IMVU Sees Significant Growth – IMVU, the online virtual world centered around teens announced that its “revenue continues its 100% year-on-year growth path” earlier this week. As of October of 2009, the company had already doubled its revenue from the same time in 2008 through virtual goods. It was seeing a $25 million annualized revenue run rate. The company says it is on track to do $40 million this year.

In addition to this, the future of the virtual world looks just as bright as the California-based company has also announced the hiring of David Fleck, former Vice President of Marketing and Business Development for Second Life, as IMVU’s new Vice President of Marketing.

Second Life Also Grows – IMVU isn’t the only virtual world doing well as Linden Lab has also announced that its user-to-user transactions for March topped $57 million. Furthermore, user-to-user transactions for the quarter totaled a whopping $160 million – 30% higher than quarter one of last year. As far as users go, Second Life is reporting a peak of 826,000 unique monthly users in March; a number 13% higher than March of 2009.

Bungie on Social Networks and Mobile Platforms? – Bungie, creators of Halo, are teaming up with Activision-Blizzard to begin work on the developer’s next major game franchise. However, what is most curious is in an interview with VentureBeat, Bungie president Harold Ryan noted that the company is interested in more than just the core gaming platforms. According to the interview, the company is focused on fun, connecting players, and building communities. That in mind, they may be taking this new intellectual property beyond just core consoles to one or more of of the social platforms and genres, including the iPhone, iPad, Facebook, and MMOs.

AdMob Releases New Mobile Metrics – AdMob’s Mobile Metrics Report is out for March, and it focuses on the growth the growing Android mobile OS ecosystem. Evidently, 11 devices accounted for a staggering 96% of Android OS traffic; traffic that was made up from two devices back in September of last year. In terms of operating system versions, the majority of the traffic was still driven by Android 1.5, Android 2.0 and 2.1, and Android 1.6, garnering 38%, 35%, and 26% respectively.

Of course, the report would not be complete without iPhone data. As such, highlights include numbers regarding iPhone OS traffic as well. The 3GS made up 39% of the traffic, while the iPod Touch and 3G made up 25% and 20%. In total, the three devices made up 84% of total iPhone OS traffic. Furthermore, 3GS traffic was noted to have increased from its 30% number back in September, 2009.

SCORE:plug Offers New Services to Flash Web Games – Israeli company, SCORE:plug is offer a new means to help socialize Flash-based games on the web. Similar in concept to services like Heyzap and Kontagent, the company allows any destination site offering Flash games to make use of the service to power both leaderboards and social communities.

A little under half of its services are free, and namely consist of different types of leaderboards. However, for monthly fees, SCORE offers features such as a registration system, events, tournaments, personalized gamer pages, and a Facebook module to allow for friend challenging.

Flash Not Coming to Apple Any Time Soon - The lack of Flash support on Apple mobile devices has been an on going issue for game developers (well, anyone using Flash on the web, really). To resolve the issue, Adobe had been working on a means of bringing Flash users’ creations to the iPhone via a compiler to be built into the upcoming Creative Suite 5. Unfortunately, Adobe claims that their plans have been stopped cold by Apple deciding to, once again, rewrite its developer agreements, thus blocking software tools such as Flash. This was followed up by a blistering, controversial letter from Steve Jobs about Adobe. See Techmeme for the full story.

Of course, this isn’t the first time Apple has made such changes that hinder development in some way, be they for software, games, or apps. What makes the change sting even more, though, is that according to Flash Project Manager Mike Chambers’ blog, “during the entire development cycle of Flash CS5, the feature complied with Apple’s licensing terms.” Well, at least until noted changes were made.

CrowdStar Sues WonderHill – One of the leading social developers, CrowdStar is filing suit against WonderHill for plagiarism this week, over the latter company’s title, Aquarium Life. Though the game does play similarly to CrowdStar’s top app, Happy Aquarium, it is hardly the first social game to follow a popular concept. In fact, the aquarium game genre got its start in China, before CrowdStar launched its version.

However, VentureBeat reports the federal lawsuit accuses WonderHill of directly copying very specific features and animations such as a “distinctive mating dance to a backdrop of hearts and romantic music.” Other claims include the deliberate copying of CrowdStar’s user interface for their 19.6 million MAU title, something that CrowdStar Chairman Peter Relan notes as unacceptable and stating that “it’s almost like you’re staring at our game.”

Playdom Cans Lil Green Patch – Way back in late 2008, Green Patch’s Lil Green Patch garden simulator Facebook app was the top game on Facebook. However, this week, roughly six months after Green Patch’s acquisition by Playdom, the title is going the way of the dodo. Along with the the app, Lil Eco Racer, and Lil Blue Cove will also be gone.  Of the Lil series, only Lil Farm Life will remain. As we noted back in November, the remaining app was and is intended as a direct move against Zynga’s FarmVille and the truckload of other farming apps that also exist.

Moblyng Adds Mobsters to Their Mob – In other Playdom-related news: the cross-platform mobile game publisher Moblyng announced today that social game developer Playdom is its latest partner. What does this mean exactly? In a nutshell, Moblyng is capable of republishing a game across multiple smartphone platforms such as the iPhone, Android, and Palm’s WebOS. As such, Playdom titles such as Mobsters will soon be available on various mobile platforms including, but not limited to WebOS, Symbian, BlackBerry, and Android.

Japanese Company DeNA Releases Annual Financial Results – The Japan-based entertainment company DeNA announced its financial results for both the quarter and the fiscal year today (for the period ending March 31, 2010). In short, the company’s fourth quarter revenue saw an 81% increase over the previous year (2008) with a revenue total of $205 million. As for the year of 2009, in total, reported revenues tallied $517 million – 20% higher than 2008.

Of course, regarding the upcoming year, DeNA plans to grow even further by launching a PC-based social gaming platform with Yahoo! Japan. Furthermore, DeNA is also planning on launching a social gaming platform in English-speaking countries as well as develop social games for Facebook and other similar platforms.

There was a time a few years ago when Facebook games were truly simple. You’d log on, do one or two things, and log off. Over time, many games have grown more complex, and more game-like in the traditional sense. While this evolution is far from a bad thing, it’s nice to see applications that are still fun, yet not complicated in the least. So we took a moment to look at two new ones we’ve come across: Combustic and The Flying Pig.

The first of the two, from Sandhill Games, is a simple, Flash-based puzzle game based on a more complex web game called Ring Pass Not. Players are given a ring with eight empty tile spaces and four tiles to choose from at any given time. Each tile has two shapes and two colors imprinted upon it. The objective is to match up shapes and/or colors for every tile place within the ring.

The trick is that this must be done within one minute. For every ring you complete – that is, placing all eight tiles – points are awarded based on how many matches, or mismatches, you made with zero mistakes also adding time to the clock. The ring is then cleared and you continue this process until time expires.

Now, this is a bit dull in and of itself, so per the app’s name, some of the tiles’ shapes are, well, on fire. If you match a flaming shape with a similar one, it will turn it into a fiery square, which acts like a wild card, matching anything. Since you can pick up and move placed tiles at any time, this proves rather useful. Furthermore, the better a match you make, the greater the chance that it will fire off “sparks” that ignite the shapes on other titles too, as well as add a few seconds back onto the timer.

Considering the nature of the game, Combustic’s social element consists of leaderboards and posting scores to one’s feed, so it’s nothing terribly extravagant. Furthermore, its simplicity may not warrant extended longevity, but it is fun enough for those that enjoy a nice puzzle game now and again.

Conversely, if you are not looking to train your brain, you may want to consider a little cartoon violence. This is where our second app, The Flying Pig comes into play.

Essentially, it is a game like the much older KickMania! or the French app Paf le Chien. The object is to send a portly cartoon piggy flying as far as you can by hitting it with… a truck…. Don’t worry, no pigs were actually harmed in the making of this game. Nevertheless, as the pig goes flying across a surprisingly nice looking landscape, they will bounce along until they run into some of the random objects littered about it.

This is where the game becomes interesting as, for whatever reason or another, the world is filled with goats, wooden stakes, couches, and discarded bombs. You see, this is how Flying Pig differentiates itself. Granted, the premise is the same as the mentioned titles, but getting the maximum distance requires a certain finesse.
With the exception of the wooden spikes, which turn you into bacon, nothing will flat out stop you. Furthermore, the spikes are low to the ground, so they’re not a big threat unless you are unlucky. On the other hand, touching a goat sends you horizontal, the couch at what seems to be a 45 degree angle, and the bomb gives you height. The idea is to play a little gamble and use these as best as possible to build up momentum (for the record, there are also random piles of dung that slow down that momentum).

This momentum does more than fling your further, but actually maximizes a three-use item you get called beans (you can also pick up more during flight if you hit them). Comically enough, using the beans will propel you forward like a jet using, erhm, your backend for a few seconds, sending you safely above all hazards. The more momentum you have before using it, however, the farther it will send you. Basically, the noted gamble is to wait for the perfect opportunity to use the beans, while risking either hitting the spikes or not having much momentum left.

As with Combustic, the only real social elements consist of challenging your friends directly to beat your high score. However, there is a nice chart that records all your wins and losses for each challenge made. Yes, it is simple, but the game is still amusing enough to put a smile on one’s face.

All in all, the success of a social game, unfortunately, depends on more that just an amusing mechanic. With the thousands of applications on Facebook, it is difficult to make a game known to the world, even with the virility of the social graph. Nevertheless, sometimes it does pay to look at the ones that don’t have millions, or even thousands of users. Those are the ones that tend to take the chances; the ones that tend to be more creative – even if it’s just a better way to do something that’s been done before.

PopCap Games seems very distant from the Silicon Valley game development community sometimes. Because it’s based in Seattle, the company’s executives aren’t always in the limelight. But founder John Vechey and CEO David Roberts were in the area last week, so we sat down with them to hear their views on social gaming.

A bit of background first: PopCap is a decade old this year. Its hit game Bejeweled has been downloaded over 150 million times and has over 10 million monthly active users on Facebook. It also created Plants vs Zombies, Zuma and a bunch of other games, several of which have a presence on either Facebook or the iPhone. PopCap will make about 10 percent of its total revenue from Facebook this year, and 25 percent from all mobile platforms, according to Roberts.

Here’s our edited interview:

Inside Social Games: Are you feeling old at all beside the new social gaming companies?

Vechey: We are a little old, and we were a bit late to get to social gaming because over the past 10 years, there have been a lot of fads. For a while we just thought it was the latest one. Now it’s interesting that we’re the only company succeeding in social gaming that existed outside of it — every other company is new.

Roberts: A year ago everyone was telling us that you couldn’t do social games unless you built monetization in from the start, that we would fail. But we didn’t.

ISG: You have copycats, like everyone else in the industry. Do you worry about clones and copying?

Vechey: No. It’s really hard to copy Bejeweled, because there’s a feeling that we spent a lot of time on. We worked a lot on how many gems should go in a row, what the gravity is. Those decisions are a craft. If you get another game where it doesn’t all add up as well, it’s not as good. That’s the only reason I can think of. There’s also momentum, but it is a craft.

Roberts: We run the balance between beating up some little company over copying a game mechanic — that’s fine, we don’t care — versus stealing our art and ripping us off directly.

Vechey: It’s hard to cross the line in copying a game. I’d call out any large developer that says copying is bad. Half-Life was, by any measure, a copy of Quake 2. If there’s ever a world where I don’t get Half-Life because of Quake, I don’t want to live in that world. But I do get annoyed when a company takes whatever was originally done and spends more money copying it without making it better.

Roberts: And if you don’t add value, there’s not going to be a commercial success.

ISG: So is success on Facebook still all about artistry and good design?

Roberts: On Facebook I think there’s also the virality and communication channels, and the managing of the virtual economy and user metrics. FarmVille is very good at that. We sometimes forget about those things because we don’t think of them things in our games, but they’re important in this type of gaming. But you also can’t just dump anything on a user and expect them to buy it. People aren’t as dumb as we think they are. You can funnel them from game A to game B, but they do care about how good a game is. That’s actually a testament to Zynga. FarmVille succeeded because people loved playing it.

The thing that’s different between Zynga and us is that they’re building the game that their customers tell them to build, it’s whatever their people click on. We’re almost the opposite. We decide in advance what people will think what is good and give it to them. In the same way Microsoft made the Zune — that’s the focus group driven product, while Apple made the iPod, where they never ask people what they want or go through a features list. Not to say that we’re Apple and Zynga is Microsoft. But we’ve just never been a user-driven company, and we’re not devoted to the statistics. So you’ll get different products.

ISG: Has it been easy to integrate your games across the iPhone and Facebook?

Vechey: It just works with Bejeweled Blitz. It wouldn’t work with Zuma. With Bejeweled, it’s the same experience on every platform.

ISG: Bejeweled is a simple game, and we’ve also seen a lot of simple games on Facebook, because everyone there is new to gaming. Do you think the games will become more complex?

Vechey: I think these very accessible games will always be at the top, and could stay around for a lot longer than the more in-depth experiences. If you look at the history of the game industry, as hardware got better, they started making games more complicated instead of deeper. So you had to play 50 games to understand the mechanics, but now we all know what five hearts in the upper right hand of the screen means. So as social games go on the companies will make them more complicated, but in the process they’ll also create a smaller market. I think the games that will stand out will be more simple, like Bejeweled.

ISG: Bejeweled is one of the most downloaded games ever. Will you be able to hang onto that title? And what about Zynga with FarmVille?

Vechey: I don’t know how you break Bejeweled’s title. It’s been around for so long, on so many platforms. But social gaming is one of the best things that could happen for traditional gaming. Fighting through keyword marketing for the same customers, instead of getting new customers — now there are all these new people playing games.

Roberts: Actually I think the iPhone did that too. I think Apple gets less credit than it deserves for expanding the number of gamers out there.

ISG: So do you think you’ll ever pass FarmVille with 80 or 100 million users for a Facebook game?

Both: Yeah.

ISG: What are your plans for the future?

Vechey: We’re looking at the path to go public — we’re going through the motions for that to be a choice. You have to do a lot of work before you can even decide whether it makes sense.

ISG: How would you define yourself to investors?

Vechey: We make games for everyone. We build really simple stuff that’s hard to do, and can adapt to anything that the market throws at us. When we started out, there was no Facebook, no iPhone or Xbox Live. However the market changes, we can be there.

Roberts: To the extent that new platforms bring more people into gaming, it’s only good for us. As far as people understand that gaming isn’t just for 15 year olds in front of an Xbox, that’s good.

ISG: So you’re fine being a bit gaming company that’s nothing like Electronic Arts?

Vechey: A company like EA has to spend a lot of money to make a product. We spent $1 million to make Plants vs Zombies, but that was it. We don’t do a lot of marketing. But if it’s a hit game — and it was — we spend a few million dollars more to put it on all the platforms. EA, because their games have such a huge budget, can only make hits, and they have to spend another 50 percent atop a huge development budget to force it to be a hit. It’s high risk, so it limits the risks they can take. We don’t have that problem.

ISG: You don’t think you’ll end up spending a lot of money on development in the future? Will there be a class of games that remains low-investment?

Vechey: If you look at us, we spend four times as much to make a downloadable game than everyone else. Nobody else spends over a million dollars on a new downloadable, but we do for every game name. But we’re still able to go across platforms. We may add social features, but we don’t have to iterate on core features.

Roberts: Look at Zynga. They don’t spend a lot on the core idea, they just make it and see how it does.

ISG: So what will change in the future for you?

Roberts: I think what changes is that there’s always a new platform, and we won’t know what it is until it’s here. We’ve seen maybe five dedicated social gaming companies that two or three years from now may not exist any more. We’d like to think we’ll weather it as we have before. To me, the market feels like it did during the mobile fad eight years ago, with companies pouring money into Java / Brew games. A few years later there were maybe three left. We went from hundreds of companies to three. That’s not a bad thing, but we probably made more profit on Java games than Jamdat ever did by staying out of it in some way.

ISG: And you don’t try to prognosticate?

Vechey: We all felt the iPhone and Xbox Live Arcade would be really cool, but we’re usually in no hurry. We usually think of ourselves as having a second-mover advantage.

Roberts: We don’t try to prognosticate but there is a lot of work to do on a new platform, more than it would seem. Look at Facebook. All the branded games that are failing, Scrabble, Tetris and Uno, all they did was say, I wonder if people will play it? And they moved it over. Only a few hundred thousand people played them, which is a failure for Facebook. The multi-platform stuff is trickier than it looks.

ISG: At our conference there was a lot of talk about whether mobile would surpass Facebook for gaming. What do you think?

Vechey: Anyone who’s worried about whether mobile or Facebook will be bigger is being a stupid Silicon Valley person. If you’re in mobile and you do a good job with your company, it doesn’t matter what Facebook does.

Roberts: The iPhone now is outselling the PS2 as a game platform. That’s only to the good. But then, we’re biased that more platforms are better. We’re making lots of money on Facebook without marketing, because people know about Bejeweled from the web.

ISG: Going forward, what will be the place for small, independent companies on the iPhone or Facebook? Do they have a future?

Roberts: The iPhone does offer a huge advantage to little companies. Sometimes, a really great product will win. Doodle Jump is a really good example. Now, for every Doodle Jump there are probably 2,000 belly-flops. If you track where indies go over time — 5 years ago they were all making casual games, flash games. The indies tend to go to the hot platforms and then move on. So people have been stuck on the iPhone for longer than I would have expected. There’s enough work there to keep the lights on, and Apple deserves credit for that — in casual gaming the developer was getting 30 percent, and Apple’s doing it the other way.

It took a while for Battle Punks to get started, but now the Gravity Bear game is growing with a vengeance. Over the past week Punks added more new monthly active users than all its previous six weeks combined, placing it atop our list of emerging Facebook games still under a million MAU.

Punks is part of a new wave of games that brings better-than-average graphics to Facebook. In this case they’re actually 3D, something of a rarity on the social network. We covered the rest of Punks’ features in our release-time review.

Here’s the rest of our AppData top 20 list:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Battle Punks	547,576	+341,034	+165.12
2.	Write In Pictures	561,648	+180,869	+47.50
3.	My Tribe	530,249	+112,698	+26.99
4.	( Fupa Games ) – Arcade Blitz	216,178	+105,655	+95.60
5.	¡Teclas Machucadas!	431,658	+100,045	+30.17
6.	Funfari	266,804	+92,052	+52.68
7.	Dumbville	180,362	+86,331	+91.81
8.	NanoStar Siege	178,808	+84,857	+90.32
9.	Evony	411,056	+81,174	+24.61
10.	Lords Online	265,298	+76,965	+40.87
11.	TinierMe	351,984	+76,029	+27.55
12.	Football Mania	192,763	+74,544	+63.06
13.	TransForce – Robot strategy browser game of 2010	222,243	+66,281	+42.50
14.	American Flag	111,871	+64,836	+137.85
15.	Frosmo	513,481	+60,264	+13.30
16.	Warstorm	879,957	+59,855	+7.30
17.	Big City Life	240,516	+54,938	+29.60
18.	MonstrosCity	155,679	+53,959	+53.05
19.	Car Madness	774,239	+52,662	+7.30
20.	Street Racer	110,557	+51,925	+88.56

Write In Pictures has followed the annoying but understandable trend of miscategorizing itself as a game; we’ll talk about it over at Inside Facebook. Below it is My Tribe, which like Battle Punks took some time to get started. Now that it has, the island management game is developing a sizable base of devoted fans.

( Fupa Games ) comes in at number four. Like MindJolt and 6 Waves, this app fits into the growing group of apps that present users with a catalog of simple games to play. At the beginning of the month, EA released its own version of this — its Pogo catalogue.

Skipping down a bit, NanoStar Siege is the second Nanoverse game from Digital Chocolate. Neither title has exactly burst out of the gates, but the company  has a longer-term plan that revolves around the NanoStar brand — and it is seeing some consistent overall growth.

We can’t cover them all right now, but this week’s list is actually littered with interesting new games. Take a look into the lower reaches of the list for some up-and-coming genres in Facebook gaming — Football Mania, for instance, is following in the footsteps of Bola, a larger soccer game, while Car Madness and Street Racer, paired at the bottom, obviously share a common theme.

Facebook announced several big developments last week at the f8 conference in San Francisco, California and the Inside Network was there to bring you breaking and in-depth coverage of the event.

Check out our detailed analysis of the Open Graph’s new social plugins and API, below, along with news from conference sessions and related stories. For those who followed during the day, note that we’ve since been providing follow-up coverage on specific topics that came out of the conference, like our story on how to administer off-Facebook pages via the API from earlier today.

But first, an update to from Facebook. The plugins have made it to more than 50,000 websites in the week since they were launched, the company announced in a blog post yesterday.

Facebook launched the plugins with 75 partners — big names like CNN and Levi’s – but the other 50,000 sites have implemented the changes on their own. Company founder Mark Zuckerberg predicted the Like button plugin, in particular, could get a billion impressions in the first 24 hours after launch. It did.

General Coverage and News

• Live-Blogging Facebook’s f8 Developer Conference: The Open Graph Launches
• Facebook Removing 24 Hour Caching Policy on User Data for Developers
• Facebook Streamlines User Data Permissions Into a Single Dialog Box
• Facebook Eliminates Connect Brand Due to Market Confusion

The Open Graph

• Facebook Announces Open Graph API and 5 New Social Plugins at f8
• Facebook Recommendations Plugin to Make Website Content Socially Relevant
• New Facebook Activity Stream Plugin Brings Filtered Stream to Any Website
• With the Open Graph Protocol, Any URL Can Be Treated Just Like a Facebook Page
• Facebook’s “Kitchen Sink” Social Toolbar Not Out Yet, But Coming Soon
• Facebook Lets Developers Search Publicly Available Graph API Data
• New Details of Facebook’s Location Plans Appear in Open Graph Protocol Docs
• How to Programmatically Administer Off-Facebook Pages with the Open Graph API
• Developers Experiment with New Search, Aggregation Products Based on Facebook Data

Conference Sessions

• Facebook Announces “App2User” Liquidity Program for Merchants to Convert Rewards Points into Credits
• Facebook: We Want to Integrate 200 Credits Payment Options Worldwide
• Zuckerberg: “There’s Just Going to be One Currency that People Use” on Facebook Apps
• Facebook Overhauls Page and App Insights, Adds Domain Analytics Features and an API
• Facebook Searching For Ways to Break Into Mobile Apps
• Facebook f8 Panel: Where the iPhone is Lacking, Android May Succeed

Ngmoco’s Black and White style game,GodFinger has gotten a lot of attention on the iPhone. Sadly, it’s not available in the United States — except on the iPad. Here’s our review.

The point of the app is what the name suggests: Build a planet, using touch controls on the device. At the start of the game, players are granted a barren wasteland of an earth and a single, sullen unbeliever. Considering your entire planet is a desert, the poor guy is wishing for rain, as indicated by a graphical icon above his head. From here, users touch a floating rain cloud, drag it over to him, and it’s time for miracles.

It’s very simple, but gratifying, as one makes it rain by pressing and holding the cloud as it charges up your deity powers. You release a torrent of refreshing water with quick downward releases. Oh, but this is only the beginning. Two things happen when you bring the rain. First off, it turns your unbeliever into follower in which you can now pick him up by his heels and drop him at the nearest shrine to worship you (more on that in a second). Secondly, as the rain comes down, the ground becomes more and more sodden and lush as plants and trees begin to grow.

The more you make it rain, the wetter and greener the ground turns. This directly effects the type of environment that sprouts around the saturated area. Very little rain will produce an arid domain, while a deluge of it will create a lush, tropical environment. Furthermore, as your entire virtual space is a whole planet (which you can scroll around, sort of like how it is done in EA’s Spore), you can make quite a wide variety.

This is where the worship comes back into play. Players have a finite amount of mana. For every miracle they perform, a small amount is consumed. It will regenerate slowly over time, but as you place worshippers at one of your shrines it returns faster.

Of course, in order to build shrines, or anything for that matter, your followers need to work to construct it, then work it to make money. The basic example is farming. You drop X amount of followers onto a farm and they work the day away, requiring you to water it with some rain from time to time. As time goes on, however, they will slowly drain away in energy and you’ll have to create some campfires, fountains, and so on to get them recharged and back to work, thus creating a nice mechanic of balancing which followers are working, resting, worshiping, or building.

Eventually, the player will also get other god powers, such as controlling the sun (which also grows flowers in watered areas), upgraded structures that produce more gold and hold more followers, and even some classic lighting striking. Of course, this is a bit less benevolent in the sense that it is used to strike down those pesky skeletons that tend to wander about and attack your worshippers. Oh, and if you’re feeling cruel, you can smite your followers as well!

As the user completes all the duties of a god, they will gradually gain more experience, and in turn, new levels, which earns more followers, more powers, and even a bigger planet.

What makes GodFinger even better is that the game is completely free to play. The primary monetization for the app is a virtual currency called Awe Points. Users get small amounts as they level up in the game, but in order to buy some of the cooler items and abilities, like making your dead followers come back to life, mana refills, or buying large sums of gold, Awe is a requirement. As such, it can be purchased within the app itself for $3.99, $9.99, and $29.99; expensive yes, but considering you probably just bought an iPad, that’s probably peanuts anyway.

Socially, the game is also connected to the Plus+ social platform. This of course means that the game comes with a truck load of achievements to fulfill and various leaderboards to top. However, it is the more subtle social elements that come to mind that make things more memorable. For example, you can not only post in-game successes to your Facebook feed via Facebook Connect, but can even name each of your followers using your iPad’s contact list. Moreover, as more of your friends play and grow their godly prowess, they will take over desolate planets within an actual GodFinger universe.

Granted, this is technically no different than the leaderboards in a Facebook game, but being able to pinch zoom outward and see a galaxy of friends is much cooler. The touch interface on iPad’s 9.7-inch screen is a uniquely better experience for the game compared to what web and mobile games can typically provide.

Overall, GodFinger is a fantastic game on all fronts. If there was any one thing particularly lacking, it would be that there isn’t a whole lot to do if you want to be a cruel god early on. Either way, as a free game, this is easily a smart “buy.” The title is a beautiful mix of casual and social features, allowing users to play asynchronously together in short bursts of time, or much longer (especially if they have some cash to spend).

Suffice to say, GodFinger comes highly recommended.

This year has brought a few surprises on Facebook. Playdom’s Social City, for instance, quickly grew to 12 million players with the concept of city-building, and EA’s Hotel City has done the same with virtual hotels. But the biggest surprise may have been the lack of blockbuster hits — the Happy Aquariums and Mafia Wars that took over Facebook last year, quickly snapping up tens of millions of players.

But Zynga has eventually pulled through. On April 2nd, it released Treasure Isle, a simple treasure-hunting game. It took Isle less than four weeks to pass Mafia Wars, one of Zynga’s biggest hits: last night Isle registered 24,315,796 players, giving treasure hunters a slight edge over the Mafia.

We’ve been tracking Isle since its release, so this news won’t be a huge shock to regular readers. Within five days of its launch, Isle had over three million players, and it has added over a million players most days since, consistently placing it at the top  of our AppData lists.

Isle also appears to have single-handedly reversed a decline in Zynga’s traffic that came as Mafia Wars and several of its siblings shrank slightly, giving the company a net gain of about 13 million monthly active users over the past month:

Treasure Isle is now Zynga’s fourth-largest game, although there’s no telling how much further it will go. Traffic to rapidly-growing apps can often level off suddenly if the publisher decides each new user is requiring too many advertising dollars. There’s also an initial sign that Isle is slowing; the same daily gain that saw it top Mafia Wars was also smaller than on all other days since the game first took off.

And even with the example of Treasure Isle to go by, it may not be as easy this year for developers to achieve huge numbers on new games as it was last year. Zynga’s other new game, Poker Blitz, hasn’t gone anywhere fast, and even the admirable growth numbers posted by Social City and Hotel City are low compared to the growth created by last year’s farming, pet and fish-raising fads.

Out of the three ways that games have typically grown, only two remain strong — cross-promotion (which Zynga can do better than anyone, because of its massive size), and spending (which Zynga can do because it has a lot of money in the bank). The third, viral growth, has been severely curtailed. One reason is that Facebook removed third-party notifications in March. Another is that it has been redesigning the user home page and other features in ways that improve the overall user experience but make it more difficult for games to reach users.

In tune with today’s global economy, WyldHare Game Studios and Mjolnir have a new role-playing game out that satirizes all things corporate: Hot Money.

As with any mafia-style RPG on Facebook, the game comes with all the familiar elements: Players consume energy (Latte) to do tasks, earn experience and rewards, upgrade stats, attack other players, and of course, all of these play into becoming the best – which in this case is becoming the top dog of the business world, one way or another. However, while a lot of the features look strikingly similar to its text-based counterparts, the app is actually quite different.

To start things off, the basic tasks (Actions) that make up your typical quest system have a tendency to be broken up into four categories. The first is the most typical, where players perform a quirky action, such as offering to take care of people’s pet rocks after the Rapture, to earn experience towards new levels and some extra cash.

Once you’ve created a bit of a money sink, you can move onto the other three types of tasks which all cost both energy and money. These tasks will earn you levels in one of three extra fields: Fame, Wealth, and Power. Basically, this means that players can work their way up the leaderboards (if Hot Money had leaderboards) in four different ways. Additionally, as players do the various actions, they have a chance to earn special tokens.

These tokens include Blackmail, Hot Tips, Leaks, Fall Guys, and Latte refills. Aside from the Latte token that replenishes your energy, the rest are all used in the game’s player versus player element. The different tokens sort of make up a more complex replacement to the typical “Stamina” statistic from games like Mafia Wars, and each one allows players to attack another user’s Fame, Wealth and Power.

The way it works is pretty simple. If you have, say, a Blackmail token, you can attack someone’s Fame. Like most Facebook RPGs, the result will be automatically generated result and should you win the attack, you will take some of their Fame for your own. Of course, this works the other way around should you lose, but if you have Fall Guy tokens, you can consume one to negate the effects of any failed attack or defense.

In fact, because you have to attack and defend in three different areas, you also have to allocate stats into six different satirized areas that that represent offensive and defensive capabilities needed for earning Fame, Wealth, and Power. Additionally, players may also improve such stats with items known as Perks and Lackeys. Unfortunately, while all of these grant stat bonuses and even an hourly chance at extra tokens, they all cost the virtual currency dubbed “Hot Bucks,” meaning that if you’re not looking to spend real money, you are at a disadvantage.

Using the multiple types of levels is certainly an interesting concept that Hot Money employs, but the biggest issue with it is that it feels like it has no point. As you level them, you earn new titles, but with no noticeable leaderboards implemented and no other benefit, there is no real reason for the player to choose one over the other. Additionally, there is a stark lack of social features as well.

It is true that you can invite your friends to join your “Network,” and yes, this does augment your “combat” capabilities when you attack other users. Nonetheless, such a use is something that has been done with even some of the earliest Facebook RPGs. Lately, we have seen them take more of an active role (i.e. in Castle Age or Haven), helping each other progress in a story via fighting bosses, being appointed to special ranks within the game to provide significant strategic bonuses, and so on. Of course, Hot Money’s social use isn’t bad, it just feels a bit dated by comparison.

In the end, Hot Money feels a bit average. Since it is in its early beta stages, a lot of of what we see is certainly subject to change.

There’s a lot of money in social gaming — this common knowledge that has followed the success of Zynga, Playdom and other young but profitable startups. But despite claiming huge cash flows, each of these companies also ends up trading partial ownership to investors for funding. If they’re so profitable, why not go without financing?

That’s the question a new, and possibly unique, company called Fast Pay Partners wants startups to ask themselves. Fast Pay’s answer is that social gaming startups are earning money, but not actually receiving it. Ad networks and payment partners often delay paying the money they owe to startups, sometimes for months on end. So your company could have $100,000 on paper, but no cash on hand.

One solution to this problem is called asset-based lending: Fast Pay will give you that $100,000 immediately, minus fees and a reserve that it holds. Asset-based lending is common in the business world, but according to founders Jed Simon and Patrick Yee, they’re the first to try it on social games or apps.

The reserve that Fast Pay holds is still significant, at around 30 percent of the total; it’s held because money owed is typically an estimate, and can be revised in the future. But in the meantime, the startup still has $70,000 to spend immediately, giving it a huge advantage over competitors. “There’s not a lot of liquidity out there, and people have really long payment periods. But cash is king,” says Simon.

Fast Pay manages its own risk both through the reserve and by keeping direct relationships with some monetization sources, like Zong or Boku in the mobile space. And while they’d obviously like to work with large companies, they’re also open to smaller startups, down to about $10,000 per month in revenue.

Once they’ve signed a lending agreement with a startup (a process of a few days, according to Simon) Fast Pay will deliver a check every 15 days based one expected earnings.

While Simon and Yee both have entrepreneurial backgrounds and  their own company is backed by hedge fund money, giving them a solid base. If Fast Pay can establish itself as a lender to digital companies, they say, they’ll move on to providing advances on future, anticipated earnings.

Zynga’s PetVille, a Facebook pet-caring game, is showing a streamlined direct payments interface in its offer wall. The new interface shows users the choice to buy Facebook’s Credits virtual currency before any other option.

The goal is to get users buying the in-game virtual currency, called PetCash, via their Credits accounts versus other methods. Although Zynga has been experimenting with Credits for months, this is the most prominent use of it yet as a payment option in a major game.

PetVille, with a flat 21.4 million monthly active users and a slightly falling 4.46 million daily actives according to AppData, now shows you Credits as the only option. Paypal and credit cards are available through Credits purchases only, but no longer otherwise available. Also, a new way to purchase Credits is in the mix: Japanese credit card conglomerate JCB International.

The largest Zynga game, FarmVille, has tested Credits as the first option, but it currently shows it third behind credit card and Paypal payment methods. So, we assume that PetVille is an early test of this new implementation, and we may see it elsewhere in Zynga games shortly.

All alternative payment and advertising offers otherwise remain on the wall, including a variety of mobile and pre-paid card vendors as well as SocialVibe’s offers. Facebook has incorporated mobile payments via Zong and it is experimenting with running offers so users can earn Credits. But for now, at least, it doesn’t seem to be going after the other options.

Eventually, though, expect Facebook to integrate every payment option into Credits. The company basically said this was the plan during its f8 developer conference last week. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg also has said that “there’s just going to be one currency that people use” in apps, meaning that the other options might be forced entirely in to Credits rather than being available separately as they are now.

All this remains to be seen. It is not clear how Facebook is working with Zynga and other partners to run tests. We don’t know what its specific process is for determining how Credits can or can’t be deployed versus other payment options in third parties. What we do know is that the company thinks Credits will help developers monetize, and that it is taking a 30% cut of all payments transactions itself. We’ll be covering as the service evolves.