Recently we have seen a move towards games that combine more complex game design seen in traditional casual flash games with social networking provided by popular Facebook games. We just covered one of these games: Battle Punks from Gravity Bear. Another one like this is Restaurant Life by CrowdStar.

Restaurant Life has been steadily growing since launch, in part because Crowdstar has added Restaurant Life to its cross promotion toolbar on Happy Aquarium and Happy Pets. Today, the game has more than 1.8 million monthly active users.

Of course, Restaurant-themed games are not new on Facebook. Playfish has Restaurant City and Zynga has Café World. And, like these games, Restaurant Life lets players earn cash by preparing and serving food to visiting patrons. Also, like the other games, you can hire your friends to serve the food. Lets look at some of the things that makes Restaurant Life different from existing games.

Sophisticated game play

More established restaurant rivals and even other games by Crowdstar have a cartoon-like look and feel. Restaurant Life on the other hand has a more realistic look and its graphics are rendered with a lot of attention to detail.

Also unlike other restaurant games where visitors have to eat whatever the restaurateur is serving, in Restaurant Life the visiting friend can choose what they would like to eat. During the meal they can also asynchronously interact with friends by sharing a meal with them, paying for their meal, and playing object recognition based memory games.

All of these in game actions create a more engaging game environment for those players who desire more interactivity and realism in their games.

Extending your social graph

Most Facebook games are created so that you can only play them with your existing friends. From a user standpoint this can be a problem both when the game is new and there are fewer friends playing it with as well as when the game is old and the ability to move up is restricted by ones’ social graph. We know that users experience this problem as evidenced by the multitude of Facebook (and sometimes in-person) social game groups as well as threads on application forums, all of which involve users asking each other to add them in order to be more active in the game.

Limiting game play to a user’s existing social graph is also a problem from a developer’s standpoint as it represents the loss of an opportunity to provide users to engage with the game longer.

Restaurant Life cleverly surpasses this problem through a restaurant city guide feature, which allows users to find and visit rated restaurants of others Facebook users who they may not already be friends with. To make sure visitors going to new restaurants through the guide have a quality experience, Restaurant Life only allows restaurants that have remodeled the default version to list themselves in the guide.

The app style and game play are significantly different for earlier Crowdstar apps, which made us wonder if this was an outside developer app being promoted by Crowdstar.  Yvonne Lee, marketing manager at Crowdstar tells us that the app is developed by Crowdstar Labs, a skunkworks team assembled occasionally inside CrowdStar with the charter to try innovative new ideas.

Restaurant Life definitely fits the bill for innovation of games on Facebook.

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

We’re seeing increasingly high-quality games from a broad range of developers on this week’s top 20 up-and-coming list. While Zynga, Playfish and other well-known companies continue to dominate in overall numbers, the growth on this list highlights the potential for many developers to grow big.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Ultimate Slot Machines	888,711	+404,513	+45.52
2.	Poker Rivals	256,833	+254,508	+99.09
3.	Ask a Friend	694,366	+171,798	+24.74
4.	Santa Yourself	268,929	+166,699	+61.99
5.	Youtopia	193,137	+134,537	+69.66
6.	Ponzi, Inc.	253,201	+126,088	+49.80
7.	歡樂癲地 Funland	463,766	+122,990	+26.52
8.	The Hierarchy	671,010	+120,246	+17.92
9.	Piou Piou contre les cactus	655,362	+114,432	+17.46
10.	Ninja Warz	284,744	+95,929	+33.69
11.	GooBox – Giochi gratuiti	196,546	+86,858	+44.19
12.	Icy Tower	942,282	+78,064	+8.28
13.	魔力學堂Web	255,959	+77,565	+30.30
14.	Top Fish	233,424	+63,457	+27.19
15.	Bite Me	100,973	+62,678	+62.07
16.	Gift Creator	690,795	+53,875	+7.80
17.	Minigolf Party	825,200	+53,093	+6.43
18.	BlingTown	209,089	+48,331	+23.12
19.	Doodle On Your Friends	166,138	+47,831	+28.79
20.	COLLAPSE!	377,941	+46,404	+12.28

To be clear, before we get started, this list is based on the Facebook applications that grew the most in the past week and now have between 100,000 and 1 million users — this data view lets us see small games that are becoming hits.

At the top we have Ultimate Slot Machines, a gambling-style game from 6 Waves. It made our our overall gainers list on Monday, and continues to do well, having nearly doubled to 889,000 in the past week.

In second place is Playfish’s new poker game, Poker Rivals, which fully launched last week. It has grown from near zero users to 257,000 in this past week.

All in all, the list contains many of the games we saw on last week’s up-and-coming games list, including Ponzi, Inc., The Hierarchy, Top Fish, COLLAPSE! and international titles including 魔力學堂Web,

Harbor Havoc is one of the more recent in a genre of iPhone (and Nintendo DS) titles known as “path-drawing games.” These games have been around since the early days of the iPhone, and primarily have you drawing a path for a selected object to get from Point A to Point B. In the beginning, they were indeed as basic as A to B, but as time wore on, more finesse has been adopted in the form of added challenges (i.e. enemies or power-ups). Harbor Havoc 3D falls in the latter category.

Developed by Backflip Studios, this game puts you in the harbor master chair of some of the world’s busiest ports, full of ships steered by quite possibly the worst helmsmen ever. The primary objective is to guide ships of one color to their corresponding dock color by touching the vessel and drawing a path to get there. However, as the game progresses, more and more ships arrive, and it’s up to the player to keep them from running into each other.

The core game play is an extremely easy concept to learn, but quickly becomes quite difficult to master. The easiest level is “Far East,” a tropical sort of environment, where there are only boats. After that, comes “Atlantis” where underwater rovers and submarines come into play, moving on a “bottom“ and “middle“ tier respectively. Then comes the “Artic” where you get the subs, the boats, and one more, on a “top” tier: The helicopter.

Managing three tiers of vehicles on three different planes is quite difficult. Of course, Backflip didn’t think that was hard enough, and thus added a forth, unlockable, level called “Lighthouse” (score 25 or higher on the other three maps to access it). This level is everything the previous levels had — only in the dark. The only light stems from a spinning lighthouse, and thus leads to many frustrating attempts trying to guide ships nearly blind.

Despite the aggravation invoked by Lighthouse, it was quickly forgiven by the game’s social features. This game is actually powered by ngmoco’s Plus+ platform. So players are able earn achievements, view leaderboards, issue push notification challenges to friends, and score postings to Facebook and/or Twitter feeds.

To be honest, most everything out of Harbor Havoc is positive, and the game is only made sweeter by the Plus+ integration. Everything looks and sounds great, and the only real complaints lie within the difficulty of Lighthouse and that some harbor/boat colors don’t always match up exactly (leading to a few crashed ships). Overall though, this is really only picking nits, so if you are looking for a newer path-drawing type of game, this one certainly comes recommended.

Offerpal has added a new, name-brand component to its social advertising offers service: A way to earn virtual currency in applications, by getting reimbursed for a portion of the amount they spend at a wide range of online retailers. While much of the industry, including Offerpal, has run advertising offers that dipped into scammy territory, this announcement is another example of positive changes happening.

“Offerpal Shopping” lets users, especially social gamers who use virtual currency for virtual items, purchase anything from real gifts to edible food. In return, users get virtual currency typically worth 5 to 10 percent of what they pay for the real-world item, although the company says some reimbursements are higher, as you can see below:

Other offer companies are similarly focusing on providing offers that are clearly valuable for users — as opposed to others, like mobile quiz ad subscriptions. See these recent examples from gWallet and Offerpal for more.

Zynga is at it again. PetVille, its newest game, has launched in recent days. Like others in the genre, including Playfish‘s Pet Society, Slide‘s SuperPoke Pets and CrowdStar‘s new Happy Pets, the game revolves around cleaning, feeding, clothing your pet, and checking out your friends pets.

The bigger picture, of course, is that Zynga continues to expand into game genres that have already proven successful. Last month, it launched FishVille, a virtual aquarium game that competes against CrowdStar’s massive Happy Aquarium, and a range of other aquarium apps. Before that, Zynga launched Café World, which competes against Playfish’s virtual restaurant game Restaurant City. And, before that, it launched FarmVille — following a range of other virtual farming games.

All of these games have relatively similar dynamics, in a general sense, in that the object is social, and typically more collaborative than directly competitive. They all monetize through virtual goods, letting users obtain virtual currencies to use for buying virtual items via direct payments or by earning points through offers.

Zynga has the most muscle, though — it cross-promotes games in its gaming toolbar, for example, and spends heavily on Facebook advertising to get the game in front of more users. These and other factors have helped its games grow quickly. FishVille, for example, now has 22.4 million monthly active users, acording to AppData.

The pet genre is already pretty crowded, though, so this will be a big test of how well Zynga can grow versus a range of established competitors.

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

Back when iPhone developer Booyah released its first title, Booyah Society, most of the buzz was about the creators behind it. With a number of the team coming from strong backgrounds such as Blizzard Entertainment, there were high expectations for the game that allowed players to “level up in life.” Unfortunately, it looks as if the game is no longer in the AppStore, as the company kicks off a new rendition: MyTown.

The game keeps some of the old features of Societies; namely the robotic-looking avatars. Users can interact with them by tapping the screen, earn items and clothing, and post updates via Twitter or Facebook. What is different, however, is that the game has gone the route of location-based game/social networks such as FourSquare and Gowalla. As a reminder, those are games that have users “checking in” from real locations around their town to earn points.

While lack of users in an area may still be an issue for MyTown, there does seem to be more initial rewards as well as places that are all ready tagged. Here’s how it works. Players log in, from wherever they are, and check in. A list of locations will appear, and after selecting one, a player checks in again and not only earns cash, power-ups, and wearable gear, but also has the option to purchase the location.

This is where the game starts to feel like a real-life Monopoly. Purchasing an area allows the player to earn rent, which is, perhaps, the most interesting feature. You see, each location has a set value. As other users check in at that location, you get virtual rent money. So, the more of your town you own, the more you earn.

As players check in to locations, they will also earn points towards new levels. This, in turn, allows them to upgrade any location that they currently own, thus increasing rent values (like making hotels in Monopoly).

On the social end too, beyond Facebook status updates and tweets, users can view the entire national society and see comments from around the country. A personal favorite is a user named Shawn who is apparently stuck at Target, up in Michigan, “still drinking.”

Frankly, the only significant complaint is that the game seems to be fairly easy to level up. In the span it took to write up this review, “check-in,” for the only nearby location, has been pressed over a couple dozen times, and a great deal of coin and power-ups have been earned. Nevertheless, it does seem like a pretty fun game, and certainly a nice time killer if you are traveling. Sure, there are some dents to hammer out, but overall, MyTown does feel more solid than Booyah Society. We look forward to seeing this title evolve and grow.

The prospect of virtual goods as a gaming business model is truly a lucrative thing if you have the right formula. Inexpensive yet beneficial items, addictive game play, the ability to earn important goods through play as well as money, and so on. However, some of these elements are highly volatile, and if not given proper care, will blow up in the game developer’s face — as seems to have happened for Electronic Arts’ “freemium” title, Battlefield Heroes.

The phrase here is “freemium,” in quotes, because recent virtual goods changes to the game have shot the title in its digital foot, forcing players that want to compete to spend money. Of all the aforementioned elements to a successful freemium game, EA, according to the player base, completely “screwed up” the cost-to-play ratio of the game’s two currencies: Valor Points and BattleFunds. This is a classic problem for any game with a virtual economy to have.

In a nutshell, the cartoony, shoot-em-up game has players fighting each other in zany, almost satirical combat. As they play, they earn the currency “Valor Points” (VP). Players use the currency to purchase the primary items in the game: Weapons. BattleFunds (BF) are what can be purchased with real cash. Intelligently, EA made superfluous items like unique outfits cost BF only and BF weapons cost significantly less in relation to VP.

For whatever reason, the company’s boasts at having well over a million users and a revenue expectation (for 2009) of $80 million wasn’t enough. EA decided to gouge the prices of virtually every item of merit that could be bought using the free VP, while dropping the corresponding BF prices. Furthermore, items that could be purchased for a temporary amount of time had their lifespan reduced from a month to a pathetic one, maybe three days.

According to Ars Technica: “The amount of rounds you need to play each day to keep ONE weapon [is] about 60, which is about 5 hours of playtime, every day.” Until the change, reports about Battlefield Heroes have been generally positive. But now, if players want to earn the quality weapons needed to compete with other users, they have to spend money or play for ridiculous amounts of time. Already, the game’s forums have exploded with complaints.

Can console-style sports games succeed in social form through Facebook? Although there aren’t many examples, we recently looked at a high-quality one called GridIron Live, that has a loyal but small user base. After that post, Singapore-based Game Ventures came to us with a new title, a cricket game called HowZat.

Cricket, of course, is a very popular game in the United Kingdom, India, South Africa, Australia, the Caribbean and other English-speaking parts of the world. While the American audience might generally prefer baseball social games, we’re interested to see how the game does among Facebook users worldwide.

Game Ventures seeks to bring a more console-like sports experience to the table and marry it with social features; up until now, even the most console-styled social games have tended to focus on Mob Wars-style role playing mechanics.

HowZat is a fully live cricket title that allows players to actively play the game with the bowler hurling the ball at the batter, and placed non-player characters playing sweepers and the backward short leg…. ahhh…. You know what, to make this review accessible to our American readers, let’s just simply call these players batters, pitchers and fielders. One player pitches the ball while the other player bats. To play, each user hits a directional arrow to aim and another button coupled with proper timing to swing or pitch. It sort of works like batting and pitching in most console baseball games.

Which reminds us… for those not familiar, the term “howzat” means: “the cry of a fielding team when appealing, notable because an umpire is not obliged to give the batsman ‘out’ unless the question is asked.”

Pitching was pretty easy to get, but the timing for batting actually turned out to be quite difficult (just like real life, as anyone knows who grew up playing American baseball then tried their hand at cricket). Once you did get it, though, the game was actually pretty of fun. If hit solidly, the ball flies out into the field and will be fielded by the various… cricket positions… with a level of skill based on where you have attributed points.

This is where the game starts to get into the social elements. As players play HowZat and earn experience, they can distribute points to their team members. More points equals better players. Players are also granted the ability to customize their team quite a bit; adjusting player handedness, play style, name, and team colors. There are also areas to view all your earned achievements (and unearned) as well as your latest scores.

Currently the game is only on howzat.com, but uses Facebook Connect for the social features. Game Ventures says that a Facebook app is on the way, but did not wish to run into any scaling issues; this is the primary reason the site was built first. Nevertheless, chief executive Zaki Mahomed did tell us that current users have invited well over 100,000 new players in the last 10 or so days, through email alone.

Overall, the game is impressive, and we’re very interested to see how it does.

Rick Thompson is best known in the social gaming world for Playdom: He helped found the large social gaming company, was its first investor, and continues to serve as its chairman. But he’s recently started investing in small, up-and-coming gaming studios.

Before he got into social gaming, Thompson was a cofounder and a top executive at Adify, a “vertical ad network platform,” and before that, at FlyCast Communications, a direct-response advertising company. Both companies saw big exits and put Thompson in a good position to found or invest in more companies.

So what about the ubiquitous copycatting within the industry? Thompson believes games have two to three months to prove themselves before the industry notices and responds with similar themes and mechanics. His investments, which he describes as “seed funding” are intended to help small studios successfully launch and manage a new game. If the game proves to be a hit, presumably more investment or an acquisition would occur; either option could allow the developer to build on their success despite any follow-on cloning.

When asked how his personal investments are connected to Playdom, Thompson made it clear he is “still 110% committed to Playdom” and hinted at the “synergy” between his early-stage investments and “Playdom’s expertise distributing and monetizing social games.”

We’ll go ahead and speculate that might be strategic partnerships with Playdom, at least, if his investments becomes hits. Social gaming companies, after all, regularly partner to do things like promote games on each other’s apps, or even buy each other.

We’re seeking a Sr. Interactive Designer (or hands on Art Director) to lead the visual direction and design of our new, well funded social gaming company. This position reports directly to the Creative Director. You will provide the creative vision, ideation and leadership for the visual design for our first flagship MMORPG game (and our corporate identity if you have some extra time).

In our latest look at the Facebook applications with the most new daily active users (DAU) in the past week, we see an odd trend, according to AppData. Some of the apps that made the list appear to have done so through growth starting around the Thanksgiving holiday, last Thursday. From last Wednesday back through the previous week, we’d seen lower overall gains.

It may be that people were so busy getting ready for Thanksgiving the week before that they didn’t have as much time to log on and play games. Then, with the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, they once again had the time.

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Happy Pets	1,906,178	+548,281	+28.76
2.	FishVille	6,806,371	+503,798	+7.40
3.	Birthday Cards	1,225,606	+393,058	+32.07
4.	Hug Me	500,528	+243,830	+48.71
5.	Zoo World	545,615	+199,654	+36.59
6.	Diva Life	205,801	+137,603	+66.86
7.	Fish World	2,370,899	+131,593	+5.55
8.	FarmVille	26,589,135	+130,673	+0.49
9.	Fish Isle	478,146	+125,065	+26.16
10.	Paf le Chien	181,308	+116,055	+64.01
11.	Sorority Life	1,166,854	+112,663	+9.66
12.	Band of Heroes	158,975	+111,597	+70.20
13.	Geo Challenge	169,697	+91,392	+53.86
14.	Fish Life	571,686	+68,526	+11.99
15.	Who Has The Biggest Brain?	146,246	+52,937	+36.20
16.	Poker Rivals	51,028	+50,600	+99.16
17.	FARKLE	1,136,269	+50,148	+4.41
18.	YoVille	3,014,210	+38,368	+1.27
19.	Medical Mayhem	177,903	+37,955	+21.33
20.	Youtopia	48,497	+35,051	+72.27

At the top of the list we have Happy Pets, the latest game by up-and-coming developer CrowdStar: The pet-caring app gained 548,000 new daily users this past week for a total of 1.91 million DAU and 5.77 monthly active users. This places it slightly above Zynga’s big new hit, FishVille, at least in terms of weekly DAU growth.  That app grew by 504,000 DAU, to reach 6.81 million DAU — a big number, to be sure. But as the app has grown to 21.8 million MAU within a few week of launching, it’s inevitable that not all new users who showed up as DAU in their first week of trying the game will still come back daily. Two weeks ago, it had 4.77 million new weekly DAU, and last week it had 1.15 new weekly DAU. This week is likely the longer-term DAU rate, as we discussed earlier today on Inside Social Games.

Among other notable games, we have RockYou new game, Zoo World, which has been climbing up our charts since it launched last month. It grew by nearly 200,000 DAU last week to reach 546,000 DAU.

And, what would a present-day list be without a bunch of fish apps? Besides FishVille, Fish World, Fish Isle and Fish Life all made the list. And, near the bottom, so did some up-and-comers like hospital-themed Medical Mayhem and an interesting new city simulation game called Youtopia.