As you might expect with the Thanksgiving holidays, growth in the top fish simulation games appeared to wane as the US portion of the Facebook user base focused on real-life relationships and turkey dinners.

Across the board, daily users for each of the fish sim games flat-lined during Thanksgiving — although the reporting tool failed to provide new numbers for Sunday the 29th and Monday the 30th of November, most games were flat or down Thanksgiving week. In addition, for Zynga’s FishVille we’re seeing the social game sticky factor (Daily Active Users/Monthly Active Users) declining. At this point, the game looks like it might settle at a 28-30% sticky factor similar to CrowdStar’s Happy Aquarium and Tall Tree Games’s Fish World:

In this group, 6 Waves’ My Fishbowl continues to have the strongest sticky factor, a good 33% higher than other fish sim games with over 1 million Daily Active Users (DAU). I believe its success is primarily due to the fact that it is the only one of the four top fish sim games natively coded in Chinese, which is allowing it to take advantage of Facebook’s rapid growth in Southeast Asia. In addition, it may also have something to do with the fact that My Fishbowl has a strong game element of “stealing” from your neighbors’ tanks (if your friends are late to collect the treasures produced by their fish, you can go in and steal these treasures for yourself).

Stealing is a heightened level of appointment gaming – in addition to a user knowing they have to come back within six or 12 hours to get something from their fish, they need to come shortly within that window to prevent friends from stealing that item. From my experience, this game element seems to be pretty standard fare in casual games coming from Asian developers, yet I’ve seen repeated response on game ratings and message boards that many western users don’t like the fact that they need to steal from their friends to get ahead.

If developers see Facebook growth slow (the most recent jump to 350 million users announced yesterday is at a slower pace than previous growth), there will be more pressure to tap multiple markets. This will require not only translations of game elements, but also the need to truly understand the regional differences in game styles and how best to position those games within Facebook and other regional social platforms.

HeyZap already offers a range of social and virtual currency features for developers who build games using its Flash browser plug-in, and today it’s rolling out a new one: A dual currency option. This could be especially valuable for casual game developers who have their games published across the web.

Many social games already use this concept, of course. Dual currencies typically include both a currency that costs money and one that can be earned through actions within a game — although specific implementations vary widely. Generally, the free currency lets users who don’t want to pay (or can’t pay) still progress in the game, which hopefully leads to more people playing more often. As long as a consistent portion of users pay in this system, the free currency can eventually help the developer make more money.

In Heyzap’s implementation of the dual currency, users pay or take offers to get the “coins” currency, or gain achievements or share the game with friends to earn the “points” currency. Either way, users can buy the same set of virtual goods.

HeyZap has been busy pushing a string of iterative features for its service. Back on August, it began giving web site owners the ability to earn money from games they run on their sites. In late October, it launched an analytics service, and an application programming interface to let developers integrate social sharing features from Facebook and Twitter into their games. These features are now integrated with the dual currency, co-founder Jude Gomila tells us.

The company launched eight months ago and is currently running 10 million game plays a month across 100,000 web sites; publishers include ebaum’s world, webs.com and College Humor.

Social games on Facebook and other social networks have tended to dominate in terms of numbers and revenue. And, since most games on social networks have been built in Flash, they can also run Heyzap’s services — although a wide range of other companies are competing for those developers, and many developers choose to build their own virtual economies, anyway. So Heyzap, like rival Mochi Media, has been focusing on casual game developers, trying to make it just as easy for this sector of the gaming world to become more social, grow and make money. That market is more mature, and not as currently dynamic, but new services like these could give it a boost.

Most companies in the social advertising offers business are… how do we say… going through a big transition. Facebook and MySpace have lately been taking a harder line against offer company and application developers that runs scammy offers, in some cases banning developers and offer companies. Meanwhile, top developer Zynga has temporarily banned all offers. And now, this emerging industry has a potentially big new competitor in the form of gWallet.

Having only launched this past August, the San Francisco company has just announced a $12.5 million first round of funding from venture firms Adam Street Partners, Trinity Ventures and other investors, to take advantage of what may be a newly strong market position.

Offers, for those not familiar, let people playing apps — especially social games — earn points to use within the app by taking special advertisements. And gWallet is focusing on doing a few things differently from what offer companies have historically done on social platforms, as founder Gurbaksh Chahal explained in an interview earlier today.

It is working directly with advertising agencies and others to figure out what sort of ads can work best in offers. As you can see from the screenshot, offers includes some consumer packaged goods like the Rolling Razor. A look at its offer wall on FooPets shows a typical-looking cross-section of high-quality offers: Netflix rental subscriptions, game purchases, etc.

Which is where the second part of the company’s strategy comes in, according to Chahal. He says they are focusing on improving targeting methods. gWallet tracks the offers that each user takes, serves up relevant types of offers, hides any offer they’ve taken already, and more. The data comes from what users do within its i-frame window inside of other applications; the company doesn’t pull Facebook user data or anything about what users do within games.

And, gWallet is also showing advertisers their direct return on investment from users and games. The company’s overall goal is to show developers that it can make them more money through fully ethical means, and at the same time bring in more and more mainstream advertisers — and, of course, provide offers that users find valuable.

All this is in contrast to what many offer companies have historically done. Until more recently, most developers and offer companies focused on revenue: Developers demanding the highest CPMs possible and offer companies ran some outright scammy ads as a result. Most offer companies relied on dumping generic offers from affiliate advertising networks into offer walls on apps, and most of these companies lacked effective ways to weed out the thousands of scammy ads that course through these networks.

Meanwhile, many of the scammy offers were the most lucrative; if a tricky mobile quiz ad gets just a few people to sign up for a lifetime mobile subscription of $10 per month, that generates a big ROI, and leads to more scammy advertising.

Now, however, these offers are out of the system. All the offer companies say they have been and are increasingly 1) working directly with advertisers and 2) providing filters to prevent scammy ads from getting in to the system.

Going Forward

So now the real test will be how well all of these companies can please both legitimate advertisers and developers. On the one hand, gWallet doesn’t have the presence that many of its competitors have already established on Facebook and other social sites. It may, however, have a leg up in executing on its overall strategy. Company founder Chahal is a serial ad entrepreneur, who most recently sold ad network BlueLithium to Yahoo for $300 million in cash. That company used behavioral targeting and other methods of data analysis to optimize what ads people saw on sites across the web. Lots of rivals to that company claimed to do much of the same thing, but BlueLithium is one of the bigger ones to end up with an exit. Clearly, the company had some idea what it was doing.

He also mentioned today the company is planning to move beyond games on social networks to work with other web sites.

Many of the larger offer companies took hits to their revenues when the scammy offers disappeared, and now a small but experienced competitor has more funding to go after the market with. In other words, the market is maturing. While the leaders are not yet decided, we expect the overall offers market to continue growing in quality and size as a result.

While change from last month was about the same as it always is for the Top 25 MySpace Games, the question as to how much growth MySpace has seen in the past year is a bit unclear.

A lack of detailed, official metrics has made it hard to find the answer. But, by comparing raw user counts every month, we can get a sense for where things are going. Playdom‘s Mobsters, the most popular game on the site, has a million more users than it had 12 months ago, which certainly indicates something.

Suffice to say, with Mobsters being the top game for one year running, the change in MySpace does not appear to be big. In fact, most of the games that are on this list now were on it back in 2008. This seems to show that the majority of developers are not giving significant attention to the social network’s platform. A portion of Facebook’s growth may be due to people joining and staying on the site longer to play social games. Is MySpace not growing because of the lack of games? Or is the slower growth why there is a lack in the first place? An interesting quandary to ponder. Regardless, here are the highlights from this past month:

• Mobsters saw about 92,000 new installs for its criminally addictive role-playing game last month, bringing it to 14,181,576 total users.
• Zynga‘s Texas Hold ‘Em Poker has been redubbed “Zynga Poker” as it sits tight at #5 with roughly a 77,000 install growth.
• A slight swap between YoVille and Super Pets rankings occurred with the former earning a total user count of nearly 5.9 million compared to the latter’s 5.7 million.
• BitRhymes might want to have a word with MySpace, as its #12 title, Cheers!! continues to not appear in the app gallery lists. Nevertheless, it still earns a total of 4,040,116 users.
• Racing continues to be popular with Overdrive, from Playdom, and Speed Racing, from RockYou sticking it out at #16 and #17 respectively. In fact, the latter has proven most resilient, being one of the MySpace apps to remain on the Top 25 these past 12 months.
• There was also some minor shifts at the end with Green Spot beating out What My Friends Think About Me for #23, earning 35,515 new installs compared to the latter, earning just over 10,000.
• Finally, here are the apps to survive the last year. They were in the Top 25 12 months ago, and are still here today: Mobsters, Mafia Wars, Own Your Friends, Texas HoldEm (Zynga) Poker, SuperPoke Pets, Super Pets, Vampires, Street Racing, Speed Racing, Gang Wars, Dragon Wars, Heroes, and Fashion Wars.

Last month we compared the 11 month span between the present and our first Top 25 list. Even then the difference in monthly active users was absolutely astounding. Of course, in the past month, it has only increased. To recap, the top game, one year ago, was (Lil) Green Patch, a simple 2D virtual-garden-like game that garnered around 6 million users a month. FarmVille, now has nearly 69 million users. Facebook’s growth to much more than 300 million monthly active users has certainly contributed to the rise of social gaming, but we continue to wonder how much social gaming has contributed to the growth of Facebook itself.

November saw a great deal of individual game growth throughout most of the Top 25, but the top five have not changed in the slightest – something we haven’t seen in a while. The month also saw the rise of CrowdStar, as well as the rapid growth of Zynga’s FishVille and the belated appearance of Mobsters 2. Beyond this, there was a great deal of churn across the board. Here are the highlights:

• Zynga’s FarmVille continued its growth by more than 6 million monthly active users to nearly 70 million. However, this is only a little more than half of what it earned last month. Meanwhile, YoVille lost more than 500,000 users and going from from #6 to #8. Roller Coaster Kingdom stayed at #11 with close to 15.5 million MAUs.
• CrowdStar’s Happy Aquarium continued to grow, holding on to the #4 spot, despite the number of Zynga titles around it. The virtual aquarium game is followed on the list by Playfish’s Pet Society at #5. CrowdStar’s second title on the list, Happy Pets, came in at #22 with almost 5.5 million users.
• After weeks on our Top Gaining Charts, FishVille has made a splash at #6 with more than 21 million users.
• MindJolt Games lost 1.1 million MAU to land at #12.
• And finally, long after its initial release, Mobsters 2: Vendetta from Playdom has made its way into the charts with roughly 5.3 million MAUs, followed by another newcomer, My Fishbowl from 6 waves at #24 with a monthly user count just shy of 5 million.