In recent time, ninja-based games appear to be popping up all over Facebook. Some have involved automated combat while others were strictly role-playing games. Here’s a somewhat different take: NinjaTrick, from CyberAgentAmerica, which combines combat with a personalized ninja and plants them into the middle of a ninjutsu battle royale. It’s perhaps most similar to Ninja Warz, which we covered yesterday.

After customizing their ninja, players are dropped right into the fray. While most games tend to teach players how to play with automated bots, or step by step tutorials, it would seem that this sort of thing is too soft for this ninja game. The tutorial, as it were, consists of a big ready arrow pointing to the “Play Game” button. Okay, sure, why not. Then a nice window says “Collect 7 Gems.”

At this point, you’re thinking “good, so here is one of the things I have to do in the game.” Then you see three other avatars in the loading screen. One is apparently a teammate and the other two are enemies. Wait a second…. Yup, that was the end of the “tutorial” phase right there as the new player ends up scurrying about a nine grid room searching for gems and getting pelted with attacks. It also didn’t help that the very first match we were in had a “master” level player in it. Despite the absurdity of this tutorial and matchmaking design, the game did show some promise.

After the baptism of fire, the combat actually has a lot of depth to it. As players complete matches, they earn coins and experience. This allows the user to buy new items for their avatar that not only look better but actually grant them extra abilities in battle. Such items include jutsus, traps, and other special equipment.

Consider jutsus to be like spells. Basic combat is done by clicking on an enemy, but you can perform different spells for added effects (such as healing, immobilization, or straight damage). Also, the traps are extremely cool. You can actually place them anywhere on the battle field to damage, slow, or otherwise hinder your opponents in some way.

All of these tricks are necessary as matches can vary in size and type dramatically. You might find yourself in a 2 vs 2, or a four team free-for-all. Games can go as high as eight players in total. That number, suffice to say, adds a great deal of chaos to the game, which, once you learn how to fight, is good fun.

Unfortunately, to be able to compete you need to have better equipment, and herein lies a significant issue that we have seen in a number of games using virtual goods. An overwhelming majority of the purchasable items require the “Ninja Gold” virtual currency and cannot be bought using the in-game coins. Furthermore, the goods that can be bought with coins have significant level requirements, while the Ninja Gold items seem to have none. This means the player either has to pay real money right away, or get their butt whipped for a rather extensive amount of time.

Of course, this aspect of the game may convince some portion of players to pay — which is great for the developer, if not the long-term prospects of the game’s development.

On a lesser note (depending on your perspective), NinjaTrick is one heck of a spam factory, too. It seems that every time you do anything significant, it just has to send a notification out to every… single… one of your Facebook friends as well as giving the option to post it to your feed. The feed option is enough, the nine million notifications is obnoxious.

Thankfully, since the core game play (combat) is good. The issues are easily fixable. The  game has been steadily climbing to nearly 145,000 monthly active users.

Zynga said last week that it is beginning to test a new feature: SMS updates for its Facebook role-playing game Mafia Wars. A small portion of the game’s players can now receive text notifications about in-game activity on their mobile devices. We’ve gotten a few more details from the company about what’s going on here.

4Info, a provider of SMS advertising and publishing services, is the white-label SMS provider, Zynga tells us. For now, players can only receive notifications from the game, including ways of adjusting what sort of notifications you get, and when you get them. But they will eventually be able to take in-game actions via SMS, Zynga told TechCrunch last week.

It is possible that this is a way for Zynga to start to make its Facebook games more independent. Having a diverse user base is a good idea for any company, and something that public investors will want to see when Zynga decides to go public. The concept is worth examining.

How could Zynga use SMS to move beyond Facebook? People need to give Zynga their phone numbers in order to get the texts, and if people get used to playing the game from their phones or other devices, then maybe Zynga could take the user names and phone numbers and use both to create separate identities — and services — outside of Facebook.

However, Zynga is so far looking committed to building features for its games that rely Facebook to provide real-world identities and communication channels. Facebook, for now, is where the most distribution and revenue is.

The point of the SMS updates, at the moment, is to get users engaging more with the Facebook application. The feature may help boost usage as Facebook removes app-to-user notifications soon, although Zynga said it had been working on SMS integration before Facebook decided to make changes. SMS is a promising new channel, for other reasons, too: it helps people with weak internet connections access the game, and it is a proven way for users to buy virtual goods (for more on that, check out mobile payments companies like Zong and Boku). Facebook itself uses SMS to let users do things like get updates from their friends.

Here’s a look at other examples of Zynga relying on Facebook within off-site features. It has come out with a web browser toolbar for Mafia Wars, so players can keep track of the Facebook game while surfing the rest of the web. It has also been launching free-standing web sites for FarmVille and other Facebook apps that exclusively use Facebook Connect, meaning that users can only use these sites via their Facebook accounts. From everything we’ve heard, these sites are designed to give Zynga more space for features.

And, in terms of mobile, Zynga has launched five games for the iPhone: Mafia Wars, as well as Word Scramble, Live Poker, Vampires Bloodlust and Street Racing. Some of the others include Facebook Connect integration so you can sync your Facebook account and play against your Facebook friends on the device. However, after launching Mafia Wars months ago on the iPhone, the game still does not use Facebook Connect.

So, despite Zynga’s general focus on building for Facebook, could the ongoing lack of iPhone-Connect integration be a sign that the company is moving beyond it? Probably not, at least at this point. Zynga vice president Bill Mooney said at the DiscoveryBeat event earlier this fall that he decided to disconnect development of the Mafia Wars iPhone app from the development of the Facebook app because “the iPhone development cycle is too slow.” While Zynga updates its Facebook games twice a week, updates to its iPhone games must go through Apple’s iTunes App Store approval process, thus delaying deployment.

In other words, Zynga’s iPhone development — if not all other development — has been de-prioritized as it has worked on its Facebook games. The result this past year is that it grew from 5 million daily active users on Facebook to around 65 million. Meanwhile, its mobile presence has grown to between 5 million and 6 million daily active users, with much of that growth likely driven by the brand recognition it has gained through Facebook.

Zynga chief executive Mark Pincus has, in various interviews, talked about the importance of mobile. However, he also recently reiterated to us that social games are still in their formative stages of development. While social games contain some social features, many of the social interactions happen outside of the game, whether on Facebook or in real-life situations. Pincus expects Zynga to add more in-game social features in the future.

We expect Zynga to continue building out SMS services, iPhone apps, and other mobile and off-Facebook features, but we also expect it to continue to rely on Facebook as it makese these moves. So, in terms of the company’s focus on mobile, it is more likely that Zynga will add Facebook Connect to the Mafia Wars iPhone app than try to separate its Facebook users from their Facebook identities.

The reason is that Facebook identities closely follow real-life identities. As Mooney said at the conference, the problem with Zynga’s games on Facebook’s social network rival MySpace is that MySpace friends “are not your real friends.”

Zynga’s goal is to create social games, and for the time being it needs Facebook’s real users, communication channels, and open platform to do so — other platforms, including MySpace and the iPhone, don’t have all of these the components.

So, what Facebook offers, Zynga needs. Social features drive growth, in turn allowing Zynga to fully benefit from virtual goods payments its primary means of making money. While the iPhone now allows payments within free-to-play games, it does not yet have the sorts of social features that allow for the same magnitude of user discovery as Facebook (at least that we have seen to date). Unsurprisingly, when we asked Zynga about SMS and its other mobile plans, the company explained mobile as “a natural extension,” not as a way to escape Facebook.

While Facebook’s changes to notifications and other communication channels may slow Zynga’s growth, the core social value is still there.

[Zynga SMS image via TechCrunch]

A new app called Ninja Warz, from Broken Bulb Studios, has been climbing up our emerging game leaderboard in the past couple of weeks — now here’s a closer look.

The concept is simple enough: Build a grand ninja army and dominate the world. When the player starts, they are prompted to choose between three of the great ninja clans (shadow, lotus, and fire). Each clan has its own benefits, such as critical strike rating, but in the end it all seems to balance out, so it really seems to just come down to aesthetics. Regardless, the game immediately walks you through a short and sweet tutorial, and while the game is simple enough to where it could be figured out on its own, it was very nice to have — a lesson many developers could learn from.

After the tutorial, the player should be set with a single ninja, armed with a stick and a “relic” (relics are merely items that can be equipped to boost that ninja’s stats). From here, it is time to fight, fight, fight. By clicking on the little Japanese dirigible, players can challenge other ninja armies to battle in attempts to garner gold for purchasing new equipment, experience to level up, and karma to train your ninjas with. Furthermore, the fighting is not random. Unlike some games of a “fighting” nature, players can choose who to fight, regardless of level. Basically, that means if you are too weak to fight those of your newest level, you can earn some money, karma, and experience off of lower level players.

The fight itself is actually fairly amusing to watch as the two ninjas jump into a dust cloud fraught with damage values and swinging weapons. Unfortunately, this means it is entirely automated, and rather short; at least until you get more than one ninja. Moreover, there is a fairly obnoxious load time in between each fight as you have to exit the Flash module so you can select an opponent and then reenter.

In addition to equipment, it is almost mandatory to save up and purchase more ninjas (not to mention more fun to watch). Of course, each purchase makes the next one much more expensive, but it allows players to utilize more relics and more equipment. This creates a small amount of resource management as players try to intelligently distribute karma and gold amongst their minions. However, unlike many games that have multiple resources such as these, Ninja Warz has a feature called the “Daimyo” that allows players to exchange one currency for the other as well as claim a reward every few hours.

Of all the features, Ninja Warz has, perhaps the only one that came off as annoying (beyond the loads between fights) was the Ally requirement needed for various items — this feature is clearly intended to try to get you to invite your friends. While relics seem to be locked via your level, weapons not found in the in-game shop can occasionally be dropped after a battle. However, these are often limited by the number of allies (Facebook friends in the app) that you have. Friends must actually accept an invite for you to receive credit, making that shiny katana in your inventory all the more taunting.

Despite minor complaints, the game is pretty amusing to play. Currently, the game has around 500,000 users for this month, but we will have to wait a bit longer to gauge its lasting popularity. Regardless, it is a great start for this Facebook newcomer, and with two more apps also in development, the immediate future for Broken Bulb Studios looks fairly positive.

It’s been a big year for social games as the category has exploded in popularity by orders of magnitude, going from a fad to a revolution that may well change the definition of gaming forever.

While it’s easy enough to figure out what the most popular games are simply by going over to AppData and looking at the numbers, I thought the end of the year might be a chance to reflect on what were some of the most significant games of 2009, and discuss their impact, for better and for worse.

Some of these games were hits, and others were bombs, but they are all games that will have (or should have) an impact on the way we’ll make our games in 2010.

10. Happy Aquarium

Yes, Zynga has created their own successful aquarium game, but Happy Aquarium is one of the first mainstream hits that seems to have found success without being quickly swamped by a tidal wave of clones. The aquarium category isn’t particularly innovative — it’s a mash-ups of pets and farming – but it has all the elements (emotional connection, appointment gaming, collection) that made this game dynamic one of the biggest splashes in 2009,.

The growing success of Happy Island is proof that this company is more than a one hit wonder, and Crowdstar may ready to play in the big leagues, if they don’t get purchased first.

9. Pogo Puppies

Now destined to be put to sleep at the end of the year, there probably isn’t a better example of the unique challenges that face mainstream developers in the social space than this big budget disaster from Electronic Arts that never managed to break through the 100,000 user mark. There are entire articles that could be written about this game. While it’s polished and professional looking, it often felt more like a utility than a game. The interface seemed designed to hide its entertainment value, and actively push the player away from exploration. Someone clearly thought they could make a game that would appeal to a more “sophisticated” user, but ended up making something that appealed to almost no one. Nothing quite sums up the problems with this game as succinctly as the apparently fatal mugging that is occurring in the corner of the splash screen.

Never kick a dog when he’s down…

8. Crazy Planets

While almost everyone was focused on chasing the big categories, PlayFish spent a good part of 2009 in a blaze of creativity, attempting to discover the size and shape of what the social audience is willing to play. One of its more audacious experiments, Crazy Planets ,used elements familiar to social gamers, including friends lists, and mission structure similar to the ones found in every social role-playing game, but mixed it with the gameplay elements of Worms, a classic turn-based strategy game.

Like most PlayFish titles, everything felt polished and fun. Players could stick their own head onto their avatar, and journey to worlds filled with goofball robots that exploded into a satisfying jumble of cogs and valuable minerals that could be used to upgrade your weapons and your world.

The result was (unfortunately) a truly noble failure that succeeded in every way except for being a major hit — the game has tapered off with less than 3 million monthly active users. The game remains a must-play for anyone who still believes that the once the social audience gains some sophistication they’ll start to behave more like gamers used to. Its problems are proof that something truly “different” is happening in the the social, and that making a hit title involves more than just a checklist of “easy” game dynamics.

7. Castle Age

While there have been any number of blockbuster games over the last year that have gathered millions of players in a matter of days or weeks, what’s been missing are the “slow burners”—titles that can patiently gather and grow a loyal audience in spite of more complicated game dynamics, or niche themes.

Castle Age seems poised to be the first game to truly earn that title by growing audience of just under 3 million MAU over a period of months. While it’s more complicated than most other games in the same category, Castle Age is mostly a class act, with attractive graphics, a strong understanding of how to integrate viral and community dynamics, and a few clever tricks up its sleeve that push it up above the average social RPG title. The game was only marred due to its creators’ infringement, at one point, of some images from Massive Black.

Players can, for example, have other players join them in their effort to take down a level boss, by showing up to take a few whacks at it over the course of day. It’s nothing revolutionary, but there’s an attention to detail that pushes the game up above the average title of its type. Taken altogether, it feels more like a true RPG than almost any other game in the space. Hopefully it will continue to grow in the New Year and stand as an example that sometimes determination and hard work that can be just as effective as cash and flash.

6. Mafia Wars

Zynga’s first big hit in the social space, Mafia Wars has spent the last year continually redefining itself, acting as a public laboratory of sorts as Zynga has bolted on a number of “expansions” and experimental dynamics that have managed to both plug the game’s original economic leaks, and keep it alive and growing in spite of a massive amount of competition determined to steal away the audience.

Outside of having “crime farming”, there probably isn’t a single new dynamic that Zynga hasn’t tested in this game in one form or another, from lotteries to having first come first serve items that appear in the live feed. Once Zynga gets a hold of a good idea, it works hard to effectively leverage it into as many of its games as possible.

Mafia Wars is no longer the hot title that it once was, but if you wanted to know what Zynga was thinking about it 2009, it was worth keeping an eye on.

5. Island Paradise

In the last year no other genre has had as much experimentation as the farming category. Between Barn Buddy, Country Story, and a half a dozen other titles, there have been a variety of attempts to tweak the fundamentals of the farming dynamic and build an audience. Most of these games went for twists on gameplay such as adding in more ways to interact with your farm plots, or the addition of quests.

Other games radically altered the genre, turning farming into fishing, for example. Island Paradise went the other direction, building a strong and simple farming title, then improving it by adding a colorful layer of high quality content along with a well integrated theme. By combining this with knack for community building that came from their expertise as the creators of Neopets, they built a strong mid-tier hit that has Meteor Games poised to be a break out company in 2010.

4. Mobsters 2: Vendetta

Although it didn’t land with a splash, Mobsters 2 proved that Playdom can trade body blows with Zynga when the company puts its mind to it.

A confident and thorough reworking of the social RPG, Mobsters2 honestly wasn’t a game I was expecting to find much traction with an audience already swimming in mafia games. Although its popularity may have peaked, the fact that this game was able to grow its audience in a crowded market is a testament to how much impact solid content and a great interface (along with well thought out viral integration, marketing, and cross promotion) can have on making your social game a hit.

3. Bejeweled Blitz

Standing nearly alone in the “social arcade game” category, PopCap has perfected this three-in-a-row game even further since launch. It added a number of subtle tweaks, such as minute-long game sessions and bonuses for speed, that prove its half-decade dominance over the casual category was no accident.

While many others have tried to rework classic game dynamics and make them succeed in the social space, BB seems to have almost effortlessly shown how you can make it work if you truly understand what makes a game tick.

2. Café World

While it’s only human nature to want to hate on the winner, especially when the winner is as as aggressive as Zynga, there’s no doubt that Café World is an amazing game on every level.

While some people have accused this game of being a clone, in truth it’s anything but. Yes, it borrowed heavily from the look and feel of Restaurant City, but the gameplay was an amazing remix of the Farmville appointment game dynamic. It took the basic farming gameplay of having to click on every space in a large field of squares, and drastically reduced the number of individual areas that needed to be “farmed.” That meant that a new user could get into the game faster, and had less grinding to do when they came back. It also meant that the graphics for a pot of pea soup could be far more detailed and attractive that those for a plot of peas. Layout also became more important as customers and waiters need to be able to flow through the space. Users would spend more time looking at things to buy for their restaurant, and be more likely to spend real money to get them.

Where most social games need time and tweaking to optimize their gameplay (see Roller Coaster Kingdom), Café World launched with almost everything perfectly tuned. The audience immediately recognized and rewarded that, growing the game at an incredible pace, and creating what is easily my favorite game of the year.

1. FarmVille

Sorry to be so predictable, but there’s no way to avoid giving top honors to this category-defining monster.

Zynga applied polish in all the right places to turn this into what is clearly the social game of the year, and showed everyone else what the rules are for creating a social blockbuster.  The game itself was streamlined and simplified. The UI was intuitive and clean, with plenty of feedback, both visual and auditory. Simple tricks like being able to stack clicks made the game stand out from the competition. Zynga also rewarded exploration, letting the player know when they were doing things right through well-chosen achievements, and constant invites to discover more.

The art was a well-designed take on Zynga’s existing YoVille characters, with cute, cartoony farm animals, bright tractors, and solid-looking houses and other bits of set dressing, all done up in warm and inviting colors.

The game also took advantage of every viral trick in the book, getting players to ask their friends to help them out by adopting “lost cows” and “ugly ducklings”, and offering cash in return.

It all added up to a textbook example of what makes a mainstream hit work. It was all good, but not too good. It could be annoying, but not too annoying. The game was sometimes frustrating,  but never punished the player.

Zynga may not have done any of it first, but they did it best, and Farmville was able to find an audience by perfecting a balance of rewarding exploration, clean interface design, and rapid response to user metrics.

[Image Credits: Happy Aquarium via gamebook; Crazy Planets via Canada.com; Castle Age via gamebook; Mafia Wars via Oatmeal Stout; Island Paradise via Kea's Dream; Mobsters 2 via Mobsters Forums; Bejeweled via Games.com; Café World via seeminglee; FarmVille via FarmVille Freak.]

Andrew Mayer is a Social Gaming and User Experience Consultant with over seventeen years of experience in the games industry.

Crunchyroll has until recently been a destination site that runs Japanese animation videos and other Asian media content licensed for international audiences. But it’s beginning to create social games as a way to promote this content, with the first one being the only official application for Naruto, a long-running manga and anime series about a young ninja.

The application itself is a straightforward role-playing game. You undertake missions to gain points and access new levels via text-based combat. While the game already includes offers so users can gain virtual currency for buying virtual goods, the bigger play — at least for now — is to try to promote the Naruto brand, as Crunchyroll chief executive Kun Gao tells us. While the company has not yet added direct payments for virtual goods, the app includes very clear integration points with the home site, including the ability to watch videos in order to receive special items.

Crunchyroll has separately cut deals to run 20 anime titles to date. Almost all of the episodes it offers are free, although there are lots of ads on the site for related types of things, such as for Nexon’s Maple Story massive multiplayer online game. For nearly $7 a month, the site’s premium service stops the ads, offers higher-quality video, and gives users access to the content a week before everyone else. The Naruto game itself also includes ads, apparently offered via Google, that link back to Crunchyroll as well as to other social games.

Due to Crunchyroll’s means of monetizing its content, it has almost certainly made some money off the game.

In the two and a half months that its been out on Facebook, Naruto has grown to 558,000 monthly active users and 60,000 daily active users. This is a promising start for the company’s foray into social gaming, especially considering that the game was developed in-house.

Gao explains that the company’s overall goal isn’t just to drive traffic to the home site, though. Because the license-holders for Naruto and other animes are interested in broader promotion — for Naruto merchandise, for example — the game is intended to broadly promote the brand on social networks. “As long as we promote and grow the brand, we and other licensors will make money,” he tells us. “That’s how we view the whole ecosystem.” In terms of specific dollar amounts, Gao only describes its deals as “revenue shares.”

Crunchyroll, he says, is also working on social games for other titles it licenses, and plans to expand its Naruto offering in the future. Because Facebook users have real-world identities, the company can also begin targeting them for games, videos and ads that are more relevant to the interests they show in their profiles and in the games they play. “Before, it was hard to pinpoint the audience, but now you can engage and upsell the whole experience,” he tells us.

For those not familiar, Crunchyroll has been around since 2006. It got its start running unlicensed content, but has developed relationships with major Japanese anime companies over the years. Today, it offers more than 50 percent of all newly-released one hour anime titles on its site, according to Gao. In the past, animes have typically run in Japan, then are licensed to television broadcasters in the US and other countries, then come out on DVD a year later. Crunchyroll instead broadcasts the titles on its site within an hour or so after they run in Japan, making itself an early way to for anime lovers to access new content.

We haven’t seen many content distributors get into social gaming in the way that Crunchyroll has. Perhaps the closest example are the RPGs that Lolapps has created to promote MMOs and console games from big gaming companies — an effort that seems to have gone well so far. We expect more content companies to experiment with social games in the future.

Old and new games hit the top 20 daily active user list this week with the number one position being taken by Pillow Fight, a new app released this month.

The simple poking app uses a “hot potato” style of game-play with a two day timer alerting the winner. Released in September 2008, the game returned to the top 20 after a long absence due to the inclusion of seasonal pillows into the game by developer Shikha, helping the title raise a majority of its 12 million user base according to AppData.

It will be an interesting game to watch to see if users continue with the title or if it sees a drop in daily activity after New Years only to boom during other upcoming holidays that the developer makes pillows for.

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Pillow Fight	1,201,933	+705,334	+58.68
2.	Mafia Wars	6,054,476	+296,411	+4.90
3.	Entrevista tus Amigos	593,760	+268,046	+45.14
4.	Bubble Popp	275,581	+154,437	+56.04
5.	Happy Island	1,447,647	+136,706	+9.44
6.	Ninja Saga	382,658	+96,945	+25.33
7.	Country Life	1,607,873	+94,607	+5.88
8.	歡樂癲地 Funland	97,406	+62,903	+64.58
9.	開心農場	2,659,287	+53,530	+2.01
10.	Texas HoldEm Poker	4,938,461	+37,524	+0.76
11.	Tiki Farm	256,059	+27,175	+10.61
12.	Okey	393,050	+24,201	+6.16
13.	Ponzi, Inc.	139,601	+20,646	+14.79
14.	開心魚塘	335,360	+15,574	+4.64
15.	My Town	42,355	+15,164	+35.80
16.	Three Kingdoms Online – Best Browser Game of 2009!	19,543	+11,450	+58.59
17.	Sunshine Ranch	805,998	+10,996	+1.36
18.	Sag’ die Wahrheit!	11,179	+10,652	+95.29
19.	Warstorm	30,906	+10,507	+34.00
20.	Do you think…?	10,697	+9,511	+88.91

All numbers are for the week ending December 29.

Mafia Wars has been on-and-off with the DAU list. This week it ranks second with 296,000 new players or 5 percent of the titles 6.1 million DAU.

In third, Entrevista tus Amigos (“Interview your Friends“) by Mappdev is the highest ranking foreign-language app, although we’re not sure why the developer has categorized it as a game. Anyway, answering questions about your friends has proven to be an effective — if not wholly original — concept for Spanish-speaking players as the title now has a DAU of 594,000 players and increased its numbers by 45 percent this week.

Bubble Popp filled a want with audiences. The bubble-breaking game gained 56 percent this week after raising 48 percent last week. The Bust-a-Move-styled game now has a DAU of 276,000 players in its first month and is fourth place on our list.

CrowdStar‘s newest game, Happy Island, gives players an island to populate with attractions for tourists and now has 1.5 million DAU in its first month on Facebook and landing at fifth. It is one of seven games on the list to rely on some form of virtual theme park or farming type of simulation mechanic.

Despite the wealth of farming apps, this weeks list might be the most foreign-language-heavy DAU list yet. A quarter of the titles on this week’s list are held by non-English speaking title. the highest ranked is, again, Entrevista tus Amigos. The title with the largest DAU is 開心農場 (“Open Heart Farm”) which has 2.66 million players. And the game with the highest percentage increase is German gossip game, Sag’ die Wahrheit! (“Tell the truth”) which raised 95 this week after being on Facebook for nearly a year and a half. This is one of the first German apps to ever make one of our top 20 lists.

Foreign language apps from last week, 開心水族箱 and Tarjetitas, are missing this week. Yet both titles have been raising steadily throughout December.

Next week should see the final numbers from an app-heavy December and which foreign apps gained the most users throughout the month.

Veteran entrepreneur Mark Pincus has had a huge year. His company, Zynga, went from being one of several relatively small social gaming companies on Facebook’s developer platform to clearly take the lead in terms of users — and, from what many people hear, revenue.

With a raw total of 230 million monthly active users and nearly 60 million daily active users on Facebook alone, it is many times larger than its nearest rivals, according to AppData. These numbers do not include the company’s games on other platforms, like MySpace and the iPhone.

Based primarily on the sale of virtual goods within games like virtual farm game FarmVille, the company will likely do at least $200 million in revenues this calendar year, according to our estimates, and revenue growth is looking very strong as we enter 2010.

And, earlier this month, the company closed a $180 million round of funding, in part to let employees sell stock. The signs, more than ever, point to an initial public offering, even though the company and our sources insist this is not likely to happen any time soon.

Pincus and his company have also faced a fair amount of criticism. The company, like most others on Facebook, has aggressively used viral channels, like notifications, to reach users. Due to Facebook’s recent policy enforcement actions, the holidays, and whatever else, the company has recently seen a slight dip in traffic. Earlier this fall, Zynga was heavily criticized for running scammy advertising offers within its games; it pulled all offers, temporarily, while it ensures that it can cleanly run this revenue stream.

2009 has been a big and dramatic year for social gaming, and Pincus has been in the middle of it all. Here are his thoughts on the coming year.

Inside Social Games: Despite the massive growth that Zynga and other social games have seen this past year, the last couple of weeks have seen slower growth. What do you think is going on here?

Mark Pincus: It feels like the industry is taking a breather. Maybe users are, too. It seems like our games and the rest of the industry have more or less been flatlining quite recently. We’ve been in this position before — holidays have been down or flat every year. But I watch things on a daily and weekly basis, and this month everything is still growing.

Our goal had been to get to 12 million daily active users by the end of the year, after starting at 5 million — we’re ending with around 65 million. Obviously, we underestimated how big it would get.

ISG: So what are your plans for next year? What game mechanics do you plan to add? What sort of new game genres do you plan to get into?

MP: As we look forward to next year, we know every quarter, every year the stakes get higher. The level of quality, the level of socialness has to go up.

When we think about next year, we know we have to double down on social. We want to deliver, we know whole industry has to deliver way more on the promise. A very social experience already occurs in and around our games, but mainly outside.

I feel that social gaming today is where Friendster was at the beginning. Yes, it was popular, but people didn’t use it, they talked around it. You went to bar and talked about it. But the amount of interaction inside wasn’t that high. Facebook took it to next level, with features like pokes, the news feeds, the wall for user profiles. Communication with your network was on the network.

I think that social gaming is in a similar place. In the next year to two years, it needs to be more about real user interaction and communication inside of the gaming experience. Today, its very hard to communicate with friends in FarmVille, but people talk about it at the bar, in dorms, on Facebook, and everywhere else. In 2010, they should talk about it in FarmVille.

While there are some ways to communicate already, I’m just saying we haven’t made it low friction.

ISG: Do you plan to continue supporting your big older titles like Mafia Wars and Zynga Poker (Texas Hold’Em)?

MP: Yes. They’re still here, and bigger than they were a year go. We’ve continued to develop those and innovate those games. We’re going to keep developing what exists, as well as building new ones. We’ll keep investing in franchise games while experimenting.

ISG: What sort of game mechanics do you plan to introduce. A lot of your simulation games this year featured asynchronous game play, even though your earlier titles, like Poker, were synchronous. What’s next?

MP: I think there’s a continued trend towards greater simplicity. We learned that lesson this year. While our games are more accessible than hardcore games, nobody realized making them more simple would unlock more users. Nobody would guess that one of most popular categories would be fish swimming around in a bowl.

I would be shocked if it didn’t get even more simple. I think we’re seeing new games that are pushing the envelope more in terms of production value in flash, the level of interactivity, the juiciness….

But this is a big question for 2010. Tadgh Kelly has the best-articulated criticism from the gaming industry about the future of social gaming — and Zynga [ed. here]. His thesis is that none of these are real games. Real games, as he sees them, are more along the lines of first-person shooters or strategy games. He believes users will graduate to more complex game mechanics, more like what you see in traditional games. That’s a great question for the year — we should talk this time next year and see what has happened.

ISG: How have you already tried answering this question in terms of products?

MP: We’ve continued to bring more sophisticated mechanics into our games. In FarmVille, we created buildings that mattered: chicken coops, dairy farms, etc. and designed more of the game around them. These are somewhat popular, but not everyone in the game figures them out. It’s a trade-off.

Sophistication loses many players. But maybe someone will show us how to do it in a more sophisticated way.

All types of player groups continue to expand ever week. We’ll try and see where users are willing to go. So far, feel that 2009, where answer was that simplicity sells. We would all like to think that complexity is great, but we haven’t proven it yet. Do we want to be raising the water level an inch for everybody or a foot for 10% of the players.

We tend to stay more in our mass market games like FarmVille and try to raise them an inch. It’s very hard to introduce more complexity. You don’t know which 10% of users want which mechanic. It’s not our model to aim at 10%. We’re still at the growth stage. It might eventually be interesting to segment and try to build deeper games for smaller groups. But we want large group memes.

ISG: What do you think about the pending arrival of the Civilization series on Facebook? What about Electronic Arts/Playfish introducing a title like The Sims?

MP: I’m sure EA/Playfish will try to see if one of its big titles will cross over. This will be interesting for the whole industry to watch.

ISG: But this is not where you’re headed?

MP: I can’t predict the world more than a quarter out. It’s not obvious to me today. But they’re playing with a different hand. If I were them I’d be trying to do different things.

ISG: So what are the other big trends that you expect to continue playing out in social gaming? What about direct payments? Offers — which we’ve heard Zynga is bringing back soon? Ads?

MP: I think the big trend is that it will continue to be users paying where they see value. There’s a lot of opportunity for game developers to show value to people, things they want to spend money on. I think offers are just another kind of ads. For some users, they’re a replacement for spending money directly. I think offers and ads are always going to be an add-on on top of payments. I dont think they’ll ever come close to the power of direct user payments.

I said this to you a year ago [ed. here]. The big story is user payments, even though a lot of grown-ups find this hard to believe.

[Photo via The New York Times]

A few big developers have dominated the social gaming headlines this past year: Zynga, Playfish and Playdom. But a range of others having been rising up on our AppData leaderboards, including RockYou, CrowdStar, 6 Waves, to name a few.

Fortunes can change quickly on Facebook’s platform. We should not necessarily assume the companies that have gotten big this past year — or in the past few months — will be dominant next year. Indeed, traffic to almost all social games has dropped in the last couple weeks in a double-whammy of users being distracted by the holidays and new policy changes from Facebook impacting how developers can communicate with users.

The next year should see lots of turbulence on the leaderboards, as talented developers from other parts of the gaming industry move in, and as the spam-laden viral channels that many leaders have relied on continue to get shut down (er, reoptimized).

But here’s an overview of where the current Facebook social gaming leaders are. Note: while some of these companies also have significant presences on MySpace, the iPhone and other gaming platforms, Facebook offers both the largest platform and the most visibility into traffic, so it is what we focus on, below.

> Continue reading on Inside Facebook

Everyone has certainly played games such as tag or hide-and-seek, but these are games that have more or less died with our childhood. Well, the folks over at Blowfin are looking to breathe some life back into these sorts of activities by combining them with one of the internet’s most pop culture icons, ninjas, in this iPhone title aptly named Ninjahit.

Consider Ninjahit to be a combination of the two aforementioned kid’s games, mixed with a dab of paintball. Once players register on the Ninjahit website it’s time to make some hits. The concept is simple enough, take out all other players before they take you out. Using the iPhone camera, players must hunt down opponents and get a snap shot of them without getting caught. Once you get the picture, you have “ninjahit” them and can trash (“smak”) talk them from the web page and send them the image. Assuming the victim confirms the hit, they are eliminated.

Of course, this does lead to one critical issue. Already, the core mechanic of this assassination app depends an awful lot on the honor system. Luckily, players are able to rate each other letting others know just who plays by the rules and who does not. Granted, it’s not a foolproof system, but it does at least incorporate some peer pressure to play amiably.

Despite this hiccup, the concept of the game is pretty cool, and with three different games to choose from, it really does offer something that is as fun as tag, without having the rest of society frown upon you. Moreover, with each game mode having a different level of intensity there is something for every level of ninja out there.

The least intense is easily the “Face Off” mode (which is available in the free, lite version) in which it is you versus one other person. The first player to be ninjahit loses. With a time limit of a few hours, it can be kind of fun, but it really doesn’t feel like it would be something to play often. However, if you upgrade to the full, $1.99, version, you gain access to two more modes: “The Assassin” and “Me Against the World.”

In both modes, there are an unlimited number of players allowed to join and the match can last up to seven days. In Assassin, every player receives a random target of someone in the current game from the server. No one else knows who that person is, and once you assassinate them, you get the target that they had. Suffice to say, you move down the chain until you have been killed, time expires, or are the only one left.

As fun as that sounds, the best mode is probably “Me Against the World.” This is the ultimate challenge of your sneaking skills because it is one big ninja free-for-all. Everyone is an enemy, and they could be anywhere. The winner is the last man standing.

Frankly, Ninjahit is a really cool game. Unfortunately, it does have one disheartening flaw. That is that it must be played on a smart phone. Currently, it is available on the iPhone and iPod Touch and it is stated to be in beta for Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Android. While the game is cross-platform, ask yourself: How many of your friends own one of these devices? In other social games on such devices, the play is limited to two to (maybe) four players, but Ninjahit is a game that doesn’t reach its potential without a multitude of users.

Blowfin seems to realize this as you can use the iPhone’s GPS to find and join games in progress, but it feels a little awkward to track down people you’ve never met before (stalking charges anyone?). Also, would you go up to a person in the subway and yell “tag, you’re it!?” This is a similar feeling.

In the end, Ninjahit is a fun game for friends, college students, and co-workers. It’s intense, it doesn’t fill too much time (so procrastination isn’t an issue), and it gets people off their butts. That said, though, the game feels ahead of its time. It is really cool, but in most peoples’ circle of friends, those that own something like an iPhone are often a minority. Granted, these devices are slowly becoming more common, more affordable, and more mainstream, but they are not quite there yet. Until that happens, Ninjahit will, sadly, not likely reach its full potential.

Another promising game that uses the same concept — albeit making your iPhone into a gun — is Gunman, which we’ll be taking a look at soon.

Starball, an iPhone/iPod Touch game from Quantum Squid Interactive, uses the device’s accelerometer — and a few social features — to live up to its “simply addicting” tagline.

The app is straightforward enough. Players navigate a green ball around a flat, rectangular field with the only objective being to collect as many randomly appearing stars as possible before you die. Here is the catch: The controls are completely based on tilting the iPhone, making use of its accelerometer. As if this didn’t make things tricky enough, the map is also full of smaller enemy red ball. These little buggers bounce back and forth either horizontally or vertically, and if they touch you, it’s game over.

Seems simple, no? Well, it is, but simplicity hardly means boring (look at games like Bejeweled). Also, appearing around the playing field are yellow question marks that turn into random power-ups to help the player reach the stars before they run into a red ball. Power-ups include SloMo (slows red balls), Shrinkage (shrinks your ball), Time-Freeze (stops red balls), Ball Bomb (destroys nearby red balls), Inviciball (destroys red balls you touch), and Ballbuster (destroys all red balls). Most of these last only a limited amount of time, so wise usage of them becomes paramount as you collect more stars and, in turn, trigger more red balls.

Since red balls appear with every star collected, the higher the score, the harder the game gets. Couple this with the accelerometer tilt controls, and you have a recipe for some challenges. Luckily, it doesn’t take very long to get used to the controls, and once you do, you are able to further challenge yourself on one of three difficulties: Beginner, Normal, and Insane, with the harder the difficulties releasing more red balls with each collected star.

Starball also uses OpenFeint’s social gaming platform for the iPhone. At the moment, the one it makes the most use of is the OpenFeint leaderboard system that tracks scores for all three difficulty levels. Games like Bejeweled or Tetris benefited from getting users to compete against existing high scores; Quantum Squid makes perfect use of this through the platform.

Quantum Squid is looking to update Starball in the near future as well. Beyond new music, power-ups, and levels, the company is planning on including achievements as well, and if experience has taught us anything, this simple addition to any game has added hours to many a game player’s experience.

Honestly, the only complaint to be had is that sometimes the tilt controls can become marginally obnoxious. Over time, it feels like they shift a bit off center and other times you can’t see quite what is happening based on your perspective (i.e. lying down versus sitting). Of course, this is just the nature of this type of game, and Quantum Squid does a good job of mitigating it by allowing you to pause and recalibrate at any time during play. Granted, it does break the flow of the game a bit, but the effort is most certainly appreciated, and frankly, the game is too much fun for us to care.

That said there are no real complaints to be had. Starball is simple, easy to learn, and a ton of fun. Furthermore, with its social features growing through OpenFeint, the level of addictiveness will only get worse… or better, depending on how you look at it. Highly rated by other sites and its players, Starball is well worth its $0.99 price tag.