While the farming genre boom has died down significantly, the prospect of growing virtual crops has still stirred up sparks of life here and there on Facebook. Perhaps the most common “reinvention” of this type of game comes in the form of island farming — as opposed to the Midwestern prototype. We’ve seen it before in games such as Tiki Farm, but now we’re taking a look at Metaplace’s rendition, Island Life.

Metaplace is the gaming company founded by well-respected game designer Raph Koster, that has shifted focus from making virtual worlds to social games. Overall, the game shows this, with polished interface and smart spin on gaming dynamics. And so far, it is getting some decent traction with just shy of 400,000 monthly active users.

The primary reason is likely the familiar farming element. The game, at its core, is the same as any other farming sim, just on a deserted island. Players are granted a small space littered with plots of land and two palm trees. Now, for the record, we do not know why every deserted virtual island is approximately 20 feet in diameter with two palm trees, but the cliché is still fun. Thankfully, players are able to use an island expansion feature to reshape and sculpt their virtual space to the way they see fit.

Regardless, players can plant as many crops as there are plots of land, 36 to be exact, with no apparent limitation based on level (the type of crop and some decorations, are still limited by level). After X amount of time, the plants are harvestable and can be sold for more money.

This is where another major difference comes into play. Friends can still visit each other’s islands to help care for their farms, – picking up trash and fertilizing to earn points – but it doesn’t look like Island Life has any of the other caretaking elements to worry about. Namely, this refers to watering, killing bugs, and so on. Everything is simplified to plow land, plant crop, harvest crop, which for many players may actually be an improvement.

Considering the very casual and non-gamer nature of most Facebook users, the prospect of not having to check back constantly to ensure your plants are taken care of is a plus. To many, the constant logging on can feel like a chore, and often, many players don’t log on more than once every one or two days, anyway.

Of course, the second element to Island Life, is the décor. Players are able to decorate their virtual island with tropical-themed elements ranging from simple rocks and fences to glorious pirate ships. It offers a social take on this that we haven’t seen in many competitors games — some of the items require friends to help you construct them.

If you do not have friends playing, then the building (a “small hut,” for example), will remain a heap of construction materials wherever you placed it. If you do have enough friends, then it will build in X amount of time, depending on how large it is. Additionally, friends also come into play in the fact that each island is its own multiplayer environment, complete with real-time chat, bringing a bit of that virtual world mentality to Island Life, and making the creation of a good looking space even more apparent.

Unfortunately, this creative use of the social network also comes with a large number of prompts. Just about every two or three minutes, the game throws an “invite friends” message at you. Many social games push invites and other actions like this. The reason is that more prompts can increase reach and engagmement numbers. The risk is that players get fed up with not being able to enjoy the game itself, then spend less money on goods and move on sooner than they might otherwise.

Island Life does have some differences that make it a bit more in tune with the more non-gamer type demographics on Facebook, and it also has a realistic style that is a nice difference from all the cartoon graphics out there. Moreover, some of the virtual world-like features really do add a nice extra flare to the title. Nonetheless, users would be better able to enjoy the game’s qualities if it dialed down the messaging.

The latest two games from Playdom have the lead over everyone else on this week’s top 20 list of Facebook games gaining the most monthly active users. Social City is by far the standout with over three million new players, but Tiki Resort, a distant second, still manages to edge out the nearest competition.

This is Social City’s second week heading up the list. The city building game has only been around for a little longer than that, but it’s already the 19th largest game on Facebook, according to AppData, and shows no signs of slowing down yet. The game’s addicted userbase is also single-handedly dragging up Playdom’s daily active users as a percentage of MAU stat, as seen below.

So we’re finally ready to declare that Playdom has hit on the newest social gaming fad since fish games. In fact, the company has doubled down on its bet by investing $5 million in MetroGames, which makes Towner, another game in the SimCity style; you can find it at number seven on this list. As we reported last week, Zynga may also be ready to dive into city building.

That’s all too bad for the small developers who were early into the space with games like My Town and My City Life. Luckily, they’ve at least gained a toehold to fight from.

Here’s the rest of the list:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Social City	7,432,756	+3,142,460	+42.28
2.	Tiki Resort	2,939,897	+666,014	+22.65
3.	Bubble Island	2,762,032	+613,707	+22.22
4.	Keyboard Mash!	1,264,303	+554,954	+43.89
5.	Texas HoldEm Poker	28,332,917	+525,270	+1.85
6.	MindJolt Games	21,186,925	+504,076	+2.38
7.	Towner	1,282,282	+446,669	+34.83
8.	Jeux Gratuits	1,261,870	+369,592	+29.29
9.	Zoo Paradise	894,732	+297,373	+33.24
10.	Music Pets	859,321	+284,943	+33.16
11.	Restaurant City	15,503,029	+265,926	+1.72
12.	JibJab	259,333	+259,333	+100.00
13.	2010 Bracket Challenge	420,185	+249,961	+59.49
14.	Jumping Dog	999,726	+244,186	+24.43
15.	Bola	615,192	+207,641	+33.75
16.	PetVille	19,961,359	+206,531	+1.03
17.	Top Stalkers	719,024	+193,442	+26.90
18.	Mahjongg Dimensions	1,148,597	+186,747	+16.26
19.	Puzzle Bobble	675,915	+171,149	+25.32
20.	Ameba Pico	459,112	+160,692	+35.00

Wooga’s new game Bubble Island is still doing well at number three. Consistent with Wooga’s homebase in Berlin, more of the bubble blasting game’s new users appear to be European than American. Its growth will likely continue, as higher levels of the game almost require that users invite their friends.

Keyboard Mash! doesn’t need any further description. But interaction specialists take note: Facebook users love banging mindlessly on their keyboards.

Finally, we’ll point out MindJolt Games. Its gain doesn’t look too significant for a game of its size, but don’t be fooled; steady wins the race. Assuming MindJolt was acquired before the beginning of March (we reported the acquisition on the 5th), the game is now a full 20 percent larger than what its acquirers paid for. Not bad, for a month’s work.

Tencent Brings in $1.8 Billion in 2009 – When it comes to virtual goods transactions, China’s Tencent is one of the company’s making the most money: the internet media company reports an impressive $1.8 billion in revenue for 2009, a 74% increase over last year. Kai Lukoff has a good analysis over at Venturebeat. Comparively, we’ve reported that Facebook is between $600 and $700 million.

Composed of multiple services such as QQ Messenger, QQ Show, QQ Game, and so on, the network offers free and exclusive virtual goods for each one. However, these services require a “diamond membership” of different colors. Only by having that color membership, – $1.50 a month, for one – do users get the goods for its corresponding service. Currently, around 10% of Tencent’s active user base pays for them. Furthermore, over 75% of their revenue stems from such “internet value-added services.” Services with a noted 94% growth rate in 2009.

Zynga Recruits Steven Chiang - Yet another veteran from the colossal gaming studio, Electronic Arts, makes his way into social gaming. This time, it is veteran EA exectutive, Steven Chiang, as he joins social developer Zynga as president of the company’s social development studios. Among other changes, co-founder and Executive Vice President of Sales and Business, Andrew Trader, recently left the company.

PlaySpan Partners with Changyou – Monetization services company PlaySpan has a new partner, Changyou.com. Offering popular MMOs such as Dragon Oath, Changyou will provide its users in the United States, Europe, and Malaysia purchase options for virtual goods using PlaySpan’s UltimatePay method.

Nintendo Dabbles in Social Games – While Microsoft and Sony have been adding social elements to their consoles for some time now, Nintendo has rarely expressed any real interest in the space. However, their frequent boasts about an 93% bigger screen size on their upcoming portable device, DSi XL, has led to an amusing Facebook application, aptly dubbed “93%.”

Essentially, it is nothing more than a poll that lists funny objects and asks which ones users would like to see 93% larger. However, Nintendo has recently stated that it plans to “significantly boost the social fun of portable gaming.” Unfortunately, their definition of social gaming seems to merely be crowding around one screen, but perhaps that outlook will shift with the release of two “social games,” America’s Test Kitchen: Let’s Get Cooking and WariorWare: D.I.Y. which will allow multiple participants and the sharing of mini-games respectively.

Russian Company, Nival Network gets $7 Million in Investments – This past week, Nival Network raised a hefty $7 million in funding from DST (a former Facebook and Zynga investor), 1C Company, and Sergey Orlovskiy, Quintura reports. The company is the developer and operator behind Russia’s top online gaming and social networking portal, ZZima.com and provides both free-to-play online games (developed, published, and operated by Nival Network) and as well as massively multiplayer online games such as Dragonica, Shaiya: Light and Darkness, and Cabal Online. Such services are available throughout Russia and other former Soviet countries.

Live Gamer Partners with Kount – Payment solutions provider Live Gamer announced Friday that it has partnered with a company called Kount. The latter company specializes in “card-not-present” fraud control. Though details are not completely clear, the two companies have stated that Kount”s fraud protection tools, such as device fingerprinting and proxy piercing, will be integrated into Live Gamer’s element platform.

Free Realms & 7-11 Promote Virtual Currency with Dinosaurs – Sony Online Entertainment, creator of MMOs such as Everquest and Everquest II, is offering a free virtual dinosaur (a T-rex, to be exact) mount for players in its title, Free Realms. The catch? They will need to purchase $10 worth of the developer’s universal virtual currency, Station Cash, at brick and mortar 7-11 locations. The special promotion will last until April 19th, and membership is not a requirement.

As a lesser note, customers will also receive a free green hat for their virtual pet dog in Free Realms as well. Of course, if they don’t have one, they’ll still have the $10 in Station Cash to buy one.

Chinese Consumers Spend $5 Billion on Virtual Goods – Last week, Gamasutra outlined consumer spending in the MMO market. Long story short, U.S. consumers spent 15 times more than Europeans, tallying in at $3.8 billion in total for 2009. However, this total is for all MMO spending, not merely virtual goods, which we had estimated to be just over $1 billion last year. However, that number is dwarfed as CNN reports that Chinese consumers have spent well over $5 billion in virtual goods for 2009.

Considering that many Chinese citizens are reported to have “limited disposable income,” the total may be a bit of a shock. However, the business model for virtual goods transactions is primarily centered around $1 to $2 transactions, further proving how lucrative these small, impulsive purchases can be.

Apple Now Accepting iPad Developer Applications – The company is looking for developers to build early applications on its soon-to-launch iPad device. Applications due on March 27. TechCrunch has more.

As anyone who was at GDC last week could tell, “social gaming” was certainly one of the major themes that people were interested in talking about this year – much moreso than last year, when there was barely even a panel on it if I remember correctly. As social games continue to become more and more mainstream in the west, a lot of people are getting attracted to what appears to be the first mass market opportunity of this scale in a long time. Nevertheless, there also continue to be skeptics who see social games based on virtual goods as just a Flash in the pan. “They’re not even real games,” many people say. Is this kind of casual social gaming really here to stay?

Let’s step back and take an anecdotal look at human behavior in general. Have most people over the years (generally speaking) preferred to spend their time playing games with people they know or people they’ve just met? Although there are some important exceptions, most anecdotal evidence suggests that many more people would rather play games with friends and family than people they meet in a lobby, even if the “games” they’re playing are pretty basic, like cards or checkers.

On average days, most people who play games want to play with people they know – whether it be in the back yard growing up, in the nearby field with friends, or during game night at the house. These experiences are fun, not just because of the content of the game itself, but because of the context for social interaction with friends that they allow. Having a fun experience with friends is generally more important than in-game achievement.

So now, as what we today call “social games” proliferate across online social platforms, it should come as no surprise that millions of people are starting to play the types of games that allow casual, asynchronous interaction with friends that never played other types of online games with strangers. There are already 16 games on Facebook with more than 10 million monthly players, one (FarmVille) with over 80 million (I repeat, 80 million) monthly players – most of whom don’t identify as online gamers – and we’re still in the very early days.

Of course, there are some important exceptions to note. Some of these include:

• In skill-based games, particularly in team or clan games, players who reach a certain level of proficiency generally want to find other players of a similar skill level, no matter if they are friends are not. We see this both in the physical world in sports leagues like soccer/football, and online in examples like Counter-Strike leagues. However, in general, people who continue to play skill games often tend to be the more skilled players, i.e. are generally viewed as “hardcore,” and not representative of the average person.
• In MMORPGs, players often form strong ties with a particular group, and endeavor either individually or collectively as a guild to perform tasks that intrinsically lead to frequent interactions with strangers. (This is what the commenter “Brass Monkey” is referring to on Raph Koster’s blog post regarding this comment I made at GDC.) It’s certainly true that this is a fundamental dynamic of most MMOs, and many “social games” on Facebook at least partially share these characteristics. For example, you can interact with friends or strangers in games like YoVille.
• In gambling games, people often like to play with strangers more than friends because of the intrinsic and potentially relationship-damaging conflict that can arise from taking your friends’ money. Just as many people gamble in casinos instead of with friends when playing for high stakes, most people also even play poker games on Facebook with strangers. (Poker games are also happen to be synchronous, making it harder to find friends who are online at the same time to play with, but I think that doesn’t affect this core social dynamic.)

As gaming technology has advanced over the last 20 years, social infrastructure has lagged behind. As a result, gaming culture has become branded in many traditional senses as “anti-social” (i.e. images of a teenager in a bedroom with a headset on at a computer or a child in front of a TV are common). Now that high-fidelity online social graphs exist (Facebook being the largest and primary case), online gaming is about to become much more socialized and “normal” as these games blend entertainment and authentic, asynchronous communication with “real-life” (i.e. not just in-game) friends.

Facebook is the best platform for this blending of entertainment and communication to happen on because it is built on trusted identity and meaningful real-life connections (at least for a very large portion of its users). That’s something that gaming portals just don’t have. Over time, Facebook and other social platforms will gradually take over more and more of the “casual” gaming market, though there will of course be opportunities for carve-outs in particular game genres just as there are carve-out opportunities in particular cultures and geographies in general. But on the whole, most people want to play games with their friends most of the time, just as much now as they always have.

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Mobile gaming appears to be a console-style business, at least judging by its premiere platform, Apple’s App Store. Only a small fraction of games and developers get enough users and make enough money to be meaningfully profitable. Due to minimal social features, apps need to get a lot of attention to break through — from ads, the press, being featured by Apple in the store, etc.

But all this is changing, for mobile gaming startup Ngmoco. It now has what may be the first big social gaming business primarily based on the iPhone and iPod touches.

I had the opportunity to do a question and answer session with Jason Oberfest on the topic this week at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas. He’s the company’s vice president of social applications, and a former business and product leader at MySpace. Having worked on MySpace’s developer platform, he has an especially clear understanding of how the mobile and social gaming worlds intersect.

Here are some tips he shared for any developer looking to make a successful social mobile game.

Identify and closely track all key metrics: Ngmoco has “instrumented” all of its software, meaning that when it can measure a wide variety user behaviors that happen within its games. But its not enough to use analytics. You need to know what to track — you don’t want to measure then build around the wrong features. Like social gaming companies, Oberfest says Ngmoco focuses on: the number of daily active users in a game, including the number of sessions they have each day; the viral coefficient of a game; user churn rates over timenumber of friends each user brings in for a game; the average revenue per user; the average revenue per paying user ; the effective cost per thousand impressions (eCPM); and other related factors.

Understand the trade-offs between reach, retention and revenue: Some features might make your game spread fast, others might get people coming back, but they need to be balanced with how you plan to make money. Charging for your application, for example, is a great way to discourage friends from sharing it with each other — free and social have to go well together, he says. And yet, making it really easy for users to share, say, a gift with lots of friends might feel spammy, and discourage users coming back every day.

Plan for virtual goods from the start: Ngmoco has benefited from Apple’s decision to allow free-to-play virtual goods in games, last fall. It can include gifts and other features that encourage users to spread the game for free, then monetize those users through virtual goods purchases later. The company retrofitted some of its games to include virtual goods, but Oberfest says that the real revenue is in designing the game around virtual goods. For example, its forthcoming medieval city-building game, We Rule, features a FarmVille-style ability to raise crops and produce other goods, but also an ability to build stores and then exchange them goods with other users. He also notes that while virtual goods provide a strong revenue base for free-to-play games, brand and app-install advertising can be layered on top; Ngmoco currently makes 40% of its revenue on average from in-app virtual goods purchases and the rest from other revenue sources.

Decide if a mobile social platform is right for you: Ngmoco, along with competitors like Scoreloop and Open Feint, provide social platforms for game developers. They include leaderboards, achievements, and other social features designed to integrate with a variety of mobile applications, thereby encourage users to do things like invite friends to compete. In addition to social features, ngmoco also offers a monetization platform for mobile game developers and a virtual goods platform as well. Mobile game developers should carefully consider these platforms to see how they might improve reach and retention as well as create additional revenue streams in-game.

For more background on Ngmoco’s experiences going social, read our February interview with chief executive Neil Young.

This week’s top 20 upcoming Facebook games still under a million monthly active users has a few distinct themes. The top games are about pets or avatars; a bit further down, the list is dominated by sports and skill games.

CrowdStar’s new zoo keeping game, Zoo Paradise, is the top overall, with 341,073 new users. Actually, that number is likely a bit low, as Facebook’s reporting seems to be delayed by a couple days. Whether the growth in MAU will be enough to satisfy Crowdstar is another question; Paradise is set up as a competitor to Zoo World, a RockYou game with about 20 million MAU.

Here’s the rest of the list:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Zoo Paradise	818,347	+341,073	+41.68
2.	Top Stalkers	694,952	+261,740	+37.66
3.	Music Pets	741,986	+243,034	+32.75
4.	Jumping Dog	919,413	+235,639	+25.63
5.	Ameba Pico	456,039	+214,702	+47.08
6.	Puzzle Bobble	628,916	+182,865	+29.08
7.	Glamble Poker	686,155	+164,529	+23.98
8.	Bola	520,396	+160,957	+30.93
9.	PoxNora	179,680	+149,625	+83.27
10.	2010 Bracket Challenge	283,888	+148,182	+52.20
11.	MMA Pro Fighter	842,548	+132,117	+15.68
12.	三國風雲 – 最佳多人在綫網頁遊戲	124,402	+124,137	+99.79
13.	Garden Life	765,436	+111,670	+14.59
14.	Alien Attack	279,392	+100,126	+35.84
15.	Island Life	338,449	+98,146	+29.00
16.	Ocean Party	138,130	+81,511	+59.01
17.	Social Pang	506,388	+77,868	+15.38
18.	Funflow	806,585	+76,939	+9.54
19.	My Casino	829,882	+71,225	+8.58
20.	Armies	708,426	+70,930	+10.01

Top Stalkers is actually a social graph app, not a game. It’s followed by Music Pets, by Conduit Labs. This fun little game blends the popular pet care concept with music games; playing the right music to your pets is part of raising them. The game has a pretty low engagement so far, with only 10 percent of its MAU returning as daily active users.

Jumping Dog is in the same boat, but its success isn’t limited to Facebook. This appears to be a port of a popular mobile game, in which a dog jumps up to pop balloons and collect coins. The developer isn’t listed, though. When we played, the game seemed aggressively tuned to viral growth: It wouldn’t allow us to opt out of letting it make wall postings.

We recently reviewed Ameba Pico, a game by CyberAgent America in which you travel around with an animated avatar. This game is a bit unusual for having synchronous elements in its chat rooms; it also has a stand-alone site that players can use with Facebook Connect.

Looking down a bit, three sports games stand out: Bola, 2010 Bracket Challenge and MMA Pro Fighter, representing soccer, basketball and mixed martial arts, respectively. Sports games are another category that has been tried before on Facebook, but never produced any stand-out successes; this upcoming generation of games could change that, though — although the bracket app is seeing seasonal growth due to the March Madness college basketball tournament.

A surprising fact came up at last week’s 2010 Media Summit in New York. An eBay spokesman said that Zynga was PayPal’s second-largest merchant in 2009, following eBay itself. Overall, PayPal processed about $500 million in virtual goods payments last year, according to the estimate of Citi analyst Mark Mahaney, who wrote a recap of the summit.

It’s not clear whether Zynga came in second based on the number of transactions or the total amount processed, but it’s probably the latter. Either way, the company is leading a whole new market onto PayPal.

The payments company’s total volume is over $60 billion per year, by the way, much of which comes from eBay — the auction site is still huge, despite its problems in recent years. Much of the rest of PayPal’s income probably comes from hundreds of thousands of much smaller sources, so it’s no surprise that Zynga could reach number two so quickly.

But it’s interesting to consider how Zynga became so big on PayPal, so quickly. Some of its most successful games were launched in 2008, and their quick growth helped prove to the world that virtual goods and virtual currency are a viable market. Texas HoldEm Poker and Mafia Wars were both launched in the latter half of 2008, so they already had a presence in 2009.

The caveat is that neither reached their full potential until part of 2009 was past — Zynga started 2009 with fewer than 15 million players. Then there are the many games that Zynga launched in the second half of 2009. Its two largest games today, FarmVille and Café World, were launched in July and September of 2009, respectively. FishVille was even later, showing up in November.

Those games alone represent over half of Zynga’s current 240 million monthly active players, but they were barely present for most of the period that PayPal was measuring.

Zynga’s growth has leveled out this year, but it’s possible that it will experience another growth spurt before 2011 arrives. Could it ever become PayPal’s largest seller? Well, that’s still pretty far off. By our estimates, Zynga’s revenue is still only on the low hundreds of millions. eBay, PayPal’s top seller, has revenue of several billion dollars.

However, it’s not inconceivable that virtual goods, as a category, could outgrow eBay within a few years. Our own Inside Virtual Goods report estimates that the virtual goods market will grow to about $1.6 billion this year, and it’s still a young market.

Earlier in the week, we caught wind of Playfish’s coming title, Hotel City. At the time, the game was not actually available — just the beta stages, with little really known. However, we just got access. Here’s our review.

The game turns out to be very similar to our assumptions from a few days ago. Players are presented with a vertical cut-away of a budding hotel. Using a 2D interface, users are able to add new rooms of varying size to the overall structure, decorate them, and hire friends, as they attempt to build a growing hotel business. Obviously, there is a lot more to Hotel City than these generalities, and frankly, each element contains a fair amount of depth; affecting various parts of the game.

With any business-oriented title, income is always the most important. As expected, money is earned by having guests stay for a period of time within one of your guest rooms. Like any hotel, the amount earned is directly dependant on the size of the room being occupied. So, should a guest stay in, for example, the smallest “Budget Room,” they’ll pay one coin upon leaving. If they stay in the larger “Small Room,” they will pay three coins. Curiously, guests will stay in larger rooms for longer, so while they pay more money to stay in them, you go through more customers, faster, with smaller ones.

This actually makes for an interesting player choice that goes beyond larger rooms simply taking up more physical space. Does one try to use many small rooms and rely on high numbers of guests? Or do players attempt to go with quality over quantity? Either business model is viable, which is nice, but likely, most players will choose to build a fair number of the larger rooms due to the greater screen real estate available for decorations.

Like an older hotel game, Chinese title, Happy Hotel, décor is for more than just visual expression. In Happy Hotel, decorating a room leads to a higher cost of renting it for guests. However, in Hotel City, the level of quality your room is at directly affects the star rating your overall hotel receives (just like in real life).

Each room has an experience bar of sorts. As players add new items such as wallpaper, shelves, lamps, and so on, the bar fills up. As you completely fill up these bars, the star rating of the entire hotel gradually increases. Since hotels are only rated from one to five stars, the leveling of this rating appears to be invisible most of the time. Likely, the increase in star rating is exponential, and will require many fully decorated rooms to earn the maximum star rating. Currently, we are stuck at three.

As one might expect, the rating is directly linked to the number of guests that come to visit your hotel, so earning a high one is prudent. Unfortunately, building a hotel is a most expensive endeavor, and you only earn money from patrons so quickly. Thankfully, there are a few ways to increase profits.

Hiring your friends is the most effective long-term method to save on cash. However, in order to hire a friend, they must currently play Hotel City – a surprising change from Restaurant City which did not require them to. Luckily, if you don’t have friends who play as well, the game hires temporary staff computer players to work for a fee. It’s not a tremendous amount, but you must specify just how long they will work and pay all their wages in advance. Once the shift ends (which you can set to be anywhere from two to 48 hours), the hotel will close and a new shift will have to be started.

Another curious means of earning some extra money is by actually poking sleeping guests. You can only do it once per guest; try not to think about how weird that actually is. Nonetheless, sometimes nothing will happen; other times, they will get up, pay, and leave early; and other times, they will leave you a couple hundred coins.

Apparently, the game will also allow for the virtual currency Playfish Cash in addition to the ability to sell back items you bought. Unfortunately, as the game has just gone live and is in early beta, the virtual currency is currently unused and the sell back feature unavailable.

Now, in regards to the elements that are active, one of the best ones has to be the attempt to satisfy the customers. As each guest comes into the hotel, they will tell you what they want, and as the player increases in level (done passively as guests visit your hotel), they will demand more and more niceties. Some will ask for more décor, others will want a gym, and still others may want a night club or bar. These rooms are usually quite large, but will offer areas for multiple guests to enter and pay for.

Beyond the social element of hiring friends, players are also able to keep track of each other’s progress via the standard leaderboard system. As you’d expect, these can also be used to visit your friend’s hotels and earn a little bit of extra cash, daily, by clicking on a money bag that happens to by lying around. Granted, this doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense, and doesn’t really seem justified, but extra income is still extra income.

Overall, the game play complaints for Hotel City are currently minor, with the only significant one being the awkward scrolling the player has to do to see more of where they can place buildings. Beyond this, most of the characters feel very robotic in their movements and the staff does absolutely nothing except stand there. Moreover, the general art style seems a bit too cartoony. While prior Playfish games have incorporated a cartoon style, Hotel City seems almost like something from a bad Saturday morning cartoon. You will either love it or hate it.

Of course, most of these complaints are merely early beta issues, and many of them will likely see new iterations and fixes later down the line. In fact, the only legitimate disappointment, beyond the overlaying visual style, lies in the 2D interface. The isometric views and aesthetic value in games like Restaurant City was phenomenal, and while 2D works for something like Pet Society, when the users has a building filled with dozens of tiny rooms, it just starts to feel a bit… cluttered.

Visual complaints aside, Hotel City still makes for a fun experience. Furthermore, with its concept of having multiple rooms, many players will probably rejoice in the ability to more easily create a variety of styles to suit their tastes. Granted, there are minor issues here and there, but knowing Playfish, these will be hashed out sooner rather than later. That said, if you’re looking to feed your inner interior decorator, than this is an app you should check out… err… check in….

Zynga has been very quiet the last few months, after a string of big launches last fall. Its only game since PetVille in early December is Poker Blitz, which launched earlier this week but is not yet being promoted heavily (judging by its traffic numbers).

But now Zynga appears to be focusing the big trend of this past winter: SimCity-style city building games on Facebook.

The company has been running ads directing users to answer a few questions on social gaming, then offers them $75 in exchange for taking a 30 minute survey. Inside Social Games contributor Eric von Coelln spotted the ads yesterday, and noted that Zynga asks two question specifically about Playdom’s genre-leading Social City. The game has surged to 6.15 million monthly active users and 2.51 million daily active users in just a few weeks, according to AppData, our independent traffic measurement service.

The first is “How frequently do you currently play Social City” and the second is — quite specifically — “Into which of the following ranges does your current Social City level fall?”

Zynga is clearly trying to figure out just how much users are playing the game. These questions should tell the company a lot about the success of the game. If people play the game all the time and have reached higher levels, then Zynga will know it has a serious competitor. If most people say they barely play and are at low levels, Zynga can better discern if most of the traffic is coming from ads or other non-organic sources.

Either way, the company’s interest in city-building suggests it either has a title in the works already, or is about to start one. We haven’t seen any city-building trademarks come through for Zynga — although it has many others — so the name of the app is anyone’s guess. CityVille? TownVille? SimVille? Take your guesses in the comments.

With a recently-announced $5 million from Playdom, Argentina-based MetroGames is a healthy-looking smaller developer. And, despite a horde of other city-building games, including Playdom’s booming Social City, it has a strong city builder of its own, Towner.

This SimCity’esque application appeared at #12 on our most recent top DAU gainers list. It currently has around 190,000 daily active users, while its monthly active users currently tallies in at around 1.1 million. Growth seems to have taken off in late February — maybe it began spending some of its new funds on ads, at that point? In any case, here’s a closer look at the game.

It starts out about the same as any other city-builder. Users are presented with a grid of green space and are told to place House A into Spot B. Okay, fairly simple. As expected, part of the core play is to manage your income (earned passively via “rent” from structures) and create an aesthetically pleasing cityscape.

This is hardly ground-breaking, so Towners does add a few new elements to the game. This is where MetroGames takes a more farming-style game approach than some of its rivals. Players must periodically repair buildings every so often, as well as inaugurate them when their initial construction is complete. If you do not, rent is lost and the buildings “die” (are condemned).

This is an interesting concept, to say the least, but it does beg the question as to how well this will work outside farming applications. Granted, in the grand scheme of things, a digital house is no different than a digital crop. But they are certainly more expensive, which leads to a big repair cost should you, say, leave town for a week.

Perhaps it is mere doom-saying, but if it costs a ton of money to rebuild a city that looks like something out of The Road Warrior, many users may just as soon leave it and move on to a new game. At least with other city builders, the city can live without you.

Regardless, one element to Towners that is better than the competition is the prospect of resource management. Playdom’s Social City does well with players managing citizen happiness, money, and population, but that merely comes down to constructing leisure buildings, factories, and houses respectively.

While Social City resource management is very general, but it would seem the residents of Towners know a little bit more about what they want. Making them happy requires more than just random entertainment facilities and trees. Happiness is actually broken up into six categories: jobs, entertainment, security, fire stations, health, and education. In order for the population to be 100% happy, all six need to be at 100%, and the larger your city gets, the more of these categories’ corresponding structures (all of which are obvious; schools equals more education points, etc.) are needed.

Another interesting element to this app is that it actually makes use of a virtual currency called Towner Cash, as well as Facebook Credits. The Cash is used for expanding your city limits and a few decorations. In regards to the former, however, you can still expand for free based on the number of neighbors you have (friends that play too), but if you can’t get anyone to play with you, you will either need to spend some money, or slowly earn one Towner Cash at a time for every level up.

In regards to the decorations, these are obviously not required, so the need for Towner Cash is less prevalent. Not to be confused with decorations like trees – dubbed “Green Space” – this decorum consists of famous landmarks such as the Arc’De Triunf, a crashed UFO, or the Statue of Liberty. Curiously, some of these can also be purchased through Facebook Credits as well. Logically, this seems a bit odd, but perhaps it is a means to simply entice users that may have Credits lying about, to spend them, rather than buying a new virtual currency.

Another surprise to Towners, is that it doesn’t seem like the player can actually place their own roads. Maybe because the game is “Towners” – town, not city – this is justified, but the only road is one that circles the entire building space. The jury is still out on whether this is a good or bad design. It does alleviate some of the tediousness of placing and layout roads one grid space at a time, but being able to do so gives the player’s virtual space a little bit more uniqueness, and helps to make a city or town feel more complete.

Overall, Towners takes some interesting paths in constructing its city-builder. While it incorporates all of the standards, it does enough differently to stand out. That said, it’s not clear whether or not some of the features will have the effect the developer is hoping for. But so far, so good.