtual goods monetization.

We actually got a chance to briefly speak with founder, Mike Levine who, while not being able to give specific metrics, stated that “hundreds of thousands of kids have come to the concerts and love them.” As a matter of fact, he also said that they are currently “planning a major holiday benefit event with a major charitable organization, with some very big acts.” A relatively small but growing virtual venue, Planet Cazmo hopes to make this show their biggest yet.