Creating and running a store of some sort is not a new style of game on Facebook, but we keep seeing successful iterations on the concept, from Restaurant City and Café World to  Medical Mayhem, Happy Hotel and Hotel City . There are many other examples. But a quality new one we’ve been watching is Mall World.

The idea, of course, is to make and run your own store in a virtual mall, and it is heavily skewed towards women (you can’t even make a male avatar).

The mysterious developer is named 50 Cubes, and although the company is not providing information about itself on its web site or anywhere else, we can tell that it is distributed on Facebook by publisher 6 Waves. With good effect, apparently, as the small new app has started growing fast, making our list of top gainers by daily active users earlier today.

So, here’s a closer look.

Players create an avatar and step into a virtual mall containing a number of small boutiques to visit, which appear to be run by other players. Users can pick a shop, then try on and buy any number of tops, pants, skirts, dresses, shoes, and bags and buy them with the in-game currency, Mall Dollars. Of course, this is a bit dull in the grand scheme of things, and will eventually bore even the most avid shoppers.

Thankfully, Mall World tasks users with the main goal of opening and running your very own boutique. Essentially, this is your own virtual space, which you decorate with shelving, lighting, wallpaper, and so on in a sort of 2D, Pet Society kind of way. However, this is more than just a virtual space, it is a virtual business.

You see, players have to actually stock their store with clothing by ordering it from a catalog — an appointment gaming feature that can take anywhere from 60 seconds to a couple hours, if not more. Then, they put the merchandise on the shelves. Once your store is stocked, your friends and other random Mall World players will be able to visit your store and buy clothes from you. You can then use that money and invest it into your own wardrobe, or turn around and buy more stock. What makes this even more interesting, however, is that as you do pretty much anything in the game, you gain experience, thus earning new levels and unlocking new designer sets of clothing. This can also grant lower level friends access to buy and wear clothing they could otherwise not receive without extensive shopping in other random players’ stores.

There is also a wonderful mini-game called the “Dressing Room Game.” Basically, players are given a random item such as a purse and have 30 seconds to pick out shoes, pants, tops, etc. that best match that item. The better the match is, the higher the happiness of the customer (represented by a vertical bar). This factor is then combined with the time it took to pick everything out, and a chunk of money and experience is rewarded to the player. Moreover, there doesn’t seem to be any limit to how many times you can play. Normally, this might be a bad thing, as it would provide an infinite supply of money but even at the maximum score it’s only around 100 Mall Dollars, and surely our avid mall shoppers could understand just how expensive designer clothing can be. Obviously, this means that you had better run a good business if you want to get the best clothing in any reasonable amount of time.

Another very cool feature is that while you are within your own store, your Facebook friends will come and randomly visit. Well, the female friends visit anyway. You won’t see any of your guy friends walk on the screen unless they take the form of a female avatar as it is not possible to even create a male character.

Anyway, when friends visit you can actually click on them and create “a look” for them. You get to change their hair, makeup, shoes, clothing, etc. and send them the ensemble, along with a personal message, to them for their approval. This then goes into a little archive called “My Look Book,” which saves all of the looks your friends have created for you.

As it stands, Mall World is sitting pretty at just over 400,000 monthly active users and 131,000 DAU – with half of that number appearing in less than three days. It’s no wonder why, though, as this really is a beautifully designed game that truly nails down an appeal for its target audience. In fact, chances are you’ve already named off a handful of people that would love this sort of thing. Frankly, in a realm that mostly sees only new iterations on old ideas, it is refreshing to see something that feels so different, and we can only hope to see more like this app in the future.

Metaplace has recently a new social game out on Facebook, called My Vineyard, that takes a more refined approach to virtual farming than many other titles we’ve seen. Like making and drinking fine wine in real life, it may take more time and focus than what some people want — but the aesthetic and social experience could be just what others are looking for.

With a quasi-realistic style identical to their last title, Island Life, players are tasked with the management and care of their own personal vineyard.

Be it red or white wines, players can produce everything from the more commonly known chardonnay to the more expensive rousanne. Basically, players are given a pre-set number of field plots in which to plant their grapes, and after X amount of time they become fully grown. However, the typical steps of watering, bug killing, and so on have been removed in exchange for more wine-making elements.

From here, all the grapes are moved to a platform where they are stomped into juice (which is just a click, unfortunately), and placed into a cask of you choosing and set out to age. After the aging is complete, it’s time to sell.

This is where the game starts to get a bit more interesting, and will likely be the point that gets most people’s attention. For every cask of wine you sell, it will receive a rating from wine testers that will rate it up to 100 and leave you with snide commentary comparing it to things like “butter and grass” (at least that was the quality of our first couple batches). It’s a curious means to create an artificial goal for players, as that ranking appears to be affected by everything from the quality of grapes used, to the container, to even your friends.

Ah, yes. This is where Metaplace incorporates some more creative social features beyond bombarding the user with “invite a friend” messages (a lesson learned from Island Life). When each batch has aged to the proper amount — which will take anywhere from a few minutes to a few days — they can have their friends taste test it. This is by no means a requirement, but the more that “taste” it, the higher rating it will receive. Granted, it’s not any different than any other reward a social game might grant you for inviting friends or posting to your feed, but those rewards are often superfluous décor pieces. In the case of My Vineyard, the reward stems towards that goal of making the best wine; a goal artificially created by the developer by merely nudging the user in that direction, and not explicitly telling them “you need to do this.”

As for other social features, the app seems to be built in the same way that Island Life was constructed. Like Island Life, basic social elements include visiting each other’s virtual space and helping out the crops, but My Vineyard also brings back the previous title’s building construction method. Essentially, players can buy a house to decorate their space with, but it requires friends to turn it from a bunch of parts into an actual abode. However, instead of requiring 10 friends as Island Life did, this house requires 30 clicks from your Facebook feed, but only one friend can click a day.

As the biggest and best looking piece of decorum, the house is a socially meaningful structure to have, especially considering that My Vineyard looks to have the same multiplayer elements that Island Life did, such as chat. As such, it looks like players can, once again, literally visit each other’s virtual spaces in a synchronous, virtual world-like environment.

Unfortunately, the game is a bit of a slow burn, with the fastest grapes taking about six hours to grow, so it will be a long while until your vineyard is looking good enough for any sort of virtual party. Also, the usability of the decorating aspect is also a bit frustrating. Examples include not being able to see the object before it’s placed, often not being able to see where it can be placed or not, and having to switch back and forth between tools to move it once it has been placed somewhere.

Of course, these are all merely annoyances, and nothing terribly devastating. Overall, My Vineyard is rather calming, and will probably prove amusing to those who like farming-style games. However, it is likely that its significantly slower pace will detract from that player-base. At the same time, it’s virtual world’esque features could attract a completely different one. With such a mixing and matching of different audiences it is difficult to say how this new title will do. Currently, it sits on a mere 47,000 monthly active users (though it’s only been out a few days), yet Island Life has grown steadily to over 635,000 MAUs. It will be interesting to see if this new app follows that same trend.

Zynga has pulled a twofer this week, heading up both our Monday MAU list and today’s list of fastest Facebook gainers by daily active users with Treasure Isle. When the dust from the new game’s rocket-fueled growth settles less than half of the new DAU you see below will probably remain — but that would still be plenty to head up the the list.

Following it at number two is Playfish’s Hotel City, which has made gains over the past two weeks that would normally be considered spectacular, but are currently overshadowed by Isle. As you can see, everything else has picked up far fewer new DAU on our AppData list:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Treasure Isle	4,383,461	+2,730,691	+165.22
2.	Hotel City	2,638,497	+942,891	+55.61
3.	Birthday Cards	1,808,120	+374,046	+26.08
4.	Zoo Paradise	808,372	+178,983	+28.44
5.	Family Feud	414,659	+172,410	+71.17
6.	Happy Pets	1,720,771	+165,795	+10.66
7.	Happy Aquarium	4,296,714	+115,003	+2.75
8.	Happy Island	2,646,166	+114,452	+4.52
9.	Mall World	131,472	+107,106	+439.57
10.	Tiki Resort	940,072	+89,556	+10.53
11.	Ninja Saga	934,149	+87,213	+10.30
12.	Pet Society	4,079,277	+80,057	+2.00
13.	Fish Friends	102,191	+78,678	+334.61
14.	Zoo World	2,105,866	+65,364	+3.20
15.	Bola	216,334	+49,464	+29.64
16.	Bubble Island	975,133	+45,986	+4.95
17.	Restaurant City	3,365,450	+42,851	+1.29
18.	Mahjongg Dimensions	227,246	+42,575	+23.05
19.	Kingdoms of Camelot	307,134	+32,151	+11.69
20.	Wild Ones	439,709	+29,182	+7.11

CrowdStar’s latest, Zoo Paradise, has notched up its growth over the past couple weeks, although it has a long way to go to pass Happy Pets, Happy Aquarium or Happy Island, which took out a block from numbers six to eight. But Paradise may yet catch its siblings; despite the impressive feat of getting four games within the top ten on the DAU list, CrowdStar’s overall DAU has remained steady, with only Paradise growing at any appreciable pace.

Mall World, at number nine, is coming up quickly. Like a social gaming version of Polyvore, Mall World has girls put together fashionable outfits on virtual characters, then open a boutique to sell their own clothes. As one commenter on the game’s wall describes it (in apparent ignorance of FarmVille’s very broad demographic), “Move over testosterone!! Here come the the ovaries!”.

Tiki Resort, another island-themed game by Playdom, is still coming up, though its DAU as a percentage of MAU has fallen below 20 percent. Fish Friends, several places down, takes the fun offshore; it’s also growing well, something of a surprise since the fish-raising genre is months old now.

April 20 | San Francisco

Inside Social Apps 2010, our first conference on the future of monetization on social platforms, is coming up one week from today. We had to turn off registration over the weekend because we’re at capacity, but tomorrow at 11am US PT we’ll be making a small number of additional tickets available, so we encourage you to register then to reserve your spot.

On April 20th in San Francisco, one day before Facebook’s official “f8″ event, many of the leading developers from around the world will be gathering to discuss the future of monetization inside social apps and games on Facebook and beyond.

At Inside Social Apps 2010, executives and experts from leading social game and app developers, payment services, advertising providers, and investors will be discussing the future of virtual goods monetization in social apps and games from a global perspective. The event will be held at the Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF, located at 1675 Owens St in San Francisco (map). The full agenda for the day is available here.

The full list of speakers at Inside Social Apps 2010 is below:

• Atul Bagga, VP Equity Research, Games, ThinkEquity
• Jens Begemann, CEO, Wooga
• Jim Bobowski, Director Online Partner Marketing, Netflix
  
• 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
• Dave Etling, VP Product Development, InComm
  
• George Garrick, CEO, Offerpal Media
• Steven Goh, CEO, mig33
• Eric Goldberg, Managing Director, Crossover Technologies
  
• Vikas Gupta, CEO, Jambool
• Sebastien de Halleux, Founder and COO, Playfish, and VP Business Development & Strategic Partnerships, EA Interactive
• Ron Hirson, Co-founder and SVP Product, Boku
• Maha Ibrahim, General Partner, Canaan Partners
• Benjamin Joffe, Founder, +8*
  
• 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
• Alex Rampell, CEO, TrialPay
  
• Peter Relan, Executive Chairman, CrowdStar
• Justin Smith, Founder, Inside Network
• Kavin Stewart, CEO, Lolapps
• Rick Thompson, Co-founder, Playdom, and Investor
  
• Jay Weintraub, Founder, LeadsCon
• Season Xu, Co-founder and COO, Five Minutes
  

We encourage you to register tomorrow at 11 am US PT.

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

Space is almost sold out, so we encourage you to register tomorrow (Wednesday) at 11am US PT.

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

Casino card games on Facebook are not unfamiliar to most users. Unfortunately, most of them never really see much traffic — usually due to poor quality or lack of anything new to offer. But for those that do make it, these games (specifically Zynga Poker) have become extraordinarily popular applications.

So we were interested to see the real-life World Poker Tour publish an official Texas Hold’Em app on Facebook. It’s aptly named WPT Texas Hold’Em Poker, and developed by FunClick.

If you’ve played any of the older Texas Hold’Em apps, or the real thing, for that matter, then you’ve played this game. Essentially, and as far as game play goes, it really just boils down to a newer, fresher feel to the game. And the app pulls it off. The game feels very crisp and clean, with a very serious mood to it. Frankly, it doesn’t even feel much like a typical social game, but that is sort of the point.

WPT is trying to fill the a niche for “advanced” Texas Hold’Em players — users that are there to play the game itself, and not so much post updates and decorate rooms. Right as you launch the app and set up your character, there are dozens of tables ready to join with play speeds ranging from normal to fast and stakes as low as two to four chips and as high as 2000 – 5000. Advanced users can go straight to the table that’s fitting for their level and beginners to theirs. Once seated, standard Texas Hold’Em rules apply as avatar icons of all nine players highlight and the player folds or bets.

Despite the focus of the game, WPT also uses the strengths of Facebook. As such, the game has all of your typical social elements including friend invites, gifting, achievements, game play statistics, and a customizable avatar – all of which, sans your friends, can be viewed by anyone that clicks your avatar at a card table.

As a matter of fact, this avatar has a surprising level of detail to it, granting users the ability to customize commonplace items such as hair and skin tone,  and minor accessories such as rings and belts. In fact, as users play and gain more card playing experience – thus unlocking new levels – they can even buy dogs, cars, planes, and a number of other absurdities that we only wish we could actually afford.

This is were your chips come into play. Obviously, these are used for betting at the tables, but they’re also used to purchase all of the avatar items. This means that if you’re not careful, you can quickly become very broke. Hmm, just like Vegas. Of course, that’s sort of the idea, as this is the primary monetization factor for WPT: Selling more chips. There is no actual gambling, per US law and Facebook’s platform rules.

Frankly, chips are pretty cheap, and if you so desire, you could buy 3.5 million for $100. If you are not quite such a high roller, then you can still buy chips for about $5 or complete a number of offers in order to earn them.

Perhaps you are wondering at this point: Why is WPT Texas Hold’Em worth playing over other poker apps? One reason may be because of the fact that it is an official World Poker Tour game — perhaps it will do tie-ins with the real tour at some point? Meanwhile, there are prizes, although not based on your success in the app.

Fans of the Facebook app — you need to become a fan of its Page —  can enter to win everything from the simple to the very extravagant. An example of the former would be official WPT tournament poker chip sets. The latter, most recently, was two seats on a 7-Night VIP poker trip on the WPT Boot Camp Battle@Sea Cruise on the Mexican Riviera. Oh yeah, while there, you would get to play in four tournaments with a prize pool of up to $200,000.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to say when the next major prize will become available, so WPT also set up their official hostess, Alison Waite with a Facebook page that provides not only updates for these prizes (which is also on the app’s Page), but often provides tips and videos on how to become a better poker player.

Overall, WPT Texas Hold’Em Poker is nothing significantly new as far as poker games go. It’s more of a different flavor of poker game; one that focuses more on the diehard poker fans, and not so much the standard social gamers themselves. That doesn’t mean the app is devoid of social elements, but rather, just that these are more for enhancement purposes and not intended, in our view, for the typical social gamer. Evidentially, this strategy is starting to work as well, for the past four days or so have seen big growth for the application and it has currently reached just shy of 90,000 monthly active users.

Digital Sky Technologies, the investor/holding company that made big late-stage investments in social gaming leader Zynga and social service Facebook last year, announced that it has an investor of its own now. China-based online gaming and media giant Tencent has put in around $300 million, in exchange for a 10.26% ownership stake, 0.51% voting power and the right to nominate a board observer.

Tencent has been considering a variety of ways to expand, from buying AOL’s ICQ chat service to buying social gaming company CrowdStar. It was reportedly bidding against DST on the former deal. The latter one is no longer on the table — apparently, Tencent balked at CrowdStar’s push for a $200 million price.

With $300 million in DST, Tencent has a more diversified and arguably stronger portfolio than it could through most any other move. DST’s wide range of investments in Russia, in market leaders like, Mail.ru, Odnoklassniki and VKontakte, give it control of more than 70% of page views in the country. It also has investments in top web sites in Eastern Europe.

Those markets are relatively small, of course, but DST is well-financed. Along with money from founders Yuri Milner and Gregory Finger, it is 35% owned by industrialist Alishar Usmanov, “the hard man of Russia,” and has additional minority investments from Goldman Sachs, Tiger Global and Renaissance Capital. The money has enabled it to buy stock in later rounds from Facebook and Zynga, and at higher valuations than what other big investors were looking for. Those investments look shrewd in hindsight, given that both companies have continued to grow traffic and revenue in the following months — at the time, many people in Silicon Valley still believed Facebook and its platform to be worth significantly less money than what DST paid.

It bought $200 million worth of Facebook preferred stock last summer at a $10 billion valuation. It followed this by announcing it was purchasing up to $100 million in employee common stock at a $6.5 billion valuation, giving it a total Facebook ownership of around 3.5% by the time those deals were complete last August. Then it spent an unannounced amount of money on stock from former Facebook employees, so we’re not sure how much Facebook stock it currently has in its possession. From what we’ve heard, Facebook has helped the firm get as much available current and employee stock as possible, effectively making it harder for other third-party investors to do so.

Facebook has quickly grown in the past year to more than 400 million monthly active users, 70%of whom are outside the US; we estimate it made between $600 million and $700 million in revenue last year, up sharply from previous years.

DST then put $180 million into Zynga last year, in a scantly detailed investment where early employees were similarly able to sell some stock. Partner Alexander Tamas told us at the time that DST itself was looking to get some liquidity, even though its investments were intended to be long-term. So the Tencent investment makes sense. From that interview:

We’re organized as a company, not as a fund. We don’t need to distribute money to investors. That means we can take 5, 10, 15 year views on these companies. This is why it’s so important to find founders who are working for the long-term. The way that people get liquidity is trading in DST shares. There may be a DST IPO at some point, which would give our investors liquidity without them having to sell shares in DST.

We’re more like Berkshire Hathaway than a venture capital firm. That’s what resonated with [Zynga chief executive] Mark Pincus and [Facebook chief executive] Mark Zuckerberg. We told them: “You’ll never have any pressure to sell or go public. You won’t have to do what’s not right for the business.”

It’s not clear if Tencent will rely on DST to make big international investments or acquisitions, or separately continue to look at deals itself. It’s also possible that DST might get more active in China.

DST and Tencent will embark on a long-term partnership and co-operation as they seek to benefit from each other’s insights gained from their respective markets. DST’s deep understanding of the Russian Internet market, together with its leading brands such as Mail.ru, Odnoklassniki and VKontakte, will enable Tencent to benefit from the high growth of the Russian-speaking Internet market. At the same time, Tencent’s leading position in China will provide DST and its companies with unique and valuable operational insights and access to its regional network that can help DST further accelerate its growth path.

One final note here. In case you thought this was just about Russian and Chinese media conglomerates combining forces, there’s also a third in the mix — South Africa-based international media company Naspers (which, we should mention, has also looked at ICQ). Naspers owns a 34.5% stake in Tencent, meaning it now indirectly owns a small amount of of stock in Facebook and Zynga. With social gaming, social networks and virtual goods becoming increasingly global operations, we expect social gaming and other apps on Facebook’s platform to continue to see more investment from international companies.

Evony, which is known for its suggestive advertising campaigns, is now turning to the social graph for more growth and engagement. Over the past 16 days, we have watched the Facebook app for Evony grow from nothing at launch to just over 200,000 monthly active users. Well, “app” is a term used loosely as sans gifting or inviting friends as “Allies,” everything takes place on a separate browser window in the Evony site itself. The company is actually using Facebook Connect.

Regardless, for those unfamiliar with the title, Evony has absolutely nothing to do with the ladies advertised. No, it’s basically a browser based version of Civilization – in fact it used to be called “Civony” – but after being out for a few years (Age I, anyway, the current version is called Age II), the freemium title has proven that while it is not quite its predecessor, it’s still good enough to garner millions of worldwide players.

Essentially, the game is broken up into three major sections: Town, City, and Map. Within the town, you have your city-building sort of rules. Cottages are required to grow your population so you have workers and soldiers, taxes increase your gold, users have to keep the people happy, and so on. From here, players move to the outer limits of their City, where they build sawmills, farms, quarries, and mines to produce the raw materials they need to do, well, everything else.

This is where things start to get a bit more complex. Each building has a particular purpose. If you build military facilities, you can start training and upgrading units for an army. If you build an academy, you can start researching means to improve your production efficiency. If you build an inn, you can recruit Heroes (non-player characters that can be used to lead your armies and town for added bonuses). The list goes on. The idea is to construct an efficient and thriving medieval city and then raise an army to defend it.

Yes, defend it. These are feudal times, and there are many enemies and potential enemies about. This is where the Map section comes to play. This is a high, bird’s eye view of the entire land and from it, you can see every plot of land, with every resource and every other player city. Now, different spots of land can grant benefits, such as increased food production or even be used to construct new cities. Of course, with the shear number of players on Evony, there are likely to be at least four or five players adjacent to that same resource.

This is where the social play style sort of comes into play. The game is connected through Facebook, so you can invite friends as allies – or ally with others within the game directly – to aide one another as need be to help in defense, share resources, and so on. Basically, you can play diplomatically. If that sounds boring, then you can simply declare war and try to ransack everyone that looks at you funny.

Another interesting element to Evony is that, periodically, random events will occur that will ask you to post something to your Facebook feed. Occasionally, it is a blatant means to get you to advertise for them with events like “A disease is spreading in your city” and you have to ask your friends for help (there is no penalty for ignoring it), while others are more useful and offer you rewards such as resources, prestige, or population. Unfortunately, these events have a tendency to appear very, very frequently and get very old, very quick.

On a lighter note, Evony does do an excellent job at getting a new player started. This doesn’t refer to the tutorial at all, but rather the fact that it is rather quick to get your kingdom underway. Basically, you can only construct one structure at a time, and the more advanced it becomes, the longer it takes to build. That said, any building with a build-time under five minutes (pretty much all level one buildings) can be sped up and completed instantly. Furthermore, as you get more complex or upgrade parts of your city, the game grants you a generous amount of special items to improve everything from build times to production efficiency.

Normally, such items are reserved for paying customers, where you would utilize Evony’s virtual currency, Cents, to buy them. These can be bought in packages ranging from $5 to $1000, though we have no idea who would spend that much. Regardless, this is the game’s primary monetization method, and without making use of it, once you are beyond the beginning levels, the game becomes a bit of a slow burn. Granted, at upper tiers of play, there are a lot of different things to do (especially if you are picking fights), but they start to take more and more time. As an example, an upper level Town Hall could take over a day to construct.

While the beginner’s experience is not too bad, the game does tend to ramp up rather quickly, so don’t expect to understand everything right away. Evony does make an attempt to help clear this up with a quest system broken up into Routine Quests, Hero Quests, and Commission Quests. While the latter two are for more advanced users — though there is not exactly a clear explanation on them, they seem to be meta quests made up of the routine quests and user-generated quests respectively — Routine Quests are described as more tutorial’esque quests telling users what to do next. All the same, however, this log is bloated, and really only gets clicked on to claim the reward. Likely, most users will just poke around, building structures until they pick everything up themselves.

Of course, clicking on the quests tab, or any other tab for that matter, may be avoided because of latency and loading issues. Granted, Evony is a free-to-play game, but every time you click on something, a timer appears and the user has to wait. Sometimes it only takes an extra second, others, it’s an eternity. Either way, it is extraordinarily annoying.

Overall, for a free-to-play title, Evony is not half bad; especially if you are a fan of Civilization and are still waiting for the Facebook version to come out. Yes, the game has some issues here and there, but once you dabble around within it for a while, it starts to become fairly easy. That said, there are still a myriad of features yet to be mentioned, and the more we play, the more new ones we discover, which really does wonders for longevity. Well, assuming you like such complexity. So, the next time you see a busty maiden, just remember, it’s actually  game about complex feudal kingdoms, available to play with your Facebook friends.

[Editor's Note: The following article, and the Global Monitor Report data it cites, are from Inside Facebook Gold, our new data and analysis membership service tracking Facebook's business and growth. In addition to monthly Global Monitor data updates, Inside Facebook Gold presents weekly in-depth analysis articles exploring the most critical developments impacting the future of the Facebook ecosystem. Click here to learn more.]

Facebook has seen tremendous growth in Southeast Asia over the past several quarters, at the expense of formerly dominant competitors like Silicon Valley companies Friendster and hi5, and locally-based networks.

The leading countries in terms of overall growth in traffic have been Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia, based on the data we track in our monthly Global Monitor Report. Notably, Indonesia is now Facebook’s number three country in the world in total audience size, trailing only the United States and the United Kingdom. And yet, Facebook has seen little growth in Japan and South Korea — two of the most lucrative markets in the region — and it is blocked in mainland China, East Asia’s largest and fastest-growing market.

One country in which Facebook has enjoyed an exceptionally meteoric rise is geographically near to these Southeast Asian growth zones but offers us a unique view on growth throughout Asia. Taiwan’s Facebook traffic and engagement are growing as fast as the most standout Southeast Asian success stories, and yet it is different from these markets in one key way. Like the island metropolises of Hong Kong and Singapore, Taiwan has adopted Facebook the way the Southeast Asian markets have. But, culturally and linguistically, Taiwan, also like Hong Kong and Singapore, remains deeply connected to East Asia.

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Top social application developer RockYou announced a smart plan to tap the Chinese social gaming world last Friday. It is starting to license Chinese social games and publish them around the world.

Monetization and distribution services are not new to Facebook, as RockYou and many other developers have provided them for years — the company has sold advertising for applications since 2007, for example. But most services have either focused on being a developer or on being a service provider, while RockYou has so far managed to do both. Taiwan-based 6 Waves has specifically based itself around the publishing model, providing a network of its own apps that it has leveraged to distribute others’ social games, especially ones from China.

Today, RockYou wants to publish Chinese social games outside of China, rather than build its own apps for social networks in the country or try to provide platform services there.

The announcement comes at a time when the company has been been on something of a rebound on Facebook. It has also been rumored to be considering an acquisition from Chinese gaming giant Shanda, as we covered last week. Rockyou has not directly denied talking with Shanda and it has framed the possibility as “just rumors.” But, RockYou cofounder Jia Shen says that the company is planning more acquisitions of its own in the country and region. We first heard a rumor about this when RockYou raised $50 million in a fourth round of funding last fall, following in previous funding of $67 million; the latest announcement appears to affirm its independent plans.

China investor/blogger Bill Bishop interviewed Shen on Friday, and got some more details. “Shen did not address [the rumor] specifically, but after talking to him and others in the industry I don’t think RockYou would sell to Shanda right now,” he writes. “When asked generally about possible moves into US social gaming by Shanda and Tencent, he said that those firms are still trying to figure out SNS gaming in China and so does not expect them to move that quickly into the US.”

RockYou made a big point of its China partnership efforts last Friday, with Shen providing a presentation to developers in Beijing about the nuts and bolts of social apps during a social gaming conference. Many Chinese developers do not have the resources to go after big US markets on their own.

The Chinese market is big, but most gamers are playing well-established massively multiplayer online games or casual games offered within portals, rather than ones based on users’ social graphs in social networks. Revenue in other popular games can be quite high, with the overall Chinese virtual goods market estimated to be worth more than $5 billion — but most of that amount is not from social games like what one sees on Facebook or MySpace. And it is harder for developers to make money. “For something a Chinese user is willing to pay one Renminbi [for], a user in the U.S. would pay $1,” Shen said, according to The Wall Street Journal. “‘It’s almost a one-to-one comparison.” (One dollar is the equivalent of almost seven Chinese yuan. Other factors, like tight censorship rules, also get in the way of building successful social gaming companies. Small developers can’t typically afford the fees and time required by China’s increasingly rigorous censors.

Bishop got a range of other key details, as we’ll summarize here. But before we get into them be sure to check out the details what RockYou’s monetization platform includes, if you’re interested: Basically, a range of advertising and virtual currency services.

To date, the company says it gets 13 billion ad impressions every month. It has 280 million unique visitors across major social networks, 121 million of whom are in the US — and 72 million un-deduplicated users on Facebook, according to AppData. 1,000 developers are already using its platform. It shares 50% of the revenue from licensed games with monetization platform partners.

RockYou has already been busy in the country, as Shen told Bishop. Although it published two games on RenRen in 2008 — that Shen says did well — it does not plan to do any more of its own. But it has outsourced some of its own game development to Chinese developers, and it may establish an internal studio in Beijing. In the meantime, it has “a Singapore-based executive overseeing China (though Shen is very involved),” as Bishop describes. It has licensed one game already, CafeJoy’s “Casino World,” and it is working with some of the largest Chinese social game developers today, it announced. No names yet, though.

In terms of buying more companies, it is “open-minded on possible deal structures, from license deals or minority investments to outright acquisitions.” The company is, unsurprisingly, not looking for “one-hit wonders.” The focus also continues to be social versus traditional gaming, as Shen “does not believe there will ever be a market on the English-language social networking sites for Chinese-themed games like ‘Romance of the Three Kingdoms’ or ‘Journey to the West.’”

Lots of big social gaming companies based in the US and other parts of the world have been spending more time in China over the last year or two. RockYou has made the biggest moves yet, and if its publisher plans work, you can expect to start seeing a lot more China-based social games coursing through the Facebook ecosystem in the near future. The strategy should give the company more total traffic, meaning additional inventory for its advertising business, and purchasers for its other monetization services.

Not too long ago, we took a look at Zynga’s new hit game Treasure Isle. It turned out to be a pretty decent game, combining virtual, personal spaces and treasure hunting. However, the latter half was accused by many commenters of being a clone of an older app’s main focus, and so we decided to take a look at zSlide’s 2.4 million monthly active user title, Treasure Madness.

As the title suggests, the game is all about treasure hunting. Players get maps of uncharted islands – evidentially in the Caribbean – and must dig them up in search of treasure. Grid space by grid space, users dig up the sections of each island earning gold, experience, and the occasional treasure. As you’d expect, each item found is added to a sort of achievement section aptly dubbed “Treasures.“ That section displays all of your findings, as well as what you might still need, and whatever it is your friends are also currently looking for.

Instead of energy, health is the cost of searching for treasure, with each form of searching (digging, mining, diving, etc.) costing a different amount. As players level up, the different tools needed to employ such methods become available for a hefty price, and include diving equipment for searching underwater, or boots for trekking through swamps. However, something interesting — that Treasure Isle does not have — is that some items have improved versions of themselves that can be used for lower health costs.

Unfortunately, the only example of this unlocked for us at the moment is a better shovel, but even this only saves one health point per dig, making the benefit almost moot. Frankly, it’s just easier to eat the different fruits – which regain health – that one digs up while exploring.

In addition to the various items that can be found amongst these treasure littered isles players are also able to “dig up” a multitude of mini-games that must be played in order to earn rewards. Ironic that Treasure Isle copied the hunting aspect of Madness, as each of the mini-games are something we have all seen before elsewhere. This includes match three games, memory, a Dr. Mario-type game, and a bunch more that most users will have likely played on Yahoo or MSN games at some point.

What makes these a bit different, however, is that as they are found and played, users can gain ranks in each one, leveling up a sort of title (i.e. Novice) as they get better. Of course, the faster one completes a mini-game, the more points they get towards that new level. Nevertheless, one has to actually find that game first in order to play and level within it. Thankfully, one can spend a small amount of health to randomly get a different one.

Another element to Treasure Madness worth mentioning is that the developers certainly take the time to add new content in tandem with real world events (currently, there are still Easter maps available for purchase and exploration). Furthermore, for each new feature they add, the app has a blog-like home page that explains the new feature and allows users to provide feedback with a simple click on either “Love It” or “Hate It.”

Beyond these, players also get access to yet another set of mini-games within the “Gold Rush” section of the title. Limited to every eight hours, users can play simple games – such as “The Path of Fear,” which has players using their mouse to grab gold nuggets while avoiding creepy hands – to earn a sizable chunk of change.

This is where Treasure Madness and Treasure Isle truly begin to differentiate themselves. Whereas Madness focuses heavily on mini-games, Isle takes the gold players earn and lets them decorate their own virtual island. In Madness, all gold is really used for is more maps and equipment. This, in turn, allows the player to earn more gold and treasure, which is then once again used to buy more maps and equipment. Essentially, it becomes an endless cycle with no real feeling of accomplishment and reward.

In the case of Zynga’s app, or any other virtual space app for that matter, there is something truly gratifying about watching a place you call “home” (so-to-speak) grow and become more extravagant. It’s a means of self-expression and a visible reward that you can see and show off.

For the record, Treasure Madness is a pretty decent game. With an MAU count over 2 million, that is evidence enough. But with a lack of visible rewards, its longevity doesn’t feel quite as strong. That said, yes, Zynga did make use of Madness’ core treasure hunting mechanics, almost down to the exact tools needed to explore, but the virtual space offered in the newer title is just so much more gratifying. It’s hard to say just what Treasure Madness needs, without suggesting something that’s already be done to death, but as it stands, mini-games will just only stretch so far.