It will come as no surprise to anyone that has been reading the tech news that FrontierVille, the newest game from Zynga, is at the top of this week’s list of Facebook gainers by daily active users. The company released metrics yesterday claiming five million DAU in just two weeks, as well as 10 million created homesteads, 550 million tasks completed, and several other stats. (We took note of the growth on Monday.)

The catch is that Zynga’s claim of five million DAU is likely only technically correct. When a game first launches, its brand-new users are counted as DAU — after all, they used the application within the past day. But, inevitably, a number of these new users never come back. The standard percentage of DAU out of all monthly active users is between 20 and 30 percent for most games; FrontierVille’s still comes in at over 50 percent, a portion that will likely fall as the player base matures. Of course, if the game continues growing like it has been, both the DAU and MAU counts will end up far higher than they are today.

But even without the nice, round number of five million, FrontierVille’s growth has still been fantastic. Facebook’s own public stats, captured below by AppData, show the new game capturing many times the new DAU of the next-closest app:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	FrontierVille	4,430,143	+3,178,204	+253.86
2.	Gift Creator	298,049	+295,524	+11,703.92
3.	Birthday Cards	1,037,891	+246,221	+31.10
4.	Restaurant City	2,784,088	+149,633	+5.68
5.	EA SPORTS FIFA Superstars	554,798	+123,813	+28.73
6.	Ninja Saga	1,082,210	+120,269	+12.50
7.	Baking Life	481,087	+66,957	+16.17
8.	Fashion World	255,581	+62,952	+32.68
9.	Evony	118,502	+61,736	+108.76
10.	Hug Me	149,816	+57,165	+61.70
11.	Monster World	205,946	+56,279	+37.60
12.	Zoo Kingdom	92,654	+49,221	+113.33
13.	Name Analyzer	62,546	+43,585	+229.87
14.	JibJab	43,983	+42,231	+2,410.45
15.	Mall World	648,051	+40,279	+6.63
16.	Pool Master	218,313	+37,205	+20.54
17.	GooBox – Jeux Gratuits	338,719	+35,325	+11.64
18.	Crazy Cow Music Quiz	209,425	+33,350	+18.94
19.	Bola	696,509	+31,382	+4.72
20.	Jumping Dog	64,756	+31,379	+94.01

Restaurant City, an older game by Electronic Arts, is very slowly declining over time; we often see large apps in its position temporarily recover DAU. Below it is EA SPORTS FIFA Superstars, by the same company, a soccer team management game that we expect to continue growing at least until mid-July, when the World Cup ends.

The two EA titles have picked up a significant number of DAU, but growth down the rest of the list is pretty average. Ninja Saga, the first of the rest, is impressive for its continued growth; most other games that were released last December have long since stopped gaining users. However, Saga is a bit deeper than the average game, with multiple RPG elements and some synchronous play.

Baking Life and Fashion World are, though released by two different developers, inseparable. The pair has been moving up and down the charts in tandem for about a month now. Fashion World is actually a bit newer, and thus smaller, but both games also share a concept, that of store management.

Despite the relative lack of turn-based strategy titles in mobile and social gaming, it’s a genre that lends itself well to those two platforms. So we were happy to find Attack and Destroy, a fairly new iPad (and iPhone) game from Appular that includes multiplayer modes and OpenFeint integration.

Attack and Destroy is about as simple as the title suggests. Using three special forces units, players work toward the enemy stronghold at the far side of a top-down map, all the while protecting their own base. This setup is reminiscent to Digital Chocolate’s epic Facebook app, NanoStar Siege, but at a much more simplified level. However, while simplicity is often a good thing in mobile games, it tends to work against Appular in this particular case because of drastically limited strategies and overly simplistic mechanics and levels.

Each unit comes with a pair of abilities and is in one of four classes: Grunt, Sniper, Scout, and Engineer. In short, Grunts are siege type characters, taking and dishing out damage (particularly to buildings). Snipers have long range, but are slow moving. Scouts are fast and move great distances, but have, supposedly, low damage. And last, Engineers are defensive in that they can build seemingly limitless static turrets, but are fairly weak themselves.

Every match is broken up into a set number of turns, each of which consists of a planning and execution stage. In the former, users select what units will use what special ability (i.e. the Sniper can turn invisible, while the Scout can run extremely fast), and draw a path to where they want them to go. As the path is drawn, a cone representing line of sight appears, and shows where the unit can shoot. Moving units (except the Sniper, who must be stationary) will attack anything within that cone.

The idea is to reach the enemy stronghold and destroy it before running out of the allowed number of turns. The problem is that, aside from the Scout, none of the units move very far per turn, and it takes three to four turns just to walk them to the other end, which must be repeated if they die.

This is where the headache begins. Just having a unit die doesn’t seem like it would be the end of the world, as a helicopter will pick them up and drop them back at your base to revive. But the wounded unit will be out of commission for an extra turn, which feels like a lot in the 15 or so turns allowed to destroy the enemy base. Adding to the potential for disaster, units take damage just from shooting the enemy base — so if you get there with low health, you’re out of luck. Also, the average single player match takes about 15-20 minutes, but running out of turns means complete failure and a restart, which feels like too much of a punishment. In the purely defensive missions, which only require that you survive until the turns run out, the game is so easy it becomes boring.

Occasionally, players also get a special power to call down an air strike that will take out the enemies in its path. At those times, Attack and Destroy becomes a bit more forgiving in both its attack and defend modes, and allows you to progress without dealing with less enemies for a turn or two. Unfortunately, the game likes to put landmines everywhere, so by the time you reach the enemy base, you have low health and die after a couple shots.

Unfortunately, in addition to these irritants it doesn’t feel like there is any real strategic value to be had in Attack and Destroy. The individual special abilities don’t really feel like they do much, and with narrow maps, so few units, and everyone having, potentially, the same types of units, it really feels more a game of luck and who gets more critical hits. Granted, players chooses what three units they will use, but other than the Sniper, in general, and the laying of turrets by the Engineer, they just don’t feel different enough. A perfect example is a Scout doing roughly the same damage as a Grunt.

The other reason strategy feels weak is because things tend to die pretty quickly. Everything is more a tactical reaction to the immediate situation rather than a truly thought out plan.

Thankfully, Attack and Destroy makes up for some of its shortcomings in the multiplayer department. Between Bluetooth and same-device synchronous multiplayer, the game does have the potential to be a lot more fun that it is in single player. Competition and human intelligence make the game more interesting as other people not only become more creative in both strategy and tactics, but unlike AI, make more blatant mistakes to exploit. Additionally, the multiplayer modes have 999 turns as opposed to just a handful.

The game is also socially enabled on the OpenFeint network. As per usual for such games, this means sharable achievements and various leaderboards. Those are nice additions, but Attack and Destroy also feels like it could work nicely with asynchronous multiplayer — either through turns and notifications or more passively, as in NanoStar Siege (where players set up defensive AI themselves).

Additionally, there is a Challenge Mode that can be unlocked, but doing so requires completion of the nine single player missions. Honestly, it may not seem like much, but with the overly simplistic strategic features, slogging through single player is actually very boring to do.

Overall, Attack and Destroy has a great concept but an unfortunate lack of variety and overly simplistic mechanics. Tactically, the game comes off as alright, but even strategy enthusiasts may not find it worth the $1.99 price tag (though if you do wish to buy it, the increased screen real estate on the iPad makes for a much better experience). All the same, the multiplayer and social integrations do help, even if not enough to carry the rest of the title. Long story short, Attack and Destroy is a game that’s going to need a few more updates before it’s truly worth while.

Earlier today on Inside Facebook, we published an exclusive interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in which he talked about the future of Facebook and its surrounding ecosystem.

More specifically, Zuckerberg shared thoughts on the application platform, developers, games, Credits, Twitter and more. Below is a small excerpt that game developers may find interesting — but feel free to head over to our sister blog for the whole interview.

Justin Smith: What’s the state of the platform right now, in terms of the alignment of incentives between developers and Facebook and users, compared to where it was just after the Platform launched a couple of years ago, and where you want it to be?

Mark Zuckerberg: There’s two parts of the Platform – there’s canvas and then everything outside of Facebook. The focus now is actually the latter – Connect and everything we’re doing with social plugins. We have an all hands meeting later today and I was just told that Connect is now on 1 million sites. That’s definitely an increasing focus, and the last two f8′s have been around that. But I think what you’re asking is about the canvas part.

There are two ways that apps get usage that really define the character of the application. One way is viral distribution – spreading to new people. The other is reengagement. Early on, the viral strength was so much, but there were really no channels for reengagement. So people were using viral channels to reengage people, and you basically had apps that were growing very quickly, and their best way to get a good user count was to get new users and churn through them. That really optimizes for apps that are very viral instead of apps that are high quality and that people want to reengage. So we intentionally weakened the viral channels recently, and intentionally strengthened reengagement with emails, so that there will be better apps. It’s going to be a long process, but I think it’s going reasonably well.

One of the things we did recently was rebalance around games. A lot of users like playing games, but a lot of users just hate games, and that made it a big challenge, because people who like playing games wanted to post updates about their farm or frontier or whatever to their stream. They want all their friends to see their updates, and they want to get all their friends’ updates, but people who don’t care about games want no updates. So we did some rebalancing so that if you aren’t a game player you’re getting less updates.

One of our goals that we have is to make it so that you have just as good of a chance to build a good game if you’re a standalone game shop as if you’re a part of a bigger conglomerate, like Zynga or EA. That is a long term thing, to make sure the market stays competitive around this. CrowdStar has grown pretty quickly in the last 6 months, from very small to now pretty big. That to me shows that it’s definitely not a one company market, and that’s what we’re looking for. A lot of what we’re working on is can a small company succeed in the space.

JS: What do you think about how big the games business has become on the platform? You told me a couple of years ago soon after the Platform launched that you weren’t really thinking about games when you built the Platform.

MZ: I was surprised, I was surprised about games. I had a conversation with some folks at Apple at one point, and they were surprised that games was the big thing on the iPhone too. I also heard anecdotally that the people making the first PC operating systems were surprised that games were that big too. So I think people build platforms for utilitarian purposes and then get surprised that games are a killer app, so I don’t think it’s uncommon. But clearly a lot of people like them.

Someone once wrote that I don’t like games, and I think that’s pretty silly. I don’t spend a lot of time playing games myself, but it’s really cool as a first proof example of an industry that’s getting completely disrupted by the whole social movement. All the dynamics of how you play the game, getting neighbors, trade with people, do tasks with people to more efficiently use your resources. It’s the first place where someone completely wove in social dynamics into the dynamics of the industry, and it works really well. The early games like Jetman and Boggle and things like that weren’t that social, but now when you hear gaming companies talk about the next generation of games that they’re creating, everything is about integrating the social stuff more and more deeply into the game.

Now, there are companies like Zynga, EA/Playfish, CrowdStar, but then there’s a Facebook version of Civilization as well, so it’s going in both directions. The Civ game is your traditional high quality game, but the big question there is whether they leverage social dynamics enough. The risk for them is that it might just end up being a good traditional game with very little social integration.

JS: One of the questions that people I talk to have these days is what role Credits will have in the future of the company. How important is Credits in terms of your overall product priorities, do you think it will succeed, and how important will it be in terms of revenue?

MZ: It makes sense that there should be one currency. If I go play a CrowdStar game right now and get Credits there, I can’t go use those Credits in a Zynga game, so that kind of sucks. One of the biggest inefficiencies in buying virtual goods is all the friction of having to take your credit card out, so having one store of [virtual currency] that you can use everywhere is both good for users and good for all the apps.

The other thing about Credits from our business perspective is that payments and Credits is a significantly lower margin business than ads. Ads are 20%, 30%, 40%. A lot of people are skeptical of when we say we are doing this primarily for the developer ecosystem, but that’s really how we think about it. A lot of the apps so far are games, a lot of games monetize a lot better through virtual goods than through ads, and a big goal for us is to build this level ecosystem. So if Zynga or any one player can allow cross payments within their games, but that doesn’t extend to other games, then that ends up being a big barrier to entry for other startups. Making it so that there is one currency that people can take everywhere levels the playing field a bit, which is good.

We want to make it as easy as possible for users to build up a liquidity of Credits themselves, so we’re planning on pouring all the money that we make on Credits back into things like different offers or cards that people can buy in stores, to lubricate the economy so people will buy more stuff in apps. Overall we think it’s better for everyone for us to be in that place. Now if we fail, we fail, and someone else will succeed. But I think that over the long term this will end up being a pretty valuable thing.

> Continue reading on Inside Facebook

[Editor's Note: The following stats are excerpted from Inside Facebook Gold, our membership service tracking Facebook's business and growth around the world. Click here to learn more about our complete data and analysis offering.]

Today, we revisit growth and demographics stats for Facebook’s top languages.

Facebook’s user base has become increasingly international since the site launched its first non-English version in February of 2008. Back when Facebook was still the English-only social network, site localization turned out to be an important force in driving Facebook’s traffic growth in locales around the world.

Now, the United States’ 125 million users currently account for just a third to a quarter of the social network’s total. That portion will fall even further by the end of the year as other regions, especially Europe and Asia, expand further.

While growth within specific countries is an important metric — one that we examine in depth in the Facebook Global Monitor Report — an equally vital measurement is which languages are actually being used most often. The results aren’t always what one might expect; for instance, many users across the world load the English version of Facebook, even when their own languages are available.

We track Facebook’s 15 most used languages, which account for about 90 percent of all users, as part of Inside Facebook Gold.

Below is an excerpt showing the top 10:

Since we looked last month, seven of the ten languages in the sample added users. English, including both the American and British standards, saw the largest growth, adding just over 10 million new users in the past month.

Spanish appears to have grown at a somewhat slower rate, adding less than two million speakers — a surprising fact, since Latin America added well over three million new monthly active users to Facebook in March. There is, of course, the Portuguese-speaking country of Brazil to account for, while users in the other countries may be choosing English to interact with applications or friends abroad.

French, the next language following Spanish, is only a third of its size. But in combination with two other major European languages, German and Italian, French offers both developers and advertisers a good reason to consider localizing for Europe. Portuguese might be included in this group, but over half of its users on Facebook are actually in Brazil. Still, in all, the various continental European languages within the top 15 (not all are shown here) now make up about 15 percent of Facebook’s userbase.

Below French, Turkish is maintaining its lead over Indonesian, despite the stronger growth of the latter country. Again, this is likely because many Indonesian users tend to choose English, while most Turkish users seem to stick with their native language. But Indonesia has almost three times the population of Turkey, so it should inch past within the next month or two.

The three languages that didn’t grow over the past month — but didn’t lose users either — were German, Chinese, and Arabic. Note that our measurement of Chinese includes both traditional and simplified usage, and spans several countries, including Taiwan, Singapore and Pacific Rim states like Malaysia; China itself has banned Facebook.

The chart below shows the percentage that each of these top ten languages represents out of the total Facebook audience:

Overall, the strongest growth among the language groups this month is coming from Europe, and we’re seeing developers (especially in gaming) work toward localizing their apps for that audience. However, Asia is gradually becoming more important, and should provide some interesting challenges; Asia’s audiences often skew much younger, with huge audiences in the 13 to 17 age range and very few users in older demographics.

The full breakdown of Facebook’s top 15 languages, including age, gender, and country splits by language, is only available through Inside Facebook Gold, our data membership service that also includes the monthly Global Monitor report on Facebook’s traffic growth around the world. To get access to the all the data we’re tracking, please see Inside Facebook Gold at gold.insidenetwork.com/facebook.

If 2009 is remembered as the year that casual gaming stormed social platforms, 2010 is quickly becoming the year that the industry started to mature. Facebook is getting more involved in the monetization ecosystem, last year’s hit games are fighting for their lives, and new developers and games are climbing the leaderboards. At the same time, the M&A ecosystem is alive and well, as larger players are consolidating smaller studios and teams, and large media companies and traditional game developers continue to plot their social gaming strategies.

Get the Annual Membership Get Annual Membership (Includes Report + 3 Additional Quarterly Issues): $2,495 OR Buy Single Report: $995

That’s why we’re excited to announce a new original study in our Inside Virtual Goods series that is exclusively focused on spending and usage patterns in the social gaming market, entitled Inside Virtual Goods: Spending and Usage Patterns of the Social Gaming Audience. It is being released for the first time today.

Most of the studies on player spending and usage patterns in social games over the last year have actually been conducted by industry vendors. Inside Virtual Goods: Spending and Usage Patterns of the Social Gaming Audience is our exclusive independent look at the virtual goods spending and behavior patterns of social game players on Facebook — data you won’t find anywhere else.

About the Report

Inside Virtual Goods: Spending and Usage Patterns of the Social Gaming Audience gives you an inside view of the market at this critical juncture in the intersection of social networking and online games.

We have surveyed nearly 2,000 players of social games on Facebook from around the world and across the demographic spectrum. Inside Virtual Goods: Spending and Usage Patterns of the Social Gaming Audience is the most in-depth independent survey of player behavior and spending patterns in the social gaming market.

What We Cover

1. Spending Habits and Payment Methods in Top Games – It’s easy to compare games based on audience numbers, but which games monetize better? What payment methods do players use most often in top games? We investigate how spending patterns compare across top social games.
2. Frequency of Play and Methods of Game Discovery - As Facebook cuts down on developer access to viral channels, designing an engaging and viral game is becoming both increasingly important and challenging. We investigate which games people play most frequently, and which methods of social game discovery are most effective for top games.
3. Demographic Differences by Region, Age, and Gender – While the social gaming market is becoming increasingly global, the audience is also becoming increasingly diverse by age and gender. How do different segments of the audience differ in terms of spending and usage patterns inside social games? We take an in depth look.
4. Brand Recall for Social Games – How important are brands, and how well can users identify developers of top games? We investigate brand recall amongst social game players.

See the full table of contents below:

Table of Contents

I. Methodology and Respondents

1. Introduction

• About Inside Virtual Goods
• About the Authors
• Survey Objectives

2. Research Methodology

• Target Population
• Respondent Acquisition Method
• Survey Structure
• Potential for Bias

3. Survey Respondents

• Description of Total Respondent Population

II. Overall Results

4. Favorite Game

• Distribution of Favorite Game
• Frequency of Play
• Favorite Game Discovery
• With Whom Do You Play?
• Spending on Favorite Game

5. Payments

• Frequency of Payment Methods

6. Play Patterns, Spending, and Brand Recall for Top Games

• Frequency of Play in Top Games
• Spending in Top Games
• Aided Brand Recall for Top Games

III. Demographic Differences in Usage Patterns and Monetization

7. Regional Differences

• Game Discovery and Spending
• Favorite Game
• Payment Types

8. Age and Gender Differences

• Who are the Social Gaming “Whales”?
• Spend Across Games
• Analyzing the Top Two Games: FarmVille and Pet Society

Index of Charts and Graphs

• 1.1 Survey Respondents by Region
• 1.2 Survey Respondents by Age
• 1.3 Survey Respondents by Gender
• 4.1 Distribution of Favorite Game
• 4.2 Frequency of Play of Favorite Game
• 4.3 Method of Discovery of Favorite Game
• 4.4 Who Players Play With
• 4.5 Monthly Spending on Favorite Game
• 5.1 Frequency of Payment Methods
• 6.1 Frequency of Play in Top Games
• 6.2 Spending in Top Games
• 6.3 Aided Brand Recall Rates for Top Games
• 7.1 Method of Discovery of Favorite Game By Region
• 7.2 Who Players Play With By Region
• 7.3 Monthly Spending on Favorite Game By Region
• 7.4 Favorite Game By Region
• 7.5 Most Popular Payment Types By Region
• 7.6 Frequency of Offer Use By Region
• 7.7 Frequency of PayPal Use By Region
• 7.8 Frequency of Credit Card Use By Region
• 7.9 Frequency of Mobile Phone Use By Region
• 8.1 Top Spenders by Age
• 8.2 Top Spenders By Gender
• 8.3 Top Spenders By Region
• 8.4 Number of Games on Which a Player Spends More Than $25
• 8.5 Frequency of Top Spending By Game and By Gender
• 8.6 Proportion of Top Spenders Who Report Spending on a Given Gam
• 8.7 FarmVille Top Spenders by Age
• 8.8 Pet Society Top Spenders by Age
• 8.9 FarmVille Top Spenders by Region
• 8.10 Pet Society Top Spenders by Region
• 8.11 FarmVille Top Spenders by Gender
• 8.12 Pet Society Top Spenders by Gender

Appendix

• Survey Questions and Response Rates
• Related Companies

More Data, More Actionable Insights

In 2009, social games began to show what kind of value can be created on top of social networks. 2010 will be an even more important year.

Social gaming, powered by virtual goods, is this year’s industry to watch. If you’re involved, or are considering jumping in, Inside Virtual Goods will be one of your most important tools.

One year of original data and exclusive in-depth reports delivered on a quarterly basis is $2,495 and contains:

• A detailed overview of the current state of the industry
• Specific estimates on market size by segment
• Diagnosis of key opportunities and issues by segment

Get The Annual Membership

Get Annual Membership (Includes Report + 3 Additional Quarterly Issues): $2,495

OR Buy Single Report: $995

The one year subscription is US $2,495 and includes three quarterly updates on key developments in the space, including future editions of our annual reports, Inside Virtual Goods: The US Virtual Goods Market 2009-2010 and Inside Virtual Goods: The Future of Social Gaming 2010.

Or, you can download just this report. The price is US $995.

It goes without saying, that you tend to see a lot of the same type of game nowadays. Revised old concepts and clones tend to be safer, but more often than not, it’s the small folks that break that mold. Such an app comes from a single guy, Matt Rix, this time around, with a terribly addictive puzzle title for the iPhone called Trainyard. It’s a $1.99 app, that combines simple path-drawing mechanics with timing, planning, and color. Married with some simple, and non-intrusive social features, Trainyard is an app that has very little to complain about.

Essentially, the goal of the game is to make it through well over 100 puzzles by getting all trains from Point A to Point B. Early on, the game is simple enough: Players get one starting terminal and one goal terminal and draw a path to get there. However, all trains and terminals and goals have their own color, thus only a train of the same color may enter the goal safely. Also note that paths are not as free-form as they are in other path-drawing apps (i.e. Flight Control). Each section of path is set within a grid space and will either be a straight or corner piece.

It’s all fairly straightforward and intuitive, not to mention very, very easy for a good third of the puzzles. Despite the slow ramp up time, once you make your way to the more intermediate and advanced puzzles, Trainyard begins to take on its unique shape.

To start things off, once all track is laid, users launch the trains, which all go at the same time. As you’d expect, later levels will have more than one train, and players must warry on when they or if they should collide, but more on why in a moment. Frankly, it’s easy to prevent if you need to as you can draw separate paths from the separate train terminals to the separate goals. At least at first.

Eventually, rocks start appearing that the trains can crash into, which forces users to make multiple trains of different colors use the same track. Moreover, many puzzles will have only a single goal terminal that must accept X amount of Y color for a puzzle to be solved. This is indicated by a number of colored lights on the terminal. This means that if there are four green lights and four blue lights, players must ensure that four of each color reach the end safely.

Remember the color? The way that trains use the same track is that each grid space can hold two pieces – a primary and secondary track. Without going into the fine details, if you launch two trains at the same time, and they combine where these two tracks are, they merge into one. Now, for trains of the same color, this is no big deal. But often the goal will accept fewer trains than are being launched — as indicated by a number of lights on the starting terminal — and thus you must combine them. At more advanced levels, the goal might require, say, a purple train. The only problem is, you have only red and blue trains. Well, now you have to build a track from Point A to Point B, and combine the two colors to make purple. The same works in reverse. If you combine the two and the goal only accepts red and blue, you will fail.

As you can begin to see, all of these very simple rules begin to create a very complex set of results, and in the case of many puzzles, there are any number of ways to solve them. In fact, this is where the game’s social elements come into play.

After completing a puzzle, users can actually post to their Facebook feed or tweet to their Twitter account their solutions. It’s not an earth-shattering feature, but considering the difficulty of some of the puzzles — and if you have friends that play — they are great additions. Oh? How do friends know the solution? When you post a solution to one of your social networks, it includes a nice video showing how you solve it.

Truth be told, there really isn’t anything significant to complain about with Trainyard. It’s wonderfully creative, easy to learn, and has any number of possible solutions to its puzzles. Moreover, the rules are simple enough to create a near infinite number of new levels for future updates, or even potentially purchasable level packs. If there was any one issue to be had, it’s that the game takes a bit too long to really get started, and the tutorial levels get very old, very quick. Overall, however, for $2, its an app that is well worth checking out.

Some people use marijuana to make everyday routines and recipes a little more interesting. A group of anonymous developers have humorously appropriated the plant for the now-commonplace farming genre on Facebook. Their app, Pot Farm, tasks your hippie avatar with growing the somewhat illegal crop virtually — without getting busted by a virtual forest ranger.

The app is essentially like any other farming game on Facebook: plant crop, grow crop, harvest crop, sell crop. However, there are three types of marijuana plants, classified based on the level of “Protection” that they can grant.

The basic, first plant, is hemp which has a neutral protection level of zero, meaning it doesn’t affect much (just like real hemp). However, more illicit, and by extension, often more profitable crops such as the “Time Warp” grant negative protection.

Since growing such crops are illegal (unless you have a medical license, in some states), there is a non-player character, “Ranger Dick,” who can come and confiscate your freshly grown plants. What entices him to show up are the negative protection plants, which are officially called “Ranger Bait.” Should you be in the negatives for protection, you need to make sure you come back and harvest your crops right away before they get taken away.

Now, this feature would be a little bit drab in its current form, so to enhance it in a sort of strategic, balancing kind of way, the developers integrated the third type of plant. These are crops that are “Ranger Approved” and grant positive protection. The idea is to keep neutral or postive protection levels overall.

Pot Farm also surpasses most farming games here, by making its décor do something more than just look pretty. Many items offer protection, from subtle fir trees that hide your little operation, to guard dogs and rope snares. Either way you choose, it’s nice to having an added reason to purchase decorations beyond aesthetics. Additionally, there are any number of other items, dubbed “contraptions,” that can be unlocked at later levels such as a popcorn machine or makeshift brewery. Considering that you can grow plants like corn and hops, in all likelihood, these will become another means of making money beyond selling the crops themselves, adding yet another layer of functionality.

The style of this app also merits a mention — it plays on stereotypes about hippies to an unrealistic degree, that will be especially funny to people who don’t know real hippies, or real marijuana growers. On the downside, the visuals are going to be very hit or miss with most players. The almost top-down, copy-pasted grid look the game has to it is not nearly as vibrant or interesting looking as you often see in other, fully isometric, farming games.

Similarly, the game’s social features feel the same as every other farming game on the market, with options to add neighbors, send gifts, track progress, and so on. They work for what they are, but it’s too bad that Pot Farm didn’t keep up its creativity in its social aspects — especially considering marijuana’s real-world social cachet.

When it comes down to it, the only real concern worth mentioning about Pot Farm is its potential to offend anyone outside a certain niche audience. Considering the wide breadth of users that games such as FarmVille or Farm Town attract, the concept behind Pot Farm may actually be its limiting factor in the long run — although one assumes the developers are well aware of this. The title has so far managed to bring in over a million monthly active users despite its theme, so its unique theme is probably working in its favor, too.

Seven months after raising its initial $43 venture capital million round, social gaming company Playdom has taken on another $33 million, according to TechCrunch. Three new funds also took part this time around: Bessemer Venture Partners, Disney’s Steamboat Ventures, and New World Ventures.

The new funding shows that Playdom is keeping pace with Zynga, which also raised a large round last November and another earlier this month. The only difference is in the amounts; Zynga’s latest funding was for up to $147 million. However, Playdom’s smaller raise still counts as a very large when compared to the average for social gaming startups.

Interestingly, TechCrunch was told by Playdom that the new round was taken at the same $260 pre-money million valuation that the company had in November — meaning that this new money is part of an existing round. Meanwhile, though, the company has more than doubled its number of monthly active users since November, and proved its market strategy with the release of Social City, which quickly became the first successful city building simulation from a large developer. One might expect its valuation to have gone up accordingly.

Of course, Playdom is struggling with the same overall decline from a spring peak in MAU and DAU that Zynga is. Over the past month, the company has dipped to 36.2 million MAU:

We’ll add any more details Playdom shares later. For now, it’s worth pointing out that Playdom is actively pursuing its own fundings and acquisitions. Here are the ones we know of, from the last two months:

• May: Acquired the well-known developer Acclaim
• April: Acquired Merscom, a North Carolina developer, in part to help localize games
• April: Acquired Three Melons, another Argentinean developer
• March: Invested $5 million in MetroGames, an Argentinean developer
• March: Acquired OffBeat Creations, creator of Super Farkle

That list alone makes it clear that Playdom is focusing strongly on international markets, especially for the Spanish language, which follows English as Facebook’s second most popular. The company has also said as much during various presentations and interviews.

We also heard, earlier this year, that MySpace owner News Corp was interested in buying Playdom. However, like earlier speculations that Playdom might hold a 2010 IPO, the buyout rumors are unlikely to materialize for the moment, in light of the new funding.

They’ve done it again: with FrontierVille, a new mix of the farming and city building genres set in pioneer days, Zynga has added some 7.4 million monthly active users to its total. That’s in only 12 days since the game’s launch, with the most significant growth taking place over just the last four days.

Zynga became the world’s top social gaming company for a reason: it’s masterful at growing an audience. However, FrontierVille’s huge success also comes at an interesting time for the company. Last Friday, it hit a milestone of another sort, dipping below 200 million monthly active users for the first time since it passed the mark last November.

On Saturday and Sunday, Zynga recovered, inching back over 210 million MAU. But the company has shed users steadily for several months now, a fact that suggests its MAU could sink further yet.

In the past, we’ve also pointed out that Zynga’s daily active user count is more stable than MAU — an important point, since DAU is a more significant measurement of how many serious players a game has. But while Zynga’s DAU has held steady at times, it’s also declining over the long term; in February Zynga’s DAU peaked at over 70 million, while today it’s around 50 million.

Zynga is often the target of criticism within the gaming community. However, its success rate with players is not at fault here. The company has found hits in two thirds of its releases this year. The thing is that there have, in fact, been only three releases: FrontierVille, Treasure Isle (currently its third-largest property) and Poker Blitz, which never took off, but also wasn’t heavily promoted.

That’s a rate of one game every two months, assuming Zynga doesn’t release another before the end of June (we have no expectation that it will). By contrast, Zynga released at least one new game a month in 2009, including its mega-hit, FarmVille. With bimonthly releases like Treasure Isle, which topped out near 30 million MAU, Zynga’s traffic could still stabilize at over 100 million MAU; but Isle is just one data point.

At its new, slower pace, Zynga resembles the rest of the social gaming world. We’ve seen fewer releases from most of the major developers this year. Development is becoming a more rigorous, expensive process, and since Facebook’s notification changes, each release has a harder time becoming successful — meaning even more investment to ensure that each release does well.

While it’s possible that a game like FrontierVille could blow past Treasure Isle to become the new FarmVille, capturing more than 60 million players and bringing Zynga back to its previous heights, it’s more likely that we’ll see both Zynga and its competitors pursuing other ways to grow traffic this year.

Those may include localization for foreign-language markets, new markets like Japan and China, new platforms like the iPhone, and acquisitions of smaller publishers. We’ve actually seen Zynga work toward each of these goals, most recently with a huge investment from Japan’s Softbank and the announcement that it would put FarmVille on the iPhone and iPad.

It’s also probable that Zynga, along with its peers, is constantly learning how to better monetize users, meaning that even declining traffic numbers could still return higher profits to the company. However, without being able to look at the company’s balance sheets, it’s impossible to tell whether it’s preserving last year’s presumably high profit margins.

As Facebook continues to experiment with its universal virtual currency, Credits, some developers continue to tell us that the product is going to lose them money — even as others say the opposite.

One issue is the flat 30% fee that Facebook takes from all Credits transactions on third party applications. But there other potential costs, that some in the industry say increases the total percentage to around 50% of their revenue, versus what they are bringing in now.

Facebook, however, believes that Credits will be a net win for developers, and not just a big new revenue stream for itself. Before we get into the details of what the real costs (and benefits) of Credits might be, here’s some more background.

The Place for Credits

The virtual goods market has boomed around the world in the past decade, mainly in Asia — but Facebook quickly becoming a leading platform for growth of companies based on the virtual goods model after it launched its developer platform in late May of 2007. Many people who use third party social games and applications, it turns out, are willing to pay for digital products in order to do things like win a competitive game or more beautifully decorate a virtual space.

This year, we expect the virtual goods revenue model in social games to bring in around $835 million within the US alone, with most of the money coming from Facebook apps. See our Inside Virtual Goods report for more research on the market.

For most of the history of the platform, Facebook has not taken any fee from developers on its platform. When it launched the platform, the company even told developers that they would be able to keep all of the revenue they generated from applications.

> Continue reading on Inside Facebook.