Although the two companies are both closely tied and also recently at odds, Facebook and Zynga have just announced this morning that they have agreed to a “five-year strategic relationship that increases their shared commitment to social gaming on Facebook and expands use of Facebook Credits in Zynga’s games.”

Zynga, by all accounts, has been resisting using Credits, Facebook’s virtual currency, as the company would be required to pay a 30% fee as part of it — even as Facebook’s many initiatives to make Credits profitable are still not fully proven. That has not been the only issue, though. Facebook’s anti-virality changes over the last half a year have hurt Zynga’s traffic. Meanwhile, Zynga’s aggressive behavior on the platform have earned it a negative reputation.

The social game developer was even threatening to launch its own web site, called Zynga Live, that could possibly exclude any integration with Facebook, or Credits.

We covered these problems, and more, in an article last week; we concluded that the two companies would probably work things out. Zynga needs Facebook users; Facebook needs Zynga to help it push Credits forward.

We’ll be following up with more coverage later. In the meantime, here’s the press release, verbatim:

Over a year after the launch of its only other in-house social game, Tagged has released a second, the simply-named Farm. As you might expect from the name, Farm follows in the farming game tradition, featuring a handful of plants and animals that can be bought and later harvested for more money.

Farm is a pretty simple affair, at least in its current state. Unlike most of the popular farming games of the moment, it doesn’t involve any animation, and you never see your farmer. Instead, you’re presented with a simple six by four grid to plant in. Animals and structures reside under a separate tab, and the experience that help you reach the next level is simply the amount of money you’ve spent.

Tagged will probably wait to see how Farm does before putting much more effort into it. But the game’s release is a tell-tale sign of a deeper change taking place within the company. With Facebook having become the 500 pound gorilla of social networking, Tagged is working to turn itself into a more game-centric network.

Games aren’t the sole focus, of course — sites like Kongregate fill that industry niche. Instead, Tagged is trying to position itself as a place to meet new people, according to VP of sales Steve Sarner — unlike Facebook, which is mostly about interacting with people you already know. “We use the social gaming aspect as another conduit to help people make new friends online,” says Sarner.

But with only 800,000 daily active users for its games, Tagged also isn’t going to attract many exclusive games. So the company is taking matters into its own hands by hiring game developers and working on its own titles. Sarner says that Tagged will be releasing several more games throughout this year.

It should be interesting to see whether Tagged can pull off the shift. MySpace, also, is turning more toward games, but it’s a significantly larger company, with more money to invest in new initiatives. Tagged has less breathing room, which could be good as well as bad; unlike MySpace, there’s a big motivation here for Tagged to get it right the first time.

Evidence is on the rise that Android is becoming a significant mobile gaming platform. The latest tidbit: Scoreloop, a social feature platform for mobile games, reports that it is adding 300,000 new Android users per week.

We’ve written about Scoreloop several times. Available for both Android and iPhone games, the company allows white-label use of its platform — so you may not always realize that you’re using it. Developers using Scoreloop can add various social features to their games, like leaderboards, social networking and discovery, virtual currency and challenges.

Since launching its white-label service last October, Scoreloop CEO Marc Gumpinger says that 2,000 developers have signed up, resulting in a couple hundred games.

The company only added Android compatibility in December, following its April 2009 release of an iPhone platform. That made it an early arrival to the cross-platform scene, which we’re seeing more companies dive into as it becomes more obvious that that Android is a serious mobile gaming challenger to the iPhone.

Scoreloop is keeping up the pressure, though. The company is also announcing the launch today of a software development kit to help developers work across the two platforms, as well as looping in MySpace. And it’s working on adding more white-label services for each platform, like downloadable content.

Asked what will set Scoreloop apart in the future, Gumbinder tells us in an email that in-game challenges created by players, as well as team mechanics. “Meaning: games that are designed for you to advance only if friends help you doing so,” he writes. “All of this gets really powerful when being combined with our virtual goods and currency.”

The business simulation genre on Facebook already includes farms, zoos, cities, restaurants and hospitals. But we’ve begun to see a new sect of business-based titles on the social network: the ever profitable (except in a bad recession) and extraordinarily glitzy casino business.

And social developer RockYou has its interpretation of the Las Vegas high life with its Facebook game, My Casino.

For the record, however, this isn’t the first casino game we’ve seen. Another one is DNA Games’ Casino City, a title we plan to look at more closely, as well.

My Casino has a simple enough premise: Build a beautiful casino full of various games to earn (virtual) money, and in turn, build an even bigger casino.

The app is simple enough to play. Players start with half a dozen slot machines and a Pai Gow table as guests begin filing in to lose… ahem… win some money. As the various games get played, their coin capacity fills up and the player must check back periodically to empty them so that more income can be earned. It’s pretty low at first, but thankfully, every game can be upgraded to hold more money. Of course, performing an upgrade not only comes with a price tag, but it also appears to lock the machine from being played until completed and the player manually reopens it by cutting a ribbon. Expectantly, the larger the upgrade, the more expensive the cost, and the longer it takes to complete.

Luckily, there are a few things one can to do while waiting. The quickest distraction is to play a little slots yourself. Each user actually has a slot machine that they can play 10 times a day — at first glance that seems like a lot, but remember, it’s just slots. Using your casino earnings, users bet a small amount, with larger bets unlocking as one levels up, in the hopes of a lucky return. Just like in real gambling though, the slot machine is less than generous on the payout.

What’s pretty cool about this feature, though, is that you can not only play 10 more times at each of your friends’ casinos, but as they play yours, you actually earn a little coin from them. Furthermore, in order to upgrade it, it has to be played X amount of times by you and your friends, with the max level machine requiring 5000 plays. This, in turn, not only increases how much money it can hold, but even increases the number of times it can be played each day, up to 20.

Users can also gift special items – beyond just decorative elements – that can provide added bonuses to each other. One in particular is called Star Dust, that will instantly fill a game’s money bag to full; something rather useful at high levels with heavily upgraded machines. It is also worth mentioning, that the more gifts you receive, the more special items you can redeem. For example, 100 gifts received can earn you an animated, golden gryphon statue.

On another note, as players get more friends to join, they can also visit one another’s virtual spaces, help resolve random issues such as too much trash (though doing so is just a click on a button that basically says “help out”) to earn extra income, and even search their machines for a hidden treasure; a la Zoo World.

Decoratively, My Casino is a bit drab. The only point to doing so is to appease one’s own palette and other than the actually games, nothing affects anything. At least in other games, such as Nightclub City, décor would improve how luxurious your club was and by extension, how much non-player characters spent on tips and cover fees.

Beyond a point to decoration, the art style is going to be very hit or miss. Essentially, it’s the same style as RockYou’s popular Zoo World app, but because those characters were tiny (as the game was zoomed way out), they looked fine. Here, they are normal size with this sort of pasted, marionette grin, two total outfits, and two animations. When there are about 20 that all look and move identically, it looks almost creepy.

To make matters worse, the decorum itself is bland too. Everything is a mere paper cutout with no flare or style. It’s a casino! There should be lights, glitz, glamour, yet save for a handful of items, there is nothing of the sort, yet.

The tutorial NPC looks great and, though flat and 2D, makes for a much better character design, and the user-playable slot machine blinks and moves constantly. They are actually interesting to look at.

At its core, My Casino is a decently made game. It certainly makes for a new an interesting concept in a sea of imitators, and that — combined with RockYou’s cross-promotion and ad muscle — has been enough to earn the title nearly 660,000 monthly active users so far

[Editor's note: We've been covering how social game developers are being affected by Facebook's ongoing changes to its communication channels and monetization. While some developers say the changes are hurting them, Germany-based wooga is doing well, as cofounder and chief executive officer Jens Begemann explains below. As he tells us, he has an insider's view of the social gaming industry, but from outside of Silicon Valley.]

Over the past few weeks tension between Facebook and game developers has increased. With rumors of a tense relationship between Zynga and Facebook, complaints about removed “viral” channels and the introduction of Facebook Credits, it seems Facebook has become unattractive for game developers.

I don’t share this view.

Instead, I see Facebook taking bold steps to make quality more important. I strongly believe that these changes – disruptive as they might be for the incumbent players – will help strengthen Facebook as a gaming platform and benefit the companies that produce the best games and customer experience – not the ones best at exploiting Facebooks messaging opportunities.

How big is the problem?

Looking at AppData, it seems that there is a paradigm shift happening right now. Out of the top 25 games only 8 were released since November 2009 (when Facebook started tightening up policies) and all except one are from the top 5 developers, who have big pockets for marketing spend and millions of users to cross-link (the exception being our game Bubble Island).

This is very different from like a year ago when new games entered the MAU leader-boards much quicker. It is quite natural that as the industry matures the barriers of entry become higher, but the changes by Facebook have accelerated this shift.

Virality – still there but much harder than before

It is much more difficult to grow a game now than it was a year ago.

Not only is the space way more crowded with many more high quality games for users to pick from, but Facebook has taken countless small steps limiting almost all viral channels. Most recently Invitations were given decreased visibility now appearing lower on the homepage.

Today it is very hard to launch a new game without spending more than $100,000 to “seed” it and attract a critical mass of users, unless the game is of exceptional quality and you can cross link from existing apps. Bubble Island, for example, launched in February and we cross-linked from our first title Brain Buddies. This brought the first users, but since then the game has grown organically to 1 million DAU (less than 3% of users came via paid marketing).

The demise of the app-to-user notifications

For many developers, notifications were one of the main channels to get players back to the game. By being very aggressive and pushing the limits towards a “spam” approach, some rumors say that during the third quarter of 2009, more than 75% of all notifications on Facebook were “app to user” notifications.

Since their removal on March 1st all of the incumbent top 5 developers have seen big drops in MAU and DAU. There have been many loud complaints about this removal and this is allegedly one of the things that are “killing” the Facebook gaming platform.

Our experience is very different. If a user stops playing a game simply because he/she (probably a she – we have 70% female players) does not receive daily reminders the game is simply not good enough to keep that particular user coming back to the game. Bubble Island never used notifications and has maintained a healthy 15-20% “sticky factor” (DAU/MAU ratio) since launch.

It is also fair to assume that the users that were lost after notifications were removed had very low monetization value and lower than normal virality. So one could argue that the actual impact of the removed notifications is and adjustment of artificially inflated DAU/MAU numbers.

Engagement

Earlier developers could rely on unlimited, free and fairly effective methods to get users to return to their games on a daily basis. Today, these possibilities have been limited and there has been an increased focus from Facebook to reward “positive interactions” from the user such as becoming a fan (or a “liker”) of the game, bookmarking the game etc.

Again – this seems to be a move that is clearly aimed at rewarding high quality games with a high intrinsic engagement factor, not an artificial engagement based on relentless communication.

The games dashboard would be great if…

The Games Dashboard was supposed to replace and improve on Notifications and other channels that have been limited or removed over the past months. On paper it looked like a great tool for both discovery of new games (virality) and users returning to old games (engagement). So far the Games Dashboard has been a letdown, but we hope Facebook will take the opportunity and turn it into a driver of Facebook as a gaming platform:

1) Give it a permanent box on the homepage showing the user’s 5 most recent games
2) Give it a permanent place in the top bar navigation. (Example: Home | Games | Profile | Account)
3) Fix loading times! It often takes 10-15 seconds for the dashboard to load and quite often it does not load at all.

Enter Facebook Credits

Besides Facebook taking steps to reduce spam by limiting the virality and engagement channels across the platform, its Credits virtual currency is the other product making a big splash on the social gaming scene. With a 30% revenue share going to Facebook and plenty of rumors that Facebook will force developers using it, the concept has become a big issue for many developers.

We recently started our monetization efforts on Bubble Island and Monster World. We are exclusively using Facebook Credits (FBC) at the moment and so far the results have been quite good. We have every reason to believe that it will continue to improve and that the conversion will ultimately more than offsets Facebooks 30% share.

The reason is that Facebook Credits will make it easy for users to start spending more money on more (different) games. Once a user has once completed a Credits purchase the payment information is stored by Facebook so a returning user has an extremely streamlined and high-converting flow where two clicks is all it takes to complete a transaction – it is a great customer experience for micro- transactions!

Conclusion

In spite of all the recent noise and complaints we are very confident in Facebook’s future as a social gaming platform. With the introduction of Facebook Credits and hopefully some changes to the games dashboard, hungry developers who focus on doing polished and engaging Facebook games will have plenty of opportunities to get a strong presence on Facebook.

Jens Begemann is cofounder and CEO of wooga. He was previously an executive at mobile entertainment company Jamba (Jamster).

With an eye on international markets and allowing chairman Peter Relan to take on a more strategic role, CrowdStar has finally hired an official CEO: Niren Hiro, who was formerly the VP of worldwide business development at mobile ad firm AdMob.

Relan owns the incubator YouWeb, where CrowdStar began. The company’s founders are Suren Markosian and Jeff Tseng, who both concentrate on game development. Hiro will work on the business side.

Although AdMob had become quite large when Google acquired it late last year for $750 million, Hiro says it was actually smaller than CrowdStar is today when he started in 2006. “There are common areas between the two,” he tells us. “They’re both run by very motivated groups of technologists who are also very business savvy.”

CrowdStar’s ambition is to catch up with competitors like Playdom, Playfish and even Zynga, which still has almost six times CrowdStar’s 42 million monthly active users on Facebook. Relan, who joined in the interview with Hiro, says that he views social games as still being in their first stages of growth, but preparing to head into a second phase that will shake up the order.

“After that comes the final chapter, which is who plays to truly be number one in this industry,” Relan says. “That will play out based on how we set ourselves up in the next few months.”

A big part of that setting up is going international, especially in Asia. CrowdStar is targeting a few tech-heavy markets that have already been exposed to social games but haven’t been penetrated by Facebook: Japan, Korea and China.

“We’ve already started in Japan,” says Hiro, “which is a very hard market. We’re trying to expand into certain markets that are not only attractive in terms of size and scale, but keep us future-proof.” The company chose its game Happy Aquarium to put on the Japanese social network Mixi, and according to Hiro, the game has already hit the top five most played games on that network.

Happy Aquarium was also modified so that the Japanese audience could play it as a mobile game — something that we just reported on CrowdStar doing in the US with another YouWeb graduate, Sibblingz, for its game Happy Island last week.

Going forward, CrowdStar will keep working on Facebook, while also working internationally and considering more cross-platform work. ” “I think we have to see the mobile platforms catch up a bit to Facebook style micro-transactions,” Relan says. “Next year I fully imagine that you’ll see more cross-platform stuff, but don’t be surprised if you see some early innovations.”

China also remains distant; the company doesn’t believe any US social gaming companies will crack that market this year (local regulations basically ensure that). And both Hiro and Relan are careful to point out that their main goal is just to make innovative games, with Hiro handling daily operations and Relan watching the horizon. “I’d like to focus on multi-year business strategy and how to have a technology platform that enables creativity,” Relan says.

Family Feud has finally worked its way up to the top, leading everything else on this week’s list of fastest-growing Facebook games by monthly active users. The trivia game has been hanging around for about two months, but this is the first time that it has led the pack. Also notable is that despite its relatively long time since release, the game’s growth is still gradually accelerating — we’d even see higher growth for this week, but Facebook’s stat reporting on the app has been hung for the past three days.

It’s not the only one with delayed reporting, so the numbers look a bit low overall this week. Here’s the AppData top 20 list:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Family Feud	4,816,329	+420,998	+9.58
2.	Collect Roses	895,866	+331,196	+58.65
3.	Nightclub City	978,034	+318,460	+48.28
4.	Name Analyzer	843,352	+286,941	+51.57
5.	Big City Life	1,431,276	+239,693	+20.12
6.	Bola	2,572,522	+236,171	+10.11
7.	Kingdoms of Camelot	3,183,890	+193,243	+6.46
8.	MindJolt Games	12,959,308	+177,140	+1.39
9.	My Tribe	809,038	+168,444	+26.29
10.	Monster World	456,058	+155,160	+51.57
11.	Mall World	2,736,545	+123,621	+4.73
12.	Games	2,113,376	+117,732	+5.90
13.	Funfari	487,571	+110,273	+29.23
14.	Bike Mania 4 Micro Office	290,599	+109,540	+60.50
15.	Hero World	1,889,376	+107,186	+6.01
16.	My Stuff	3,945,047	+105,423	+2.75
17.	Ameba Pico	1,226,273	+105,141	+9.38
18.	Bubble Paradise	155,435	+102,048	+191.15
19.	Jungle Life	460,403	+93,166	+25.37
20.	My Casino	658,572	+86,350	+15.09

Nightclub City and Big City Life have been growing almost in tandem since they were released, despite different developers (Playdom is behind the latter) and a fairly weak thematic connection. There is a distinction to be made, though; we’ve noticed that Nightclub City’s stats still show the game bringing back over 40 percent of its users on a daily basis, while Big City Life draws only 8 percent back, far lower than the average.

Playdom makes up for its low engagement in that game, though, by also registering the soccer game Bola, which it owns through its acquisition of Three Melons. Bola is becoming one of the first large soccer games on Facebook, although we’re expecting many more, given the social network’s strong international growth — indeed, Playfish has already announced the impending release of a FIFA title.

Monster World is an up-and-coming Wooga game that’s worth keeping an eye on, even if it’s basically just a farming game featuring monsters. Sometimes it’s the little touches that count. That could also be said of Mall World, the next entry down, which recently enjoyed strong growth by strictly limiting its audience to fashion-obsessed girls and women; unfortunately, its gains now appear to be slowing down.

Mother’s Day Offers Soar in Social Games — TrialPay released some interesting numbers this week stating that in the days leading up to Mother’s Day, promotional offers dubbed “gifts for mom” generated around $1 million per day. According to the offer-based payment platform, social game developers saw an offer-based revenue increase five-times that of their norm. Furthermore, 40% of consumers were first-time buyers.

Capcom Looks to Join Social Games – Japanese game developer Capcom said this past week that the company has plans to introduce a premiere title onto Facebook. According to Capcom President Haruhiro Tsujimoto, the time for them to start is now: “Gaming on social networks is poised to impact the traditional video game industry and is a presence that cannot be ignored.”

Nickelodeon’s AddictingGames Adds Virtual Goods — With 34 million monthly active users, television network Nickelodeon‘s AddictingGames casual games web site has recently launched its first virtual goods platform. With it, users will be able to purchase virtual goods for participating games using a virtual currency dubbed AddictingGames Bucks.

Jolt Online Gaming Launches FarmVillain — We’ve been tracking FarmVillain‘s hilariously offensive rise on Facebook, and now the farming-game parody from Jolt Online Gamingand SillyGoose.ie is live. Of course, it’s not so much a game as it is a hodgepodge of bizarre, random, lewd and just plain wrong “gifts” you can send to friends or put on your wall, somewhat reminiscent of Zynga’s hit game, FarmVille. The difference is these guys range from flashing sheep, to growing hemp, to earning more cowbell.

Sometrics Joins Up with Nexon & PopCap – Earlier this week, offer solution provider Sometrics announced two new partnerships: Nexon America and PopCap Games. Through the team up, the two game developers will utilize Sometrics to provide their player communities a means to earn free in-game currency. Furthermore, in the case of PopCap, this will be the first offer provision for the popular social game Bejeweled Blitz.

iPhone Outselling Android Globally – As we watch the battle between Android and the iPhone unfold, it’s difficult to discern who will eventually come out on top as a better gaming platform. But while NPD Group figures note Android adoption rates that rise above the Apple counterpart in the US, Apple, in a very rare move, has commited itself to third-party sales figures to counteract the claim on a global scale. According to Apple spokesperson Natalie Harrison in talking to The Loop, “IDC figures show that iPhone has 16.1 percent of the smartphone market and [is] growing, far outselling Android on a worldwide basis.” Furthermore, Harrison notes that iPhone sales for this quarter, with OS 4.0, were growing by 131%.

AdMob Stalls on iPhone; Grows on Android – To add more to the iPhone versus Android debate, major advertisement provider for the Apple device, AdMob, has been stalling out ever since the Google outbid Apple to buy the company for a hefty $750 million. Since then, ad impressions on the iPhone have dropped from 54% to 46%, while Android impressions have grown from 16% to 25%.

Game Sales Drop – When we pulled the numbers for our monthly Top 25 Facebook Games, the month of May saw a staggering decline in players. However, this may not be a sign for the social gaming space so much as the gaming industry as a whole. As VentureBeat notes, the entire gaming world’s sales numbers fell 26% over the course of April. In total, the revenue generated was $766.2 million, down from $1.03 billion a year ago.

Foursquare Teams Up With the Today Show – Television’s Today Show struck a deal with location based mobile game Foursquare this week. Based around the show’s yearly Summer Concert Series, visitors that check in at the location of a Today Show Concert will be able to earn three special badges including the “newbie” badge for a single visit, a “rocker” badge for three visits, and a “10 to 10″ badge for visiting ten times.

[TrialPay image via TechCrunch]

A company by the name of Left Brain Games have taken the old saying that learning is fun to a very literal extension with its creation of a new Facebook application, University of You.

If the game could be compared to any type of app, it would be best classified as a city-builder. However, with any number of role-playing, virtual space, quiz taking, and other such features, it can really only be associated with this genre loosely, at best. Regardless, the objective of the game is to construct and run a successful college university using none other than your own Facebook friends as students.

Greeted by a quirky and overly enthusiastic character named Dean (pun intended), players are run through the basics of University of You (another pun intended). The first core element of the game is the more city building-like feature that places you into an overhead construction mode. From this mode, users can purchase new schools, venues, scenery, and even landscaping.

Actually, the most basic of the four is the last, as it merely acts as flat, path making décor tool. However, once the landscape is purchased (roads, dirt paths, flowers, etc.), it acts as a sort of Photoshop brush that allows players to literally paint their campus landscapes in a very free-form fashion. There is no cost beyond the initial purchase, thus allowing for a great deal of creative potential. The downside, however, is that once you exit the building mode and re-enter the 3D, isometric world, it is literally pressed flat against the ground and looks a bit awkward when up against full three-dimensional structures (an issue that is equally apparent with decorations such as trees; though they are flat on a vertical plane).

Beyond aesthetics, users must also construct more functional elements such as parking lots, dorm rooms, and actual, you know, schools. With these, players are able to add more students and earn more money respectively.

Each school, such as Liberal Arts or Business, allows users to enroll their Facebook friends into either a class or a job for X amount of time. Upon completion, players can collect their buddies’ work for a chunk of change and should they have completed a class will earn a “Credit” for that friend as well. These credits act as a gating mechanism that prevents players from placing their friends into the top level courses (which earn the most money) right away.

In regards to work, such as picking up litter, there is no gating mechanic in place, and if you want, you can put a friend on the longest and most profitable job right from the get go. Unfortunately, that friend then becomes unusable for anything else until the task has been completed, and some courses and jobs can last 2 – 4 days. Furthermore, unless said friend is taking a class, they will no experience earned towards your university’s level.

As with most Facebook games that involve any sort of decoration, this becomes the means to unlocking new classrooms and venues. This, in turn, is what is needed to access better and more profitable jobs/courses, and in the case of venues, the ability to add even more friends as students too.

Another curious addition to University of You is the incorporation of a basic quiz mini-game. For each school you add to your college, you must inaugurate it by undertaking a simple, general knowledge, five question quiz. It’s nothing extravagant, but you can publish your score to your Facebook feed as a challenge for friends to beat. In fact, another interesting publication is the ability to post your enrolled friends’ in-game transcripts, including anything they may have failed! Of course, if they do fail anything, that just means you forgot to come back to the game and collect their work in time. Oops.

It is also worth noting that this app also comes with a very amusing sense of style. Everything from the tutorial and quiz prompts to the blurbs of flavor text found when clicking on or purchasing a school make for rather amusing, satirical commentary that play on everything from the mind set of your average college student to type of degree being earned. A prominent one that stuck out was commentary on just how “useful” a Liberal Arts degree was when it came to finding a job fresh out of college.

Overall, University of You comes with little complaints. Really, the only qualm comes with the art style in that the, literally, flat décor feels extraordinarily awkward within the 3D setting. Beyond that, it’s really just a question of whether or not users will find the premise of the game appealing. Though the title does have a lot of features, will Facebook users enjoy the concept of making a school? Likely, they will enjoy the city-building mechanics, but all the course and job micromanagement might prove more cumbersome. Nevertheless, Left Brain Games is still attempting something a bit more unique in a space cluttered with clones, so here’s hoping that more new and creative ideas start taking such chances as well.

Offers are becoming more broadly available as part of Facebook’s Credits virtual currency expansion, after having first launched as a stand-alone integration within games like CrowdStar’s Happy Island last month.

You can now access them through all Credits payment interfaces, including the main user account settings for Credits,  through the apps and games dashboards on the home page, and within the many apps that provide Credits as an option for purchasing in-game virtual currency.

The generic Credits payment window includes an option for offers below direct payment methods, that says “Earn for free by shopping.” Click on it and you’ll see various brand-name offers you can participate in to obtain Credits. When you take up the offer, for example, signing up for a Blockbuster subscription, you receive Credits as a reward for the purchase. The value of offers can range into the hundreds of Credits, depending on what the user is earning.
The point is that users can take offers instead of paying for Credits directly; this can potentially encourage otherwise non-paying users to try their first Credits transaction, and get more money into the Credits system for use in all apps. Facebook is also slowly adding more offers in to the service, although its partners continue to be TrialPay and Peanut Labs. When it launched in April, Credits had 21 offer options; today, it has 37.