Rather than go the typical route of either (a) cloning the popular app Doodle Jump or (b) attempting to emulate directional-pad or arcade buttons on the touch screen, a French developer by the name of Bulky Pix has created a quality new platform-style game together with Artik Entertainment and Fishing Cactus.

The recently-launched and very original OpenFeint-enabled game is called RollOut, and it takes a more Lemmings-like approach and replaces virtually all avatar control with a more innovative scheme.

The player avatar Wabba, a lovable mixture of Pac-Man and Sonic the Hedgehog, begins by rolling continuously from left to right, with the level looping when he reaches the end. However, in a unique twist, there are a myriad of scrolling (right to left) icons on the screen that can control his movements, and it is these that the player moves to influence Wabba’s path. As simple as it sounds, this easy-to-learn game comes off as refreshingly new, with just the right touch of puzzle-solving.

Each level is a simple layout of platforms, scrolling icons, other environmental “hazards,” plus a psychedelic-looking exit portal. The goal is to guide Wabba from his entrance point to the exit portal located somewhere on the higher platforms.

The icon “controls” represent movement mechanics. If they point up, and Wabba touches them, he will jump up; if they point right (the direction he is rolling), they will make him move faster. There are other icons that add to the depth, including the ability to slow down and even stop. Here’s the catch: all of these control icons scroll at precise and slow intervals, so the player must touch the screen and move the icons into Wabba’s path in order to allow him to reach higher platforms. This creates a tremendous challenge in regards to both timing and planning.

It’s also worth noting that while the controls are being moved, it’s not possible for Wabba to interact with them, so choices must be made quickly and accurately. Any mistakes, and you may find yourself back at the bottom of the level.

To add an additional challenge, there are also a number of environmental “hazards”. Not all of these elements are negative, but each has its own unique role to play in the course of each level. They include moving elevators that stop Wabba’s movement completely when he rolls atop them (at least until it has taken him up to a higher platform), platforms that only appear when Wabba is going a certain speed, and areas that disable all icons while Wabba is inside them.

The challenge added by this icon disabling zones is fantastic. It adds a level of difficulty that requires true finesse to accomplish. However, it can also lead to frustration, as sometimes the jumps are so precise make it nearly impossible to get Wabba to hit an icon as he traverses a tiny gap between two disabling zones; additionally, the game does not always appear to recognize that he is, indeed, in the right place during the time allotted. It’s not an enormous issue, and it can be worked around, but it does get annoying from time to time.

But even this negative, in an odd way, can work in the player’s favor. RollOut is actually very forgiving when it comes to making jumps. So long as Wabba is even remotely on the edge of the platform and above it, he will roll his way onto it.

Despite a few minor irritants, RollOut’s gameplay is a great deal of fun, creating a fine marriage between thoughtful puzzle solving and twitchy platforming reactions. Moreover, as the game has no way to actually die – if you fall, you merely try again within the endlessly repeating level – it is a great app for your average iPhone user.

The final layer to RollOut is its OpenFeint integration, which adds social mechanics to the game. Like many mobile, social platform-enabled titles, RollOut’s integration consists of mere achievements that you can share amongst your OpenFeint friends. It’s simple, yes, but it works for the game concept. Honestly, if there were any major social disappointment, it’s that the game notes Facebook and Twitter compatibility, but does not yet appear to be integrated anywhere (unless you count OpenFeint’s prompt to search for Twitter and Facebook friends). Future platformers would do benefit from spending more time on social features.

Overall, RollOut is a fantastically creative game that feels deceptively simple. Its combination of platform based mechanics and its slower paced, puzzle solving elements make it well worth the $0.99 price tag. Frankly, it’s a perfect title to kill some time when you’re on the go or just looking to procrastinate a little. Granted, it does fall a little short presentation-wise, and the social elements were a tad disappointing based on what the app’s page states as a feature — but all in all, compared to the excellent game play, these points are all things easily forgiven.

Social games have exploded on Facebook’s developer platform in the past few years, because they successfully combine social interactions and the virtual goods revenue model. Some social network rivals have followed suit by launching their own platforms for social game developers, with MySpace having the most success to date. And lately, service providers like Heyzap and Mochi Media have tried to make it easier for smaller sites to integrate social games by offering what amounts to their own platform layer.

Now, Viximo is quite logically trying its hand in this area, too.

The company already provides virtual economy services to help other web sites monetize virtual goods. Its new social gaming distribution service, called the Viximo Platform, promises developers a single implementation that will get their games working across all of its participating partners. Developers who have signed up already include Frosmo, IGG, Mob Science, Playtaki and Synapse Games. The total possible user base for the platform is 60 million users, according to the company, and includes partners like BlackPlanet, Multiply and Quepasa.

One conceptual catch, of course, is that the base value of social games comes from the existing social graph and communication channels available on a host site (otherwise, “social games” aren’t much different from casual games). There’s also the matter of how revenue is shared. While some larger developers, notably Zynga, have worked out their own distribution partnerships on other sites, Facebook’s sheer size and high engagement numbers continue to make it the focus for developers.

So how exactly is Viximo’s service going to work? We sent a few questions over to the company. Here’s what we got back.

Inside Social Games: What’s the revenue share on the virtual currency?

Viximo: Since Viximo works with premium partners only, not a self service system, the terms of its deals vary and are kept confidential at their partners’ request. We can say though that the game developer receives the largest share of the revenue.

ISG: What are specific ways that developers will have their games promoted?

V: Games are promoted through a variety of ways depending on the network. Common methods are email marketing campaigns to the sites users, interstitials on login, site home page placement, apps/games section placement, use of advertising space, cross promotion from other applications, among a variety of other methods. The amount of promotion leads to a critical mass of free users for every game.

ISG: How do you compare this service to others, like Heyzap.

V: Viximo’s distribution partners are all premium social networks typically between 3M – 20M users per month to provide the social context needed for social games. No long tail or content portal sites. Additionally, we integrate deeply into the social fabric of the site so game developers have easy access to the sites native social graph and viral channels (compared to posting notifications back to Facebook) which is vital for making social games thrive. Both lead to fast growth and higher revenue potential.

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

Today, we present recent findings on demographic breakdowns in Facebook’s top country markets around the world.

For years, we’ve observed Facebook capture the US market, demographic by demographic. We know that in the US, Facebook has slightly more female than male users, and that the site boasts a large percentage of users in the middle of the age spectrum, with plenty of users over 25.

But that’s just the US. Other markets look quite different. Now, with over 70% of Facebook’s nearly 500 million users in countries outside of the US, it’s time for the savviest developers and marketers to start digging in to demographic data for Facebook’s many other important markets.

The country market data outlined below is a selected sample of the full data overview, available through Inside Facebook Gold.

The United Kingdom

In the UK, Facebook’s second largest country market, we see a pretty even split by gender. Women outnumber men by just 2.2%.

For age demographics, the 26 – 34 age group rivals the 18 – 25 age group, and holds true across both genders. In the UK, there’s also a substantial number of users of both genders in the 35 – 44 age range, though women lead this age group by 2 percentage points.

43.5% of Facebook users in the UK are under 25. This is a substantial number, but of course the flip side is that well over half of all Facebook users in that country are over 25. In the US, 39% of Facebook users are under 25. Overall, across age and gender, it’s clear that the UK and the US share similar demographic profiles (see the most recent US demographic data we released last week).

Indonesia

In Facebook’s third largest country market, a completely different picture emerges.

Among Indonesian Facebook users, there are substantially more men than women, with men leading by 18.4% overall. Indonesian Facebook users trend younger, too. 45.2% of women are between the ages of 18 – 25, and 31.8% are between 13 – 17.

For men, 45.9% are between the ages of 18 – 25 and 23.5% are between 13 – 17.

Overall, users under 25 make up 72.5% of all Facebook users in that country, with more women in the younger categories than men.

But, men make up most of Facebook’s Indonesian users. What age group are do most of them fall into? A large percentage of men fall in to the 26 – 34 age group, with a sharp dropoff after that.

Notably, older demographics barely register a blip, with users over 35 making up just 8.9% of the total userbase.

Turkey

Like Indonesia, Facebook’s Turkish userbase is comprised of vastly more men than women. Of that country’s total Facebook population, 64.4% are men, while women make up just 35.6%. Turkey’s Facebook users are young, too. Among women, 18 to 25 year olds make up 40.5% while 13 to 17 year olds make up 23.2%. The total percentage of female users under the age of 25 is 63.7%. In Turkey, though, a significant number of female users are in the mid-range of ages, too, with 23.4% of female users falling in to the 25 to 24 age group. After that, the numbers decline sharply, with only 12.8% of the female userbase over the age of 35.

Among Turkish men, the younger groups are also big part of Facebook’s audience, but less so. 18 to 25 year olds make up 38.9% of the audience, while 13 to 17 year olds make up 17.6%. The 26 to 34 contingent is slightly larger with men, reaching 26.7%. 16.9% of the male total are over the age of 35.

Overall, Turkey’s Facebook demographics trends strongly male, but are more evenly split across age groups. Well over half of the total audience is under the age of 25, but the 25 to 44 age range makes a strong showing too.

France

When we get to France, the demographic data again resembles what we’re seeing in US. There are slightly more women than men on Facebook, but the difference is just a few percentage points. Male and female groups show nearly identical age distribution, and total audience numbers are distributed evenly across age groups in general.

A considerable 49.9% of Facebook’s French users are under the age of 25, but of course that also means that those over 25 make up 51.1%! In the US, Facebook is a mature market in many sense, with 38.2% of all users over the age of 35. While Facebook in France is not quite there, the site does appear to be popular with that age group. 25.7% of all French Facebook users are over the age of 35.

Of Facebook’s top 15 country markets around the world, the youngest country is Indonesia, which, as mentioned above, is also the company’s number 3 market globally. The country with the largest percentage of users above 35 is the United States, followed by Canada, the UK, and Spain.

More data at Inside Facebook Gold

The full data overview includes demographic breakdowns for all 15 of Facebook’s leading markets. It’s available as part of Inside Facebook Gold, our data membership service that also includes stats on Facebook’s global traffic growth, top app demographics, language adoption rates, user behavior, and more.

Location-based iPhone exercise application Skimble, from the developer of the same name, is taking some of the competitive elements from gaming and applying them as a means to get people up, out, and active.

Taking a similar approach to the game Booyah Society, where players could “level up in life,” earning achievements for real-world activities, Skimble grants players some fairly in-depth means to motivate themselves into being active and getting healthy, through points, contests, leaderboards, and more.

However, as interesting as all of it is, as a location-based app, its full potential depends partially on people using the app in your area. Not only this, but there is also the concern that Booyah Society did go the way of the dodo, until it was replaced with the successful MyTown.

So what exactly is Skimble? In short, it’s an app that can track up to 45 different physical activities, but it attempts to give users added motivation to push themselves and to get healthy through game-like and social mechanics. The latter element is the most “primal” of game elements, and it is the aspect of competition and high scores. For each activity a player completes, they earn one point and are tracked via global, friend, and regional (near where your iPhone’s GPS signal is) leaderboards.

As for the activities themselves, there is easily something for everyone: Cardio, running, weights, martial arts, surfing, horseback, and even BASE jumping. Depending on the type of activity, users will track how long they do it for, and if there is distance involved, they can input the number of miles, feet, kilometers, and so on. Additionally, other activities, such as aerobics, will allow you to input the type and level of difficulty of the workout.

There’s more to add about a good number of these activities too, and this is where some of the geo-location comes into play. For any exercise that requires you to be outside (running, skating, biking, etc.), you can use the GPS system to track where you go on an interactive Google Map. Then, you can name and save that path for you to either use later when offline or for other nearby users to try.

Skimble also has some other nice social features to account for as well. Whenever you finish an activity, you can post it to Twitter and Facebook, and since you can create a Skimble account with your Facebook account, that process is all the more simple. However, this is all just touting your accomplishments (and maybe trying to guilt friends into working out too), but exercise is all about motivation, and that’s something Skimble does not overlook.

True, the earning of scores and points is great, and the leaderboards are great motivators for competitive players, but incentives don’t stop there. Skimble actually has some nice contests for its users. Currently, every day that a user tracks at least one activity, they earn a contest entry for some random, monthly drawing. The prize at the moment is a set of gear from Mountain Hardwear. Beyond this, the app tracks all of the users’ progress based on when they exercise, what they’re doing, and how long they do it for, and let‘s them know when and by how much they improve by. Moreover, when you look at user updates from everyone using the app, that helps you get off your butt too.

Last but not least, users can even upload photographs, taken with their iPhone, of their activities as well. Unfortunately, you need to have an internet connection to do so, lest you have to pay for a “Pro” account which costs a monthly fee.

Truthfully, the biggest downside to Skimble is the volume of users within your area. It’s great that you can see what people are doing nearby, share paths, and even try to connect with people doing activities you love, but if no one in your region uses the app, the potential for Skimble is limited. That said, this was an early issue for Gowalla, Foursquare, and MyTown too at first, and look at how they took off.

Of course, Skimble is also very much like Booyah Society, a game that rewarded players for getting out and actually living life. The app, apparently, never did all that well, and got pulled from the App Store. Perhaps people just didn’t like the idea; perhaps it was the game itself; or perhaps physical activity is scary. Either way, it didn’t last. Nevertheless, Skimble is targeting athletes and highly active individuals, so with that targeted audience, things might work out differently.

Overall, Skimble is a fantastic application to have for anyone that likes to exercise. There is something for everyone, and the more you play around with it, the more cool nuances you discover you can track.

In the console gaming market, the new Western title Red Dead Redemption is single-handedly reviving the market. Could a Western-themed social game do the same on Facebook? Zynga thinks it’s worth a try, with a new game out today called FrontierVille.

In FrontierVille, players will take on the identity of a pioneer, trying to hack a living out of a wild plot of land and raise a family in the process. If that sounds a bit like Little House on the Prairie, that’s intentional on Zynga’s part; if it also sounds like Oregon Trail, that’s no accident, either.

Actually, Zynga’s new game doesn’t fit firmly into any category — something we’re seeing from more social game developers this year, in a sharp turn from 2009′s me-too spate of farm and fish games. There are, of course, heavy farming elements in FrontierVille. But there’s also a bit of city (or, at least, homestead) building, and another helping of exploration and discovery.

In short, it’s something for everyone — at least, Zynga hopes so. “One of the things that we were looking for was something that appeals to a broad range of people, ages and genders,” we were told by Brian Reynolds, the Zynga developer who built FrontierVille and, in a previous life, was lead designer for famed titles like Civilization II and Alpha Centauri.

So FrontierVille has ended up with an interesting array of features. Veteran FarmVille players happily planting crops may be surprised by a wandering bear; Treasure Isle aficionados can amass collections of virtual items. Perhaps the most interesting addition, though, is the idea of spouses.

As everyone who has studied early American history knows, each pioneer that headed out west had a sweetheart waiting back home for good news (one per pioneer, no less and no more). So Zynga has provided players with the same, a distant lover that can be corresponded with and sent gifts.

Following a successful courtship, players can then bring their new wife or husband to the homestead and get hitched. From there, it’s time to make babies — also a major facet of early American life. The more babies the better, since nothing suits growing children more than farm work. Eventually, says Reynolds, players can accumulate quite a clan, if they continue having children.

For this title, Zynga has stopped short of letting real players marry each other — the spouse, though it can be named after a real-life sweetheart, is strictly virtual. But the company is nevertheless also trying to encourage more collaboration between players.

As in other games, players can visit each other to help out or gain a benefit. But in FrontierVille, Zynga has expanded the range of options; players can cause each other’s crops to unwither, trim back the encroaching forest and help construct buildings. And unlike earlier games, they’ll actually see their friends’ avatars at work on the homestead.

Along with more ways to cooperate, Zynga has also added “hearts”, a sort of experience point that grows the “reputation” of players. With higher reputation, users will become more effective at helping out on others’ homesteads, hopefully leading to more regular cooperation.

For Zynga, this is an especially important point to get right, since Facebook’s notification changes earlier in the year hurt its ability to keep players engaged. With higher rewards for cooperation, players may be willing to interact more with their friends, thus creating a stronger community effect.

We’ll take another look at FrontierVille down the road if it seems to be doing well. But from here, that seems quite likely. Zynga’s release schedule has slowed down significantly this year, so making each title a success has become more important. And FrontierVille has also gotten a significant time investment, having been in development for at least a quarter; so it’s reasonable to expect that Zynga will be promoting the game heavily.

This Monday, we predicted that Hello City and My Empire, two new city-building games by CrowdStar and Electronic Arts, would be riding high by Friday. But the pair moved even faster than expected, landing on top of our Wednesday list of fastest-growing games by daily active users.

Granted, much of the DAU gain for these titles is still indeterminate — when new apps are growing rapidly, users who joined within the past day show up as DAU. But both games are also likely to be fairly sticky, meaning there’s also a degree of accuracy to their growth stats.

Here’s the AppData top 20 list:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Hello City	298,042	+289,986	+3,599.63
2.	Texas HoldEm Poker	5,756,880	+279,255	+5.10
3.	MindJolt Games	2,938,258	+243,403	+9.03
4.	My Empire	910,522	+224,404	+32.71
5.	Family Feud	1,474,872	+221,224	+17.65
6.	EA SPORTS FIFA Superstars	201,899	+187,650	+1,316.93
7.	phrases 4 fun	250,636	+180,628	+258.01
8.	Nightclub City	860,927	+176,004	+25.70
9.	Bejeweled Blitz	2,578,300	+168,308	+6.98
10.	Mafia Wars	4,808,424	+111,647	+2.38
11.	The Hardest Game of the World	107,498	+102,205	+1,930.95
12.	Games	545,480	+86,862	+18.94
13.	COLLAPSE!	177,887	+67,699	+61.44
14.	Baking Life	263,437	+66,358	+33.67
15.	Funfari	133,425	+66,213	+98.51
16.	Mall World	582,797	+64,826	+12.52
17.	YoVille	1,501,716	+64,016	+4.45
18.	Social Pang	77,247	+60,869	+371.65
19.	Temple of Mahjong 2	106,288	+59,389	+126.63
20.	德州撲克	625,328	+58,267	+10.28

Zynga’s Texas HoldEm Poker occupies the number two spot. This is a game that continues to impress; despite significant losses in most of Zynga’s other titles, HoldEm has held tight, losing only a tiny fraction of its monthly active users over the past month, and actually gained DAU.

MindJolt Games, also, is proving to unexpectedly resilient. The game portal’s DAU gains over the past week are representative of its month; since April 9th, it has gained an even million new DAU. However, some of the growth could be coming from active promotion of the game, and may disappear quickly in the future.

Moving down a bit, we find EA SPORTS FIFA Superstars, the new license-heavy soccer game from Electronic Arts. As with the city builders, it’s hard to tell just yet where its DAU will end up. But it’s up against a lot of competition; see our roundup of soccer games from yesterday for more.

Finally, we’ll point out Nightclub City, a club management game that has done rather well over the past couple months. It has been out long enough now for its growth numbers to steady out, giving us a look at its DAU as a percentage of MAU: a healthy 25 percent, significantly above most other games.

Over the past couple of months, Google’s Android mobile operating system has made significant headway, both in the public and in the tech world, with reports showing Android sales catching up to the iPhone. Yet we’ve also seen multiple sources note that Android has not succeeded on Facebook.

That judgment has been based on the stats for Facebook’s Android smartphone app. At right, you can see Facebook’s own monthly active user measurement for Android, which led to the confusion. By appearances, the Facebook for Android app has only 68 monthly active users.

We’ve checked in with Facebook about the Android app, and gotten the real story: the mobile app has over six million MAU. In combination with the HTC Sense app, which is mostly used on phones with Android as an underlying platform, Android has well over seven million MAU on the social network.

This is significant not only for Facebook, which wants to encourage smartphone use, but as a measure for the overall smartphone market, in which sales numbers often must be estimated. Let’s see how the Android apps stack up against competing phones:

There’s actually a distinct possibility that Android has even more users on Facebook than we’re estimating, because Mobile, which you see above with almost 20 million users, is a catch-all app for feature phones. Any number of Android users could have set up to use this app instead.

> Continue reading on Inside Facebook.

Earlier this year, a now infamous talk by Jessie Schell, a game design professor at Carnegie Mellon, advanced the idea of game mechanics creeping into everything. The vanguard of that movement is here, and its name is BigDoor Media.

This morning, BigDoor announced a $5 million funding round led by the Foundry Group’s Brad Feld, who holds a Zynga board seat. BigDoor’s goal is to add game mechanics to everyday websites: virtual currencies and items, leader boards, badges and so forth. As in actual social games, the aim is to keep people coming back, the more often the better.

Bringing game mechanics to the rest of the web is hardly a new idea. Anyone who has used Digg is familiar with it, and companies like Bunchball have been advising major media companies on gameifying their websites for years.

This year offers a new inflection point for the web, though. Aside from Schell’s talk, marketers worldwide have taken notice of the sudden success of social games on Facebook, using viral features that could conceivably translate to websites.

In the past, most attempts to do so have failed, unless they were baked in from the beginning (as in the case of Digg). But BigDoor has a savvy set of investors and more tools at its disposal than similar companies have had in the past, including Facebook and smartphones.

We’d recommend Xconomy for more on the funding, and TechCrunch points out the somewhat seamy history of BigDoor’s founding duo, who ran Zango, which distributed adware, in the 90s — though the two long ago came clean, and have lessons to share as a result.

The latest addition to the social gaming gold rush is Friendster, the grandaddy of social networks. Over the past year or so we’ve already seen its many descendants take notice of Facebook’s success with games and make them a priority: MySpace, Hi5, Bebo, Tagged and so on.

Friendster’s inclusion of games isn’t entirely new; we wrote last October about its plan to emphasize games more. That began through the networks’ top navigation bar, which includes an apps category under the “Fun” tab — hardly the most aggressive placement. But in early April, Friendster also launched two in-house games built by MMOG Asia, called Boomz and War2.

Both of these new games get special placement under the Fun tab, and Friendster has also begun promoting them through email blasts. In something of a break from the usual social gaming mold, these two games are both fairly complex strategy titles.

Boomz, the first game, doesn’t even allow solo or asynchronous play. After creating an avatar, players go through a tutorial teaching them to hurl their weapon across the screen. Then it’s straight on to the full game mode, which centers around team combat, with awards and items being awarded to those who achieve certain goals. As you can see from the screenshot below, the game employs a rich anime graphical style.

Note that players can also get married on Boomz. That’s something we’ve seen in a number of other Asian games, but that rarely comes up in Western-oriented titles.

War2, the second game, is (very) loosely based on World War II and takes itself a little more seriously than Boomz, if only marginally so. If you’ve played online strategy titles like Evony — which is in turn derivative of titles like Civilization — the style and strategy-based gameplay of War2 should be easily recognizable.

Once players have created their town / military camp, it’s on to battling with other players, while continuing to work on training and building up their own resources. There are also alliances to join and, as in Boomz, “missions” that are roughly equivalent to achievement badges.

Overall, Boomz and War2 are great looking games that obviously took a significant amount of development work. That’s in contrast to the typical mode of social games. However, promoting more complicated, in-depth games does fit with a general strategy of focusing on a smaller, more lucrative audience, while letting Facebook take over the larger job of being the world’s social network — assuming that Friendster’s audience wants more complex games, of course.

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 $1,995 USD* OR Buy Single Report: $995 $695 USD* * Pre-order discount ends June 21, 2010. All pre-ordered reports will be delivered on June 21, 2010.

That’s why we’re excited to announce today 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 will be released on Tuesday, June 22, but is available for discount pre-order now.

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
• Total Number of Respondents
• Overall Breakdown

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. Age and Gender Differences

• Who are the Social Gaming “Whales”?

8. Regional Differences

Appendix

• Survey Questions

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 $1,995 USD*

OR Buy Single Report: $995 $695 USD*

* Pre-order discount ends June 21, 2010. All pre-ordered reports will be delivered on June 22, 2010.

Although the report will not be released until next Tuesday, June 22, we are offering a special pre-order discount for those who purchase now. A one year subscription is $1,995 until June 22, at which point the price will go to US $2,495. The one year subscription 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 pre-order price is $695 until June 22, at which point the price will go to US $995.