Cie Games, a spun-out games company from Cie Studios, has a new title out. The social developer is taking a more automotive approach to gaming with Car Town.

From cars, to avatars, to a full blown garage, Car Town is a game that gives players everything and a bag of chips to customize to their own personal aesthetic. While the game doesn’t necessarily add anything new to the table in regards to virtual spaces, the quantity and premise offers a fair substitute for originality. And the rather hefty number of social mechanics it makes for an excellent title to play with one’s friends.

Car Town’s objective is no different from other virtual space games at its core: create the best looking personal space you can. In this case, it’s a car garage of sorts. But more than just building a garage, the game is also about customizing your own collection of cars.

Virtually any guy would relish collecting cars, but few of us have the money to build a real collection. Cie grants players the next best thing, allowing users to buy and customize everything from a vintage 1960 Chevy Corvette to a 2010 Lamborghini Murcielago LP 670-4 Superveloce. Once purchased, each car can be customized with rims, body kits, paint, tires, and virtually everything else.

Not all customization elements are purely visual. Each vehicle has a performance rating, and it’s possible to increase that rating with new shocks, steering, engines, etc. In fact, this is where the first major social mechanic comes into play.

Players can actually race their friends in a sort of challenge mode which consists of an actual drag race. Instead of a traditional racing game, this race is a simple exercise in timing that uses a single mouse click to hit the accelerator and shift gears at the proper time. Between the precision of the user and the performance level of the car, the winner will be determined.

The cars themselves are a grand source of income. Beyond racing friends, players can take their car on a five minute pizza delivery jaunt (in which “excess” pizza can be delivered to friends) to earn some extra coin.

Two other social exercises that are even more interesting than the pizza deliveries. The first one is a 24 hour “job” called a road trip where players travel to any number of locations (beach, camping, Vegas, and so on). What is interesting is that players can actually pick up other friends, up to five, that play and earn extra income based on how many join the trip. Second, players can also enter a 24 hour car show where users actually vote on their favorite customized cars.

But wait, there’s more. In a more traditional virtual space/business endeavor, players are able to purchase various mechanic bays for their garage in which to perform jobs for cars that park out front. Ranging from two minutes to a day or more, players can assign workers to take care of various automotive needs; needs such as installing fuzzy dice or a jet engine, perhaps. Obviously, the longer the job takes, the more money it earns.

Workers are also the primary gating mechanism to Car Town and are directly linked to level (which also gates what you can purchase). Only so many can be had based on one’s level and every job done with a car or with a mechanic bay indisposes that worker for the duration. Also, as in other past virtual space games, players hire their real Facebook buddies to slave… err, work… for them, and as yet another means of customization, they, as well as the users’ avatar, can be customized. It’s also worth mentioning that Car Town even has functional décor such as arcade cabinets and vending machines that can also, periodically, earn the player extra income.

As far as negative aspects go, there’s not a lot to complain about. Our biggest qualm is that Car Town is yet another virtual space oriented game. Granted, there is a lot more to it, and the quantity of customizable elements is wonderful, but it does still feel like a bit more of the same.

Other complaints are minor by comparison, such as the horribly obnoxious honking when customers are waiting at the curb. We don’t like it when people do it in reality, and it’s no less unnerving here. Moreover, having the customers pull up does seem kind of pointless as the player can initiate any mechanic job from the bay itself.

Overall, Car Town is an excellent addition to the virtual space collection of games. As a virtual space game, it certainly has everything under the sun for the player to play around with, and the prospect of collecting sexy cars is always a plus for the male demographic. Wrought with as many social elements as customizable ones, it certainly feels like an apex for this style of game. At its core, however, it’s still a type of game that is now beginning to saturate the market, and while good, begs the question: What is after virtual spaces? And is it time to begin evolving past them?

[Correction: A previous version of this article said the game was made by Playdom. Cie Games currently has no direct connection to the company.

Game retailer GameStop is continuing its efforts to gain a foothold on Facebook with Gangsta Zombies, a game by its subsidiary Jolt Online.

To promote Gangsta Zombies, Gamestop is handing out promotion cards with a code for free in-game currency at its retail stores — and, for players that are already, hooked, selling $10 pre-paid cards that give access to premium content.

We’ve seen a number of big brands try to reach the Facebook audience through social games, as well as large traditional game companies like Electronic Arts and Ubisoft, but GameStop probably has something of a unique angle.

Some companies, most notably Zynga, have tried to reach potential paying users who can’t pay online with in-store game cards sold at retail locations like Walgreens; GameStop already has the retail locations and sells other companies’ cards, so it just needs to create its own titles to better take advantage of the trend.

For now, the effort isn’t likely to go far. Gangsta Zombies itself is not a great game, unless you absolutely love zombie humor. Otherwise it’s a pretty direct take on the Mafia Wars genre, with little that stands out. Since it was put on Facebook well before the promotion, we can see that a dismal percentage of users come back on a daily basis — only four percent, according to AppData. Most winning games come in around 20 percent.

But it’s still interesting that Gamestop is trying. With a healthy following among the under-served young male demographic — those that are most likely to need prepaid cards, and currently least likely to be playing Facebook games — the company is in a good position to exploit Facebook’s game community, if only it can find a winning title.

Despite dating all the way back to November, Kingdoms of Camelot has done a great job of extending its appeal for players. This week the game has staged a comeback to its previous monthly active user highs, leading off our list of the top 20 Facebook gainers by MAU.

Note that while this list usually covers a week-long period, this time it’s 11 days, as Facebook didn’t update its stats for the nine days preceding last Saturday. Here’s the full AppData list:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Kingdoms of Camelot	3,746,121	+715,382	+24%
2.	Millionaire City	4,627,217	+693,631	+18%
3.	FrontierVille	21,386,522	+651,368	+3%
4.	Bejeweled Blitz	11,414,930	+628,098	+6%
5.	Baking Life	4,087,511	+601,044	+17%
6.	Fanglies	840,065	+572,002	+213%
7.	Fashion World	2,867,104	+527,306	+23%
8.	Pirates Ahoy	555,814	+499,907	+894%
9.	SuperFun Town!	1,895,303	+467,063	+33%
10.	Resort World	1,759,144	+385,245	+28%
11.	Games	4,545,849	+329,516	+8%
12.	Nightclub City	4,840,116	+328,896	+7%
13.	Office Wars	822,996	+305,385	+59%
14.	Bar Society	831,727	+274,065	+49%
15.	Horse Saga (renamed)	981,750	+262,296	+36%
16.	Make Your Jersey	2,427,121	+256,464	+12%
17.	Birdland	1,098,921	+240,883	+28%
18.	Hero World	1,763,541	+234,119	+15%
19.	My Vineyard	1,107,449	+233,784	+27%
20.	德州撲克	2,151,583	+224,989	+12%

A bit more on Kingdoms of Camelot: although the Watercooler game topped out in early June at 3.7 million MAU and is now at that level again, it’s far smaller than other popular sim games. However, as a complex strategy game that may turn off some Facebook players, it also has an advantage: the more in-depth gameplay appears to give the game a much longer lifespan. We recently covered the success of Camelot and similar strategy games on Facebook.

Millionaire City is still doing a great job for developer Digital Chocolate; it’s now the second-largest pure city-building game on Facebook, having beaten out CrowdStar’s Hello City and EA’s My Empire. That’s pretty impressive, considering that Digital Chocolate is many times smaller than those two competitors.

FrontierVille, which was previously dominating the rankings, is still growing but appears to be headed for a plateau in the near future, at least if you compare its current gains to those in previous weeks. Following it, Bejeweled Blitz is another old game that’s adding new players.

We can’t cover the whole list, but there are plenty more games that deserve some attention, including the newer titles that are working their way up the rankings: Fanglies, Pirates Ahoy, SuperFun Town!, Office Wars and Horse Saga.

Farming games on Facebook have seen their share of revisions and remakes in the past year or so, but there’s still room for new ideas — like UK-based developer Geek Beach’s first Facebook title, GoGo Native. At time of writing GoGo is still in its final phase of testing, but from what is working, its looks like it has a good deal of potential.

GoGo is a farming game at heart, it’s true, but rather than working in an infinite harvesting cycle to earn money and harvest some more, Geek Beach adds extra reasons to grow different crops, in the form of animals. These critters appear to be far more useful than your everyday farm animal that merely produces milk or eggs every 24 hours, and even play into the social and mini-game mechanics. In fact, said mini-games stand up well by themselves, and while their full potential and integration cannot be seen early on, may prove to be a strong extension of the overall farming theme.

When starting out, players are granted a minimally customizable tribal avatar and a small clearing in the jungle. From here it’s up to them to decorate it as they see fit, but also to grow crops in order to make a profit. Here’s the catch, though: crops are for more than just mere income.

Each plant grants the player one of three “powers,” so-to-speak, called Oomf, Zing, and Jomo. You see, each plant apparently has a value for one of these, and planting them will increase the associated power. It’s not 100% clear as to how this works, but based on the few tutorial pop-ups that are presented, different variations of these powers will attract different types of animals to your clearing.

This is where things start to get interesting. By attracting animals, or buying them from the market if you have a good chunk of change handy, players can eventually breed them. The following mechanics get really weird: Players can apparently cross breed animals. No, no… really cross breed. As an example, if one attracts a dog, and, say, buys a pig, they can purchase a “Love Shack” building and create creatures like a “Pigdog.”

This has two rewards associated to it. The first is social, in that players can visit a place called the “Native Market” and buy animals from other users. The second is that each animal gives players varying bonuses and advantages in the three GoGo Native mini-games.

As best we can tell, the farming/breeding aspects of the app support the mini-games, especially the one called Jungle Rumble (but more on that in a bit), and the mini-games are more oriented around competitive achievements and leaderboards. In truth, they don’t feel all that tightly knit together (though that may be because we don’t have much in the way of bred animals to help us yet), but individually, they do work. Regardless, there are currently three to play: Swamp Jumper, Voodoo Charms, and Jungle Rumble.

Each of the three has a unique flavor, and is exceedingly simple to play. Jumper is a game where players control a toucan as it hops from lily pad to lily pad and avoids traps and some nasty witch doctor and his minions. Charms is similar to the casual game Collapse in that players must remove tiles by clicking on them, before they reach the top of the screen. The more one clicks, the faster they rise, but it’s mitigated by special bombs and area of effect tiles that take out everything within their proximity. Unfortunately, the mini-game still came off as a bit boring compared to Swamp Jumper.

The last mini-game that’s currently active is a synchronous multiplayer game called Jungle Rumble. Based on what little description we have, it’s a game that lets you directly compete against friends or random people. Unfortunately, due to the early testing and thus, the lack of players, we were never able to get a match, but according to the developers, it will involve a battle of throwing spears. Also, should the player have animals, they will come into the game with the user, granting them extra power and/or even be usable as weapons.

The last curious addition to GoGo Native worth mentioning appears as part of the three powers — oomf, zing, and jomo. As players accumulate them (again, by planting specific plants), their power can be invoked to speed up things like plant growth (zing), hasten cross-breeding (jomo), or give more power in Jungle Rumble (oomf). Typically, such powers are reserved for virtual goods like fertilizer that usually cost virtual currency, so these three elements also apparently create a secondary set of rewards for building them up beyond attracting animals.

Overall, the only negative aspect to GoGo Native is that it’s just not done. It has a lot of new mechanics that farming-game players are not going to be familiar with, and its current build just doesn’t do a whole lot of explanation. All the same, these are minor annoyances that are fairly expected in an “officially unlaunched” title. Even with its issues, Geek Beach’s first title certainly looks more interesting than most of its competitors, holding a potential not seen in the farming genre for a long time.

Facebook’s growth in India has started to pick up in India the past few months, and with that growth has come new social games from developers in the country. The latest we’ve seen is a Mafia Wars’esque sort of game called Mumbai Underworld, from ibibo, for one of India’s major social networks of the same name. However, while the game is only available on that site, it is connected through Facebook Connect, allowing users to use their Facebook credentials to become part of the ibibo network as well.

Though Mubai Underworld is similar in respect to Mafia Wars, it’s not actually text based (nor does it have missions). Players actually build an illegal business empire through a more visual, virtual space-style means. Nevertheless, while the game may be more visual, it’s not necessarily deeper.

Players start out with a simple terrain full of locked venues. At the start, all players can own is an “illicit” dance bar, though, eventually, they will unlock a shipyard, casino, hotel, etc. From here, everything is quite simple: Open it up and start building oneself up as the top underworld mogul.

This is where the virtual space concept comes into play. Players will earn money periodically by merely owning a venue but extra income can be generated by hiring various “assets.” As far as the dance bar goes, these include pole dancers, bartenders, bouncers, and miscellaneous equipment such as a music system. Each one will “work” for a set amount of time, and the player will be able to collect income from them at varying times (e.g. the pole dancer earns money every two minutes). Once purchased, the assets will also appear in the space, performing whatever animations they have.

Unfortunately, while the addition is great, and can create a wonderful sense of progress, the player starts with so much money at the start that everything that isn’t gated by level can be bought right off the bat. Additionally, the ones that do move are not very fluid; animating at an extremely low frame rate.

Once your dance bar is pulling in its weight, it’s time for the social aspects of Mumbai Underworld. Like Mafia Wars, or any other game of that genre, players can attack, so-to-speak, other players. Oddly, however, those other players are stated to only be one’s friends that play the game, yet we have a few random users we can fight as well.

Perhaps the word “fight” should be used loosely, as it only actually occurs if a “Gunda” is present. What a Gunda is, is a friend who has been dropped onto another player’s property to loot a percentage of its income for about 12 hours. Also, that Gunda will reflect that friend’s level and equipment (some of which can be bought with a virtual currency called iCoins). The only time a fight occurs is if you visit a property and someone else’s Gunda is present or if one invades your place directly.

Regardless of the reason, fights are pretty straight forward. They are automated, with the winner being determined based on the weapons the player owns (which increases their “power”), the current level of health they have, and how many friends they have.

Interestingly enough, there doesn’t appear to be any form of stamina or energy that limits how many actions the player can do in any given session. They can simply play until they run out of money or health, with the latter healed in the hospital. The true limiting factor on game play sessions is actually stuff to do.

Even though there were some random players in our friend’s list, there were only two. There is nowhere to pick fights with other random players of the game as there is in just about every other mafia-style game. Moreover, when attempting to place Gundas in these two random individuals’ dance bars, one of them already had a significantly higher level Gunda present, meaning there was nothing that we could actually do to win.

Yes, one could level up and unlock better weapons, but therein lays another issue. Leveling is painstakingly slow. In a single session, players only garner a handful of experience for the different actions they can perform, and it takes 200 experience just to get to level three. Typically speaking, most games will at least let a user get to level five or six before things slow down this much, in order to hook the user.

Overall, Mubai Underworld is headed in the right direction, and the Facebook Connect integration to ibibo makes it easy for new user to jump in, despite some of the design problems.

Live Gamer, an in-game monetization company that has mostly worked in the social gaming space to date, is making its third partner announcement for July today: Electronic Arts has signed on the company as its partner to introduce virtual goods into its online games.

Unlike a similar partnership that Live Gamer announced last week with THQ, in which a popular strategy title called Company of Heroes will become free-to-play and supported by virtual good microtransactions, there are no specific titles to talk about for EA.

But other companies will surely be watching EA closely. As the most visible Western game publisher, EA has also led its peers toward online gaming, acquiring Playfish last November for up to $400 million and working connect with online gamers in its traditional titles.

During EA’s most recent earnings call in May, top executives said they’d seen significant upside from adding downloadable content to its most popular game franchises, like Madden, FIFA and Battlefield.

For the most part, that content isn’t free — players pay several dollars for each addition. If the amount EA makes from these add-ons begins to rival the up-front income from game sales, the company could begin switching over its biggest titles to a free-to-play model, which can bring in many more potential customers.

The broad trends suggest that this online tipping point may be approaching. Last week the NPD Group released a study showing that PC game downloads now rival box gamed purchases, while Microsoft and Sony are both reporting good results from their online stores for the Xbox and Playstation; players are evidently becoming comfortable with all their games including an online component.

The game industry itself might also prefer the virtual goods model, since it would provide a lasting connection to customers (and their wallets). “We believe the ship-it-and-forget-it mentality is giving way to much deeper relationships between the consumer, the game and the publisher,” said chief operating officer John Schappert on EA’s earnings call.

The other recent Live Gamer relationship, announced in the middle of last week, was with RealNetworks’ GameHouse.

Check out the top headlines and insights this week from Inside Facebook— tracking Facebook and the Facebook platform for developers and marketers.

Monday, July 19th, 2010

• Create Your Quiz Rises to Become Facebook’s Third-Largest App by MAU on This Week’s List of Fastest Growers
• Levi’s Users Events Marketing for Sales Promotions [Updated]
• Announcing the Inside Network Job Board
• Votigo Sets Its Sights on Facebook Marketing
• In Strange Ownership Suit, Judge Removes Restrictions on Facebook Assets
• As Facebook Prepares to Announce 500 Million Users, a Look Back at Its Traffic Growth

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

• Top 20 Facebook Pages: Music, Big Brands, Celebrity and Bob Marley
• Facebook Allows Advertising Accounts to Have Multiple Users [Updated]
• Despite Controversy, Penkake Is the Largest Known Quiz Developer on Facebook
• Ads API Profile: TBG’s ONE Media Manager Streamlined Advertising Interface
• Wildfire Launches Group Deals on Facebook

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

• If True, the Ceglia Case Could Rewrite Part of Facebook’s Early History
• Appbistro Page App Marketplace Launches A Q&A For Page Administrators
• Facebook Announces 500 Million Users, Stories and Thanks Applications
• Facebook Releases C# SDK
• User Survey Results: What Do Young Female Users Think of the Facebook Privacy Debate?

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

• RockYou Also Signs on to Exclusive Five-Year Deal for Facebook Credits
• Facebook’s Hires This Week: Austin, Google and eBay
• Who’s Using Facebook’s Top Apps? Newer Games Attract More Older Women
• Facebook Hires Two Executives for New India Office
• New Jobs This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: Lolapps, Context Optional, EA2D, & More
• During Talk, Zuckerberg Hints at Friends List Changes, Calls Upcoming Film “Fiction”
• Facebook Application Bookmarks Now Drop Below The Fold If Unused For 30 Days

Friday, July 23rd, 2010

• Crowdflower Labor-On-Demand Releases API, Partners with TrialPay
• Wooga Becomes the Fourth Large Developer to Use Facebook Credits Exclusively
• More Facebook Home Page Changes May Be Coming, as News Feed Test Appears
• Facebook Expands Like Button Functionality with Iframe Commenting, Multi-Page Publishing
• Facebook Roundup: Zuck on TV, Lawsuits, Sarah Palin, Coca-Cola, and More

Chuck Norris Rejects FarmVillain – Apparently Chuck Norris is more powerful than Steve Jobs as the FarmVille spoof app, FarmVillain, makes its fourth failed attempt to be approved by Apple for release in the App Store. The reason? It includes Chuck Norris who “has previously objected to other applications that include features that use his name or likeness, and believes that such features infringe his rights.”

Virtual Goods Create Results for Brands – In a new research study from appssavvy, the real world value of virtual goods as they apply to brands has proven to be a most valuable opportunity. Among the highlights, it increased brand awareness anywhere from 44.5-69.8%. Mobile ad awareness was increased by 60.1-74.2%. Purchase intent was shown to have increased 31.5-62.8%.

Raptr Upgrades to 1.0 – Social gaming tool, Raptr is getting a big upgrade this week. Beyond its cross-platform buddy list (Xbox Live, PSN, Steam, Xfire, etc.), the service is stated to now support messaging on any instant messenger network including Facebook, AIM, and Yahoo. Additionally, the developers note that it will now dynamically generate a profile for users based on the games they play and achievements they unlock.

Super Rewards Monetizes TinierMe – At the Casual Connect conference this past week, Super Rewards announced that the developer behind social MMO TinierMe, GCREST, will be using the company to monetize itself through virtual currency.

TinierMe Adds Japanese Icon – In addition to the monetization announcement, GCREST has also debuted the appearance of the Japanese icon, Hatsune Miku in the culturally saturated TinierMe. Players will now be able to acquire limited edition virtual items for their avatars as well as have the chance to listen to free music from the anime-singer.

SupersonicAds Partners with BigPoint, Playdom, & Watercooler – International virtual currency monetization firm, Supersonic Ads, announced three new partnerships at Casual Connect this week: BigPoint, Playdom, and Watercooler. Players of these developers’ games will now be able to earn in-game currency through SupersonicAds’ targeted advertising and offers.

Shockwave Launches Virtual Goods Platform – Earlier in the week, casual gaming portal, Shockwave, announced its first virtual goods platform. Using Shockwave Cash, players will now be able to purchase in-game items across any number of the site’s games.

Real Networks Partners with Live Gamer – In more virtual goods news, Real Networks has teamed up with Live Gamer. The latter will power the virtual goods transactions within Real’s social gaming platform, GameHouse.

Sony Working with Codename – PlayStation 3 virtual world PlayStation Home is set to be transformed into a social gaming space. Partnering with indie label Codename, Sony has announced that the company, along with other international developers, will develop exclusive new games for the virtual world.

Heyzap Introduces Heyzap Arcade – Hot on the heels of its $3 million in funding, Heyzap is launching its newest product, Heyzap Arcade. Now, users will be able to add up to 30,000 games to their website with only one line of code. Already, the tool has been adopted by social network platform, Ning.

Zindagi Teaches Entrepreneurship with Social Games – In order to teach students (ages 10-15), a startup called Zindagi is working on a game that combines social game mechanics, problem solving, education, and real money management, says ReadWriteWeb. According to the developers it is “FarmVille meets Mint.com” and will teach kids concepts such as budgeting and saving, using actual money.

GameCoins.com Sees Success with “Missions” System – Introduced at E3, Sometric’s GameCoins.com‘s new “missions” system sought to create a fun means to intertwine game online mechanics and marketing campaigns. Now, the company is reporting that it is tracking an 86% completion rate with over 50% of those players earning extra virtual currency by telling their friends about it on Facebook.

Scvngr Adds “Bumping” to Location-Based Games – Scvngr is attempting to further socialize location-based games with a new means of checking in. Using the app of the same name, users will be able to complete in-app challenges by physically bumping their iPhones together.

[Editor's note: This story was previously posted on Inside Facebook.]

Each week, it seems, we hear about another company choosing to pass by Facebook’s many independent monetization companies and use Credits, the social network’s in-house virtual currency, exclusively. Wooga, a German developer with 9.7 million monthly active users, tells us that it’s the latest.

Last week, we covered RockYou’s decision to use Credits, before the company officially announced a new contract with Facebook this Wednesday. Before RockYou, we reported the switch by LOLapps, which is known for both games and quizzes. Along with CrowdStar, Credits’ biggest cheerleader, that now makes four big companies using Credits exclusively.

There’s an interesting twist to Wooga’s story, though: the company didn’t have to switch to using Credits. For a year, since the July 2009 release of its game Brain Buddies, Wooga lacked any monetization options at all: no ads, no virtual goods, no subscriptions.

Monetization is the focus for most companies, so Wooga’s failure to include it in its first three games – now including Bubble Island and Monster World — sounds naïve. CEO and co-founder Jens Begemann doesn’t have any regrets, though.

“Our goal is more long-term,” Begemann says. “We want to create one of the top three game companies in the world — but we started roughly 20 months later than Playfish or Zynga. Last autumn, we had the decision to either monetize as quickly as possible, or raise venture capital and invest it in growing the userbase. We took that option. It’s a little bit like what Facebook did for a couple of years. We didn’t make money, but we grew.”

Since Wooga is based in Germany, it also publishes its games on StudiVZ, that country’s largest social network with 15 million users versus Facebook’s 10 million. Along with the release of Credits on its Facebook games, Wooga added monetization to its games on StudiVZ, so we naturally wondered how Credits compared.

Surprisingly, Begemann says that Credits perform almost as well as StudiVZ’s payments, which have the advantage of targeting local options like mobile payments.

“We find Facebook Credits are better than they’re being talked about if you deeply integrate them into the gameplay,” says Begemann. “If you look at Monster World, Facebook Credits is the currency, we don’t call it something else. That, as we see it, tends to reduce conversion. But if you make Credits your currency, it works pretty well.”

We’ve written extensively about Credits here at Inside Facebook. For the best of our coverage, check out our in-depth examination of the issues around the virtual currency and our interviews with industry leaders on the pros and cons of Credits, over on Inside Social games.

While media giant will pull the social gaming acquisition trigger first? Playdom, one of the largest social game developers on the Facebook platform, has been talking to Disney about an acquisition, sources tell TechCrunch and VentureBeat. Rumored sale prices start at the company’s previously-estimated $345 million valuation from its last funding round, and go up past $600 million.

While Playdom has been busy buying smaller developers in the last several months, we’ve heard rumors about it selling during the same period — including through the past few days. It’s possible that the company is talking to other suitors too. It wouldn’t be the first time as we heard that Playdom was talking to News Corp, back in March:

Indeed, we’ve been hearing continued rumors in recent months, the latest of which is News Corp’s interest in Playdom, one of the largest developers on the MySpace developer platform and an increasing presence on the Facebook Platform. Given Zynga’s size and Playfish’s recent acquisition by Electronic Arts, Playdom and fellow developer CrowdStar are two of the more likely acquisition candidates over the coming year. And Fox’s involvement would certainly make the dynamics between it and Facebook even more interesting.

CrowdStar was in talks with Microsoft, Tencent and other suitors earlier this year, according to other reports and one of our sources. The company is still independent, though.

The two other market leaders on Facebook’s platform, Playfish and Zynga, are both accounted for. Playfish sold to game giant Electronic Arts last fall for up to $400 million. Zynga, the largest social gaming company, has been busy raising money (or maybe its early investors have been busy selling off chunks of their stock?). Anyway, after having talked to a range of companies about selling itself last year, it appears to have hundreds of millions of dollars available, and a valuation of more than $6 billion, we’ve heard from industry sources. It is still busy trying to buy smaller social gaming companies, these people say.

Overall, Playdom is in one of the better positions among social game developers, with historical strength on MySpace, mobile forays, and two solid Facebook hits this year, city-builder Social City and soccer game Bola. With some $76 million in funding, and stats that imply significant revenue — it currently has 41.3 million monthly active users and 4.84 million daily active users on Facebook alone, according to AppData — it could very well stay independent, and eventually make an initial public offering like it has hinted at.

We also expect media companies like Disney, if not other game developers and international market leaders like Tencent, continue looking at buying social game developers, even as many of them test out their own apps.

For Inside Network’s in-depth research on the social gaming market, check out Inside Virtual Goods: The Future of Social Gaming 2010