The web’s many Flash game developers and those that specialize in Facebook gaming tend to be a world apart, despite being close cousins in terms of their skillsets. But in the future more Flash developers will be moving successfully onto Facebook, if Arkadium is any indication.

Arkadium is old, in internet terms: the company has almost a decade and some 300 games under its belt. And it’s not particularly small, either, with 80 employees split between offices in New York and Ukraine. But until now the company has stayed clear of social networks.

Majhongg Dimensions is its first foray — a game that until now has lived on websites frequented by those nearing their golden years, like AARP.com and Publisher’s Clearing House.

It’s stale news, of course, that Facebook’s youth has been fading as people of all ages use it, but seeing a game like Dimensions launched on Facebook brings the age of its user base into sharp relief. The game has proven fairly popular so far, bringing in about 230,000 users since its mid-January launch. About 32 percent come back on a daily basis, according to our AppData stats.

To ensure Dimensons’ success, Arkadium partnered with Mob Science, a developer that we’ve pointed out for its forays into social gaming, including Sea Garden and Gardenhood (reviews here and here).

The catch for Mob Science is that it has thus far been most successful with one-off holiday apps with aggressive viral components, like St. Patrick’s Day, which made our list of emerging apps today alongside Dimensions. Its games haven’t grown particularly large. However, the company’s marketing efforts for Arkadium seem to be successful so far.

Arkadium’s CEO, Kenny Rosenblatt, says the choices of both Mahjongg Dimensions and Mob Science for the company’s first Facebook game were careful choices.

“I think Mob Science has proved historically that they can grow traffic virally on Facebook,” he says. “We knew there were some strengths on both sides that would complement each other. The games they’ve grown haven’t been very good, so they had a lot of traffic, but monetizing the traffic hasn’t been easy.”

This is not the first partnership between a traditional game developer and a Facebook application company. 6 Waves, which itself has developed many apps and games, also publishes a wide variety of games from others. Others, like Zynga and SGN, have experimented with the model over the years.

The next step for Dimensions, then, is to add features that can be monetized. The game already has leader boards and gifting options; in March, Arkadium will start offering a deluxe, downloadable version for $9.95, and for players who stay on Facebook, virtual items and bonuses like extra time to complete a stage.

The game, by the way, is worth a try. Mahjongg, for those who aren’t familiar with it, involves finding matching tiles within a mixed-up stack. Most games online present the tiles from a single 2 or 2.5 dimension angle; the “Dimensions” in the Arkadium version refers to its 3D stack that has to be spun around while playing to find the right matches. The games are short and sweet, lasting a minute each.

As for Arkadium, Rosenblatt says that its next step, besides working more on Dimensions, is to release one of its existing games each month — they’ve already picked 50 that seem suitable. Games specifically designed for Facebook (and, potentially, a younger audience) are also in the works. “We have a big library, and we know which games and mechanics work,” says Rosenblatt.

If it’s successful in its goal of reaching a million players for each game — something Rosenblatt projects happening next month for Dimensions, based on current growth rates –expect other web game developers to take the cue.

CrowdStar has been building games and other applications on Facebook since 2008, but it exploded last fall with hit game Happy Aquarium, and it has since launched two followups that have done well in their own rights, Happy Pets and Happy Island. As of today, it has 10.3 million daily active users, the second most out of any developer behind Zynga’s 67.1 million. The result is that potential acquirers and investors are looking very closely at the company.

We’ve been hearing rumors about investors trying to get in for a few weeks, but Bloomberg recently reported some key details of what the company might be looking at — a potential acquisition by Microsoft, according to two sources. Or, the company may stay independent via a private equity investment (probably a big round), says one of the sources; the valuation is $200 million, says another.

We have a few more details to add from sources, although we can’t confirm Microsoft, a potential private equity investment, or the valuation. Given the many of interested parties circling the company, there are also a range of rumored names and numbers floating around, and none are easy to confirm. One of our sources says that CrowdStar signed a letter of intent with a potential acquirer as recently as last week.

Sources have also raised questions about the company’s demographics, and its long-term viability — do its users make it money? Facebook is popular around the world, but certain markets, like the US, monetize especially through the virtual goods business model used by CrowdStar and most other social gaming companies.

So we asked executive chairman Peter Relan where the company is at. Most people who play Happy Aquarium and Happy Pets are female, he says, but men are the majority on Happy Island. About 60% of the audience speaks English, and within that segment US is the biggest, versus the rest in other languages; out of all demographics, older women bring in the most revenue in female friendly games. To learn more about consumer purchasing patters of virtual goods in social games, see our recent report, Inside Virtual Goods: The Future of Social Gaming 2010.

That description sounds pretty normal for a social gaming company with millions of Facebook users. It is also notable for using Facebook’s virtual currency, Credits, much more than any other big company. Its games now exclusively use Credits, and the result, as Relan tells us, is that his company has had to figure out how to best implement Credits. There’s been some question about how profitable Credits can be, as we covered in detail on Inside Facebook yesterday. Facebook takes a 30% cut and implementing it requires developers to refigure portions of their games. “Once you get over the hump [of figuring it out],” he explains, “it’s great, and just as profitable” as other options.

Regardless of what the company decides to do, it has already doubled in headcount from last year and is planning to expand it further in 2010, according to Relan, while still aiming to be the “leanest and most profitable company in social gaming.”

Note: Relan and other social gaming executives will be speaking at our Inside Social Apps 2010 event on April 20th in San Francisco, where we’ll be covering the future of monetization and investment opportunities in social gaming.

Our Friday list of the top 20 fastest-growing Facebook games still under a million players, drawn from AppData, features a number of repeats from last week. The large developer Slide is most prominent, once again placing three games on the list, this time all in the top ten: Top Fish, SuperPocus and SPP Ranch!.

Take this list with a grain of salt. Facebook has some ongoing reporting problems that may be affecting rankings — some apps haven’t seen an updated MAU in five days.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Send Glitter!	593,362	+320,966	+54.09
2.	World at War	951,116	+262,848	+27.64
3.	開心農場 2	680,743	+136,774	+20.09
4.	Mahjongg Dimensions	205,238	+124,941	+60.88
5.	Top Fish	606,527	+117,859	+19.43
6.	SuperPocus	401,640	+116,010	+28.88
7.	SCRABBLE	874,163	+104,402	+11.94
8.	Flowers for Friends	694,160	+101,584	+14.63
9.	Di la Verdad!	207,371	+96,696	+46.63
10.	SPP Ranch!	600,620	+88,313	+14.70
11.	My City	680,529	+85,865	+12.62
12.	Go to Hell	606,215	+81,932	+13.52
13.	IQ Test	610,614	+79,410	+13.00
14.	Dress Me Up	550,439	+77,953	+14.16
15.	Ciudad en el Cielo	550,873	+76,716	+13.93
16.	Bubble Town: Party Planet	383,986	+75,408	+19.64
17.	Little Rock Pool	602,974	+72,762	+12.07
18.	Fairyland	552,321	+68,278	+12.36
19.	MiniPlanet	767,670	+67,678	+8.82
20.	Bubble Island	110,421	+63,869	+57.84

Send Glitter! is just the new poke app du jour and not really a game, so we’ll skip it and call World at War the real number one entry this week. The latter app is a new game in the same style as Mafia Wars and its many clones.

These games seem to consistently do well with relatively few new features in each iteration; World at War has a handful of its own, as seen below. But despite being built by an unknown developer, the game has been growing quite quickly, so it’s worth keeping an eye on. At its current rate it will have well over a million players next week. Maybe Facebook’s global user base is really into the theme?

開心農場 2 probably gained even more players than our stats are showing; Facebook hasn’t updated its MAU in almost a week. The game the Chinese-language version of Happy Farm 2 by Five Minutes, which has also been fairly successful with the original Happy Farm, a game with 2.3 million MAU. (For a quick chuckle, check out the Google Translate version of 開心農場 2′s description.)

Mahjongg Dimensions is another version of the classic Chinese tile game, by Arkadium. The unique take is that it’s 3D mahjongg, with a stack of tiles that must be rotated to find all the matches. It’s a pretty good-looking game, although the developer seems to be having some technical problems that may be slowing growth a bit.

The last game deserving of a mention is SCRABBLE, the “official” version of the old favorite by Electronic Arts. It has been well over a year since Scrabble replaced Scrabulous (now Lexulous), which was perhaps Facebook’s first runaway game hit by an independent developer.

But the game never became very successful — either a victim of the short attention span of Facebook players, or resentment from disenfranchised Scrabulous players. Whatever the case, it appears that Scrabble’s userbase may finally be growing.

Back in September we covered the release of the casual massively multiplayer online game, Faunasphere from developer Big Fish Games. The company has already been testing Facebook Connect for the environmentally-friendly game. Now, it is introducing a Facebook application.

Many traditional game publishers are experimenting with how to take advantage of Facebook — can an app work better than Connect, even though both services provide the same user identity information and communication channels?

This is basically what Big Fish is trying to find out.

Will O’Brien, the company’s new vice president of social games, tells us that the app is intended to give users more choice in where they play the game, even though he says the Connect implementation is already showing some positive results.

The company isn’t sharing overall numbers for the game so far. O’Brien says that “as a standalone site, Faunasphere has demonstrated incredible user growth and consistently high average spend per users.”

The original browser-based version and the app are connected to the exact same virtual world. The only difference is that the app is on Facebook. Some portion of users feel more comfortable playing on Facebook than on the web. The result is that when users check out games by seeing ads, or activity in their news feeds from friends who are already playing, some larger portion of them appear more likely to stay on.

AppData is showing limited Facebook Connect traffic to Faunasphere so we’ll be watching for increases.

For those that missed our first review, the game is a quality MMO where players control a cartoonish-looking animal called a Fauna (which, for the record, can be easily shared on your profile too). Set in a sci-fi sort of universe, users proceed around the world completing quests and cleaning up various forms of pollution (some of which fight back). As they progress, they eventually begin to find trees, ground tiles, and even waterfalls to decorate their own personal space called a Faunasphere.

Eventually, players also gain the capability to adopt and grow other Fauna – beyond the first handful you can pick from – via breeding or feeding them “gene food,” leading to over 50 million possible variations.

All of these qualities that made the browser rendition attractive are still intact, This includes the ability to purchase the virtual currency, Bux, for spending on rare or limited items such as holiday goods or the gene food, as well premium memberships that grant large amounts of Bux per month and a greater cap on how many Fauna a player can create.

Facebook is partnering with eBay-owned PayPal, the two companies are announcing today, so that people can buy Facebook advertising and its virtual currency, Credits, using the online payment service.

Although some have speculated that Credits could become a PayPal rival, this partnership suggests that Facebook is going to continue building Credits as a virtual currency, and not as a payments service. The press release today says as much: “The goal of Facebook Credits is to give users a fast and easy way to buy virtual goods on Facebook, including items from the Facebook Gift Shop.” Other ways to buy items include mobile payments, via a partnership with Zong, and direct payments via credit cards.

> Continue reading on Inside Facebook.

Luckily, upon going deeper into the game, we found it contains some nuances that make the overall game play experience more gratifying.

Perhaps the most notable of all these features was a section dubbed “Collections.” As one might expect, random items can be earned by completing “Tasks” (quests). However, this can be more than weapons or armor. For each set of quests – which are gated by one’s level – there are a hefty number of random items to collect.

In essence, this works a bit like achievements. Players will often spend large spans of time earning these, and they will likely also repeat quests in various areas just to collect an entire set of items. Moreover, the collection is more than just a personal endeavor, for upon completing it, users gain bonuses to stats such as energy, attack, or defense.

As a matter of fact, Collections, and items in general, lend themselves nicely to social gifting as well. Yes, players can gift virtually any item, but users can also mark them on their “Wish List,” informing their friends of what they want or need.

Another nice feature comes with the battling element of the game. As with most role-playing games of this nature, players can attack other users at the cost of stamina and take their silver (Empire Battle’s in-game currency). Similar to RPGs, like Mafia Wars, smart players will stash a large portion of their money in the treasury. If they do not, other players not only can see their level and team size, but how much coin they have on hand. It isn’t an exact number, but is represented by lit up silver coin icons from one to six.

For a role-playing title, there is one major complaint to be had with Empire Battle. There is no story. Granted, a Facebook RPG is no Final Fantasy, but more often than not, users often praise these titles for their plots (i.e. Castle Age). Beyond that, the game has a knack for not telling you certain things. As an example, the inventory might be full of weapons found on quests, but it never actually tells you that it was equipped. The player just has to assume it is when they see it in their profile page. Yes, it’s minor, but a little player feedback would be nice.

Of course, adding that might be a double edged sword, because it would simply add more stuff to load, and everything seems to take loading time. Click this tab – load. Add one stat point – load. Do this task – load. View Collections – load… error… refresh. Most people aren’t very patient when it comes to games, and constantly loading or reloading gets very old, very quick.

All in all, Empire Battle has a few quirks and kinks that it needs to work out, but it’s not a bad game. That said, however, it does feel very standardized, and despite its quality artwork, feels a bit lacking without a traditional RPG storyline. Luckily, for those that do not care for such things, the game does have some nice little improvements to make the game more interesting. In the end, it really comes down to whether or not you are a fan of fantasy RPGS applications.

While many iPhone games come with social features like leaderboards, achievements, and occasional challenges help, via third-parties, the games quite often aren’t social in their own right. A creative take on pictionary, by the name of Charadium, from On5, challenges that generalization.

The game uses ngmoco’s Plus+ platform, but while that feature plays a strong role in the game’s social prowess, it is hardly the focal point. Best described as an online, multiplayer marriage of charades and pictionary, Charadium is a social app all on its own.

Using either WiFi or 3G, players connect with other app users (this can also be limited to just friends) and play against one another in full games of 15 rounds (don’t worry, there is an option for quick games too). One person will draw, and the others guess. If you’re on the guessing end, the makeshift artist will begin to draw something, pictionary-style, based on a mystery word that only they know. Given the standard iPhone keyboard, players will type their guesses until someone gets it right, earning them points.

Obviously, ease of guessing the right word often depends on the artistic prowess of the person drawing, so the game does try to help out as needed, eventually displaying how many letters are in the word, filling in letters, and auto-correcting misspelled words.

At the end of a round, a new artist is selected. In this case, the mystery word is presented to them and could be something as simple as “tea,” or more ambiguous like “emptiness.” From here, the player uses the touch screen to draw and a basic palette to change their pen color. Granted, it’s not Photoshop, but it’s enough to get the job done. Moreover, points are awarded to the person drawing based on how quickly their work is deciphered.

The Plus+ integration include in-game achievements to add further longevity (though since its multiplayer, it already has a hefty lifespan), as well as leaderboards. The game’s results can be shared with others via email, Twitter, and Facebook. You can also view game log results and your drawings at Charadium.com using a “room code” granted at the end of each game.

Frankly, the game is a ton of fun and a great adaptation on classic analog games. In fact, the only complaint to be had doesn’t even come from the design side at all. As with most online games that give any sort of user control (even something as simple as chat), there are the random, immature morons that have to come in and draw offensive and obscene content. Thankfully, you can boot them out of games, but it is still very obnoxious.

Iif you’re looking for a simple, yet extremely fun and addictive game, Charadium comes highly recommended at $0.99.

Facebook is home to endless adaptations of the games of yesteryear. Harvest Moon, Pirates, Worms and many other non-action hits from gaming’s golden days undeniably provide inspiration for new games like Zynga’s FarmVille and Mafia Wars. But there’s a seemingly-obvious title that has missed out on the historical mining: SimCity.

Why obvious? The mechanics that make FarmVille (or Harvest Moon) such a resounding success are mirrored in SimCity. The most obvious one is growth. Farms grow and change; so do cities. The difference between a cornstalk and a skyscraper is time and size, but a game can easily re-scale either to fit the screens and attention spans of players.

There’s also the popular “harvesting” mechanic. Got a bean patch? Click on it to harvest and you’ve earned virtual coins. Click on your building, and you’re also harvesting coins. The big difference is what the players — and developers — imagine.

The use of Facebook’s communication features to grow games and increase engagement also seem applicable. FarmVille lets you send farm-themed gifts to your friends, Mafia Wars requires friends to help in team goals — why can’t the same things happen in city building?

Further, either setting up a virtual garden or a city appeals to a natural, human sense of order and beauty. On Facebook, satisfying these urges goes beyond farms to restaurants, animals, theme-parks and islands. The more one considers, the stranger it seems that SimCity has been overlooked so far by Facebook’s major game developers.

Luckily, a few small, relatively unknown developers recently began tapping the classic gaming goodness of SimCity.

There are two rapidly growing games that cleave fairly closely to the original SimCity formula: building and designing an entire city for the sake of doing it well (there’s no specified end game), while managing its buildings, zones and citizens. These two are My City Life by City Life, and My Town by Broken Bulb Studios.

You can see in the two graphs at right just how quickly these games are growing. In the top graph, My City Life, released late last month, has reached about 1.75 million players, while below it My Town, which has been around about a month longer, is closer to 2.5 million players.

These two come after a number of tries by other developers. In a review a couple weeks ago, we panned My City, which also follows the SimCity mechanic; it has stalled out with fewer than a million monthly active players. Even less successful are Enercities, Metropolis and Tiny Town (click each link for our review), each of which borrows from SimCity in varying degrees.

Why are My City Life and My Town more successful? We tried them out to get an idea. First off, it should be pointed out that SimCity fans shouldn’t expect a faithful reproduction of their game. As hinted above, these games tap into the same mechanics that make a game like FarmVille successful.

In SimCity, much of the action happened on its own; zone a section of the city to be residential, for instance, and it will begin growing on its own. But keeping players engaged on Facebook is about bringing them back repeatedly for short sessions, not letting someone sit back to watch a city grow for several hours.

So all the building is done manually; homes, shops, factories and parks are all manually placed. Just as in farming games, players must return periodically to click on their buildings, gaining their revenue.

There are other differences, although many of these come down to the Facebook platform; your city isn’t very animated, for instance, because that’s tougher to pull off. And many SimCity features, like terrain or natural disasters, aren’t present. The Facebook games are, in a nutshell, far simpler. But in our view, that’s what makes My City Life and My Town successful.

Each game has one clear aim: build a town that earns you enough money to put down buildings that you want to see, whether that’s a post office or public park, and expand further. There’s in-game currency that’s used for construction, with the usual option to buy more using real currency.

The successful Facebook games have almost all been fairly simple to date, and that’s not just because of the limitations of using Flash. The original SimCity was far simpler than SimCity 4, and built up to its complexity with each installment of the series; the relatively game-inexperienced userbase on Facebook will likely go through a similar progression, pushing the games to develop more features as they grow.

But even now, players are taking their urban planning seriously. “We get hundreds of emails about My Town each day through Facebook’s contact form,” says Robert Nelson, the CEO of Broken Bulb, which is based in Scottsdale, Arizona. “We got one off-the-wall email with 141 bullet points of features the player wants to see. It’s neat to see someone invested enough to send us that list.”

Broken Bulb has had a few surprises with My Town. The studio built the game to attract large numbers of somewhat engaged players, while it thought its other title, an RPG called Ninja Warz, would be smaller but earn more from virtual goods. “We’d heard from other companies that harvesting-style games don’t earn as much,” says Nelson. “But with My Town we’ve found an exception to the rule.”

I asked Nelson why someone else hadn’t already built a successful SimCity-style game. He says he was equally puzzled, but began to find some reasons in development. For instance, landscapes in My Town are fairly permanent.

“Not picking up an object when you harvest wreaks havoc — our game looks like FarmVille, but the mechanics are totally different,” he says. “People can’t schedule the game around their life as easily, and you run the risk of people starting to think their game is getting stale.”

The solution for Broken Bulb seems to be adding areas to expand into, so that players can go from a small to a large city, or even a region with several cities. The larger and more complex the maps get, the more the game will likely resemble SimCity instead of FarmVille.

Nelson says he considers My Town the first successful city building game on Facebook, and the biggest. The question is why, when Electronic Arts, which also makes games on Facebook, has owned the license to SimCity for years. Especially now that it owns Playfish, one of the successful social game developers on Facebook.

We mentioned SimCity for iPhone over a year ago, right after it was released, but there’s no sign yet of a social-gaming modification by EA. That’s a significant oversight for the company, which usually does a pretty good job at getting value from its licenses.

But whether EA gets involved or not, SimCity and its offshoots have a long, robust life ahead of them. In fact, there’s a whole new generation that will know and love the game: a free version of SimCity was recently released on the OLPC.

Aurora Feint‘s OpenFeint social platform is getting a big upgrade, the company says today. It already lets iPhone application developers add leaderboards, achievements, and other basic social features. The upgrade, OpenFeint X, includes a range of social features that offer more communication between users — and more users, engagement and revenue for developers. The upgrade is free, launching today with new Japanese strategic partner, DeNa Group, and will be generally available within a few months.

The new platform will actually offer developers the ability to create free-to-play games that include communication channels, virtual goods, and by extension, virtual goods transactions. The idea is to emulate the primary monetization model found on Facebook and the heart of the massive success of companies such as Zynga or CrowdStar. More and more companies have been experimenting with the free-to-play model on the iPhone after Apple made it available last fall, with some free-to-play games reaching its top leaderboards.

Features include they can use incentivized game invites, customized game boxes for player profiles, chat walls, newsfeeds, and “game nudges.” OpenFeint X will also offer premium services that provide not only the means to run a social game, but the ability to run one — but not quite for free. The service is using the free-to-play model, in a sense, because developers who use its virtual goods store, detailed analytics, a game-specific currency wallet, and downloadable game assets share a portion of the revenue with Aurora Feint.

Developers using OpenFeint have a total of 12 million total users and 25% per month growth, executive chairman Peter Relan tells us, including more than 1 million daily active users. Relan is also the chairman of CrowdStar and Sibblingz, a cross-platform social game engine service.

Zynga has swapped out one game for another on this week’s AppData list of top Facebook games by growth in daily active users (DAU). Last week it was FarmVille; now it’s  Texas HoldEm Poker, one of the company’s first successes.

There’s a big difference between today’s list and last week, though. Last Wednesday, the top five entries had amassed over six million new DAU. Today, we’re showing less than a million DAU gained for the top five. Some of this is probably due to more of Facebook’s recent analytics errors, but there may be another explanations too, like a shift in how the platform counts new users. Here are all 20:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Texas HoldEm Poker	6,033,218	+311,497	+5.16
2.	MindJolt Games	2,853,133	+234,366	+8.21
3.	SPP Ranch!	216,500	+123,019	+56.82
4.	Island Paradise	2,075,752	+106,337	+5.12
5.	My City Life	461,588	+106,307	+23.03
6.	Top Fish	120,335	+61,292	+50.93
7.	Ninja Saga	576,708	+58,214	+10.09
8.	Send Glitter!	74,851	+58,013	+77.50
9.	Mafia Wars	6,257,276	+52,387	+0.84
10.	Mahjongg Dimensions	66,204	+48,323	+72.99
11.	Jungle Jewels	373,344	+46,142	+12.36
12.	Bubble Island	67,943	+42,722	+62.88
13.	SCRABBLE	249,097	+39,833	+15.99
14.	My Town	662,929	+39,262	+5.92
15.	FARKLE	705,178	+37,300	+5.29
16.	Collect Roses	57,969	+34,051	+58.74
17.	Happy Island	2,960,032	+33,793	+1.14
18.	Farkle 2	73,913	+28,092	+38.01
19.	Roulette Madness	57,990	+27,302	+47.08
20.	GooBox – Jeux Gratuits	365,388	+25,388	+6.95

Both Texas HoldEm and MindJolt Games are large, so their gains aren’t terribly significant, in view of their overall playerbase. But both apps have also been trending up for longer than a week, particularly MindJolt, which is creeping toward three million DAU.

SPP Ranch and its partner in crime at number six, Top Fish, are both games by Slide. We pointed out the growth of three Slide games last Friday, and it would appear that whatever Slide is doing is still working. Over at Inside Facebook we’re also seeing some gains for the Slide FunSpace app, although there are clearly some reporting errors from Facebook skewing its ranking.

Also take note of My City Life, at number five. Like My Town, which is down at number 14, this game is a pure city-builder in the style of SimCity, which is somewhat rare on Facebook. Both of these games are gaining well; keep an eye out for a story later today, in which we explain why.

Finally, if you haven’t taken a look yet at Bubble Island, check it out at number 13. It’s a new bubble blaster game by Wooga, a German developer, that is gaining strongly. We reviewed the game last week.