Over the past couple months, we have seen Blizzard Entertainment dabble in the realm of social games and networks, from virtual goods in the massively multiplayer online game, World of Warcraft, to a Facebook application that publishes player accomplishments from the game, to hints to a more social Battle.net. Those hints – which first came up in September - are coming to fruition. Blizzard offered a preview of the new, improved, and social version of the online gaming service.

Founded 14 years ago with the company’s ever popular Diablo title for the PC, Battle.net has always connected gamers to an online world of multiplayer competition, chat, and leaderboards. Frankly, it is one of the oldest and most successful gaming services to date. Having evolved through the games of Starcraft, Diablo II, Warcraft II: Battle.net Edition, and Warcraft III and holding, currently, more than 12 million active accounts worldwide.

However, Blizzard feels there is still more to be done.

Essentially, Battle.net will become an “always-connected experience” where users can log on and interact within the service whether or not you are playing a solo mission (i.e. in the upcoming StarCraft II) or competing in multiplayer matches. In times past, the system was merely a means for people to play online with one another with no real sense of self, in its own right, save for some basic chat room-type features. Soon, Battle.net will allow users that prefer solo play as well as multiplayer combat will receive the same news, content, chat, and friends’ status updates.

Using StarCraft II as an example, Blizzard states that players will be able to create a single “StarCraft II Battle.net character.” This will act as their personal identity across the entire service and track everything that you do in Battle.net connected games, including win/loss records, achievements, unlockable rewards (i.e. new avatar portraits), and so on. Furthermore, since the games will be connected through Battle.net, all saved games will also be accessible to that user from any computer at any time.

The backbone of all of these new features, according to Blizzard, is “Battle.net’s social networking and communication capabilities.” This comment refers to more than just text and voice based chat systems, but actually refers to a new feature dubbed Real ID.

Using a mutual invite/acceptance method, players can form Real ID friends that will identify users “by their real name, along with any character they are logged in as.” In addition, Real ID friends will provide users with more detailed information such as what they are doing, allow for broadcast messages, and even allow cross-game chatting between, initially, StarCraft II, Battle.net, and World of Warcraft. Of course, this will carry over into future Blizzard games as well.

The new Battle.net is also going to be highly supportive of community-created content as well. In the past, users have often submitted maps for StarCraft, modified levels for Warcraft III, and so on, and as a company that has always openly supported creative user generated content, Blizzard will now grant said users a “full-featured content-creation toolkit” for their creative endeavours. The kit uses the same tools used by the StarCraft II design team to create the single player campaign. Moreover, Battle.net will incorporate another new feature called Map Publishing which will allow players to upload their creations and share them with everyone immediately.

Eventually, these creative individuals will gain even more advanced sharing capabilities, at least with StarCraft II, with a StarCraft II Marketplace. From here, anyone can browse, download, rate, comment on, and even buy mods and content should the creator desire.

The system will also have a myriad of other minor improvements, better individual and group matchmaking systems for games, leaderboard and ladder systems, and a ton more. All in all, this is a huge move and improvement for Battle.net and we expect it to be a success for Blizzard Entertainment as a whole, as well. An in-depth preview can be found here at the StarCraft II website, including an interview with Battle.net Project Director Greg Canessa.

Slide is living large on this week’s AppData list of top emerging apps on Facebook with under a million users. The big developer has had games on Facebook since early 2009, but until now it has had most of its users on its other apps.

Something has changed in Slide’s equation, though, because it has no less than three rapidly growing games listed below: SPP Ranch!, Top Fish and SuperPocus. Find them at numbers two, nine and 17:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Facts about friends	906,932	+906,770	+99.98
2.	SPP Ranch!	512,307	+326,061	+63.65
3.	Go to Hell	524,283	+250,352	+47.75
4.	World at War	688,268	+243,158	+35.33
5.	Kingdoms of Camelot	843,103	+172,623	+20.47
6.	Funflow	270,873	+169,284	+62.50
7.	MiniPlanet	699,992	+141,344	+20.19
8.	Address Book	236,601	+120,731	+51.03
9.	Top Fish	488,668	+116,918	+23.93
10.	Dress Me Up	472,486	+108,620	+22.99
11.	Di la Verdad!	110,675	+102,137	+92.29
12.	Città nel Cielo	205,428	+96,866	+47.15
13.	Ciudad en el Cielo	487,055	+95,821	+19.67
14.	Roulette Madness	226,030	+93,198	+41.23
15.	Flowers for Friends	592,576	+89,500	+15.10
16.	Cité des nuages	703,712	+84,762	+12.04
17.	SuperPocus	285,630	+83,358	+29.18
18.	SCRABBLE	769,761	+79,402	+10.32
19.	Collect Roses	278,819	+78,489	+28.15
20.	Jumping Dog	185,377	+76,706	+41.38

Slide has a couple more games besides those three, including the SuperPoke! Pets game that SPP Ranch is based on. Only the three listed above are showing significant growth. But oh, what good growth it is: they collectively picked up some 526,337 new players during the past week.

There’s a good way to go until any of these Slide games match the nearly 10 million users its Top Friends app has; in fact, they’re its three smallest apps.

On to the rest of the list. We only focus on games in this roundup, so we’ll write about number one, Facts about friends, over at Inside Facebook. Number three, Go to Hell, is a simple marketing “game” that Electronic Arts built to go with the release of Dante’s Inferno on consoles.

Kingdoms of Camelot, Funflow and MiniPlanet all appeared last week in the top ten, so they’re worth keeping an eye on. And there are three games with an interesting story: Città nel Cielo, Ciudad en el Cielo and Cité des nuages. This trio is an otherwise identical game in Italian, Spanish and French.

In the most recent post in our China social games series, we saw that China’s social game developer landscape is marked by high barriers and a payment structure that favors large social network platforms over individual developers. Today, we examine the financial incentives for developers in that market, and look at why developers of all sizes are looking beyond China for growth.

Low ARPUs and High Social Network Fees

While some developers are viewing Facebook’s impending Credits rollout and revenue share with apprehension, Chinese developers have been dealing with the revenue share question for years. China’s social networks take a cut – a generous one – of all revenues earned by social games on their platforms. These share rates are highly unfavorable toward developers, with some social networks reported to be keeping between 50% and 70% of all third-party app revenues.

On China’s social networking platforms, the number of visitors to apps is high and daily active users (DAU) are comparable to some of the most popular games on Facebook. The developer Five Minutes’ Happy Farm is seeing around 23 million DAUs while Zynga’s FarmVille is currently enjoy 27 million DAU according to our most recent numbers from AppData. Despite these promising traffic numbers, the average revenue per user (ARPU) remains very weak. One source reports that a game with 100,000 DAUs will bring in around $5,000 USD per month. That would calculate out to around $0.06 / DAU / month. For reference, many games on Facebook are making under $1 / DAU / month, with a few of the stronger games surpassing the $1 threshold.

Why are ARPUs so low? It’s not because Chinese users are strangers to virtual goods. As we noted in this series’ first installment, China’s overall virtual goods market is on its way to becoming a $5 billion market in 2010, while the U.S. virtual goods market is on track to becoming a $1.6 billion market, according to our research for Inside Virtual Goods: the Future of Social Gaming 2010.

A $5 million market from virtual goods alone should be nothing to complain about, but much of this revenue will be generated from virtual goods outside of social games by businesses like QQ’s extremely popular instant messaging service. It’s not because of high payment friction either. In fact, one insider we talked to told us the following about payments:

“Payment is actually BETTER than on Facebook and FB apps, with LESS friction. On RenRen you can already buy RenRen Beans, which are used across applications, like Facebook Credits plan to be.”

What we do know is that few in this industry understand the specific reasons why ARPUs remain low in China’s social games. Developers we’ve spoken with have cited a variety of explanations, from low transaction values, high volumes of non-transacting users, the relative newness of the social gaming trend in China, and the different audience it appeals to (as opposed to traditional gaming, which appeals to a different, ‘hardcore’ audience with different spending habits). Whatever the reason, the low ARPUs and high share rates with social networks have some Chinese social game developers setting their sites on new, more promising markets.

What’s Coming in 2010, and What It Means for the U.S. Market

It’s obvious from both our conversations and from observable movement in the China social games industry: Chinese social gaming has abundant developer talent and creativity. If the social gaming ecosystem in China is as stifling as some are indicating, then what will be the alternate outlets for this innovation?

We expect we’ll see two directions of expansion for the developers in China’s social gaming ecosystem. First, talent acquisition activities will increase. For example, as part of EA’s Playfish deal, it inherited the latter’s sizable Beijing office and the considerable developer talent there.

Second, we can expect more Chinese developers to begin moving into other markets, especially the U.S. We previously commented on the growing number of Chinese developers on the Facebook platform; as players in the Chinese social gaming start hitting the bounds of that market, we expect entrance onto platforms like Facebook and Japan’s Mixi to accelerate dramatically. Beijing-based Rekoo is already among the top ranking social apps on Mixi in Japan, with its Sunshine Ranch game drawing 3.8 million users, or around 20% of the networks total users.

These are natural transitions for Chinese developers outgrowing their home market. As source puts it, “Since the games are not a whole lot different [between] West and East and entry barriers are low, it is a reasonable move for Chinese social app developers to launch on Facebook, MySpace and even on Japanese, Korean or Russian social networks. The difficulty remains to “culturalize” the services and do proper community management, as those games are not ‘products’ but really ‘services.’”

All this is good news for Facebook — its platform is seeing an influx of Chinese developers, and we expect that trend to continue this year. These developers are bringing in their experience and abilities, likely resulting in more high-quality apps. We also expect these developers to have a relatively favorable view of Facebook’s platform regulations and payment cuts, because they’ve endured months or years of far less favorable rules and share rates in their home markets.

It’s also good news for the big publishers looking to acquire top developer talent. Finally, the Chinese social game developer diaspora will have important implications for payments companies and other service providers catering to developers – they’ll soon find themselves with a new set of potential clients to win over.

April 20 | San Francisco

As we announced two weeks ago, Inside Social Apps 2010, our first conference on the future of monetization on social platforms, is happening April 20th in San Francisco, one day before Facebook’s official “f8″ event. We’re excited to see all of the developers from around the world that are planning to attend!

In addition to the initial set of 20 confirmed speakers at Inside Social Apps 2010, we’re also excited to announce three more speakers today: Keith Lee, Co-founder and CEO of Booyah, Ron Hirson, Co-founder and SVP Product at Boku, and Lisa Marino, CRO of RockYou. They will be joining our full list of speakers listed below.

• Atul Bagga, VP Equity Research, Games, ThinkEquity
• Adam Caplan, VP Virtual Currency, Super Rewards / Adknowledge
  
• Renata Dionello, Chief of Staff to the CEO, eBay, and former Director of Consumer Business Development, PayPal
• Eric Eldon, Editor, Inside Facebook & Inside Social Games
• George Garrick, CEO, Offerpal Media
• Vikas Gupta, CEO, Jambool
• Sebastien de Halleux, Founder and COO, Playfish
• Ron Hirson, Co-founder and SVP Product, Boku
• Nick Lawler, Managing Director, Maverick Capital
• Keith Lee, Co-founder and CEO, Booyah
  
• Vish Makhijani, COO, Zynga
• David Marcus, CEO, Zong
• Lisa Marino, CRO, RockYou
  
• Dave McClure, Investor, Founders Fund Angel and fbFund Incubator
• Rex Ng, Co-founder and CEO, 6waves
• Jason Oberfest, VP Social Applications, ngmoco
• Mark Pincus, Founder and CEO, Zynga
• Shervin Pishevar, Founder and Executive Chairman, SGN
• John Pleasants, CEO, Playdom
• Keith Rabois, VP Strategy and Business Development, Slide
• Peter Relan, Executive Chairman, CrowdStar
• Justin Smith, Founder, Inside Network
• Kavin Stewart, CEO, Lolapps
• Jay Weintraub, Founder, LeadsCon

More speakers and a full agenda will be announced shortly.

Finally, a limited set of “early bird” tickets is now available through Friday at a special price of $279. This price will change after Friday, and space will be limited, so we encourage you to register now.

Inside Social Apps 2010 – April 20th in San Francisco

Three years after the Facebook Platform launched in 2007, what started out as sheep throwing and vampire biting has quickly become a profitable billion-dollar industry. Today, social games monetizing through virtual goods have quickly become one of the hottest sectors of technology and entertainment, both in the US and around the world. Where are social apps going, and who is leading the way?

Inside Network is proud to announce our first conference on the future of monetization on social platforms: Inside Social Apps 2010, happening April 20th in San Francisco, is bringing together the world’s leading entrepreneurs all in one place to discuss the future of social applications and games monetizing through virtual goods.

This will be an in-depth one day event geared toward developers on Facebook, MySpace, and the iPhone, senior executives, and investors. At Inside Social Apps 2010, founders and CEOs of the top social gaming, mobile social gaming, payments, and virtual goods infrastructure companies will be tackling the key issues facing the industry. We’re hosting it one day before Facebook’s “f8″ event in San Francisco, so this will be an excellent opportunity to learn about the key issues facing the future of the Facebook Platform and beyond before Facebook’s official event.

Register Now

A limited set of “early bird” tickets is available through Friday at a special price of $279. This price will change after Friday, and space will be very limited, so we encourage you to register early.

From all of us at Inside Network, we hope to see you on April 20th in San Francisco!

San Francisco-based social game developer CrowdStar has meteorically risen to #2 on the AppData DAU charts over the last several months, surpassing Playfish and Playdom and now second only (albeit distantly) to market leader Zynga. As you may imagine, there are folks interested in the social gaming market who might be taking a look at acquiring the company.

We’ve been hearing a bunch of rumors in recent weeks, but the latest rumor published by Bloomberg this morning is that Microsoft is in the mix, and may be valuing CrowdStar at $200 million. (CrowdStar Executive Chairman Peter Relan will be speaking at our upcoming Inside Social Apps 2010 conference April 20th in San Francisco.)

The Bloomberg report says a deal is not imminent, and that CrowdStar is considering taking private equity funding as well.

The last three months have seen a string of major investments and acquisitions in the social gaming ecosystem:

• In November, Electronic Arts acquired Playfish in a deal that could total up to $400 million.
• Also in November, Playdom raised $43 million in funding from New Enterprise Associates, company chairman Rick Thompson, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Norwest Venture Partners.
• And in December, Zynga raised a whopping $180 million round led by Russian investor DST, who is also an investor in Facebook.

CrowdStar is in a strong position at the moment, and is known for running a very tight ship. “We want to be the most profitable social gaming company, not the one with the most revenue,” he told Inside Social Games in December.

Relan says the company plans to fend off Zynga by being very agile. “Every time they enter a category where we have gotten big,” he said, “we’ll launch an entirely new game within weeks.”

We’ll let you know as anything happens.

After Zynga announced its acquisition of Serious Business this morning, a couple of business development execs from the two companies have independently announced that they are leaving their respective firms to pursue new opportunities.

Charles Hudson, formerly VP of Business Development at Serious Business, said today that he is moving on to pursue new opportunities now that the acquisition is closed. Hudson is also the co-author of our Inside Virtual Goods market research reports, and recently sold his conference business to WebMediaBrands, where he remains a consultant.

“I’m very excited about what Serious Business and Zynga will be able to achieve together. Working with the team at Serious Business for the last year and a half has been a great experience and I’m really going to miss everyone over there. Having spent time with the team at Zynga, I’m really impressed by what they’ve been able to put together in a really short time and I walked away with a new-found respect for how well they’re operating and how they think about building and monetizing social games,” Hudson said.

“Ultimately, though, I wanted to be part of a smaller enterprise and be an integral part of starting something new. In addition to staying involved in my conference business following the acquisition that closed in December, I’m exploring a few great opportunities and should have something to announce later this spring.”

Bret Terrill, formerly Senior Director of Corporate Development at Zynga, told us today in Hamburg, Germany that he is leaving the company to pursue other opportunities, but has not finalized what those are yet.

“When I joined Zynga, I joined because I knew it was a company that was going to win,” Terrill says. “It looks like, for all intents and purposes, that that’s true. Having been through that process, I wanted to move on to other opportunities where I can be more impactful. I’m not sure what that is yet. At a company with 800 people, that opportunity gets smaller, and I just want to keep adding value.”

“Leaving Zynga was very hard for me. I think what I learned most during my time at Zynga was how to run a successful startup from Mark [Pincus] – you can’t get any better. Watching Mark and the management team has been fantastic. Mark always says life is too short to struggle – if you’re going to pursue something, you need to do it fully. I know Zynga will continue to dominate the industry. Zynga currently is larger than its next 30 competitors combined. My personal professional highlights working at Zynga were the MyMiniLife and Serious Business acquisitions. It’s too soon to see how [the SB acquisition] will go, but I wanted to go out strong.”

Terrill says he’s going to “brief vacation and see where my opportunities are, but I don’t know what those are yet.”

Social gaming giant Zynga has acquired Serious Business for an undisclosed amount, the companies just announced this morning. Both companies are based on San Francisco, and the Serious Business team has already joined Zynga at its Potrero Hill headquarters.

Serious Business has a very talented team and has built some hits, especially Friends for Sale, but it’s not huge. It has a total of 6.20 million monthly active users and 838,000 daily active users, according to AppData. The company previously raised $4 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners, which is also an investor in Playdom and RockYou. Serious Business’s founders, Alex Le and Siqi Chen, are both former employees of Powerset, a search company that Microsoft acquired in 2008.

Zynga currently has more than 68 million non-deduped daily active users on Facebook, according to AppData, making it by far the largest social game developer on the platform. We estimate the company brought in more than $200 million in revenue last year; it also recently raised $180 million from Russian investor DST.

Serious Business is not the first company that Zynga has acquired. Others include MyMiniLife, a smaller studio that has helped Zynga build popular simulation games like FarmVille, the Facebook app YoVille, and GoPets, a pet-caring game builder that appears to have helped work on the company’s PetVille game. The previous acquisitions were notable for their talent and strategic value to the Zynga product pipeline and that appears to be the case today.

Zynga’s other purchases have also led to new games, and we’re interested to see what results from the Serious Business team. Zynga filed 21 new game trademarks in December, so we’re expecting more, soon.

As social gaming becomes more competitive, we expect to see more smaller developers get acquired — either by larger developers like Zynga, or by other gaming companies.

A charming French Facebook game called Paf le Chien, from developer Adictiz, has made our top 20 charts several times over the last few months. Now, it’s available in English. Here’s our review.

Loosely translated, it means “Paf the Dog,” except that “paf” is a French onomatopoeia for the sound made when hitting something; the English version is available as Waf Waf the Dog, and it’s actually a collection of three mini-games.

As odd as that translation sounds, it makes a lot of sense. The object of the original Paf le Chien, was a lot like the Facebook app, KickMania! which we covered more than a year ago. Basically, players line up their foot and directly using the motion of the mouse, punt poor Paf (or Waf Waf, whichever name you prefer) into the air.

Evidently, this goofy looking dog is rather aerodynamic as he flies quite fluidly and bounces surprisingly well. The object is to send le chien as far as possible in one shot, using what looks to be geese to spring him farther. Assuming one doesn’t land smack into a brick wall (which is amusing in its own right), Paf will continue to soar and bounce along until friction and gravity have run their respective courses.

As players kick Paf farther, new items unlock to increase the effectives and style of the dog’s flight and include kamikaze goggles, wings, and even some dynamite. Of course, if you’re having trouble, you can always purchase the items directly.

In addition to this dog-punting game, the Waf Waf app also comes with The Real Revenge of Waf Waf the Dog and Waf Waf Skateboarding. The former is somewhat similar to Paf le Chien, but rather than a guy kicking the dog, the roles are reversed with this mean-spirited man sitting, unwittingly upon a seesaw.

Using the same mouse controls, players move Paf and sling him into said seesaw to send the man flying. Unfortunately, the controls are a bit hard to get a hang of as well as the best way to launch the fellow, so we never really did get much distance before he plummeted into the ground.

Regardless, the last little game, Waf Waf Skateboarding proved to be more amusing, as players simple use the arrow keys to skate Paf up and down a half-pipe, sending him absurdly higher and higher. It really only comes down to timing your left and right arrow keys based on the direction you are moving, but it was a bit funny to watch this goofy critter breach the city skyline. Furthermore, like with the first game, new items can be bought or earned and consist of skateboards and performable tricks.

Currently, the English version of Paf le Chien (Waf Waf the Dog) is still relatively new, and only sits around 21,000 monthly active users. However, the amusement of the French original did prove to be very popular at one point with between 6 and 7 million monthly active users, appearing in our November Top 25, and a couple more times in our Top 20 games with the most daily active users. Unfortunately, the game’s popularity has dropped off since them and currently sits around 600,000 monthly actives. Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see if English audiences will be captivated by this bizarre little animal in the same way.

Though the big game is over, international usage of Facebook and its features are always something to keep an eye on. The latest find is a compilation of four simplistic titles called NFL Canada Social Games. Powered by Playaction and integrated with Facebook Connect, this football oriented portal brings everything from pools, to memory, to free cars to the table.

Despite what many seem to think, NFL popularity is hardly limited to just the United States, and NFL Canada is just the site to help sate that international thirst. Of course, that doesn’t mean one has to be Canadian to make use of the portal, but it couldn’t hurt considering that the registration to win a Nissan Pathfinder asks for your province. To be clear, this site is not for the Canadian Football League, which is a variation of American football.

For the record, this registration is just for the car, as the primary login is through Facebook Connect. Nonetheless, it is worth mentioning, as the more players play the collection of applicationss on the site, the more times they are entered to win (though there are limited entries per game per day or week).

The first two games featured on the site are fairly similar and are dubbed NFL Confidence Pool Playoffs Edition and NFL Live. Each game is about predictions as you and a slew of other Facebook users try to predict what will happen in a game. What is interesting, however, is while Confidence poses questions before a game (i.e. “Which team will register more passing yards in the game?”), Live actually updates in real time with questions such as “What will the next play be?” In fact, you can even be notified via email before a game starts.

The other two games are more game-like – Quiznos Trivia and NFL Concentration – and are your basic quiz and memory type of games. In the former, players test their NFL knowledge with quirky football puns appearing based on your answer, while the latter is merely matching up team logos.

All the games are amusing, but what makes them better than their descriptions is the Facebook integration. Through Facebook, players can not only publish results to their feed, but view weekly and overall leaderboards as well. More than this, however, one has to consider the social nature of the two prediction games.

Through Connect, Confidence is more reminiscent of an office pool (which may or may not be very social, depending on the people involved), and Live feels more like a bunch of buddies at a bar or in the living room guessing what will happen next. Granted, it’s not the same without the din of noise or 50 hot wings, but the prizes players can win from either of these games (beyond the Pathfinder), more than makes up for that (i.e. an NFL prize pack for Confidence).

Yes, the NFL season has come to a close, but the world is still turning as more and more international sites, apps, and developers empower, socially, themselves through Facebook. Unfortunately, it will be some time before NFL Canada sees heavy usage again, but until then perhaps it would be wise to brush up on your NFL trivia knowledge. After all, who knows what prizes they’ll be offering next season.

Welcome back to our Wednesday list of top gaining Facebook games by growth in their daily active users (DAU), pulled from AppData. This week shows some impressive gains for apps both old and new, but they should be taken with a grain of salt; Facebook failed to update its stats several days last week, leading to some potential inconsistencies.

FarmVille, for instance, is showing a 13 percent rise to almost 32 million DAU — a bigger bump than it has enjoyed for several months. Yet some of its gain could come down to the monthly average user numbers freezing for several days before being updated today; brand-new MAUs are briefly interpreted as DAUs.

But most of the apps are on even playing ground with their reporting problems, so the list as a whole is generally accurate. Take a look:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	FarmVille	31,937,622	+4,278,734	+13.40
2.	Birthday Cards	2,972,808	+971,030	+32.66
3.	Zoo World	2,660,560	+492,826	+18.52
4.	Pet Society	4,198,261	+310,074	+7.39
5.	My City Life	350,224	+148,321	+42.35
6.	PetVille	4,817,157	+139,421	+2.89
7.	Ninja Saga	518,494	+137,761	+26.57
8.	My Town	623,667	+136,871	+21.95
9.	Happy Aquarium	5,963,706	+124,174	+2.08
10.	MindJolt Games	2,618,767	+105,563	+4.03
11.	Restaurant City	3,359,280	+85,531	+2.55
12.	Medical Mayhem	280,339	+64,160	+22.89
13.	Texas HoldEm Poker	5,721,721	+55,796	+0.98
14.	SPP Ranch!	93,481	+54,666	+58.48
15.	開心水族箱	1,764,422	+53,191	+3.01
16.	(Lil) Farm Life	1,050,736	+51,988	+4.95
17.	Fish World	1,255,007	+43,368	+3.46
18.	Vampire Wars	632,291	+37,968	+6.00
19.	Okey	488,593	+34,615	+7.08
20.	UNO™	294,813	+33,131	+11.24

Returning briefly to FarmVille, the game’s path to virtual agricultural domination is continuing apace. Zynga announced late last week that it will take Farmville to MSN’s half-billion users, and the game is going all-out for Valentine’s day with a roughly $40 “Unwither Ring” that simultaneously shows love and keeps crops from ever withering. Two ways to look at that: one is that it’s ridiculously expensive, the second is that it’s only a matter of time until virtual goods start substituting as engagement rings.

Birthday Cards and Zoo World, both from RockYou, take the second and third spot, but there’s no indication yet that their DAU gains are going to last.

The rest of the list offers a couple of good synergies. First there’s Pet Society and Petville, respectively from Electronic Arts and Zynga. Both are posting relatively minor gains, but there’s always the possibility that a feedback loop is taking place — perhaps some players really love playing pet-caring games, and are discovering and using both apps?

My City Life and My Town are where the real action is. These sim town games are growing rapidly, and at least in the case of My Town, have been for some time. What’s interesting is that this is a category that big developers by and large haven’t gotten into yet; but if strong growth continues for the smaller developers making these games, chances are that won’t be the case for long.