Profile Box and Name Analyzer may have listed themselves as games, but you can’t believe everything you read. The top game on this week’s list of emerging Facebook titles still under a million monthly active users is Nightclub City, with over half a million new monthly active users.

Out for about three weeks now, Nightclub City offers something of a unique experience, although with familiar mechanics. Players get to manage their own night club, complete with patrons, excessive drinking and the occasional bar fight. Since the game appears to be by a new independent developer, we’re going to call this game successful entirely on its own merits; we certainly enjoyed playing it, too.

After skipping over Collect Roses (another purposefully inaccurate listing) on the AppData list below, pretty much everything else is a real game:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Profile Box	763,433	+564,078	+282.95
2.	Name Analyzer	732,099	+537,645	+276.49
3.	Nightclub City	897,950	+535,969	+148.07
4.	Collect Roses	862,850	+485,347	+128.57
5.	Monster World	420,621	+330,820	+368.39
6.	My Tribe	767,546	+236,515	+44.54
7.	My Casino	643,371	+197,776	+44.38
8.	Bike Mania 4 Micro Office	258,963	+182,666	+239.41
9.	Jungle Life	439,391	+175,120	+66.27
10.	Ranch Town	279,555	+167,820	+150.19
11.	My Vineyard	639,721	+142,803	+28.74
12.	Funfari	444,897	+126,019	+39.52
13.	( Fupa Games ) – Arcade Blitz	408,105	+117,855	+40.60
14.	Kungfu Online — Best Martial Arts MMORPG Ever!	251,262	+108,176	+75.60
15.	GameHouse	103,340	+102,589	+13,660.32
16.	My Fish	187,180	+100,096	+114.94
17.	Jewel Puzzle	270,785	+94,512	+53.62
18.	NanoStar Siege	363,164	+94,007	+34.93
19.	Empire Craft – The Most Popular War Game!	298,119	+89,082	+42.62
20.	MonstrosCity	320,890	+88,967	+38.36

Monster World is from the idiosyncratic minds over at Wooga, the German studio that also produced Bubble Island. The new title is basically a farming game, but with monsters. There’s a bit of synergy between this game and MonstrosCity, which you can see way down at the bottom of the list.

My Tribe, right below Monster World, is continuing its steady march toward a million MAU. We weren’t sure at first that the game would make it, since it’s a step up graphically and thematically from the the most popular Facebook games, but with the past week’s acceleration it looks like the Big Fish game will keep going after it passes a million.

Moving down again, My Casino is a recent RockYou release that was having trouble growing until a couple weeks ago, so it seems likely the company devoted some advertising budget to getting it started. Unfortunately, like many RockYou titles, the percentage of players who come back on a daily basis (DAU) is lower than average.

Finally, we’ll skip a number of other games (which are all worth a look, if you have time) to settle on GameHouse, the new portal app from a division of RealNetworks. This should be an interesting one to watch, since Gamehouse execs essentially told us last week that they’re staking the reputation of their new game development platform on the app. So far, so good.

Earlier today, IGG.com (I Got Games) announced the launch of four new Facebook games: Crazy Clinic, Crazy Pirates, Perfect Poker Live, and Miracle Garden. Traditionally seated in free to play, massively multiplayer games – specifically the porting of Chinese ones to the rest of the world – the developer-publisher first experimented with Facebook back in October of last year with FishIsle. Now, IGG seeks to improve on past titles with these new releases. To see how they did, we took a closer look at the, currently, only English translated title on the list: Miracle Garden.

At its core, the new app is basically your typical farming-style game. However, this particular title appears more rooted in the concepts of aesthetic beauty, focusing on various forms of flora as opposed to fruits and vegetables. Nevertheless, the basics are still the same: Plow land, plant flower, water flower, harvest flower, sell flower. It’s all been seen before, but IGG does attempt to make up for it in a number of ways.

The first and most visible means stems from the actual artistic style. Everything has a very distinct style to it. The items are very cute looking and highly exaggerated with big heads, small bodies, stubby features, and an oversaturated color scheme. As odd as the combination sounds though, it actually looks pretty good.

Beyond surface value, Miracle Garden also has a nice means of creating guidance and goals through a simple quest system. Bit by bit, the game teaches you how to play (even though most users will already know how) by giving you small quests to accomplish. They’re all very simple, such as plant X number of Y plant, but each grant various rewards such as generous amounts of coins or items only purchasable with virtual currency.

Truthfully, it’s not an original feature, as we first saw it with Playfish’s farming app Country Story, but it is still a mechanic we don’t see very often in the farming genre. Most of the time, it’s simply a set of rules that are explained and the player does what they want; growing what they want. However, as subtle as it may seem, having the quests coaxes the player into doing very specific tasks that give them something to try and accomplish. Granted, these sandbox-like titles are about creating one’s own goals most of the time, but for those users that start one and go “What’s the point?” or “What am I supposed to do?” now there’s something spelled out for them.

It is worth pointing out, however, that this concept has proven itself to be a lucrative one in online games. Merely look at older massively multiplayer online role-playing games. Older MMORPGs such as Ultima Online, EverQuest, or Final Fantasy XI were created as worlds in which players could determine their own goals. Nonetheless, as popular as they were at times, the MMO genre did not truly take flight until Blizzard Entertainment decided to create goals and objectives with its World of Warcraft quest system – a system virtually everyone now copies.

Other than quests, the most significant element of Miracle Garden is its advertised “Miracle House.” According to the developer, players can actually cross-breed different plants to create “tens of thousands” of different types of flora; a similar concept to what we saw in Tall Tree Games’ Garden World. Upon doing so, users can plant the seed and wait a day until it blooms to see what it is, or they can use an item that costs virtual currency – dubbed a “Plant Identifier” – to identify it right away.

These can then be gifted to your friends as well, or visa versa, to create even more combinations. Moreover, after you’ve planted so many different types of flowers, you can also purchase new species within the game’s store as well. Unfortunately, the game isn’t exactly clear on what these requirements specifically are, and we have yet to unlock any.

Interestingly enough, the use of your friends to discover new types of flowers appears to be rather important, as users are only granted a limited amount of space within what is called the “Nursery.” Acting like an in-game store, but for just plants, the Nursery contains all of your flowers available for growing, including the ones you discover. Eventually, this requires players to pick and choose what they want to be able grow in the future. Of course, this can always be expanded for a sizable amount of in-game currency of a paltry amount of virtual currency.

In fact, there are a lot of little things players can purchase using Miracle Garden’s virtual currency (just called “Cash”). Some of it is basic, such as food that can replenish user stamina that is consumed by performing actions; even though this hardly ever runs low. Other purchases, however, are a bit more interesting and include means to improve the chances of flower mutation upon breading, reviving dead plants, and even joining a “VIP” club for a limited time that gives you improved gardening tools and faster stamina recovery.

On the down side of things, the biggest issue for players comes early on with the sheer cost of decorations. In the beginning, it is a bit tough to make money and some of the décor is extremely expensive. Moreover, a lot of the flowers you breed are gated by level, effectively locking you out of one of the central mechanics until you earn that level. Granted, it’s not a huge deal, but it is a bit annoying when you wait a day to get a new species and then can’t use it.

Nonetheless, Miracle Garden is still a nice addition to the farming-style genre. It’s certainly well made, and has a wonderful visual style that will appeal to a wide variety of users. Unfortunately, as a farming type of game, it’s main concept is a bit of a tired one, but it is able to make up for it slightly with the quest system and the users’ capability to create their own flowers. Overall, it’s a pretty worthwhile app, but how it will do amongst the sea of others of its ilk is still yet to be determined.

Back in February, we speculated that the city building genre was about to take off, a trend that seemed to culminate in Playdom’s hit Social City. But creating and running a town is a compelling mechanic that doesn’t appear to have run its course. The latest game from Playfish is evidence of that: My Empire, which transports players back in time to construct a Roman city.

Playfish didn’t go out of its way to announce My Empire; we had to hear about it from Social Game Central, and at the moment the game reports a piddling 140 monthly active users, many of whom are complaining about a persistent bug. So think of it as a soft launch, perhaps intended to test the game without competitors immediately getting a look at its features.

That’s probably a good idea, because My Empire takes a step beyond most Facebook games, in terms of complexity. As soon as a new player enters the game, a half-dozen new city management concepts pop up: population, fame, happiness, tax collection, and a variety of building resources.

We’ll get to most of those in a moment — but first, about the tax collection. This is a pretty brilliant idea, actually. Most time management games still involve endless clicking on crops and buildings. Playfish does away with the clicks by offering you a tax man who will gather taxes for a pre-determined period of time, at the end of which you collect the money with just one click. Time management still figures in, as you have to collect your taxes before “bandits” take them away.

Your taxes are partially based on population and some important buildings, but just collecting a bunch of money won’t get you through the game. First, to grow your city, you have to balance population and happiness. Houses must be built to attract new people, while most other structures provide happiness points that have to be balanced against population.

The concept is quite simple, but it’s more than we’ve seen from most Facebook games, even recently. The complexity notches up a few minutes into the game, when you’re suddenly notified that it’s time to build Stonehenge, which requires four resources like wood and stone.

Stonehenge? Rome? Well, it may be a bit apocryphal that your good Roman polis can eventually include structures like Stonehenge and the Sphinx, but Playfish obviously didn’t set out to give history lessons. But it is doing two clever things by combining Rome and Wonders of the World. The first is taking a page from Civilization’s book. Considering the enduring popularity of that game series, emulating any of its characteristics is probably a good idea.

The second advantage Playfish gets from its setting is Rome itself. Roman cities were extremely orderly places, by ancient standards, with a variety of civic structures and a well-defined bureaucracy, much like a modern city. By picking Rome, Playfish gets to avoid trying to replicate every modern structure — instead, it can add a bit of mystique while still putting us in a world with concepts we recognize.

Overall, the design of My Empire comes off pretty well, although I found myself playing on for longer than I would have expected. Most social games have a five minute introduction, after which you’re expected to go away for a while. Not My Empire, in which you start off with thousands of gold coins, while building new structures only costs one or two hundred coins.

The result is that you can actually build a pretty decent city on your first play, provided you’re willing to put in 20 or 30 minutes. The choice to give so many starting coins to players couldn’t have been accidental for Playfish; they’re obviously working toward longer playing times.

Another notable design choice is forcing players to invite friends to complete various structures, including a temple that will remain a blank spot on the ground until you find three friends. In the bottom right hand corner of the game, a small box also cycles your friends’ names and faces in a manner that makes it look, somewhat deceptively, as if they’re already playing. And, of course, the usual sharing and gifting buttons are all present.

It should be interesting to see where My Empire goes in the coming weeks. Our first impressions are of a well-designed title that takes cues from any number of successful PC games, including the Civilization, and Rome series and Zeus: Master of Olympus. But despite a growing number of deeper gaming experiences on Facebook, social gamers have yet to prove en masse that they’re interested in complexity.

IGG.com (I Got Games) has historically developed and published free-to-play massively multiplayer online role-playing games. But it began experimenting with social games on Facebook late last year, and now it has four new ones coming out: Crazy Clinic, Perfect Poker Live, Crazy Pirates, and Miracle Garden.

Here’s a quick look at each.

The first of the four, is most similar to Playfish’s and Zynga’s Restaurant City and Café World respectively. The key difference, as the name would suggest, is that Crazy Clinic takes a more hospitalized theme, like Medical Mayhem. Users are tasked with creating of their own fantasy clinics and decorating them as they see fit. However, IGG brings particular attention to game’s stylistic humor of patients being zapped, poked, prodded, covered in radioactive foam, or exposed to a torrent of other procedures as users search for cures to devastating illnesses such as Internet Addiction, Mummification, and Spontaneous Combustion.

Perfect Poker Live, on the other hand, is a bit more tame, giving players a means to play traditional poker online. It’s about the same, game play-wise, as any other poker game, but what is really cool is that the game actually incorporates both live audio and video chat systems. That’s right, if you have a webcam and a microphone, you can play face-to-face with people from around the world. Granted, it might be a bit awkward at first, but is a very nice option all the same. Maybe now, people will have to be more aware of those habitual tells.

Third on the list is Crazy Pirates, and this is easily the most traditional of the four IGG releases. It’s your standard Facebook, text-based, RPG. Similar in respect to games like Mafia Wars, the game’s pirate-themed play has players doing all the basics, from quests to battling. However, the app is differentiated by a more unique “Fleet Creation system” that allows player to collect special items and customize their own fleets. While we haven’t gotten a chance to play it yet, the system will presumably create a more in-depth level of player personalization in order to make player versus player combat less predictable and both more competitive and dynamic.

Unfortunately for us, all three of the above games are in Chinese. Sadly, we haven’t yet learned the language yet. Luckily, IGG has told us that English renditions of each are on the way will be out in early June. Thankfully, however, the last title on the list, Miracle Garden is already translated and ready to go.

This 3D Flash title is your typical farming application. Of course, the key difference is users are growing a garden as opposed to corn and cows. While all the basics are there, IGG describes one tremendous, different, feature: the hybridizing of player’s own flower species. With this mechanic, players will be able trade flowers with friends and create “tens of thousands” of different flower combinations.

As the only game currently in English, we’ll have a full review on Miracle Garden coming soon.

Having been out for about a month or so now, the iPad has seen a number of early successes, including the reaching of it’s 1 millionth unit sold. However, while there are a number of games steadily coming out for the Apple platform, one socially enabled app by the name of Warpgate HD had been nagging at the back of our heads for a while. Developed by Freeverse Inc., this quasi-virtual world title has players warping about the galaxy in a surprisingly lengthy experience.

The game is basically an enormous space age world where players traverse the galaxy, completing missions, building up reputations, or just trying to make the biggest and baddest ship they can. Of course, what you make of the game is up to you, but the central play is still revolving around a relatively long, overarching story.

Essentially, players start out controlling a mere mining vessel and are sailing through an isometric universe of massive proportions. The controls are simple enough. Simple touches on the touch screen move the ship and users can even view an entire sector map and plot courses to follow automatically. Furthermore, interactions within the world are entirely contextual, meaning that if you are near a planet you can land or scan, and if you are near a ship you can either attack or flee.

As a matter of fact that latter context comes at the user quite quickly, as within about the first two minutes of game play, they run into some rather nasty space pirates. The engagement is actually most interesting as once combat is engaged, the game shifts into a sort of separate battle-mode ala Final Fantasy where the player actually controls their ship using the iPad’s accelerometer in a similar fashion to SGN’s F.A.S.T. title on the iPhone. Frankly, it’s a bit clunky at first, but once you get used to it, it’s actually very intense and fun.

With the movement controls, users can dodge incoming attacks and by tapping periodically recharging weapon icons, launch volleys of their own. Moreover, they can sacrifice some of their firepower to temporarily boost their shield defenses. All of this combined, makes for a very simple, yet satisfying and intense experience; especially as battles get larger.

This is all a bit twitch-oriented, however, and may not be of as much interest to casual or social mobile users. Nonetheless, as players defeat enemies and complete missions for the game, they begin to delve into mechanics that may be of a bit more interest. The most prominent of these are factions. Most of the actions in the game affect one of a handful of different factions and your reputation with them.

Depending on who likes you and who doesn’t, different options – such as missions and rewards – become available. Unfortunately, Warpgate HD comes with about 35 different star systems to explore, 172 different ships to create, as well as over 100 missions, so breaking down every possibility that stems from faction choosing is going to take a few days… at least.

Beyond factions, however, users then get into what might interest the social ilk the most. You see, as you travel, you can visit any number of different planets. At each of these you can buy equipment to further improve and upgrade your ship, but also play a little bit of the businessman as well. At each planet, there are a variety of resources you can buy that are above, below, or equal to market price. Based on the size of your ship, you can buy and ferry those goods over to a neighboring star system and resell them for higher profits. Unfortunately, it is a bit of trial and error, as there is no clear way to compare and contrast market prices — sometimes a problem in real markets, too. But despite that qualm, entrepreneurial users can lose themselves for long periods of time just doing business.

Of course, if this is too slow paced, you can always supplement income by exploring and placing mining drones on asteroids you find on your journeys, or simply picking fights and selling the spoils of war. The choice, and pacing, is really up to the player. Either way, it is always fun to earn that money and get the starship of your dreams.

Socially, Warpgate doesn’t meet all the potential it has. The game is powered by ngmoco’s Plus+ platform, so it does come with leaderboards and achievements, with the former being much more interesting in such a massive game. Within them, users can actually track everything from kills to income, and truly see who the galactic big wig really is. Additionally, the game has an interesting “Postman” feature, where users can send their friends a postcard from any planet or key location from within the game. These can be posted to a Facebook feed, your Twitter account, Tumblr, or even through a direct email.

Truthfully though, with such a vast universe, we half expected to be able to see friends’ ships or own personal planets. Even if they didn’t control them and it would be very cool to see your friends’ ships flying about and helping you as needed.

Currently the game is available on both the iPhone and the iPad. Furthermore, Freeverse has even released a free lite version for both. Granted, that rendition doesn’t have everything the full version does, but it has more than enough to sate one’s appetite and help them decide whether to front the money for the full version or not. For the iPhone it’s about $5 while the iPad copy is $8. However, considering the sheer scale of the world, the increased screen size on the iPad alone makes the latter version more worthwhile.

If there were anything to really complain about with Warpgate HD, it’s that it takes a little bit of trial and error to figure everything out; and there is a lot to figure out. There is a tutorial, but it is slow and painful to go through; taking upwards of 20-30 minutes to see everything, and likely you won’t remember it all anyway as it’s mostly text based. The mission system does help ramp things up at a steady pace, but on occasion the story does feel a bit contrived and generic. Furthermore, while it does have social Plus+ integration, the game does fall short of its potential.

Overall, however, if you own an iPad, the lite version of Warpgate HD is certainly worth a try. It’s fun and pretty well thought out for a mobile game, and none of the complaints are real deal breakers. Moreover, there are a number of side missions to undertake beyond the central storylines and the market and reputation systems, coupled with leaderboards and achievements, will certainly earn your $5 – $8 worth of play.

Most social games are either on Facebook or the iPhone, with no real interaction between the two. But there’s now one notable exception: CrowdStar’s Happy Island, which is one of Facebook’s most successful games withmore than 10 million monthly active users. CrowdStar worked with a new company called Sibblingz on Happy Island, which will be available soon on both iPhone and iPad, with an Android version following.

Sibblingz and CrowdStar have a direct connection: both are emerged from YouWeb, the incubator run by Peter Relan. So in a sense, CrowdStar has been on the path to becoming a multi-platform social game company for a while.

The purpose of Sibblingz is to help developers get over the wall between Facebook and iPhone development. Most Facebook games are created in Flash for a larger screen, with a point-and-click interface. The iPhone uses a variety of Objective C development tools, and has a small tech screen.

But in spirit, games on Facebook and the iPhone are actually very similar, and the separation has led to a lot of duplication — for example, the farm game genre is strong on Apple’s device, yet features an entirely different set of developers.

Sibblingz wants to give the developers the ability to create the art for their games without worrying too much about the separate design tools, by placing most of the data on servers that feed into different development libraries. The main difference for most games will be the user interface, which can re-use some of the same elements between versions but must be adapted for the size and capabilities of each screen.

Of course, Android phones will soon have a high-level native ability to run Flash, as we wrote about this morning, although Sibblingz founder Ben Savage says that the games will be better if developed natively for the phone. The real question is how many people with smartphones want to switch between platforms — something of an unknown at the moment. Cross-development is almost certainly a good idea, though, if only for the greater exposure.

Another question is whether the graphical standards on Facebook and mobile devices will remain similar. For now, the mobile devices are far more capable of running graphically intense and 3D games. “Hopefully in HTML5, WebGL will start to pan out, but right now I can say that when we develop games for Facebook we have to keep the lowest denominator in mind,” Savage tells us.

But for now, going multi-platform looks like a good idea for almost any developer, provided the costs are low enough. Savage says that Sibblingz is handling that problem by offering its service for free, with a contractual share of future revenue.

A free platform does have a downside: Sibblingz will carefully pick who it works with. Savage says that for now, he’s interested in hearing from larger developers and those with access to branded IP, although smaller developers could potentially help handle development for their larger peers.

The NPD Group released new figures showing Android adoption rising above the iPhone, which has had fairly steady sales figures this year.

Although Apple contested the numbers, the overall trend is clear.

With Android handsets rapidly multiplying, there’s a big question for mobile game makers: can Android create a significantly different environment for games than the iPhone?

Android’s growth appears to be fueled by heavy advertising from big mobile carriers like Verizon, which is advertising its Motorola Droid, as well as a flood of new HTC handsets like the Incredible. These are all high-powered phones with touchscreens comparable to the iPhone, so in that sense it’s reasonable to expect the Android game market to end up looking similar to the iPhone’s App store.

But that likely won’t be the case. Apple itself is working to put its mobile devices (now including the iPad) in a separate development category by demanding that developers use Objective C and shunning Adobe’s Flash. The iPhone’s technical requirements have so far meant that web game developers and their mobile counterparts have stood a world apart.

Google, on the other hand, is busy cuddling up to Flash, with Engadget reporting yesterday that Android 2.2 runs Flash “like butter”. That could end up being one of the critical distinctions between Android and the iPhone, especially when it comes to games. With a smooth mobile Flash experience, casual and social game developers, from Kongregate to Zynga, will have an easy way to push their games to mobile.

And it’s increasingly apparent that Google is now taking games seriously. The company is looking for a games product manager, just hired a developer advocate, and bought the game maker LabPixies. There’s probably also a connection to gaming in its attempts to hire a head of its social product.

Of course, Google has spent years developing the OpenSocial container to help web sites build platforms for social applications. That effort has not seen a lot of momentum, although big social networks like MySpace use it — we’re interested to see how Google tries to tie everything together, now.

Having seen Facebook’s success with games, it’s not hard to believe that Google wants in. It won’t have too much difficulty, with the ability to either directly run online games (on a phone or an iPad competitor) or easily port them over.

This story will develop quickly over the coming weeks, especially if Apple is really developing a Flash competitor. Online and social gaming has developed quickly so far, but we won’t have seen anything until the boundaries with mobile games begin to blur.

A new game from Ok GameStudio, called IslandFest, builds upon the now-established island resort genre with a focus on lodging.

Of all the games we’ve looked at in the past, IslandFest is perhaps most similar to Playdom’s Tiki Resort or CrowdStar’s Happy Island. Essentially, the objective is to create the perfect tourist hot spot upon a small spit of land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. However, in order to do so, players must manage four different sets of criteria.

Unlike its rivals, visitors to your island don’t fly or sail in for a few minutes and leave. In order to keep your guests, you need to provide proper lodging. Each “hotel,” as it were, consists of pretty much anything to put a roof over one’s head and consist of everything from shoddy tents and shacks to luxurious hotels. Each hotel-structure will also provide a set number of visitors it can hold and will produce X amount of coin per Y amount of hours, with the player having to clean them periodically (lest they will no longer earn money).

Now as far as income goes, hotels are good, but as any tourism officer can tell you, a vast majority of overall spending comes from shopping. Be it cold beer, hot dogs, or souvenirs you really don’t need, people buy it all. To that end, users must also create any number of these shops and vendor stands to supplement their income; coming back to claim their earnings from time to time.

Unfortunately, while money is nice, having a means to earn it is a bit pointless if you have no visitors in the first place. This is where leisure and the Island Rating come in to play. If tourists intend to spend a couple thousand to vacation in the islands, you’d better bet they want to be entertained in some way. As such, players must construct various leisure buildings to improve their rating. Now, for the record, it is unclear as to whether or not your Island Rating increases the number of visitors/spending as the game never actually says yes or no to that, but it seems the most logical.

Nonetheless, the structures themselves vary from necessity (bathrooms and showers), to golf courses and waterfalls, with the latter items unlocking at later levels. Of course, as expensive as the leisure structures are, a level gate is almost pointless as if you don’t intend to buy any virtual currency and trade it for in-game money, you won’t be able to afford it anyway. Regardless, unlike the previous game elements, these buildings earn no income. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for some (i.e. a pub or casino) but that’s really just picking nits. What they do grant is a fraction of a star point toward that 5 Star Island Rating. To give you some perspective, the lowest leisure building gives 0.05 stars, while the highest gives 0.17 stars.

The last aspect to manage is what is called “Travel Points.” It is sort of an invisible stat as none of the buildings you can create tell you how much they give, but as we placed decorations and new structures we earned points in this category. In fact, even visiting a friend’s island in the tutorial stages earned Travel Points, suggesting that having more friends to visit on a daily basis will make earning these easier.

This becomes prudent as Travel Points, combined with your guest capacity, is what determines your level. That’s right, IslandFest is one of the first Facebook games in a very, very long time that doesn’t have an experience bar. Well, technically anyway. It does have a progress bar that visibly shows the percentage of completion towards your next level. However, in order to get that level, one simple does not just do everything that earns experience points. They must actually manage their resources in order to meet the requirements of X amount of guests (determined by hotels) and Y amount of Travel Points (determined by décor).

Socially, IslandFest is about what one might expect for a tycoon type of game. As was mentioned already, players can visit each other’s islands, presumably to earn extra travel points, but also to simply see how they are progressing. Surprisingly, however, there is no built in, always visible leaderboard system at the bottom of the screen. It seems simple, yes, but without it, some of the competitiveness that comes between friends playing such games is lost: Out of sight, out of mind. Other than this, the app has all the standard social elements such as gifting (or asking for gifts) friends, achievements, and your typical feed posts when you do something significant.

As far as complaints go, the visual style brings the island together fairly well, but other than a few non-player characters doing random things here and there for a second or two, the world feels a bit static. Buildings are empty, very few things move, things that do move are simplistic and flat, and it almost feels like your guests are walking about a ghost town. Of all the tycoon games we’ve reviewed, the best example of a space feeling alive would be Social City where its residents play ball, mow lawns, fly kites, and a metric ton more.

Additionally, the space you decorate, itself, is a bit drab. It’s literally a block of sand in the middle of the ocean. This isn’t to say the player should have the ability to terraform their space (though it would be cool for all tycoon games), but they should just get a more complex, interesting shape to work with; something with hills and elevation. In fact, it would also be nice to manually edit the ground as well with paths, dirt, grass, etc.

Overall, IslandFest is a pretty fun game that does have a wonderful tropical feel to it. Furthermore, there is enough to manage to keep the game interesting and fun, and while it is a game type most have played before, it does still feel a little bit fresh. That said, it does suffer from a lack of style. While most of the game does look technically good, it just feels static and dead. Luckily, with the core of the game strong, the rest is comparatively simple to fix. We look forward to seeing how well this tropical destination takes off.

With Treasure Isle’s growth having finally leveled off, this week was clear for Family Feud to take the top of our list of fastest growing Facebook games by daily active users. The popular trivia game gained some 331,282 new DAU over the week, according to AppData, although that figure is likely a bit inflated by the newest monthly active users.

One trend to note this week is that quite a few of the top 20 have relatively low DAU, mostly as a result of being newer. Older games, by and large, just aren’t growing — and that statement includes some of the games you can see below like MindJolt Games and YoVille, both of which are declining long-term.

Here’s the full list:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Family Feud	1,173,163	+331,282	+39.35
2.	Nightclub City	341,839	+215,664	+170.92
3.	MindJolt Games	2,035,873	+172,887	+9.28
4.	YoVille	1,717,026	+171,445	+11.09
5.	Collect Roses	188,058	+160,656	+586.29
6.	Social City	2,679,162	+103,039	+4.00
7.	Zoo Paradise	990,786	+74,436	+8.12
8.	Monster World	87,468	+73,300	+517.36
9.	My Tribe	168,878	+69,840	+70.52
10.	Kingdoms of Camelot	561,454	+67,998	+13.78
11.	Bola	440,550	+58,183	+15.22
12.	Garden Life	287,560	+54,750	+23.52
13.	Treasure Isle	7,030,863	+50,535	+0.72
14.	Ninja Saga	835,925	+42,963	+5.42
15.	Ranch Town	85,278	+42,752	+100.53
16.	Jungle Jewels	262,971	+42,027	+19.02
17.	Profile Box	54,817	+38,843	+243.16
18.	Name Analyzer	45,446	+38,832	+587.12
19.	Games	345,991	+38,413	+12.49
20.	Bike Mania 4 Micro Office	42,598	+36,012	+546.80

Of course, DAU is mostly useful as a long-term signal, taking on the most meaning once growth is fairly predictable. What you’re seeing on this week’s list are a lot of games just bringing in users for the first time, so relatively few are worth looking at through the DAU lens.

But there are a few. My Tribe is an interesting game; it’s among a new class of deeper games that try to draw in players for longer, more intense sessions. The game took a while to start getting traction, but now it’s doing quite well. Kingdoms of Camelot falls in the same general category and, impressively, just passed half a million DAU.

Down at number 13 we have Treasure Isle, the new Zynga game that we mentioned above. At this point, Isle’s new MAU growth has slowed down enough that its DAU will probably drop slightly over the next couple weeks. At the moment, it appears that 25 percent of its players come back on a daily basis; that number should probably be a couple percentage points lower, leaving Isle’s DAU under seven million.

Toward the end of the list, we find Games at number 19. What’s interesting here is that Games, a portal app of several hundred lower-case games, has actually shed roughly 300,000 MAU over the course of this month. But its DAU recently started rising, apparently the result of some new, interesting additions to the catalog.

The relationship between Facebook and the largest social gaming company on its platform, Zynga, has fallen to an all-time low, or so industry sources are telling us.

Zynga had an all-hands meeting last Thursday, where chief executive Mark Pincus told his hundreds of employees that the company might leave Facebook’s developer platform. Instead, it might launch its own social gaming service, called Zynga Live or (ZLive), as TechCrunch then VentureBeat reported.

One big reason may be money. Zynga has built a business worth hundreds of millions of dollars, largely monetizing through virtual goods that it sells in its games. Facebook now wants to take a 30% cut of this money directly out of Zynga’s pocket by forcing use of its Credits virtual currency — although Zynga could eventually reap benefits from this arrangement.

However, everyone we’ve spoken has described the issues between the two companies as being about more than just Credits. Some also say that the conflict is representative of larger issues on the platform. We’ve gathered more details, but here’s context first.

Industry Turmoil

Facebook is starting to make all of its developers use its Credits virtual currency. All other things being equal, this means Facebook will get revenue that developers have been getting up until this point. However, Facebook says that everyone can benefit through Credits.

We covered the issues in more detail in our Inside Facebook Gold membership service, last week. To recap, if Facebook’s various efforts to improve Credits work — like more payment purchase options, better user access within its core interface, liquidity due to broader usage, etc — then developers could see drastic increases in the number of paying users and the amount they pay, and thereby make more money.

The problem is that nobody knows how Credits will actually work.

Meanwhile,  Zynga has already built its own payments system, and it typically pays a much lower portion of its revenue to service provider partners, including Paypal, Offerpal, and others. No matter how well Credits eventually work, Zynga is likely to bear a big part of the cost in the meantime.

It has 243 million non deduplicated monthly active users and 60 million daily active users, by far the most out of any developer on the platform, according to our independent AppData measurement service. It is likely going to make hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue this year.

Zynga may also feel misled about Credits, and other platform changes. Like many developers, the company built its business on Facebook over the past several years with the understanding that it would be able to retain all of the revenue, based on statements made by Facebook when the social network launched its developer platform in 2007. Zynga also planned its games around specific parts of the user interface, like notifications and requests.

Beyond making Credits mandatory, Facebook removed third party access to notifications at the beginning of March and it is planning to mostly remove requests, as soon as this month. Organic growth is next to nothing now, according to many developers. Most of the biggest games are losing users, according to what our data shows.

Zynga has had one big hit this year, Treasure Isle. The title has grown through advertising and cross-promotion within its other games, as far as we’ve been able to tell. Facebook wants developers to reach its users through its news feeds, the email addresses that apps can request directly from users, or through the counters that appear in the game and app dashboards on the home page.

None of these channels are currently helping social games reach and engage with users.

Most users read their feeds in the algorithmic “Top News” view, which shows users only 50 items per day; given all of the status updates, photos, shared links from the web and whatever else they see — and the preference the algorithm gives these other types of stories — games don’t have much room to get noticed. Email has all the problems that it does in real life, such as messages ending up unread or in the spam folder. The dashboards and counters, meanwhile, just aren’t getting significant engagement, even though Facebook wants them to.

Of course, the reason that Facebook took away communication channels like notifications and requests is that many  developers (Zynga included) relentlessly messaged users through them, to the point that the channels became choked with communication that seemed more like spam. So, between Credits and the communication changes, Facebook has reduced the value that Zynga and other developers can get out of the platform — at least for the present. These are all things that any serious developer on the platform already knows painfully well.

While the current changes are severe, it is important to understand that Facebook has made changes throughout the history of the platform that have seemed just as severe at the time they happened, like when it removed app profile boxes from users’ personal profile pages, or made the news feed a raw stream of real-time updates… or changed it back to be algorithmic. For more on this sometimes-painful evolution, see our article from 2008: Facebook’s platform: rebuilding the plane in midflight.

Basically, some companies have suffered as each change has rolled out, yet the social app industry itself has grown along with Facebook.

The Issues Today

With every change over the years, some developers have said Facebook is doing a bait and switch, encouraging them to build for one set of rules then changing the rules on them in ways that hurts their businesses. Yet at every turn, it has also been clear that some developers have acted in bad faith, forcing Facebook to take action against them in ways that affect the whole ecosystem. How one views Facebook’s changes now or before depends on where one’s interests lie. Usually, developers get upset but deal with the changes.

But no developer has ever moved off Facebook’s platform, especially not one as big as Zynga. What’s the reason it might, now?

Zynga has also already established something of a presence off of Facebook; millions of people are playing FarmVille on the web site since it launched months ago, and it has been slowly expanding web versions for other games, like Mafia Wars.

But those games all have relied exclusively on Facebook’s platform, from user’s identities to communication channels. A break with Facebook would mean these aspects of its sites would be completely cut off.

Instead of Facebook’s social graph and communication channels, Zynga would apparently try to create its own. It has gathered users’ email addresses, as Facebook has encouraged developers to do. And it has been busy testing out text messaging in at least one of its big apps, Mafia Wars, so it has some phone numbers. These are two communication channels it can use beyond Facebook. And considering that there are relatively fewer other communications channels left on the service, these alternatives look more appealing than before.

ZLive would also have the immediate short-term benefit of not requiring Zynga to pay the Credits tax; although if Credits ends up working as Facebook intends, Zynga would miss out on any of the benefits.

The bigger issue is that the two companies seem to have a personal problem with each other. Zynga has had far more platform violations than any other developer on the platform, according to sources in the industry. The company is well known within the developer community to be very aggressive with everything: messaging users, monetizing, etc. We have long heard complaints about its business practices from other developers, and those issues appear to have come to a head with Facebook itself.

But how much worse is Zynga? It has so many big, full-featured games that the numeric volume of issues will naturally be higher. We also hear that it has been getting in less trouble than most other companies in recent months.

We have, meanwhile, also heard that Facebook is using strong-arm tactics to control developers, although sources have not been able to provide meaningful details about the tactics themselves.

The TechCrunch article suggests one way strong-arming might be happening:

To make matters worse, say sources, Facebook is trying to get Zynga to agree to a long term deal where Zynga remains primarily on the Facebook platform. During negotiations Facebook has taken some steps to punish Zynga, such as shutting off notifications for Farmville and other games, and Facebook has threatened, say multiple sources, to simply shut some of Zynga’s games down permanently.

This example is unlikely, as notifications were shut off for all developers at the beginning of March. But, as the platform owner, Facebook potentially has other tools at its disposal.

Facebook does regularly tweak some ways that apps reach users, such as friend invites — it has been doing this since the platform launched. We’ve heard reports from developers over the years that Facebook play favorites with features like invites. On the other hand, from our understanding, it does try to be fair, and generally we haven’t heard complaints from developers on this front in quite a while.

Whether fair or not, the problem here is that Facebook offers no transparency into how it handles negotiations with individual developers; perhaps the company turned down the number of friends that Zynga players could invite to their games, for example, but it’s not clear that it was due to negotiations versus other completely legitimate policy enforcement measures.

Because there’s no more specific information about what Zynga has done wrong, or how Facebook has handled negotiations with it and other developers, it would be a mistake to pass judgment on either company’s behavior just yet.

Conclusion: Is Zynga Bluffing?

If Zynga tries to leave Facebook, it will be embarking on a risky experiment — no social game developer has even tried to do anything similar on the scale that Zynga might. After all, the whole point of “social” in social games is that you build games that use the social graph and communication channels of a host social network. It could try to use other social graphs as identity providers and as communication channels, like those from MySpace, Twitter or even Google — but no competitors offer meaningful competition to Facebook at this point. Zynga just withdrew from Tagged, another social network it’s been on, as TechCrunch also spotted, in an early draft of a company note to users about moving to ZLive.

So it seems Zynga is trying to centralize all of its resources on ZLive, and trying to own the entire relationship with its users rather than relying on Facebook or any other identity service to help it reach users. This basically makes Zynga a casual game company. While it may have a lot of money, a big team, and users, it is essentially going up against big casual gaming companies that have already established themselves on the web. It will be playing on their turf. This seems like a big challenge, but  Zynga has actually gotten good at building games, as many of its competitors have come to grudgingly admit in the last year or so.

There are also serious questions for Facebook about how users will be impacted if all of Zynga’s games were to suddenly disappear from the platform. What about the users who have each spent hundreds of hours, if not hundreds of dollars, building up their farms, their mafias, their virtual aquariums, and the other core components of Zynga games?

Certainly, Zynga has had issues over the years, but it has also made products that millions of people love. Facebook itself could likely see traffic and engagement fall, at least in the short term, if Zynga’s games disappear. Lots of other developers are hungry to grow, and we expect they’d happily try to take Zynga’s Facebook user base. But are they able to create and operate as many high-quality games at the scale Zynga has already achieved?

A related point here is that because Facebook has curtailed developer-to-user communication — it’s not clear how competitors will reach the users they need to in order to fill the void. We don’t know how many Zynga game players overlap with rivals; millions have likely only played Zynga games, and don’t know about the others. Techniques like cross-promotion within other games may not work that well here.

Zynga is also paying Facebook millions of dollars for performance advertising every month. Rivals buy ad space to reach developers, but most lack Zynga’s budget. It’s possible that Zynga’s departure would reduce the cost of ads, helping rivals find users, and hurting Facebook’s revenue. But many non-game advertisers have moved on to the system, other developers may not be able to gain much of an edge here.

ZLive ultimately sounds like it could end up worse for Zynga than for Facebook, but a split is a gamble for both companies.

The more damaging part for Facebook here is if it is publicly seen as acting unfairly towards Zynga, in a way that undermines other developers’ interest in the platform. If most developers thinks they can’t create a business on Facebook without having the rules changed or unfairly enforced on them, then they might also leave.

That doesn’t just apply to social app developers, it applies to web publishers busy integrating its new social plugins around the web. Platform developers are generally hooked on being able to access Facebook’s traffic — many describe it as an “addiction” — and the plugins are now helping other sites get that same addiction. Mainstream media companies have already been reporting significant traffic from Facebook. In other words, the plugin users are making Facebook a more important part of their businesses.

But if companies on the rest of the web think that Facebook will treat them poorly, they might not add its features in order to avoid the same headaches Zynga is going through. Facebook is also dealing with fallout over how it has handled a user privacy around the plugins and a variety of other launches; critics say it has tricked users into revealing sensitive personal information, as we’ve just covered in detail over on Inside Facebook.

Zynga and Facebook are in a good position to hurt each other. As with mutually assured destruction in other realms of human conflict, we think they’ll look at the costs and benefits, and work out their differences — although probably in a way that serves Facebook more, given the company’s better leverage.