Environmental preservation is not something everybody believes in strongly. So Paladin Studios, a company that describes itself as building “serious games” has a new one out called EnerCities. Its goal? To teach people a little bit about global energy issues, the company has built a SimCity type of game, available on Facebook and a stand alone website. Players are tasked with the objective to reach a level five city with a population of 200 citizens. Sounds simple right? Not so much….

There are five categories of sections to choose from that essentially break down into residential, economic, green, happiness, and energy. The problem is that each section has a downside, yet all produce something you need, meaning you have to keep a balance between your entire city. For example, you need to build businesses to make money, but work makes people unhappy (how ironic is that?). If people are unhappy, your population drops, so you have to build structures to increase that. However, this takes more energy, which requires more space and can use up finite natural resources….. Beginning to see the challenge?

Notice the comment “more space.” With each level, the user is granted a minimal amount of real estate in which to place buildings. At level one it is a mere seven plots of land. Remember the five categories? After placing structures, they begin to passively impact the city, increasing or decreasing stats such as happiness, population, economy, resources, and so on.

There is actually nothing the player can do after placing their buildings — sort of like real life — except place more buildings to replace them and hope they start moving closer to their goal of winning the game. The player has 100 quickly-passing years to reach level five and that 200 citizen population cap, and all this trial and error greatly diminishes both time and resources.

While there is an avatar that periodically gives hints, they never stay up for long, and the player has no real objective beyond “beat the game.” Here is the million dollar question though: How does one beat the game? No, don’t say “get level five.” What is the process one has to take to get there? The player has no real direction other than a tips page, thus devolving the experience into randomly placing structures to see what works.

The concept of EnerCities is great, and once you begin to figure out what the heck works, it’s rather addicting. Perhaps not as much as the more in depth SimCity, but it does have similar merits. Nevertheless, getting to this point requires an agonizing and frustrating amount of time to figure things out.

As painful as this sounds, the process is further compounded as the game never tells you why something is or is not happening. If it does, it’s a blurb from your avatar adviser that is gone in about two seconds with no way to be recapped. This means that the player could be losing time, money, and natural resources and not know how to fix it, and actually find themselves playing through a scenario where it could end up being impossible to win (meaning that if your city isn’t at a certain point by year 50, it becomes impossible to succeed, thus wasting the time it takes to play the other 50 years).

Despite the complaints, the game is stated to be in “public beta” so a lot of this is still subject to change.

But perhaps the difficulty is why the developer, Paladin Studios, calls itself a maker of “serious games.” Figuring out how to balance the various needs of humanity with environmental preservation is a huge and unsolved problem. There are no advisers to tell us what to do, or what not to do. The game’s challenging dynamics, its low time limit and its lack of clues together drive this point home.

With the release of PetVille last week, one of the more notable changes is that Zynga stopped cross-promoting Texas Hold’em Poker, signaling that Zynga is continuing to move away from the synchronous games of its early days and dedicating its resources more fully on asynchronous games.

I generally think of Zynga going through three game development stages:

Stage One – Turn-based social games

• Key games: Scramble, PathWords, Word Twist, Sodoku, Attack!
• These games were fairly popular in the days of Scrabulous, but head-to-head play among friends was often a waiting fiasco: Users came on at different points in the day for a asynchronous session and would have to wait for others in a game to finally log on and take their turn before game play could proceed.

Stage Two – Testing Three Paths: Asynchronous, Synchronous and Sim Games

• Key games: Mafia Wars, Texas Hold’em and YoVille
• Mafia Wars created the ability to leverage those short, multiple-times-a-day user sessions and provide a core asynchronous play style that was duplicated in a multitude of titles (Gang Wars, Space Wars, Dragon Wars, Street Rcing, Fashion Wars, Vampire Wars, Special Forces, Dope Wars, Pirates)
• Texas Hold’em (eventually renamed Zynga Poker) invested heavily in a robust lobby system, allowing users to join other Facebook users not in their network in synchronous play
• YoVille was also developed in this period (my understanding that this was actually developed externally and purchased by Zynga) providing a valuable learning experience about what worked in sim games.

Stage Three – The Rise of Sim Games and Games as a Service

• Key games: FarmVille, FishVille, PetVille, Café World, Roller Coaster Kingdom
• Short game play with appointment gaming mechanisms that are all asynchronous and built for a more broad audience
• Interestingly, all of these games have origins from other Facebook titles, except Roller Coaster Kingdom, which actually has had the most difficulty in terms of creating growth and a high sticky factor (relative to the hyper growth of the other titles in this stage). In fact, Roller Coaster Kingdom was actually dropped from cross promotion when FishVille launched.

So why drop Texas Hold’em (currently # 11 in DAU)? I thought I’d look at the growth factors of the Stage Two games since the introduction of FarmVille in late June till the beginning of this month (using data through December 6th) to see how this rapidly growing new audience is taking in the older games. In this table, I look at the marginal growth in DAU and MAU since FarmVille’s launch:

Not surprisingly, YoVille’s similar game play style has afforded it the biggest growth among these games. In comparison, Texas Hold’em has had the smallest increase in DAU and MAU (although to be fair, the poker game had a higher base MAU of 13.8 million compared to 12.2 million for Mafia Wars and 7.8 million for YoVille at the time FarmVille launched) and seemed to benefit the least from the rise of the new sim games.

Dropping Texas Hold’em Poker from cross-promotion toolbars really seems to come down to two key points: demographics and synchronous vs. asynchronous game play. Speaking generally, Poker skews heavily male and is more of a niche (5% of the US plays poker online and players are 74% male between the ages of 26-35 according to industry data). These Stage Three games are much more casual games by nature, which traditionally has a female skew and slightly older audience.

More importantly, Poker is truly a synchronous game play mechanic – you have to have other people to play against online at the same time with you – where all of the other games have a core asynchronous game mode that make them more similar and likely more successful as cross-promotions.

Can Synchronous Game Play Thrive on Facebook?

It has been widely believed that Poker was one of the key revenue drivers for Zynga (especially prior to the release of FarmVille or growth of Mafia Wars), so I doubt Zynga will put its Poker game out to pasture. Indeed, all the major developers have their hat in the ring with poker: Playfish has recently joined the fray, launching Poker Rivals and Playdom has about 150,000 DAU using it’s Poker Palace.

Beyond poker, there is a rich history of synchronous multiplayer games especially in cards (from Bill Gates playing Bridge with users in the community on MSN’s old Zone game portal to groups gathering to play Gin together on Wednesday nights on Pogo.com), suggesting that there is a definite audience and opportunity here.

But the challenge is that in these examples you largely play a pick-up game with strangers: there is always a group of players online and enough of a pool to always start a game. In contrast, Facebook relies on the strength of your social network, and many of your friends are not online at the same time, making the pool of available players who have the same interest in playing a specific game very small.

Take a look at how many people appear in your Facebook chat window – I’d guess that at any one time you’ll have at most 10-15% of your friends available. Then think about what percentage of those friends will actually want to play the same game with you? It’s small, thus there is a need to somehow, safely, branch out beyond your friends to play.

Playing with Strangers

There is already a compliment of multiplayer games (other than poker) on Facebook that involve synchronous play with strangers (e.g. the Stage One Zynga games, GameHouse’s Uno, and Large Animal Game’s Bananagrams), but they are all relatively tiny compared to the 4.5 million DAU for Texas Hold’em – in fact many have 100,000 DAU or less.

Interestingly, the applications with the largest audiences where strangers are playing together may actually be the top asynchronous games. Games like FarmVille and MafiaWars have required users to have a certain number of friends in the application to unlock different levels or content (in some cases those items or levels can be unlocked with cash).

While not explicitly pushing users to play with strangers, you can go to any game’s fan page and see users comments to a developer post that look like a stream of “Add Me” requests – pushing users to add total strangers so they can advance in the game.

Facebook, to date, is not actively curbing this practice, which seems to be in violation of a strict interpretation of the Facebook Application policy and could lead to users overly sharing their profile data with complete strangers. Point 2 under the Application Integration Points policy states “You must not provide users with rewards or gate content from users based on their number of friends who use your application.”

Maybe Facebook recognizes as well that there is a market need for some effective way to tap into the desire to provide social interaction, not only with your friends, but others who just so happen want to play the same game as you. Clearly there is a market opportunity to easily create another set of “friends” that are strictly friends within a specific game application, and not necessarily privy to your latest status updates or photos from your last vacation. I expect developers to innovate and push the envelope, but it would be nice to have Facebook be proactive and create an API (and safe user experience) that helps bridge this gap.

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.

Games have become increasingly popular across platforms — meaning that developers have to build different versions of the game for, say, Facebook and the iPhone. So, Sibblingz is a new company trying to make it easier for developers to build a single game that runs on both those platforms and the web, while offering a single social context to users.

For example, you’d be able to play a single game on all three platforms, and see the same leaderboard with all of the same friends. It uses Facebook Connect to provide friend relationships, messaging and other social features, thereby potentially helping games to grow.

The service is going into private beta today, and we haven’t gotten a close look at it yet, although you can see Facebook and web versions of a game, called Little Monsters, on the company’s web site (the iPhone demo doesn’t appear to be live yet).

Specific features that the Sibblingz framework offers include: avatar customization, 3-dimensional virtual spaces, a virtual goods plus a store to sell them out of, a “nurturing” mechanic and “monetization” (think: currency and payments). Developers choose their game design of choice, design it to integrate with Sibblingz features, and publish it across platforms using Siblingz’s servers. There’s no upfront cost, but developers share a portion of their revenue with the company.

A number of others are trying to offer similar features, with some, like Live Gamer, offering services such as virtual economy management. A range of iPhone companies offer social features for other iPhone games, including Ngmoco‘s Plus+, Scoreloop and OpenFeint. Sibblingz is trying to differentiate itself by offering a specific range of features that are easy to integrate across platforms.

Speaking of OpenFeint, it shares a common investor and chairman with Sibblingz in the form of Peter Relan — who is also an investor in and chairman of CrowdStar (which we covered in some detail yesterday). All three companies came out of his incubator, YouWeb.

A little-known Facebook social game developer, CrowdStar, has been blowing up on our leaderboards this past autumn, first with genre-defining virtual aquarium game Happy Aquarium, then with virtual pet-caring game Happy Pets. The company — or actually, two companies — is coming up as Zynga, the largest social game developer, has furthered its domination with Café World and Happy Aquarium competitor FishVille.

Zynga is going after every successful genre and developer — for example, its newest game, PetVille, is more like Playfish’s Pet Society than it is like Happy Pets. So the question is what CrowdStar is going to do to compete, seeing as is Zynga quickly and effectively creating games in the genre.

CrowdStar’s plan sounds difficult, but the company appears to be succeeding so far. “Every time they enter a category where we have gotten big,” chairman Peter Relan tells me, “we’ll launch an entirely new game within weeks.” He says to expect a new one this month.

The social gaming market is so “massive,” in Relan’s view, that there will be room for CrowdStar despite Zynga’s aggressive success. And, he says, the company will be doing it with a small team — it now has around 20 people, versus Zynga’s 600 — and hasn’t relied on Facebook advertising as much to help it grow. So, while Zynga is on track to make more than $200 million this year, from what we’ve heard, a lot of that revenue needs to go towards labor and advertising costs. CrowdStar has a very profitable model, and intends to keep it that way, according to Relan: “we want to be the most profitable social gaming company, not the one with the most revenue.”

So how is CrowdStar making money? Direct sales of virtual goods in its games, like other developers — although it has tried offers in the past and may use them again in the future. But that’s not its only type of revenue stream. CrowdStar is actually two companies, Relan also explains. Ireland-based CrowdStar International is a publishing company that, like traditional gaming companies, handles all the business operations. CrowdStar itself is the main studio. CSI, as one might abbreviate the international company, both handles some aspects of CrowdStar’s games, like direct payment vendor relationships, and cuts deals with third parties for things like toolbar promotion within CrowdStar games.

Meanwhile, CrowdStar, the San Francisco-based company, also has what Relan describes as a “skunk works,” CrowdStar Labs. This tiny group is charged with building and testing out new game ideas, with the most recent example being Restaurant Life, a virtual restaurant game with an interesting take on the genre (see our recent review, here).

CrowdStar may have seemed to appear overnight with the success of Happy Aquarium, but it actually is two years old. It built a battle role-playing game called World War II, a year ago. It monetized well, but didn’t grow very big. Then it built Know-It-All Trivia, a quiz game that got big but didn’t make a lot of money. It combined money and size with a test game last spring called Save the Reef, that relied heavily on virtual goods. It decided to go big with the fish theme, beginning work on Happy Aquarium in late July and launching it in early September.

While many developers have been concerned that Zynga is going to snuff out the competition, CrowdStar has proven the opposite. Look for it to play a much bigger role in the social gaming ecosystem in 2010.

Tomorrow night at 6pm in Santa Clara, California, the MIT/Stanford VLAB (Venture Lab) is hosting an event on the future of virtual goods titled Virtual Goods: Runaway Growth Opens New Opportunities to Monetize.

VLAB events are great, and I’m excited to be moderating the panel discussion with Brian Balfour, Founder and VP Product Marketing at Viximo, Jude Gomila, Co-Founder and President of Heyzap, Bill Grosso, CTO and SVP Product at Live Gamer, and Owen Mahoney, CEO at Outspark.

Here are the event details. Space is limited, so reserve your spot early. Look forward to seeing you there!

• Date: Tuesday, December 8, 2009
• Time: 6:00pm – 8:30pm
• Where: Sun Microsystems Auditorium SCA03, 4030 George Sellon Circle, Santa Clara, CA 95054 (map)

To dig deeper into the virtual goods market, check out our new report: Inside Virtual Goods: The US Virtual Goods Market 2009 – 2010.

Out of the 20 games that gained the most monthly active users on Facebook this past week, there are only a couple surprises. In general, it was the usual gains by big games from big developers.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Birthday Cards	17,631,919	+3,869,528	+21.95
2.	FishVille	24,042,146	+3,401,193	+14.15
3.	Happy Pets	7,454,109	+2,319,930	+31.12
4.	FarmVille	70,476,996	+1,864,837	+2.65
5.	Café World	31,601,026	+1,062,355	+3.36
6.	Fish Isle	2,673,550	+997,820	+37.32
7.	Zoo World	4,144,008	+965,673	+23.30
8.	Country Life	3,452,588	+812,463	+23.53
9.	Band of Heroes	1,879,672	+610,024	+32.45
10.	Diva Life	3,160,236	+571,882	+18.10
11.	Medical Mayhem	1,264,295	+563,257	+44.55
12.	Treasure Madness	2,549,219	+544,654	+21.37
13.	Mafia Wars	27,343,282	+455,870	+1.67
14.	Champions Online	1,812,996	+411,503	+22.70
15.	Fish Life	2,794,465	+330,890	+11.84
16.	Hug Me	4,775,207	+308,975	+6.47
17.	Island Paradise	7,665,845	+307,409	+4.01
18.	Ultimate Slot Machines	976,342	+279,097	+28.59
19.	Happy Aquarium	27,613,478	+276,860	+1.00
20.	Poker Rivals	371,579	+270,398	+72.77

At the top we have gifting app Birthday Cards from RockYou. This app is not actually game, although the developer decided to categorize it as one in Facebook’s app directory. Moving on….

We have a long list of games that have been showing up for many weeks already, starting with Zynga’s FishVille, which grew by 3.40 million to 24.0 million monthly actives, and CrowdStar’s Happy Pets, which went up 2.32 million to 7.45 million monthly actives.

So lets take a look at the ones we haven’t see much of before. RockYou’s Zoo World, which is a game, continues to grow — a sign that the company’s new focus on gaming is going according to plan. It got 965,000 new players to end at 4.14 million; we’re not sure why, but a range of other RockYou titles are also on the upswing.

Also on the list: virtual farming game Country Life, by an unnamed developer. This is quite interesting, in that an anonymous developer has managed to grow by 812,000 in the past week to reach 3.45 million in the midst of an established and very competitive game genre. We’re looking forward to hearing more about what’s going on here.

The other surprise on today’s list is Treasure Madness, where you play a variety of puzzles within a virtual treasure-hunting game. The developer, called zSlide (nice name — we’re expecting to see a zZynga pop up soon, too), has actually been around for awhile. Treasure Madness looks like its biggest hit yet, that we know of.

Among some of the other newish titles to make the list, also keep an eye on Vojo World’s virtual hospital game Medical Mayhem and Playfish’s new Poker Rivals.

Oh Christmas. A time for giving. A time for family. A time for big, hairy creatures to come down from their mountain homes and cram gifts in our doorways. Wait, that doesn’t happen in your town? Well, it’s a good thing BioWare’s R&D group, BioWare Labs has recently released the greatest gift of all, The Gift of the Yeti.

Yes, nostalgic was the time when the great white yeti visited our home. Oh the thundering stomps of his run, the guttural rumble of his laugh, and the singing wail of police sirens. Yeah, that about sums up this game. After downloading a quick add-on, players are presented with the dire news that Santa is out sick! Well, for whatever reason or another, this friendly yeti creature is now the help.

He’s not quite as graceful as the big red man but he gets the job done as players maneuver him up and down streets delivering presents. The objective is to score as high a score as possible by delivering as many gifts as possible, in a 3D Pac-Man sort of way, to lighted houses before time expires. As you play, police will attempt to catch you, and while they do not “kill” you, they do slow you down. Furthermore, you can only carry so many presents before it’s time to restock, so you’ve also got to plan your route in order to visit nearby caves or your yeti buddy Booya.

“Gift of the Yeti is BioWare’s digital holiday card to its fans. We use social networking as a powerful tool to connect meaningfully with our tremendous fan community,” says BioWare Co-Founder and Group General Manager of the RPG/MMO Group at Electronic Arts, Dr. Ray Muzyka. “Gift of the Yeti is a fun, engaging holiday present from BioWare to our fans, the first in a series of compelling social experiences from BioWare Labs.”

The “gift” is more than just a game, however. While it is well polished and fun, the most important feature is that each play of the game will donate $0.01 to the children’s charity, Child’s Play. As described by BioWare, it is the “geek charity of choice,” raising money to help fund pediatric hospitals worldwide. The maximum goal of BioWare is to raise $10,000. That’s one million plays! So get cracking!

Of course, if you’re still not convinced its an app worth playing, then note one more thing. As an added bonus, players will be given $10 off the most recent BioWare RPG, Dragon Age: Origins from the EA Store.

So what do you say? Play a gift giving yeti, help some kids, and then slay some dragons. Sounds like its going to be a very Merry Christmas after all!

With the recent boom in virtual aquarium games, now’s a good chance to share some cheats, tips and tricks. The focus today is on one of the more realistically designed ones, Fish World from Tall Tree Games. In our endeavors to further create the most beautifully designed aquarium, we actually discovered a few dirty tricks that might just help you get a step ahead of your friends.

Trick #1: The Black Market Thief – Stealing Fish

Okay, so it has nothing to do with the black market, but it sounds cooler, no? As many players of Fish World are aware, players were recently allowed to steal fish from their friends’ aquariums. First off, shame on you! They work hard for their fishes! Okay, maybe not. Anyway, every 12 hours, you are capable of stealing any one fish from another aquarium (unless they have what is called, a “guardian crustacean” to protect them). The victim then has four hours to claim it back, before it can be sold.

Here’s the catch though, you cannot sell your stolen fish except in bulk (four or more). Obviously, this makes disposing of the evidence a little time consuming, and if you don’t have that bulk, there is extra time in which they can be taken back. Luckily, we accidentally discovered that once that four hour grace period is up, you can actually sell the fish individually, making for a quick profit. Ethical… no, but raising fish is serious business.

Trick #2: The Fish Farmer – Faster Leveling

This one might seem obvious after the fact, but evidently many people don’t realize it right away. When players start up the game, they generally focus on making their tank look great. Of course they do. It’s the point of the game. However, this includes more than just decoration, but nice looking fish as well. The thing is that nicer looking fish take longer to grow. Here’s the deal: In order to get better, more profitable fish as well as better decorations and gifts, one has to be a higher level, and to gain experience, players must clean their tanks, drop treats in friends’ tanks, and of course, sell their own fish.

In order to not go bankrupt, you want to wait until a fish is fully mature (as it is worth more than when you bought the egg). As such, it is best to purchase fish such as the Green Snapper (10 coins) or the Clown Fish (20 coins) that mature in four hours and 24 hours respectively. This will allow you to pack your tank(s) full of more fish and level up faster. Take care though, as too many fish will significantly slow down most computers.

As a side note: Investing into extra tanks of your own to clean helps raise level faster too (as well as gold).

Trick $3: The Chronic Cleaner – “Infinite” Money

If you need a little extra coin, you actually don’t have to wait hours to sell more fish, clean your tank, or express love to your fish (that was a little creepy to say). In Fish World, players are able to visit other friends’ aquariums and clean up all the algae that has built up. Each patch of algae that is cleaned is worth one coin. Not a lot in small numbers, but a completely neglected tank is worth 10.

Rather than simply saying, “invite more friends,” it is better to invite at least one that doesn’t really play. Actually, they don’t have to do anything more than create their tank. They don’t have to even put anything in it (frankly, this is better because it loads quicker). After a few hours, the tank will have reached that dirtied value of 10 coins. Clean it. Now, click on that tank again from the friends ranking at the bottom of the screen. It will reload, and look: It’s dirty again. It will remain that dirty until the owner comes and cleans it themselves, thus making for a great way to earn some extra coin (assuming you have some patience).

These are only a few of the possible tricks and tips that probably exist within Fish World. Likely, there are many more that we haven’t discovered yet, and as a game becomes more popular, you can bet that the number of new tricks will surface as well. That said, however, many “tricks” may not be intended by the developers and are merely an oversight in design. Nonetheless, it is not technically cheating as it does not use any specific game mechanics in a way they were unintended. “Sell Fish” sells a selected fish, selling fish earns experiences regardless of type, level, or quantity, and visiting a friend’s tank and cleaning it is still visiting a friend and cleaning it… it just doesn’t stay clean. That said, these are still little tricks that may not stay around forever and could very well be “fixed” in the future, so make use of them while you can.

Xbox 360 Avatars Get Pets – As Microsoft continues its quest to enhance Xbox Live’s social capabilities, it has added some snuggly new pets to the Xbox Live Avatar Marketplace. Launched just Thursday, users will be able to spend 240 Microsoft Points on a myriad of pets including three dogs (large dog, pug, and dog in a bag), three cats (cat, siamese, and long haired), birds, snakes, fish, guinea pigs, monkeys, and last but not least, a pony.

Zynga Teams Up with The Hidden Agenda Project – Social games developer Zynga has teamed up with The Hidden Agenda Project to take the lead and aid in the “first broad game development contest designed to improve education for those who face challenges learning in traditional school environments.” The winner will be a single college or graduate school team and will receive a $25,000 prize. As it seems, this non-profit contest will be annual.

GMG Entertainment Launches ON!DVD Online Powerpak – Though it’s a mouthful, prepaid card publisher GMG Entertainment is launching the ON!DVD Online Powerpak, allowing users to purchase collections of freemium online games at brick and mortar locations (namely DVD stores). The product will cost $2.99, and while that defeats part of the purpose of a “free” game, the idea is to mitigate the rather long download times required to play in the first place.

The general idea is to coax these new users into buying GMG prepaid cards for Powerpak games. Thus far, partners include Cronous, Cross Fire, Dragon Sky, Dragonica Online, Perfect World International, Metin 2, War Rock, and World Golf Tour. The product was slated for a national “sneak preview” this past week at Target department stores, but will launch in full in early 2010.

BillMyParents Partners with Offerpal to… Bill Parents – BillMyParents is a kid friendly transaction service that allows them to shop online. When it is time to make a purchase, a confirmation email or SMS text message is sent to whichever parent has opted for participation, complete with notes from their children, in order to finish the transaction. Having had success with companies such as Amazon, RockYou, Outspark, and Habbo, the partnership with Offerpal Media is intended to now bring the concept into the teen and tween fold. While the details have not been hashed out yet, Offerpal will be adding BillMyParents as one of its direct payment options (along with Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, etc.), allowing users to pay for virtual currencies via traditional methods or through ad offers.

Outer Empires Expands to Outer Reaches – Metaphorically speaking, of course, but the Facebook, web, and iPhone space-based massively multiplayer online game known as Outer Empires is expanding. What made the title stand out was that users could play this EVE-like MMO from any of the three aforementioned platforms. However, according to Pocket Gamer, the game will be also expanding to the Android and, later, the XBLA platforms as well.

Zong Benifits from Black Friday – It looks like mobile payments company Zong saw a good deal of sales on Black Friday. According to what the company tells us, it saw a 27% increase in total spending on virtual goods that day (more than the so-called “Cyber Monday”). The categories of interest are virtual gifts, social gaming virtual goods, and MMO virtual goods which saw a 15%, 29%, and 24% increase respectively.

Friendster Gets Big Changes – As one of the oldest social networks, Friendster has seen a lot over the years, but this Friday played host to some major changes to the site. In addition to basic redesign, many new sections have been added including a “Friendster Wallet” for storing the virtual currency “Friendster Coins,” the “Friendster Gift Shop” for virtual gifting. and, of course, a games section. Furthermore, according to Reuters, the social network will be sold to an Asian buyer by the end of December for at least $100 million. Among the short-listed bidders is Chinese internet business Tencent.

Big Facebook application developers have been cranking up their launch cycles to try to come out with higher -quality games faster than their competitors, with some recent examples being CrowdStar’s Happy Pets and more recently Zynga’s PetVille. But, the most recent example we’ve seen is a new game from Slide, a spin-off title from SuperPoke Pets called SPP Ranch.

The SuperPoke Pets brand has been around for a year and a half, and this new title intends to capitalize on it by using the same pet characters and art.

Like another recent Slide title, Top Fish, the main mechanic is raising virtual creatures to earn points, allowing you then get more creatures, get objects to decorate with, etc. While in Top Fish you bought, fed and sold fish, in SPP Ranch you buy, feed (and water) and release painfully cute cartoony animals. This is more like the mechanic in farming games, and some aquarium games; the original SuperPoke Pets and other pets titles typically revolve around the long-term care 0f a specific pet.

In terms of the animal-raising genre, it is perhaps most similar to Beijing-based Rekoo‘s Animal Paradise. A big difference between the two is that Animal Paradise lets you steal animals from other users — a feature that’s popular in many social games that we’ve seen come out of China. Many players in the United States and many other parts of the world prefer to not have that competitive element, from what we’ve seen.

There are also some other interesting features in SPP Ranch. For example, animals regularly make a “mess” (defecate) in their pen, so you clean up the mess to earn points. This is similar to a common virtual aquarium feature: Your aquarium gets dirty over time, but you can earn points by cleaning it.

Like other big developers, Slide, with 25.7 million monthly active users, has the ability to cross-promote new games like SPP Ranch with its range of large, existing applications — although the app just launched today so we aren’t seeing major growth yet.