We began to notice the growth of city-building applications on Facebook this past winter, including titles like My City Life, Enercities, Tiny Town, Towner, NanoTowns and Social City. But one that has quietly been on our top growing charts is My Town from Broken Bulb Studios.

Not to be confused with the smaller mobile title of the same name from Booyah, My Town has a decent user base of around 3.6 million monthly active users and 663,000 daily active users, according to AppData. Considering how much we enjoyed Broken Bulbs prior title, Ninja Warz, it seemed worth a closer look.

The game starts out like any other social city-builder (well, sort of, but more on that later). Players are granted a fairly sizable starting space to build a town from and then it’s off to build houses, business, shops, and more. Players collect coins every couple of hours each of their structures, which becomes the primary form of income.

Obviously, this would make the game slow at the start, which more often than not becomes a key concern in many slow-burn titles. If you can’t make any significant headway early on, it becomes increasingly difficult to stay interested in a game. Luckily, this is not the case with My Town. The distance between levels is very well spaced out for new players, meaning that just as you are running low on cash, it’s level up time. This, in turn, grants you new buildings to construct, but also a chunk of cash. Couple this with the easy trophies one can earn (in the beginning anyway), and you can make a nice little town right from the get-go.

Another thing that helps is that many tiny decorations, basic streets, and sidewalks are free. A lot of city-builders charge for these, but even if you don’t want decorations, streets are a necessity for any nice looking town, it is obnoxious to have to pay for each chunk of pavement.

Among these mentioned free items, however, is one in particular that raises an interesting flag: Sidewalks. Yes, this is one of the few city builders that lets you build these. However, it’s not the sidewalks that’s interesting. No, it’s that they are tiny squares only a fraction of the size of the overall invisible grid everything is placed on (or perhaps there are just about a million super-tiny grids). My Town actually grants the user the ability to decorate their town with a very distinct level of detail.

Rather than just placing buildings and rotating them, players can, theoretically, build yards, parks, alleyways, and dozens of other nuances that are done automatically in other city games; nuances most of us take for granted. Unfortunately, this is a bit of a double edged sword at the moment, as such décor (streets, sidewalks, etc.) must be painstakingly placed one… tiny… tile… at a time, and it takes forever. It’s really just a usability issue, and not a game play one though. For long strips of road and sidewalk, one expects to be able to click and drag, having the game lay out the long strips for them along that path (like how you build walls in The Sims or roads in SimCity). Instead, it just moves the camera about.

Regardless, the style of the game does make up for this. Once you’ve taken the time to build everything out, your town will feel more unique and meaningful to you than it might in rival titles. Furthermore, with the style representative of something out of The Simpsons, the game is a nice change from all the realistic or anime-looking apps out there.

With that, there is only one more element to mention. Remember that “sort of” similar start up for the game? Well, unlike the others, the game teaches you to play with a very southern, voice-acted old-man mayor sort of guy. This is only the second time we’ve seen this much voice acting, with the first being in Playfish’s Gangster City, and we’re not sure how we feel about it. Certainly, it is a step towards higher levels of polish, but do players really need the instructions read to them? Especially with a simple app. Frankly, it feels like something better utilized for story elements, assuming a game has one.

Nevertheless, this isn’t really a complaint, and other than the current tediousness of building out some of the game’s smaller structures and decorations, My Town is pretty solid. Players have the ability to build things that other city games do automatically, and the art style is a nice change from the average. The game starts up quickly and plays steadily over time, and really the only thing we think it really needs… is some way to combine this with Ninja Warz. Yeah. A city of ninjas. Now that would be awesome.

Could Zynga have found its next hit game? When we noted on March 31st that the social gaming giant’s traffic had plateaued, it wasn’t clear how the company would get out of its rut. Two days later, Zynga released Treasure Isle, an island-based social game in which players hunt for buried treasure based on a time mechanic.

Treasure Isle’s starting growth spurt is reminiscent of FarmVille’s early days. With 3.2 million monthly active users, it’s already one of Zynga’s top ten games. Engagement from players is also strong; there had already been about 2.5 million unique users by about 4pm PST today, according to Jeremy Verba, Zynga’s general manager for the game.

Zynga obviously has a huge ability to promote new titles, with 63 million daily active users among its other Facebook games and a large advertising budget. But there’s more to hitting a home run than just promotion. The company’s other new game, Poker Blitz, has only picked up 1.2 million players in the three weeks it has been around.

Players logging into Treasure Isle for the first time will be able to pick out some of the growth influences. The gameplay revolves around methodically digging up patches of land on deserted islands to find treasure chests and money; in the short tutorial, you quickly find a set of “Crown Jewels”. It’s a bit like playing a slot machine, with “energy” substituting for coins. As in farming games, a looping music track encourages the repetition.

Addictive design is only half the puzzle, though. FarmVille came out at a time that interest in farming and nature was rising. Now there’s a similar trend, at least on Facebook, with islands. Games like Happy Island, Island Life, Island Paradise, and Tiki Resort have all successfully combined this theme with time management, and even Bubble Island, an action-oriented bubble blasting game, uses it to an extent.

The market for a treasure hunting game had also been proven. When we reviewed Treasure Isle, irate commenters pointed out that the game bears a strong resemblance to Treasure Madness, a pre-existing Facebook game that had around three million MAU. Zynga is indeed masterful at borrowing ideas — FarmVille, after all, followed on the success of Farm Town — but Verba says that Zynga also brewed in concepts and atmosphere from cultural successes like Lost and Indiana Jones, along with some original ideas.

Taken together, the above factors do make a hit game more likely. They also suggest a story for what’s happening with Poker Blitz, the other recent Zynga game. Unlike Treasure Isle, it doesn’t seem clear whether players were interested in a game like Poker Blitz, and the specific mechanics in that game are, as far as we know, fairly unique.

Zynga did have its success with Texas HoldEm Poker to guide its design choices, but the originality of Blitz also contained its risk. It’s also possible that Zynga is following a slow-growth strategy for the game, developing it further according to player preferences.

As for Treasure Isle, it looks like the game will continue its blazing growth streak for the time being. So far, it’s holding up to the crush of new traffic, unlike some other recent hits that have had trouble scaling. “We’ve been able to learn on the lessons of other games here,” says Verba. “Zynga’s an environment of perfect improvement, and an example of that is how this game came out, from an operational point of view.”

It’s not just US game and media companies who are looking around at buying big social game developers. Chinese media and gaming leaders Tencent and Shanda Games are, too, according to rumors going around some technology circles in Asia.

Although neither company has showed much interest in Facebook applications over the past few years, that began to change in 2009. Tencent launched games it had developed on its own. Shanda, meanwhile, made a watershed move in January, when it acquired Flash games platform company Mochi Media for $80 million. It was the first time that a big Chinese online game company has bought a meaningful US one.

With acquisition precedent set and Facebook looking more significant than ever, Tencent and Shanda — both of whom are publicly traded, wealthy companies — have good reasons to buy. So while the rumors are not well-substantiated, they’re worth examining.

Tencent-CrowdStar

The first is that Tencent has looked at acquiring CrowdStar. The price is “up to $200 million,” says one of our sources. While CrowdStar has been a small and very Facebook game-focused company, its size and ability to get users would give an immediate and potentially long-term presence on Facebook. However, when we asked CrowdStar chairman Peter Relan if Tencent talks are currently happening, he said it was “absolutely not true.” To which he added, “Many people have approached us. That’s all I will say.”

Still, there have been a lot of acquisition rumors around the company since its sudden and massive traffic gains last fall. The company went from being relatively small and unknown in a matter of months, launching a line of hits including Happy Aquarium. It now has 48.4 million monthly active users (MAU) and 8.98 million daily active users (DAU), according to our AppData service. That’s fifth and fourth most out of all Facebook developers, respectively.

Microsoft was looking at the company in February, according to Bloomberg, while CrowdStar was also considering a move to raise more funding at the same $200 million valuation. We also heard in February that the company had signed a letter of intent, meaning it appeared to be in the later stages of the acquisition process, although we couldn’t specifically confirm Microsoft’s involvement. Whatever else has been going on, the Microsoft talks fell through last month, according to a follow-up report from Bloomberg, last week.

Shanda-RockYou

We also hear that Shanda has been looking at RockYou. There are some good reasons why RockYou would be an especially interesting target. The most obvious is that it has maintained a considerable presence on Facebook over the years, and appears to be transitioning well from make simpler social apps to more complex social games, like Zoo World. It now has 73.5 million MAU and 4.43 million DAU, according to AppData, the second and eighth most out of all developers on the platform. It has also built a big app advertising business, selling cost-per-install ads for years so developers can attract each others’ users. It has also added in brand and performance advertising options over the years.

These are all things Shanda appears to want, as the Mochi Media acquisition showed. That company had built up a business providing advertising, analytics and virtual goods services to Flash game developers, meaning Shanda gets access to both these tools and the games using its platform. Another reason for that acquisition, though, is the fact that Mochi-powered games were starting to get popular with the rising number of Chinese users who wanted simple Flash games. We’ve heard that although heavier, massively multiplayer online and downloadable games have historically defined much Chinese gaming, the cheap netbooks and other computers that consumers are snatching up can’t always handle the processor requirements. Flash games are a cheap way to get more games in front of this growing market, and Mochi can do that and make money at the same time.

Social apps are similarly easy for users to access. RockYou is an even better fit given Shanda’s dual focus on its big local market and the broader world, because the developer has spent years building for a wide variety of social platforms. Although it grew early on MySpace, and spread to a variety of different international networks’ platforms, it has also been very busy in Asia — and for years. RockYou Asia, a regionally focused part of the company, has games and other apps live on Mixi in Japan, Xiaonei (now RenRen) in China and Cyworld in Korea; from what we can tell, they’re a mix of translated standard RockYou titles like Speed Racing, and new ones.

The fact that RockYou is active in China is especially significant. RenRen has the most open platform for third party developers, but the word in the street in China is that all of the big social networks are looking to make their developer platforms far more open than they have been. Until now, as we’ve been covering, these platforms have been mostly or entirely closed to third-party apps, resulting in many Chinese app developers deciding to focus on Facebook and other platforms instead.

RockYou has lots of experience launching on new platforms, and with a backer like Shanda — and all the necessary relationships that would come with it — the company would have a clear shot at whichever new rival opened up well enough to allow it to build a business.

The thing is, RockYou hasn’t said much about its expansion plans. The company raised a big $50 million fourth round of funding from Japanese firm SoftBank, and at that point sources said it was looking at acquiring gaming companies in Korea and Japan. We really don’t know how big or profitable it is at this point. Given the recent funding, in any case, it likely doesn’t need to raise more money. But Shanda can afford to pay, and it has already hinted that it’s looking to make more big purchases.

Following its big debut on our Monday list of fastest-gaining games by monthly active users, the new Electronic Arts / Playfish title Hotel City is also leading this week’s daily active user list. The hotel management game’s DAU number is certainly bloated by the millions of people streaming in to try the game, but with 1.4 million new DAU, only a fraction needs to stick around to make Hotel City successful — and it has just begun its growth.

Hotel City is far and away the leader below, but will have to vie with Zynga’s latest game, Treasure Isle, which seems to be coming up just as fast. Here’s the AppData list of the 20 DAU leaders:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Hotel City	1,695,606	+1,394,143	+462.46
2.	Family Feud	301,543	+173,731	+135.93
3.	Island Paradise	1,799,166	+138,332	+8.33
4.	Zoo Paradise	675,194	+100,689	+17.53
5.	Tiki Resort	850,516	+99,763	+13.29
6.	開心寶貝	689,426	+46,677	+7.26
7.	Ameba Pico	91,706	+36,624	+66.49
8.	Evony	34,199	+29,817	+680.44
9.	Games	327,260	+28,617	+9.58
10.	Farm Town	2,124,063	+26,687	+1.27
11.	TransForce – Robot strategy browser game of 2010	25,089	+22,675	+939.31
12.	Bola	166,870	+22,150	+15.31
13.	Hızlı Yaz	29,030	+20,943	+258.97
14.	Sunshine Ranch	564,702	+18,495	+3.39
15.	My Tribe	65,237	+18,045	+38.24
16.	Okey Oyna	47,010	+15,320	+48.34
17.	Happy Hotel	131,395	+15,041	+12.93
18.	World at War	153,031	+13,772	+9.89
19.	Aquarium Life	145,086	+13,467	+10.23
20.	Ninja Warz	251,474	+12,297	+5.14

Family Feud, at second, is the social gaming adaptation of the famous TV quiz show. It’s followed by Island Paradise, an older title from Meteor Games that is actually losing both MAU and DAU, but has managed to rally a bit in the second category this week.

Zoo Paradise, by CrowdStar, has players collect animals within a private zoo. Out since early March, Paradise is just hitting its stride. But with DAU as a percentage of MAU at 23 percent right now and falling back toward the low teens, it seems like this game may have trouble bringing back many of its players daily — a problem shared by RockYou’s Zoo World, which Paradise is attempting to challenge.

At number five, we see Tiki Resort by Playdom. This is a slow-but-steady grower in the island management category; it has reliably showed up on our DAU list for a solid month. You may notice, though, that Playdom’s newer and more successful game Social City isn’t shown. That game is still growing, but some of its initial DAU flush is finally wearing off, suggesting that the growth could be slowing.

Skipping down a bit, we find Evony, at number eight. In case you’re wondering, this game is indeed a Facebook version of the MMORPG that has cheap and salacious ads plastered around the ‘net.

[Image via American Copywriter]

Rhythm games. Ever since the launch of Guitar Hero they have been one of the most popular niches in video games. And as the iPhone has evolved into a more robust gaming device, the genre has found a very snug home for the growing number of music apps such as Tapulous’ Tap Tap Revenge and Riddin Ribbon, the heavily polished Rock Band, and the more creative ones such as Tune Runner. With the saturation, however, new titles must seek new means to differentiate themselves, and so the Universal Music Group (UMG) Recordings is taking its shot with the title Six String.

The core of the game is basically the same as any of the Tapulous or Guitar Hero titles: A sea of notes stream down six guitar strings and must be tapped as the cross a key point – the “tap zone” – at the bottom of the screen (or left of the screen, depending on how you hold the device), which is representative of a guitar’s neck base. However, this is hardly original, so the notes are broken up into four types.

The two more familiar notes are the Music Notes, which are merely single tap notes representing a string pluck in the song, and Note Phrases, which are yellow notes that must be tapped and held for X amount of time. It is worth noting, however, that these represent a more complex series of notes, meaning the in harder difficulties, these are replaced with trickier combinations of musical notes.

Regardless, this is where similarities end, and Six String’s gimmick comes into play. Notice the title – SIX String. Most songs are not played by plucking one string at a time, so this app actually asks the player to literally strum by tapping a note and dragging in the direction of and length of an arrow. Frankly, this did feel a little weak at first, and took some getting used to (as it is very easy to strum too many strings), but after a while, it did start to feel a bit natural and was pretty fun on higher difficulties. Sort of like playing a real guitar. Beyond this, the only other new feature is the requirement to change the chord in which the song is being played. It’s nothing extravagant, and is basically just an extra button to push – in the corner of the screen, towards the head of the guitar neck – when the command appears in harder difficulties.

Like Guitar Hero, missed notes will not be played and if you start to miss too many in a row, you will fail the song. Conversely, if you get a streak, you can shake the device to get a score boost.

As for the songs themselves, the selection you get after the $5 purchase is limited to a paltry six tracks. Luckily, the songs are pretty wide in variety and include some great titles from Bon Jovi, Scorpions, and Peter Frampton. Of course, since this is a game made by Universal Music Group, there are a ton of tracks that can be purchased for about $1 from just about every artist you can think of such as 3 Doors Down, Beck, Tom Petty, and many more. Conveniently, these can be bought directly through the app, and are sortable by artist, song, or difficulty.

Now, as far as complaints go, the biggest one is the fact that you can only play one song in, what is called, the Studio at the start. Since the game is powered through Plus+, you can post your scores to global leaderboards, but in order to do so, it must be done via this mode. Unfortunately… in order to play any other tracks the game gives you in the Studio, you have to hit a percentage of the notes in practice mode first. For easy it’s 90%; medium is 80%; hard is 80%. Essentially, the game forces you to play each song twice if you want to participate with the community in this fashion.

Thankfully, you can still unlock a fairly high number of awards/achievements, and as you finish a song, you are granted the opportunity to challenge your friends to beat your high score. Granted, it is an old social feature, but it still is just as effective.

The other issue with Six String, is while it is a pretty fun, and interesting simulation of guitar playing (not to mention a good selection of songs), the cost is a bit high. That isn’t saying that $5 is a lot. Heck, that’s only slightly more than a coffee at Starbucks. No, it’s saying that for $5 we only get six songs, and in order to get all of them, it will cost a player upwards of $30. Now consider this: Guitar Hero costs $60 on Xbox 360 (assuming you have the guitar – which is a fair comparison since you already have an iPhone if you are playing Six String).

Essentially, users, for the complete experience are paying half the price of Guitar Hero for less than half the experience the mainstream title offers. This includes the tactile feedback of the guitar peripheral, the actually volume of songs coming out of speakers instead of a phone, playing with friends synchronously, and so on.

Nevertheless, for $5, Six Strings isn’t too bad a buy. It could give you more value per dollar, but future renditions will probably remedy some of these complaints. Overall, the best part of the game is that it has a much wider and more mainstream selection of music to choose from than past rhythm titles, and its new gimmick features are actually quite fun, once you get used to them. That said, perhaps it is best to stick with Tap Tap Revenge until new versions of Six String are released.

Zynga has been experimenting with SMS in its petri dish of a social game, Mafia Wars, since late last year. But at that point it only let players get updates about what was happening in their games. It rolled out two-way SMS today, so players can actually make moves in the game from their phone.

The company likely thinks it can raise the average user’s engagement level by getting them playing through SMS instead of just on Facebook, and get them buying more virtual goods as a result. It may also be trying to find alternative means of regularly contacting users about game-play. Facebook removed third-party notifications at the beginning of March. Our AppData service doesn’t show the perenially popular mafia role-playing game taking any traffic dives since then, but perhaps the loss of notifications is affecting other factors we don’t measure, like average revenue per user.

Mafia Wars has hosted a number of feature tests that we’ve seen eventually rolled out to other games, like its browser toolbar. The fact that this particular app is text-based makes it especially suitable for SMS, although it’s not inconceivable that Zynga will find other uses for the medium, like letting people water their plants in FarmVille.

To start using SMS, go to the Mafia Wars app and click on the “Help” section (although some users may find it featured on the home page). To register, you enter your phone number, then Zynga send you a confirmation code and you enter that code back in the app. From that point on, you text MAFIA (623-42) and include a variety of commands. “FF” is “fight your last opponent again,” for example. You get a free virtual weapon if you sign up, with the promise of “daily bonus rewards” for continuing to play via SMS.

We’ve been playing a small but charming puzzle title lately, called Action Sudoku, from Backstage. With 45,000 monthly active users on Facebook, it is one of a growing number of apps we have begun to see revolving around the decades-old puzzle game, Sudoku (pronounced soo-DOH-koo). But it stands out not just for social features, but because it gets some key details right.

Though the game itself was not popularized until 1986 by a Japanese puzzle company (Nikoli), it can actually be dated back to French newspapers during the 19th century. The basic concept is to fill a 9×9 board that is broken up into nine 3×3 sub-regions, with the numbers one through nine. However, each number can only appear once in each row, column, or sub-region.

Action Sudoku, follows these basic rules. However, it is a little different, in that it uses a few social gaming features. As players proceed through each puzzle, they can unlock new levels of difficulty by meeting different requirements (time, all time score, etc.). However, beyond this, players can form teams with friends to create a cumulative score in order to earn special titles and rewards. Unfortunately, the total score is rather high, and we’ve yet to earn that level of mastery.

Individually, players are also granted daily income, Coins, that are used to play each level, and buy power ups, such as hints each round. Obviously, these play a big role in assisting the player in earning the highest possible score (this is also improved by speed and making few mistakes – i.e. trying to place a number that is within the same column, row, or sub-region). Moreover, there are occasional bonus sub-regions that appear that grant extra points per cell for a limited time.

Of course, all this extra game play and even the social outlets (which also include leaderboards, challenges, and achievements) is, for this game, superfluous. What is truly worth taking away from it is the atmosphere. Backstage knows the game it is recreating: Calm, peaceful, and thought provoking. As such, the images and effects are subtle and not distracting. The sound effects are fitting with the Japanese theme. And the music is one of the few Facebook “scores” – as it were – that we don’t mute after a few minutes of playing.

In fact, this is something that requires some extra emphasis. More often than not, music in social games gets muted because it is some obnoxious sound loop that either (a) skips at the end of each loop or (b) is so bubbly and loud (for lack of a better description), that while it sounds good at first, it quickly gets old. Action Sudoku’s music, however, is very soft and truly helps the player focus on the task at hand. It almost coaxes thought along rather than being distracting, and frankly, without it, Action Sudoku wouldn’t be as interesting. It would just be another sudoku title but with basic social features.

However, why are there so many sudoku apps anyway? Just by typing in the word “sudoku,” one can find games such as Sudoku Stars, Challenge Sudoku, Sudoku Solver, Web Sudoku, and so on. The reason is simplicity, and though many of these games are a year, or more, old, that concept is worth bringing back to light.

For over a year now, social games have evolved and changed. They have become increasingly advanced, more complex and have greatly emulated the growth of mainstream gaming. However, the best games are those with rules that fit on less than a single sheet of paper – Chess, Othello, and Go name a few. These are games that have remained unchanged, at their core, for generations (some of them centuries). And while sudoku has not been around for quite that long, it is a puzzle game that is already pretty fun and for all intents and purposes, perfected. Backstage knows this, and rather than trying to create something from scratch, they took a simple concept and made it better.

Frankly, that is the lesson to take to heart about what is working in social gaming these days. It’s not about making something with ten tons of features, rules, and environments. It’s about making something with a few rules and features, and making each one shine brilliantly. Does Action Sudoku do this perfectly? No, of course not. However, it is still an excellent example on how simplicity can be improved and how little, subtle nuances can make an experience that much better.

Japan, eat your heart out. Tokyo isn’t the only city getting ravaged by giant monsters anymore. While a number of developers have been hard at work creating SimCity-like city building titles for Facebook, the folks over at BitMinion Ltd. have been hard at work on the opposite. They aren’t building cities, they’re wrecking them – Paris, to be exact – with cute and cuddly monsters in the animal(?) husbandry app, MonstrosCity.

Now, anthropomorphic monsters and animals is hardly anything new to Facebook, or games in general. Even the cute ones are fairly common. However, they always seem to be doing what any good citizen might be doing. Moshi Monsters, for example, has these creepy critters decorating homes and going through a day to day life. In MonstrosCity, your personal monsters do what they do best: Wreck stuff.

Essentially, players purchase a baby monster ranging from very off-looking teddy bears to a Black Lagoon sort of creature. From here, the concept is centered around growing them. Periodically, you have to feed your, err, pets with food that lasts anywhere from five minutes to a couple hours. After the time has expired, you can make them grow. The idea, is to grow them from around the size of a teacup, to about the size of the Eifel Tower.

This is where MonstrosCity gets interesting. Making money is not the same as other husbandry applications. You don’t sell your monsters. Oh no. You “unleash” them. After a period of time, you monsters will be able to use an ability called Unleash which has them perform a monstrous roar that shakes the room and damages the décor, earning both money and pet happiness.

To add a little more to this money-making concept, the amount of happiness (which, for the record, doesn’t appear to do anything when full) and money earned is dependant on two factors. The first is the level of Unleash used: After about two minutes, V0 is ready. Three minutes after that, V1 is ready. This continues exponentially as time goes on. The bigger the version, the bigger the reward.

The second element is the actual decorum used within your virtual space. Players start with a simple apartment with decorations such as plant pots, tea cups, action figures, toy buildings, and so on. The more decorations one has, the more destruction is caused, and in turn, a happier critter you have.

While this also earns more income, it damages your decorations. These have to be repaired regularly or they disappear, but don’t worry, it’s free (at least in the apartment) and you keep on top of it. Once you earn enough money, however, you can expand your space to Paris’ town square and downtown area and cause some havoc there as well; also decorating them as you see fit.

Unfortunately, while each areas’ purchasable décor is different, such as a glass pyramid in downtown representative of the Louvre museum in Paris, it is very, very limited. The apartment area has only 10 objects for purchase, while the exterior zones only have five and three respectively. Moreover, if you count the fact many of them, a police car for example, are just scaled up from the toy version, then the number of items is even less.

Of course, more will almost certainly come in time. The only real complaint is that the destruction could be a little bit more… well, destructive. It takes a long time to make anything look damaged, and the only way anything is busted up at all is with a roar. It would be nice to these monsters do a something a little bit more monstrous (smashing, biting, etc.) when you let them loose.

Nonetheless, this is just personal preference, as MonstrosCity is already much more interesting a concept than other husbandry titles. Of course, since it is one such app, it also warrants mentioning that it is a very slow burn game. There is very little one can do in one visit. Of course, when you’ve been saving up your Unleash, there is a good chunk of money and happiness to be gained, but it still is only about 10-30 seconds of play at any given time. It does make it a bit of a difficult app to get into because it doesn’t feel like you’ve made any progression early on.

In the end, however, MonstrosCity is a relatively new game that really does something interesting with a simple concept. Rather than making another title that happens to be of a current fad, BitMinion has taken a fun spin on a basic concept. Could it be better? Of course. But does it have lasting potential? Likely, yes, assuming it can increase its distribution. MonstrosCity is a game worth checking out.

Conduit Labs, a social gaming company with two games on Facebook, is announcing an unexpected coup today: it has inked a deal with Universal Music Group, the largest music company in the United States, to use its entire music catalog in Conduit’s games.

The two seem an unlikely pair. Universal dominates a good portion of the entire US music industry, whereas Conduit is a tiny startup working in a new field. What Conduit does have, though, are a pair of music-centric Facebook games that, it seems, Universal is willing to test out its music catalog on.

The bigger of the two is Music Pets, which we reviewed when it came out in February. In Music Pets, which now has over one million monthly active users, players have to raise a pet by playing it music; the pet can also go fetch new music for its owner, who can then teach the pet by telling it they love or hate the song.

Before Music Pets, Conduit released Loudcrowd in 2009; that game focused on humans, but was otherwise similar. Conduit’s stats from that game and its 10 indie label partners convinced Universal to get involved, according to Nabeel Hyatt, Conduit’s CEO.

Stats or not, it still seems odd that one of the “Big Four” record companies that fought so hard against putting free-to-listen music on the internet just a few short years ago would proactively sign up with a young startup. But the times may have changed. “I’d give Universal lot of credit for having a very positive business model. They no longer seem to be in the business of trying to stop innovation,” Hyatt told us.

There are a couple of enticing considerations for Universal, as well. Perhaps most important is that Music Pets is fundamentally different from the hated concept of internet radio. Players can’t just repeatedly listen to a song that they like; as in other Facebook games, the user gets allotments of energy and virtual currency that must be carefully used on finding new music and buying goods.

Discovery is central to the game as well; since Universal will be the only major label on Music Pets, players will always be hearing a Universal band, perhaps one they never knew about before. And the game doesn’t just offer a new path for discovery. Conduit also lets players buy in-game virtual goods with real money, out of which Universal will take a cut.

Even with these obvious advantages, Hyatt is keen to point out that Music Pets now has a larger catalog than a much bigger music gaming franchise, Rock Band. And he’s eager to move on to bigger and better projects. “The edges of the gaming genre don’t stop at plastic guitars and action,” said Hyatt.

In social gaming, that might mean figuring out ways to keep players coming back each time new music is released. According to Hyatt, Music Pets has an excellent long-term retention rate, a quality that he says boils down to the central feature. “We don’t see the games as what keeps people, it’s the music,” he said.

Music Pets will still have to prove that it can grow into a major hit, of course, but the Universal catalog should help significantly. As for what’s next, Hyatt isn’t saying anything specific, except that his plans extend much further. “We have some conceptions about how not just music can be used this way, but all traditional media,” he told us. So if the newspaper industry doesn’t find a savior in the iPad, perhaps it should knock on Conduit’s door.

It launched a few weeks ago, but Playfish’s new Hotel City game saw a striking amount of growth over the last weekend, going from 935,000 monthly active users on Friday to 2.40 million MAU by yesterday. Growth appears to have been steadily increasing since launch, so it’s possible that Playfish decided to give the app a bigger boost all of a sudden via cross-promotion in other apps and Facebook advertising.

This makes the hotel management app the fourth largest that the Electronic Arts-owned company has on Facebook in terms of MAU, as we noted in our weekly top 20 list from this morning. Its DAU count is a crazy 1.57 million, according to our AppData tracking service, but that’s because of all the very new users — the number could likely drop in coming days.

This hockey-stick trajectory is the opposite of the other two titles that Playfish has launched since it was acquired last fall. Of those, Gangster City has been declining to 1.20 million MAU and Poker Rivals is down to 779,000. Those games were riffs off the already popular mafia RPG and poker genres, but Hotel City was fresher. The largest Facebook hotel management game has been Happy Hotel, made by PlayCrab. It has been fluctuating around 1 million MAU in the last month.

The game is young but the graphs look right. See below. (Note that today is flat because AppData has not yet fully reported today’s data.)