Sometimes it seems to be an accepted fact among game developers that players like to cooperate with each other in social gaming; any sort of competition is generally ruled out. But how do you mix that philosophy with the competitiveness of sports? Well, maybe you don’t. At least, not if you’re Bola, which is currently the top soccer game on Facebook.

We’ve reviewed Bola before, but checked back in with developer Three Melons (owned by Playdom) about its progress in light of the ongoing World Cup tournament. Despite our somewhat lukewarm review, Bola has found about 4.2 million monthly active users, and Three Melons says the game claims a combined one million daily active users between Facebook and Orkut.

Part of Bola’s allure is that the game encourages the sort of jibing that real-world soccer fans aim at each other. “We’re stressing the humorous approach,” says Marcos Amadeo, Bola’s product manager. The game tracks stats carefully in part to make it easier for friends to tease each other’s records, and players can also prank each other’s stadiums. “We chose friendly banter over collaboration,” Amadeo says.

Players are also taking to the in-game advertising, which doubles as a core part of Bola’s revenue. The game has partnerships with Coca-Cola, Allianz Insurance, Ford, Nike, Nestle, and other brands, which can be picked up by players as their team sponsors. Several soccer games have had luck getting high-profile marketing deals in this way — something that seems mainly confined to the sports category for now, aside from a few outliers like Zynga’s 7-Eleven partnership.

Another notable point is that Bola is already available in three languages: English, Portuguese and Spanish (Three Melons is based in Argentina). The company is benefiting from its ownership by Playdom by sharing some localization work with Merscom, another Playdom acquisition.

One thing we’ll note here is that soccer games haven’t grown nearly as much during the World Cup as one might have expected. Bola has continued to acquire users at a slow pace; EA’s FIFA Superstars has taken in 2.3 million MAU with the help of advertising, but that’s not too impressive in light of the numbers that, for instance, FrontierVille has racked up in just a couple weeks.

But for now, Bola is leading the pack, and there’s still the possibility that growth in the soccer category will pick up as Facebook acquires more international users. And Amadeo points out one advantage that soccer has: unlike the popular sports in the US, soccer season never really ends. After the World Cup is over, growth can still go on.

It’s not often that a strategy game comes out on top on Facebook. But that’s what has happened this week, with Playdom’s new game Verdonia gathering the most new monthly active users of any emerging game on Facebook (meaning those under a million MAU).

We reviewed Verdonia right after Playdom stealthily released the game, finding a much deeper level of complexity than is standard even for most strategy games on Facebook. It’s most similar to Evony, which we recently found out has three quarters of a million players, about as many as Verdonia is reporting now.

Here’s the full AppData list of 20 games:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Verdonia	775,927	+763,669	+6,229.96
2.	Fashion World	934,094	+404,652	+76.43
3.	Zoo Kingdom	588,227	+246,149	+71.96
4.	Millionaire City	773,922	+240,746	+45.15
5.	Phrases	938,393	+145,907	+18.41
6.	Mahjong	777,658	+139,106	+21.78
7.	NanoStar Siege	639,776	+128,206	+25.06
8.	Maya Pyramid	197,270	+127,408	+182.37
9.	Sweet World	487,668	+115,916	+31.18
10.	Goooaaal	237,316	+112,921	+90.78
11.	- Clicks Racer Challenge	501,866	+101,291	+25.29
12.	Chocolatier: Sweet Society	217,563	+95,050	+77.58
13.	快樂島 主	309,785	+90,507	+41.28
14.	Funfari	605,924	+73,633	+13.83
15.	Age of Champions	765,964	+72,257	+10.42
16.	Epic Goal	142,364	+72,227	+102.98
17.	Super Dance	316,482	+71,149	+29.00
18.	航海傳 奇—— 一閃一閃亮晶晶，曉溪想要“五顆星”	187,167	+66,135	+54.64
19.	Classic Word Games	460,653	+63,311	+15.93
20.	Bubble Popp 2	517,075	+62,290	+13.70

There are a number of genre-based games to pick out. Fashion World is part of a mini-fad of store management games that we’re seeing; this one is about running a clothing store (for hipsters, by all appearances). It’s about to cross a million MAU. Sweet World and Chocolatier: Sweet Society are similar (we’ll review the second of those later this morning).

Next up is Zoo Kingdom, the first title from Blue Fang Games. Despite a profusion of zoo-themed games like Zoo World and Zoo Paradise, zoo-keeping seems to be a reliable category, in which we’ve seen several new developers test out their muscles. Zoo Kingdom has raised about half a million MAU over a month, with almost half coming from just the last week.

Millionaire City, a creative variation on the city building genre by Digital Chocolate, is doing quite well; a bit further down at number seven, you can also find NanoStar Siege, by the same developer. The latter title, a strategy, has been out for three months, but stopped gaining players for a significant portion of that time.

Mahjong is the latest version of the classic tile game, in yet another category that has a number of moderately successful titles. But we’ll end with Maya Pyramid, which, like Verdonia, is in a category yet to be fully mined on Facebook: in this case, puzzles. It’s actually a pretty interesting game, in which you have to make combinations to pass each stage and build your pyramid; failing to finish a round means you lose a life, at which point you either have to wait or buy another with virtual currency.

Over the course of this year, we’ve watch Playdom range far afield for its acquisitions, picking up companies in southern California, North Carolina, Washington and, even further afield, Argentina. But the Mountain View, Calif. company has returned to home base for its latest pick: Hive7, a Facebook developer whose biggest game is Knighthood.

What Hive7 does have in common with the other acquisitions (listed here) is that it’s pretty small, with eight employees listed on its about page and just 245,107 monthly active users on Facebook, according to AppData. Playdom itself is a couple orders of magnitude larger:

Although Hive7 doesn’t have much traffic at the moment, it’s probably working on something fairly significant. The company’s last game was released, as far as we know, before Christmas. Judging from Hive7′s jobs page, which has a listing for a developer with experience working on Stardoll, BarbieGirls or Habbo Hotel, the next release could be a virtual world aimed at tweens.

More broadly, Hive7 seems to specialize in massively multiplayer online games, a subject that CEO Max Skibinsky talked about in more detail in our interview with him last August.

As for Playdom, it’s now up to six acquisitions. This Tuesday, it announced $33 million in funding, which combined with its $43 million round from November could easily fill the company’s shopping basket with quite a few more companies like Hive7.

When building on new devices, making use of its basic features is what can make the most fun games. Well, with the iPad, it doesn’t get more basic than the touch screen — and Quantum Squid uses it in a most gratifying way for its primary game mechanic in the new iPad title Veggie Samurai HD.

Moving beyond concepts of tapping and slower-paced path drawing, these developers have turned user fingers into blades of Japanese steel.

Though it is a mobile game that doesn’t carry more social mechanics than most others on Apple devices, its OpenFeint integration works well for the nature of the game: Tearing apart vegetables into tiny bits. Filled with a good bit of style and simple game play, Veggie Samurai is a game that is wonderfully gratifying to play, and for an iPad title, surprisingly immersive due to its tactile mechanics.

The $1.99 application comes with two modes to play: Samurai and Harmony. The former is the primary mode where players are whisked into a dojo where an impressive stockpile of vegetables are apparently stored. From here, vegetables are tossed into the air and players use their “katana” to slice and dice them. Here’s the cool part though: This katana is your finger. And guess what: you have five.

Using a slicing motion with each finger, each vegetable can be cut twice, with extra points scored for a second cut (a “dice”). If you use multiple fingers and cut multiple veggies simultaneously the score is increased further; you can also cut more vegetables in rapid sequence for further combos. The only catch is that, while in Samurai mode, players must be careful of randomly tossed vials of poison. Cut those, and it’s game over.

Of course, if you’re looking for an easier mode, Harmony has all the same veggie action, but with no poison. The only real difference beyond this is that it is timed, thus the goal is really only to get the highest score before time expires.

Whichever mode you choose, however, it is extremely gratifying to slice through a vegetable with your finger, watch it split in half, and then splatter across the dojo. Moreover, unlike other games that use a path drawing mechanic (which is really what this is, only faster), cutting veggies with a finger actually feels moderately believable. Yes, guiding aircraft can be fun, but the quick slicing motion in Veggie Samurai actually “feels” like you are cutting. With that, it’s easy to block out the rest of the outside world.

The addiction is only furthered by the added social elements that come with OpenFeint. As has been noted in prior iDevice reviews, the integration is a bit basic by Facebook social game standards, consisting of only sharable achievements and leaderboards. Nevertheless, as this game is solely based around beating high scores, it works. Even without the OpenFeint, it would still be a fun game, but being able to compete with others, as well as unlock new accomplishments only makes it better.

On the negative side of things, the biggest design issue comes down to depth of game-play. All the vegetables come apart in the same way regardless of how you hit them, and the splattering gratification does lose some of its fun after a while. Beyond this, there is also an issue about originality.

Yes, Veggie Samurai is a fun game, but its essentially the same as the older iPhone title Fruit Ninja from Halfbrick Studios (it is worth noting that Fruit Ninja was released only in late April, so it is quite possible that Veggie Samurai was already in development, too). The only real difference is that on the iPad, the significantly larger screen and improved visuals make the game much more immersive and stylistically rewarding. Not only does the veggie genocide look better, but the larger strokes that need to be made and the extra space allowing for two hands instead of one, does actually make the experience much more fun.

Regardless of which title users like more, Veggie Samurai HD is an extremely addicting and fun app. Frankly, if you have an iPad and $2 to spend, buy this game. If you liked Fruit Ninja, buy this game. Though it is a concept that’s been done before, its still just as fun, and comes with minimal complaints.

Hiring was a little slower this week among top social game developers, according to LinkedIn data, with Zynga pulling in the most new employees as usual. Here’s the latest.

Crowdstar

• Pete Hawley – Noted already, he is now the Vice President of Product Development at CrowdStar. His previous experience comes from the same role at gaming giant Electronic Arts.
• Jeff McNab – As Slide’s overall monthly active user numbers wane, Jeff joins CrowdStar as its newest System Designer, leaving his Game Designer role at Slide.

LOLapps

• Brenda Brathwaite – Also leaving Slide is Brenda Brathwaite, whose hiring we were informed of earlier this week. Now, she is LOLapps‘ new Creative Director; her former role at Slide was of the same position.

Playdom

• Andy Kleinman – Andy is now General Manager for Latin America & US Hispanic over at Playdom. Prior to this he was a “California Melon” (which we assume means “California-based employee”) at Three Melons. Of course, the company was bought by Playdom back in April, so he didn’t have to go far.
• Tony Iuppa – Tony is now “Production” at Playdom, having previously worked as a Production Director at Zipper Interactive. Likely, it is still the same, or at least a very similar, role.

RockYou

• Erik Nichols – Formerly a Senior Recruiter for Magenic Technologies, Erik Nichols is now RockYou‘s latest Technical Recruiter.
• Matt Fairchild – Matt joins the RockYou! team as a new Community Manager. Previously, he worked with SullivanPerkins as a writer.

Slide

• Amber Padilla – Slide gets a new Designer this week in the form of Amber Padilla. Prior to this job, she was a Designer for Zugara.

Zynga

• Matt Levine – Congratulations to Matt as he moves up as Zynga‘s newest Art Director from Senior Artist.
• Katrena Meyer – Leaving her Sr. Staffing Consultant position at Dolby Laboratories, Katrena is now a Technical Sourcer for Zynga.
• Per Nilsson – As part of the Challenge Games acquisition, Per is no longer a Frontend Developer for the purchased company, but is now a Software Engineer for Zynga.
• Shriniwas Mutnure – Formerly an Associate Software Engineer for SupportSoft, Shriniwas Mutnure becomes a Software Engineer for Zynga.
• Kevin Pearsall – Now a NOC Engineer for Zynga, Kevin Pearsall was formerly a Beta Coordinator and System Administrator for GlideTV.
• Kevin Kang – Kevin joins Zynga as another new Software Engineer. Before this, he was an IT Consultant for Northwestern University.
• Nancy Delos Reyes – In the financial realm of Zynga, Nancy joins the developer as its Accounts Payable Specialist. Prior experience stemmed from Presidio Trust where she worked in Accounts Payable.

A little bit of style applied to simple game mechanics can go a long way in game design. That’s a methodology Canadian developer Frima has taken to heart with its first Facebook title, Rock Paper Sumo. Filled to the brim with well-done visuals and satisfying animations, the game is certainly nice to look at — although its simplicity leaves open the question of whether the core mechanics are enough to bring in the users.

As one might expect, Rock, Paper, Sumo is basically a glorified game of rock, paper, scissors, determining the outcome of matches through luck and intuition. Players start out learning the ropes quickly and easily enough. Each day, they can issue a set number of challenges to friends and other Sumo players, earning points and coins along the way. For each challenge, players will select rock, paper, or scissors for three rounds or simply select a pre-chosen “gambit” (i.e. Avalanche, for three rock throws). Frima also makes use of an older social mechanic, requiring the challenged player to accept within a finite amount of time or forfeit the match.

As players win, they also earn points to move up the game’s leaderboard, which is presented in a rather unique pyramid of Facebook profile images. However, in order to earn greater volumes of points, faster, players must periodically train.

Sumo training comes in two parts: physical training and, of course, eating. The physical training is actually fairly reminiscent of many Facebook role-playing titles as each of the four routines available has some semblance of a cool down time before it can be performed again. This ranges from a “weekly allowance” at every five minutes, to a practice fight every 12 hours. Additionally, for every seven practice fights, players can participate in a “Master Battle.” For each of these tasks, the reward is an in-game currency called Bento Bucks, which is used to purchase needed items in order to progress.

Each day, players can also consume up to three high calorie meals to increase their sumo avatar’s weight. Two can be bought via Bento Bucks, while a third can be received as a gift from friends. Each meal is given a star rating — one to three — and is typically more expensive the more effective it is. The bigger the meal, the more weight you gain, and the heavier the avatar, the more points are earned with each victory. Obviously, this ends up moving players up the leaderboards at a much faster clip.

Beyond food, Bento Bucks, as well as yet another purchasable virtual currency dubbed Dojo Dollars, can be used to customize a player avatar. Considering that the wrestlers don’t exactly wear much, there is a surprising amount of customization to be had, ranging from tattoos and shades to mawashis and top knots.

Once players get into the swing, the biggest problem with the game quickly becomes apparent: the requirement to challenge random individuals, and for those opponents to either accept within a set period of time or forfeit.

Frankly, there really is no reason to have players consciously accept challenges. The decision to do so was likely made to let players select their trio of rock, paper, scissors throws, but with so many games allowing users to select pre-planned defenses (e.g. NanoStar Siege), requiring acceptance and waiting seems both unnecessary and boring. Moreover, forcing the challenger to wait takes away the pleasure of watching a match. One of the stand out features of newer Facebook RPG, Mercenaries of War is that you can actually watch your mercenaries battle, take and react to damage, and explode when killed in a detailed and satisfying way. It’s visually rewarding, and watching two stylized sumo go at it could be just as fun and addicting, yet that is lost because, again, you have to wait for a a player to accept a challenge before anything happens.

On another note, the weight mechanic doesn’t feel like it’s truly part of the game’s core mechanic. It is almost like it was added as an afterthought to enhance the results of a match, rather than help determine the match itself. It is, usually, infinitely more gratifying to incorporate training that can make the user feel stronger.

Overall, Rock, Paper, Sumo is a well-made game and does a lot with its overly simplistic concept. It has a wonderful style to it, and is actually pretty amusing to watch. Unfortunately, the methods of integrating the challenges and core elements of the game feel extraordinarily outdated and do not grant the user any immediate gratification. Further, the weight mechanics, while not bad, just don’t feel all that deeply integrated into the core of the game itself. In the end, Frimo’s app is good, proven by the fact that it is steadily growing, and is now north of 24,000 monthly active users, but it could still be something much, much greater.

As promised earlier this month, the social gaming world’s biggest hit, FarmVille, has gone live on the iPhone. The release is notable because few social game developers have released their games for mobile devices; FarmVille’s developer Zynga, notably, has focused almost entirely on the web since giving up on releasing iPhone versions in the middle of last year.

At the same time, the news may seem a bit boring, since what has reached the iPhone is pretty much the same game that we’ve all known and loved (or hated) for a year: it’s just FarmVille. For now, Zynga is treating the iPhone as a mobile accessory to Facebook, with a core experience that should remain unchanged. The music, art and other key identifiers seem much the same.

That’s not to say there haven’t been changes. They’re just fairly subtle. Other social game developers, though, should be watching carefully to see what Zynga has done with the iPhone’s more limited screen real estate. We set the two versions side by side to get a better look:

There is one major, immediately noticeable change: the farmer character has been removed entirely. This makes sense, given the larger potential for mistakes when using a finger to navigate the game UI. In general, the game is more difficult to use on the iPhone versus using a mouse.

No moving, animated farmer also means less data to load, a point that we’ll return to below.

Another extremely noticeable change is that the empty field in the iPhone version is much more textured than the web version. The new grass ends up looking more like an overgrown meadow than the manicured golf course of FarmVille on Facebook, but it also helps distinguish what you’re looking at on the smaller screen.

Moving on to UI elements, the iPhone version has removed more than it has added. Gone are the sound options; the player can simply change the volume on their iPhone. The currency and point bars remain, but Zynga has moved the “Add Coins & Cash” element, and replaced the player’s name box with a logo in the upper right hand corner that leads to Zynga’s older iPhone titles. Other elements on the side have been removed.

At the bottom of the screen, the cutting got even more intense. The friend bar doesn’t automatically load — it instead scrolls out from the icon on the bottom left. On the bottom right, the various tools, the market, sharing buttons, options and the option to buy virtual currency have all been compressed into a single box, while gifting gets its own box.

That’s mostly it, for the main screen. Other features have visibly changed, like the animal animations, seem as good or better on the iPhone version as compared to the web version.

Some of the changes have probably been inspired by the lower bandwidth of mobile devices, which as we mention above, is probably partially responsible for the farmer character’s loss. The “Loading” icon is a common sight as you use FarmVille on the iPhone, making some parts of the game — like the gifting screen, seen below — less usable.

A final point is that FarmVille’s iPhone version continues a Zynga habit, begun several months ago, of gathering player data for itself rather than working solely through Facebook. When you first sign in, for instance, FarmVille asks for an email address — and doesn’t give an option for Facebook sign-in.

Once your email is entered, the game then offers Facebook access. This is obviously necessary for players to find their old farm and their friends; but when it comes time to hook up with Facebook friends, Zynga makes the option of using your mobile contacts equally prominent.

We’ll keep an eye on both FarmVille’s iPhone and web versions to see how well they do following the release. For now, the web version is down to 63,892,960 players from highs of over 80 million, according to AppData.

Heyzap, a San Francisco startup that recently repositioned to help game developers spread their titles across the web, has raised $3 million in a round led by Union Square Ventures.

We covered Heyzap’s new focus in March, when the company pivoted away from its past focus on in-game advertising. The company’s new aim is to make social games more like YouTube videos, so that publishers can embed them on any web page.

Facebook itself has helped create a new inflection point that will let social games spread more widely, according to co-founder Jude Gomila. With Facebook Connect enabled, games can reside anywhere, but still plug in to the social network’s graph and the user’s other data, including payment options.

Casual game developers attempted much the same thing years ago, with some success on major web portals like MSN and Yahoo. But Gomila believes the current situation is different. “I think what’s interesting is that casual games didn’t make much money, and they didn’t have viral loops, so they weren’t that interesting to web publishers,” said Gomila. “Now we can take the graph and put the games anywhere.”

Since we spoke to Gomila in March, he says that Heyzap has partnered with several large massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) and other casual and social developers, but the new partnerships aren’t ready to be announced yet. You can also find a bit more on Heyzap’s plans in our interview with Gomila.

Other backers in the round included Hitforge and two angel investors.

[Editor's Note: The following article was published on Inside Facebook and contains videos excerpted from Inside Facebook Gold, our membership service tracking Facebook's business and growth around the world. Learn more about our complete data and analysis offering here.]

“Fundamentally there’s a pent-up demand within games in general, where users want to level up but don’t want to pay for it. This means that things like brand advertising and brand-sponsored initiatives convert extremely well… they allow users to level up without having to pay for it.”

Lisa Marino, Chief Revenue Officer at RockYou, spoke at Inside Social Apps on where social application monetization will see the biggest growth in the coming quarters, and who can stand to benefit most.

While today’s best monetizing social apps and games can expect between 3% and 5% of their total user base to engage in a transaction for virtual currency, most apps are seeing numbers well below.

To flip the figure, that means that 95% to 97% of users in social apps do not transact to obtain virtual currency. And, that’s for the best-performing apps and games. Lisa Marino shares her insight on the formidable odds facing developers and advertisers in the Inside Social Apps panel on performance advertising.

A clip of the highlights from this presentation:

In her full interview, Lisa Marino shares her forward-looking projections on specific areas for improvement and growth in social app monetization in the coming quarters, and how developers and brand advertisers alike can get the most out of the offer wall.

Marino’s full interview covers:

* Why offers still have lots of growth ahead, both for developers and for brand advertisers
* A detailed look characterizing the “next generation of offers,” including direct deals, fraud reduction, better user experience, and new brand opportunities
* How brand advertisers can get involved in the untapped market of social games

This interview, and exclusive Q&A, were conducted backstage at Inside Social Apps 2010. The full video series is available through Inside Facebook Gold.

To date, most games on mobile devices, especially for the iPhone, have been stand-alone applications that are distributed through a centralized point, like Apple’s App Store. MocoSpace, a mobile social network wants to provide an alternative, MocoSpace Games, on its own platform.

MocoSpace claims 12 million users and has been in operation for several years, so it’s hardly an unknown. The company appears to have been fairly successful at creating an online community that is, for the smaller number of mobile web users, somewhat proportionate to regular web counterparts like MySpace.

So it’s interesting that the company is mirroring web social networks like MySpace and Hi5 in turning to games. At the moment, it says it has a million users of its available single-player games, but the new focus is to be on virally spread social games.

Any new games available on MocoSpace — the first of which, pictured at right, will be available in July — will forgo downloads, being available instead through the mobile browser.

This isn’t the first we’ve heard of browser-based games for mobile; the new Android build, Froyo, is supposed to handle Flash well, which would mean that thousands of casual and social games would suddenly become viable on mobile devices.

The problem is that app downloads actually work quite well, especially for Apple. But Android’s store has so far been panned by some developers, so it’s possible that browser-based games could gain a foothold on that platform.