Every year around this time, when I was selling casual download games across the Oberon Media distribution platform, we’d see the numbers of games sold begin to decline: disposable income and leisure time tend to dry up as everyone gears up for Christmas.

And so after months of impressive growth, some of the biggest games on Facebook are reflecting what could be a similar seasonal trend on the social platform – virtually every big game has seen a decline in their Daily Active Users (DAU) since their peaks earlier in December:

Collectively, these games have fallen 12.0% from their monthly highs, dropping from 97.0 million DAU to 85.3 million on December 21. A Facebook platform issue that impacted all applications for 48 hours starting December 9 might also have pushed users to give up the games and focus on their holiday shopping in earnest. In addition, some of these titles have had extenuating circumstances that might have caused the variances. Mafia Wars retooled their infrastructure and put in anti-hacking measurements massively impacting the game’s DAU. In contrast, Pet Society launched a new lottery feature to drive users to return every day and helped improve DAU.

Yet because the decline is pretty consistent across multiple developers and game types, it’s reasonable to attribute these declines to the seasonal trends I’ve experienced in the casual game download space. Still, could it be a bit more ominous signs of a slowing in Facebook’s growth? Or signs that games are maturing and life cycles are declining as more games enter the market?

Are There Other Factors Beyond Seasonal Trends?

There is no question that social games growth has mirrored the massive increase in Facebook subscribers – Facebook has added over 100 million monthly active users (MAU) in the six months that FarmVille has grown to just short of 75 million MAU. Having a continual influx of new users makes it relatively easy to continue growing the game.

The pace of Facebook monthly active users seems pretty consistent (at least for numbers reported through November). But what is really interesting in the graph above is comparing the relative progressions of each of the most recent Zynga releases.

FarmVille is by far the fastest growing and in general has been able to maintain its growth. The successive titles of Café World, FishVille and PetVille all appear to have smaller initial trajectories and then to plateau at a certain level, each one slightly below the former release.

This is reminiscent of the casual download space, where a developer would release a genre-defining title, like Diner Dash, and then churn out successive titles based on that mechanic. Each one had some initial huge boost in interest and sales, but over time the games held user interest (in terms of spending money to buy the title) for shorter periods of time and typically at a lesser number of units.

It is still early in the social games life cycle, the numbers for these games are still in their beginning stages and it’s probably too early to say they are on their decline – Café World only Monday released achievements in the game, which based on examples of Mafia Wars and FarmVille helps boost the DAU count.

If the casual download game space can provide any insight on this trend, changes will come the week after Christmas. Once Christmas is passed and users break out new computers or have holiday money to spend, the sales of PC download games usually rebound – and I’d expect the DAU for top Facebook games to start their upward swing again.

And if the numbers don’t rebound? We may get some interesting insights into the life cycle of a social game.

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.

Social and casual games developer Digital Chocolate has just launched their newest app for the Facebook platform, MMA Pro Fighter. With virtual currency powered through Offerpal Media, the title has players fighting each other as they vie for the championship of this mixed martial arts role playing game.

As with any RPG, players start by selecting what “class” they want to be. In most cases this consists of three choices that often equate to earning more money, stamina, or health. Pro Fighter, however, gives six choices: Three fighting styles and three grappling styles which are kickboxing, muay thai, and boxing, and judo, brazilian ji-jitsu, and wrestling. Players may select one of each, immediately adding a level of personalization to their character.

Along with fighting style, players are also able to customize their fighter’s look with other, with purchasable items becoming available in the shop after character creation. However, one has to wonder just how much customization can ever be done when all they wear is a pair of boxing shorts.

The rest of the game should be fairly familiar to most RPG players. The goal is to fight and raise your rank, and that’s just what you do: Fight other players. In each fight, the game pits up against another player avatar of your choosing and proceeds through an automated sequence of narration (that can be skipped) describing the fight. What is interesting, is that players have two stats to watch in each bought – health and cardio.

While health is self-explanatory, if your cardio drops (which it does for every action), your character starts becoming tired, leading to more mistakes or missed attacks. Suffice to say, this is an important stat to raise. Of course, doing so isn’t too hard, as player’s will be more than familiar with the method — doing missions, or quests, or training, or whatever you call it in your RPG of preference.

This is probably the most standard part of Pro Fighter. Players do training, master a “mission” and buy additional equipment. In turn, they gain experience and cash. As they do so, their stamina drains and they must wait for it to recharge.

Interestingly enough, players can actually buy items to actively recharge said stamina or to use during fights. Unfortunately, money does get a bit tight at times. More than items and the aforementioned equipment, players must also buy and master new techniques for their chosen fighting styles; something that gets very costly, very quick. Granted, players can earn more cash by mastering training sessions, fighting, or even completing challenges (achievements), but this gradually becomes rather slow.

This is where Offerpal comes into play – in order to earn a little extra coin. With the virtual currency Pro Points (which can be converted to cash, stamina, health, etc.), players are welcome to take part in offers or make direct purchases using methods such as mobile billing or prepaid cards. Moreover, the standard computer character that gives you stuff for your Pro Points (i.e. the don or the godfather in mafia RPGs) is… well, also likely intended for a male audience: ring girls.

Frankly, MMA Pro Fighter is a pretty solid RPG. It has enough similarity to standard mafia-style games to not scare people off, but enough differences to make it unique and interesting. To be honest, the only real burning question is whether or not a mixed martial arts title will appeal to the social networking crowd. In the past, we have seen many a sports title not do as well as it should based on quality alone. However, Pro Fighter is not as major a sport as something like NFL Football, and it doesn’t involve a team, only a single fighter, thus making it more personalized. Nonetheless, it is difficult to say whether this will make a difference or not.

World hunger is an ongoing problem all over the globe, and according to the World Food Programme (WFP), countries such as Cameroon are in dire need of help. With around 16 million people, 40% are living on less than one U.S. dollar a day To help fight the issue, social gaming company Zynga is stepping up to the plate.

Within three of Zynga’s larger titles, players can purchase virtual goods that feature the WFP’s symbolic red plastic cup, which represents the organization’s various school meal programmes. A portion of each proceed will then go to helping feed school children in Cameroon.

Among the game’s offering the WFP-themed items will be FishVille, Roller Coaster Kingdom, and YoVille. Below are the purchasable items for each game:

• FishVille: Users may purchase a WFP Glitter Globe for 25 Sand Dollars (FishVille’s virtual currency). 50% of each transaction will go to WFP.
• Rollar Coaster Kingdom: Users can purchase a WFP cup ride for 25 Coaster Cash, with 50% of the revenue going to WFP.
• YoVille: Users may purchase a Camaroon-themed food platter using 10 YoCash.

This marks yet another humanitarian move on the part of Zynga as a part of their efforts in “transforming the world through games.” Previous efforts included donations from FarmVille farmers to help feed children in Haiti – which has earned over $700,000 – and the YoVille campaign to sell virtual pet bulldogs and tabby cats in order to help the San Francisco SPCA. That initiative has raised $90,000 since Spring 2009. See more about these programs at Zynga.org.

With presumably over 300 million players (according to the Casual Games Association) casual gaming is certainly one of the most popular forms of computer gaming in today’s market. Couple that with the potential of social networking, and you have quite the potent recipe. To that end, the casual gaming portal from Geewa, recently launched on the Facebook platform as Live Games.

With its stand-alone site already garnering around 2 million monthly active users and a peak concurrent user count of more than 20,000, the Czech company is looking to expand its success by bringing its collection over 5,300 games to the Facebook network. Players will be able to navigate the sea of titles using real-time searching or by browsing them based on ratings or newness.

In addition to discovering and playing the myriad of titles, Live Games users can also create and customize their own personal avatar, purchase virtual goods and currency (G-Points), become part of the hall of fame (leaderboards), and participate in weekly leagues. Moreover, while playing games, players will be able challenge their Facebook friends to both asynchronous and synchronous multiplayer with the former being a simple “beat my score” sort of challenge. Synchronous games, however, will be live and include games such as Pool live! and World Soccer live! Users will also not be limited to just Facebook either. As a matter of fact, the application will also allow for challenges to Geewa users outside the social network as well (i.e. users on the stand-alone site), since all instances of the portal connect to the same central database.

Another curious feature, is that Geewa attempts to incorporate a full screen mode within the Facebook app itself. Unfortunately, Facebook page format limits it only to a marginal expansion of size. However, through Facebook Connect, the developer has made a work-around. Players can actually switch back and forth between the Facebook application and the website in order to make use of the full screen view without losing the social outlets.

According to the company’s official blog, this is only the beginning of social integration for Geewa. In the future, the casual company is looking “to optimize [its] technology for Facebook’s Newsfeed.” While it does not go into further depth, the company does look to be going the third party route as it states it is looking to grant access to it platform’s application programming interface, allowing other casual (and, likely, social) game developers to make use of Geewa’s virtual currency, multiplayer engine, and more.

While games such as FarmVille and Farm Town are currently going the winter wonderland route (in terms of virtual goods) a new farming title from Playdom is taking a different approach. Many are probably wishing for a nice, warm tropical setting now that we’re getting deeper into winter. So, Tiki Farm, one of the developer’s most recent titles, is here to help make that wish come true.

The last time we went farming in the tropics was with Meteor Games’ Island Paradise, and while the basic premise is the same, Island Paradise is a more Robinson Crusoe feel. We should also note that other themes have recently changed latitudes, like new theme park-style game Happy Island from CrowdStar.

Tiki Farm is reminiscent of Cancun or Honolulu. However, it is, like its predecessors, your standard farming app. Players plow land, plant crops, sell them, and repeat, all the while decorating the virtual farm space granted to them. It’s as simple as that.

Just like with the mafia-style role playing games, the farming genre is pretty cut-and-paste. Nonetheless, it is curious to see it following similar patterns in the fact that we are starting to see different flavors of the same core game play. This is fairly common for video games in general, and social games in particular — Zynga’s Mafia Wars, Fashion Wars, and Dragon Wars are all the same basic role-playing game, yet one has you as the modern “bad guy,” another a socialite, and another a fantasy hero.

The lesson here, however, is that these different themes allowed the company to attract different user tastes and demographics. This is something new farming app developers should consider. Don’t get into the cage with a 900 pound gorilla, right? In other words, if people want to play a farming game that looks like real farming, they’re probably going to play FarmVille; Playdom seems to have realized this, thus the tropical feel.

Frankly, Tiki Farm is refreshing. Everything about the game is warm and pleasant-looking. The colors are vibrant and saturated, and the music does help to set the mood (though it does wear on you after awhile). Even the types of crops themselves add to the island look and feel; they range from sugarcane to birds of paradise.

In fact, all of the décor adds volumes to the style. While any game dealing with a virtual space can always benefit from more decorative items, Tiki Farm allows players to go either the beach patron’s route with patio sets, beach chairs, and coolers or the islander direction with stick fences, totems, and giant tiki heads.

Truth be told, there really isn’t much to complain about with Tiki Farm other than the fact that it’s another farming game. The visual style is great, the sound fits the mood, and assuming more items will be added, the current number of decorative objects more than suffices. In fact, the game even has a few game play and usability bonuses as well, including extra steps such as clearing bugs and the ability to queue up actions when you are planting multiple seeds or plowing new plots. You can even pick up and move a plot if you made a mistake (rather than having to delete and redo it completely).

Currently, Tiki Farm is sitting at just above 500,000 monthly active users, and has been growing faster over the past four days. Considering the quality and style of the game — as well as the cross-promotion and advertising that Playdom is probably doing — this is a trend likely to continue in the coming weeks. In the end, if you are looking for a new, yet different, farming game, or your just feeling a bit chilly this winter, this is one app worth a try.

The 20 games that gained the most monthly active users did well — but not quite as well as the list had done the previous week, according to AppData.

RockYou’s card-making app Birthday Cards added nearly 4 million players for a total of 28.1 million; the previous week, the title added 7.3 million. It is not actually a game, but RockYou has strangely blended its animal-caring game, Zoo World, into the app in order to get more users.

Zynga’s PetVille added 9.3 million last week — its second week out — and this week gained 3.4 million new MAUs. Slowing numbers are to be for any app this large, but they do seem indicative of this week’s numbers overall as percentage increases and gain numbers are lower this week across the board — with only a few exceptions.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Birthday Cards	28,127,948	+3,979,319	+14.15
2.	PetVille	12,828,490	+3,357,145	+26.17
3.	Zoo World	7,450,131	+1,685,244	+22.62
4.	Santa Yourself	2,937,722	+1,639,897	+55.82
5.	Happy Pets	11,273,768	+1,287,201	+11.42
6.	Country Life	4,910,244	+682,468	+13.90
7.	Texas HoldEm Poker	20,844,469	+651,012	+3.12
8.	Fish Isle	4,426,029	+585,413	+13.23
9.	FarmVille	73,035,058	+471,122	+0.65
10.	Champions Online	2,902,280	+418,973	+14.44
11.	Tarjetitas	2,030,184	+393,758	+19.40
12.	(Lil) Farm Life	6,765,741	+390,542	+5.77
13.	Treasure Madness	3,436,265	+365,346	+10.63
14.	Forever Friends	2,516,824	+330,815	+13.14
15.	Ponzi, Inc.	789,957	+274,874	+34.80
16.	Top Fish	652,524	+249,697	+38.27
17.	Poker Rivals	992,018	+228,328	+23.02
18.	Jungle Jewels	1,713,713	+215,796	+12.59
19.	Bubble Popp	472,542	+209,028	+44.23
20.	UNO™	2,842,735	+206,997	+7.28

Zoo World is making the best of its cross-promotion with Birthday Cards (and with other RockYou apps), adding 23 percent new players to reach 7.5 million monthly actives. This is down slightly from last week’s 2 million additional players to this week’s 1.7 million MAU’s. However, the title did raise three spots from sixth to third.

Santa Yourself, meanwhile, is the only top 5 title to add more players this week over last. The fourth-place Christmas app grew by 1.6 million additional users compared to 1.1 million last week. Santa Yourself also looks to be the only Christmas title to break into the top 20 MAU’s this year. This is despite a strong showing of Christmas games on last week’s emerging list.

At fifth, Happy Pets‘ 11.3 million users was made possible by a 12 percent increase of 1.3 million MAUs. However, last week the title had added almost 2.9 million.

To point, four games increased their player base by over 30 percent this week, compared to last week, which had three titles increasing by over 50 percent.

Bubble Popp saw its first appearance in the list and has a strong chance to move up having just been released this month. It’s also a good performer for this week with a 44 percent increase. Meanwhile, Ponzi, Inc. added 35 percent to its MAU of 790,000 and Top Fish had a 38 percent increase for a MAU of 653,000.

All in all, about 34.4 million, new users joined the top 20 games last week compared to this week’s 17.8 million.

Buy a Meowmodon and Help Kids – Online game Wizard101 is feeling the giving spirit this Christmas season. Players who purchase the new Meowmodon mount will be indirectly donating the full price, $15, of the virtual item to two charities; the Austin Children’s Shelter and Child’s Play. Wizard101 developer KingsIsle will not be keeping any of the revenue from the Meowmodon sales, and is making the item available until January 5th of 2010.

Smule Raises $8 Million – Smule, creator of popular, musical iPhone titles such as Ocarina, Leaf Trombone: World Stage, and I am T-Pain announced this week the raising of $8 million in a third round of funding. The investment comes from Shasta Ventures as well as existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Granite Ventures. This brings the total funding to $13.7 million and keeps the company on track to meet its goal of $3 million in sales for 2009.

PlayStation Home Hits 10 Million – Having heard little in the past few months from Sony, regarding its virtual world PlayStation Home, it finally stated, yesterday, that it now has 10 million registered users. In tandem with the announcement the console developer also revealed a new virtual space within the world called “Sodium One” from European developer Ousto.  Within the space, players will find more social outlets, becoming bartenders, serving virtual drinks, playing mini games, buying new virtual goods, and oh… wreck havoc in some very sexy vehicles of destruction.

Crispy Gamer Media Acquires GamerDNA – The gaming social network, GamerDNA was purchased just this Thursday by the games news site Crispy Gamer Media for an undisclosed amount of money. Competitor to similar companies such as Raptr, GamerDNA connected gamers across multiple platforms such as Xbox Live, Xfire, and Steam. Since its launch in 2008, the social network has raised $3 million, but now Crispy Gamer is looking to take GamerDNA to a new level.

Square Enix Begins Selling Virtual Currency – Japanese RPG developer, Square Enix- known best for its Final Fantasy series – is the latest mainstream games companys to make use of virtual currency. Users will now be able to purchase the currency known as “Crysta” in amounts of 500, 1000, 2000, 3000, 5000, and 10,000 yen with one yen equaling one Crysta. The virtual currency will then be usable for online community games, the Square Enix MMO, Fantasy Earth Zero, and the Square Enix e-store. Unfortunately, the new currency is only available in Japan.

[via Siliconera]

The iPhone App Economy is Bigger than Expected – According to information presented by mobile advertising company AdMob, the Apple iPhone’s app economy is much bigger than we thought. Presently, there are around $200 million worth of apps sold in the AppStore each month, thus equating to around $2.4 billion a year. Tthese claims are further reinforced by Apple, who states around 1.5 billion applications have been downloaded thus far. You can check out the full breakdown here.

AdNectar Uses Virtual Goods to Promote Privacy Filters – Privacy filters are screens for laptops and mobile devices when they are being used in highly populated areas. In order to promote 3M’s Privacy Filters, social advertising network AdNector is launching a number of branded virtual goods. Entitled “TMI” (too much information), the goods will feature images of people in… compromising… situations and can be sent as gifts from the Facebook application TMI Moment.

Sometrics Launches the Shop & Earn Shopping Feed – For all those Christmas shoppers out there, social analytics and advertisement targeting company, Sometrics has revealed the Shop & Earn Shopping Feed to help users earn a little something extra during their gift buying frenzies. Whenever an online purchase is made at certain retailers, the purchaser will earn virtual currency for a participating online game. Consider it like frequent flyer miles, but for computers, and on the Internet, and with pixels. Users need only click through the Shopping Feed to reach the participating retailers, make a purchase, and voila they get free virtual currency.

Live Gamer Launches Free Realms Real Money Marketplace – Known for its virtual goods transaction commerce solutions, Live Gamer has recently announced the launch of Live Gamer Exchange (LGX) for Sony Online Entertainment’s MMO, Free Realms. The new system will offer players a simple means to buy and sell game items with one another. All transactions will be authenticated through Live Gamer themselves, thereby reducing the threat of user fraud.

SponsorPay Monetizes Users Across Over 20 Countries – Established in April of this year, German company SponsorPay GmbH has provided advertising-based payments to the online gaming world. Today, the Berilin-based company states that it is now available in over 20 countries such as Chile, Canada, Brasil, and Turkey; each of which have their own localized interface, parters, and languages.

Jivebug Tracks Your Friends – As creepy as it sounds, a new Facebook app by the name of Jivebug has the limited ability to track your Facebook friends’ real life locations. Through the app, you can install the tool onto your cell phone and it will tell you, by their first name, when one of your Facebook friends is near as well as let you chat, via text message, with anyone else you happen to find (close by) who has installed the app. The tool also has a little bit of a dating feature built into it as well, giving users an subtle beep whenever a single user is near.

Answer Our Inside Social Games Weekly Trivia Question, Win a Free USB Drive from Surfpin — Tell us the correct answer to the following question before anyone else, and mobile payment company Surfpin will award you an 8GB Surfpin-branded USB drive in the shape of a credit card. The question, drawn from an article we published this week, is as follows: What is the first Facebook game, that we know, to exclusively use Facebook credits? Send the answer to eric (at) insidesocialgames (dot) com.

Inside Social Games extends a big thank you to our sponsors for supporting the continued growth of Inside Social Games. Check them out below!

Social Gold powers payments, subscriptions, and virtual economies for online games.

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Deal United is a provider of virtual currency monetization solutions for social applications and online games in Europe.

Offerpal Media is a managed offer network for social applications and online merchants.

Sometrics is a provider of virtual currency monetization solutions for social app and game developers.

Super Rewards is a monetization solution for applications and games running on social networks like Facebook.

Surfpin is a provider of mobile and landline payments for game and application developers.

SoftLayer provides managed hosting services for social application and game developers.

AdParlor is an advertising network designed specifically for social networking sites.

It’s not just western social gaming companies that are raising money these days. 5 Minutes, the China-based developer of cross-platform sensation Happy Farm, has closed a $3.5 million first round from venture firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, according to Chinese media and sources in the country.

This marks the second recent funding of a China-based social game developer. The other was Rekoo, which earlier this week reportedly raised $1.5 million from Infinity Venture Partners.

Happy Farm, a virtual farming game, has been popular on Chinese social networks including Xiaonei, Kaixin, and Tencent’s QZone. Like Rekoo, 5 Minutes moved on to Facebook this past summer, and its game now has 3.16 million monthly active users and 1.12 million daily active useres, according to AppData.

Western developers, notably Zynga, have both created their own versions of farming games and raised far more money — that company recently closed $180 million in funding, following on the record-setting success of FarmVille, a virtual farming game that now has more than 73 million monthly active users.

Still, given the success that 5 minutes — and also Rekoo — have found not just on Facebook, but on regional social networks, they appear to be in a good position to continue growing. And as virtual farming and other simulation games monetize through virtual goods, we expect they’ll continue bringing in more money as well.

Playdom has had a few game projects in the works; one is Tiki Farm, which Games.com discovered earlier this week. And, we just came across the alpha version of another: Wild Ones.

In a nutshell, the game has players create their own personalized animal avatar and wreak havoc upon other players in an explosive, last-man-standing shooter sort of game. The game could be described best as the child of the old PC title, Worms 2 from Team17. Actually, for all intents and purposes, it is Worms 2. Players scurry about a highly stylized 2D level of varying tiers, tossing grenades and bazooka shells at one another in a turn-based fashion.

The overall objective is to be the last of four players remaining. Each explosion takes a hefty chunk of life out of both the opponent and the landscape itself. In some cases, this land reformation adds to the depth of the game as it can not only impede where users can move, but if the land beneath you is destroyed, you fall into the waters below.

Each match can be played against either computer controlled bots, in a practice mode, or real opponents. And if human competition wasn’t enough, the game tends to drop random health kits and weapon caches (many of which are most curious… such as a bee gun) from the sky to aid to the mayhem. Furthermore, if a match takes too long, the water level begins to rise with each passing turn.

Of course, all of these features were in the Worms series. That isn’t to say that everything is a copy off the classic title, as there are a lot of differences: Worms fought in teams, health was lower, you could only fight one human opponent, and it had different unique weapons (i.e. the holy hand grenade or banana bomb).

What the new app does have that is distinctive, is that players are actually able to customize their avatar and even change its animal type. When you start out, all you have is a plain looking dog, but as you play and level up you will unlock a rabbit, panda, and monkey template for purchase (using currency you gain periodically or purchase). Moreover, higher levels also have greater access to purchasable weapons and more intricate level maps.

Again, the game is in alpha, so a lot is subject to change. Quite frankly, Worms was a fantastic game, so as far as game play goes, Wild Ones doesn’t earn any major complaints; well, except for that it is still basically Worms. It does, however, beg for the physics that the Worms franchise was known for. Wild Ones does have them, but they don’t feel as sensitive as Worms’ did (which is actually something you would want to copy). As an example, if a grenade landed at your feet, you were about to go sailing across the entire map. Also, the health seems a little high. It takes forever for a match to end; especially when health kits keep falling from the sky.

Also, since the game is in alpha, it’s not really possible to make changes to the core of the game anyway, but the shopping for weapons and accessories does add some uniqueness to the title. Moreover, with the social integration, it makes playing against your friends infinitely easier than its predecessor.

Thus far, Wild Ones already has over 300,000 monthly active users, and we will look forward to seeing how it does once alpha is completed.