While island decorating games are a newer form of social game, brain teasing puzzle apps have been around for quite a while. Popular brain training titles from companies such as Playfish and wooga have always done well, but rarely have they combined themselves with the younger genre. That’s where the Facebook app Uber Brain Isle from Fit Brains comes into play.

Uber Brain Isle combines brain-teasing titles, such as Brain Buddies, and island décor games such as Tiki Resort. Unlike the latter, however, players aren’t taking a tycoon role, but rather they “collect dreams” in order to build up a personal island the way they see fit. However, the combination of these mechanics with the brain teasers feels a bit clunky at best, and neither really feel part of the other.

Mechanic combination aside, the core aspect of Brain Isle is still the decoration of the best island one can imagine. In fact, imagination and dreams appear to be a strong premise in the game, as the primary form of player revenue are various dream factories that produce Brain Coins that can be collected after a set amount of time.

As with most virtual space type of games, placement and collection of coins earns experience (this includes placement of decorative items as well), and the higher one’s level, or Brain Rank, the more objects become unlocked.

Among the unlockable elements of the game are the brain teasing mini-games called Brain Boosts. Currently, there are five games to unlock, and playing them will earn the user a good chunk of bonus coins and experience, depending on how well they do. None are very difficult. With the first game — Lost Treasure — players of pick out which object, amongst an ever increasing set of objects, is different from the others. The second — Dream Journey — consists of replacing a missing puzzle piece to a picture based on what the current image is and the shape of the missing piece.

Though the other three are not unlocked for us yet, its probably safe to say that they are as simple as the initial two. This makes it plausible that this app is intended more for a younger audience. Regardless, what is curious about these games, however, is that the player can only play them once a day for free (or when they level up).

Initially, the game’s launch was announced on Facebook’s Credits page, and lo and behold, this appears to be the slightly more unique use of the virtual currency. Granted, there are decorative items and dream factories that can be bought with Credits, but in order to play a mini-game more than once within a 24 hour period requires anywhere from five to 200 Credits for one and 50 extra plays, respectively.

As far as complaints are concerned, the game play itself is pretty dull. The visuals feel a bit fuzzy and drab, and just doesn’t feel that interesting. Namely, it’s because the means of reaching the objective is the objective itself: Decorate your island to decorate your island. Most other virtual space oriented apps have some other aspect to make that decoration more interesting. Tiki Island was justified by drawing in tourists. Restaurant City was business oriented. Nightclub City’s décor made the club worth more. These had clear visible goals, which is not so much the case here.

The brain training games are a nice touch and an apparent attempt to make up for this lacking, but they just don’t feel integral to the game. They don’t really enhance the game experience at all, save for tossing in a few extra Brain Coins. They’re just sort of… there. If they don’t want to, the player never even has to visit them. Playing them needs a more meaningful effect on the island or the island needs a more meaningful effect on them.

The idea of combining brain-training and decorating is interesting, but this game needs to work on the quality of the mini-games and how they tie in with the overall concept.

Not all successful Facebook games have to be simple, quick, or built by an experienced or well-funded developer. There’s still room on the platform for independents with original ideas, as proven by a profitable new game called Dawn of the Dragons.

We were recently introduced to one of the founders of 5th Planet Games, the company behind Dawn. Robert Winkler created the company with co-founder Steve Pladson last year with the intention of creating a massively multiplayer game — even though neither had direct experience in the games industry.

Soon enough, the MMO morphed into a social game, and took the shape of a Mafia Wars-style text-based game. However, the two had more unusual ideas on where to take the concept.

The first step was to hire a professional writer to create a comprehensive back-story for Dawn involving struggling kingdoms, scheming wizards and, of course, dragons. The story makes Dawn stand out from other Facebook games; aside from being fantastically geeky, it also assumes a level of engagement from players — regularly reading paragraphs of text — that most developers instinctively shy away from.

5th Planet released Dawn in May. Since then, it has picked up some 86,749 monthly active users and 28,638 daily active users. That means about 33 percent all players return as DAUs, a higher level of engagement than most Facebook games enjoy. (Note that the plateau at the end of the chart below is due to a glitch in Facebook’s updates to its public stats.)

MAU and DAU are available for any game. However, Winkler was also willing to share stats on monetization with us, which developers rarely announce publicly. Although based on less than two months’ worth of data, the stats suggest that Dawn is also making more than the average game:

• Players who monetize: 2.1 percent
• Average single transaction: $22.04 for direct pay, $3.12 for offers
• Average revenue per paying user: $26.24
• Paying users who have spent over $25 (whales): 24 percent
• Paying users who return for a second transaction: 40 percent

While monetizing 1-2 percent of users is fairly typical for Facebook games, Dawn’s ARPPU is higher than we’ve seen for most other titles. Since the end of its first month when it ran a promotional campaign with Offerpal (which Winkler credits for helping make the game successful), Dawn has been making well over $1,000 per day for the company, according to Winkler.

These stats fit a broader trend that we’ve talked about recently: in-depth strategy and RPG titles can achieve higher engagement, and make more money per user, than more mass-market titles. Going for a niche audience, in other words, can be a great bet for a small developer.

Winkler thinks that Dawn’s success is in part attributable to the game’s storyline. “We knew that if we wanted to go the traditional RPG route, the story would be important,” he says. “We didn’t just want to push things together, and make the plot fit the game elements.”

Beyond the game, Winkler says there’s evidence that the story is engaging users on the application’s wall, where the company will sometimes post “lore” that’s of no real use other than giving insight into the story. “We see the same click-throughs on those that we get on patch notes and other things,” says Winkler. Some players have even started writing fan-fiction.

Contrary to what one might expect, though, not all of Dawn’s players are dedicated fantasy readers or gamers. Winkler, who interacts regularly with fans on the game forums, says that some come into the game without any background in fantasy at all. “Our number one spender, from what we know, isn’t into games like this — they’re into farming games,” he says.

In general, whether users engage with the story or not, the most engaged users and the heaviest spenders tend to be those that interact with others in the game.

While that would normally mean real-world friends, Winkler says that some gamers appear to interact mainly with people they met on the game, and that such interactions have the same reinforcing effect on players’ engagement as dealing with real-world friends.

For now, Winkler considers 5th Planet to already be successful, and is plowing the profits back into expanding the game — features to come include guilds similar to those found on an MMO — and advertising. Tomorrow, Offerpal will be detailing the effects of its promotion with 5th Planet at Casual Connect in Seattle.

A United Kingdom-based game developer called Zattikka has raises $5.5 million in a round led by Notion Capital, a venture fund also located in the UK.

Zattikka is most active through nearly identical casual game portals like BadHed and Gimme5games.com, which it acquired last September. The company also has iPhone and Twitter games, though (a favorite title: Blocks With Letters On) and a Facebook game portal called Games For The Planet.

Two former Virgin games executives founded Zattikka in 2009. The company has published more than 100 games, and claims 77 million plays during its lifetime.

Though we touched on it lightly in the past, we’ve never really taken a close look at the latest revisions of the Facebook role-playing game, Platinum Life. Currently in beta, this Facebook title from Heatwave Interactive has grown moderately over the past month or so, but with the recent upgrade to its Facebook version as well as its addition to competing social network, MySpace, it seemed as good a time as any to take a closer look.

The game is more or less typical of any Facebook RPG, broken up into quest/mission modes and battle modes, consuming energy or stamina (“juice” and “cred” in this case) as actions are undertaken. However, it goes beyond the commonplace by providing a much greater focus on music and real artists.

Essentially, the objective of Platinum Life: Web Edition is to go from a no-name upstart to a platinum level superstar. Broken up into two modes – Career Mode and Battle Mode – players utilize the slowly regenerating stats of Juice and Cred to earn cash and experience. Well, the latter actually being called “fame” in this app.

Career events are essentially missions or quests in any other RPG, but rather than seeing them all at once, players are only presented with a single event at a time. It’s believable enough as each one involves an increase in scale that corresponds well with the player’s fame level. For example, users start by doing an event for an Open Mic Night, while in a later one, they’re making mix tapes and selling them on the streets.

For each event, Heatwave also incorporates the concept of “progress.” This refers to the percentage progress bar that many RPG makers have incorporated to integrate an artificial form of longevity into the games. Essentially, it forces the player to repeat the same quest multiple times in order to “master” and complete it. Sometimes it’s justifiable (e.g. searching a crypt in Mercenaries of War), but a good number of times, it’s just arbitrary. In the case of Platinum Life, it works as it’s never dubbed “progress.” Events have various prep work to be done in them which often consists of two or more bars to fill up.

As an example, the first event tasks the player with rehearsal, followed by stage setup, then, finally, the performance. Unfortunately, players don’t do anything beyond press the “perform” button, but at least its more justifiable than a mere percentage bar.

One element that does make the Career Mode more interesting is the player’s cell phone. Randomly, players will get a call from a big name artist such as Ludacris, DJ Holiday, Shontelle, or about a dozen others. Regardless, when they call, players can undertake an event in their name, gaining some added experience and money. That said, they don’t feel different than the normal career events, but it seems like an area that could become quite interesting in time.

As a matter of fact, there is also an Artists page where players can purchase branded virtual goods for their avatar. These, of course, use the game’s virtual currency, Platinum Points, and as many players enjoy the prospect of expressing themselves through their avatar, it’s certainly a prudent addition. Furthermore, all the artists’ pages come with links to their official homepage as well as a feed of their latest tweets.

Though you have probably deduced it already, Platinum Life attempts to center itself around music. This extends beyond just the inclusion of platinum artists, but its one of the very few RPGs that actually has a soundtrack to it. Well, “soundtrack.” In truth, it’s more like a streaming radio in the background, but with at least a half-hour of hip hop, DJ spinning, R&B, as well as a few recorded cameos from some of the stated artists, it’s nice to just listen to. That’s saying a lot for a Facebook game considering most music and sound gets muted due to obnoxious, 30 second loops.

The only downside to the music, is that it’s just sort of there. Unlike Booyah’s Nightclub City, the music doesn’t really feel an integral part of the game. It creates a nice atmosphere, yes, but no one would really be the wiser were it not present.

Regarding the battle system, this is one of the core social elements, as players can challenge any user within their general level range at the cost of Cred. Of course, the battles are all automated, with the winner determined by factors such as fame and the number of friends one has.

Friends themselves can also provide added bonuses to the rest of the game as well. Inviting friends into one’s crew, for example, can grant users reductions in Juice and Cred costs as well as bonus cash and fame from events and battles.

Overall, and after numerous iterations, Platinum Life is a fairly well made RPG for music lovers with just over 500,000 monthly active users. Nevertheless, the chief complaint is that beyond the random events from artists calling the player’s cell phone, there isn’t a whole lot different to game play. Granted, the music itself is quality and the various artist pages with Twitter feeds and branded virtual goods are nice, but none play a very important role in the game as a whole. They’re just sort of there (save for, maybe, the virtual goods that users can dress their avatars with).

In the end, Platinum Life: Web Edition has a number of cool parts to it. They just need to be brought more tightly into the fold. The music itself has tremendous potential – a fact proven by Nightclub City, who has done zero advertising and brings in 4.5 million MAUs. Moreover, it’s just too good to let lie as a background afterthought. Regardless, as more iterations come down the pipe from Heatwave, only time will tell what changes are yet to come.

Early this morning, we wrote about in-game monetization company Offerpal’s plan to help Facebook game developers move off the platform onto other distribution channels like Yahoo or MySpace. But Offerpal is hardly alone in that ambition.

Four other companies launched their own takes on social gaming outside Facebook either yesterday or today: Oberon, Hi5, Sony and WildTangent. Most of these efforts haven’t received much coverage yet, because there’s a logjam of news from the ongoing Casual Connect conference in Seattle.

But that doesn’t mean they’re not significant — if not individually, then as a broad trend that shows just how many parties want a slice of the market that Facebook currently dominates.

Each take is fairly different; here they are:

Oberon Blaze

Oberon Media is a rather large casual gaming company that prides itself on cross-platform work. Like most companies in its vertical, it’s interested in making what seems like a short leap over to social gaming.

While Oberon publishes its own games, Blaze is a tool for all publishers to use, giving social games broad distribution across other sites, notably AT&T Games and MSN UK. These are already active platforms for the casual market; the trick for Oberon is to give developers broader reach while keeping them connected to the social graph, which at the moment is mainly available through Facebook Connect.

Blaze is perhaps the least unusual of the platforms being launched today, competing with earlier offerings from Mochi Media, Viximo and others; they key for all of them is making it easy for developers to load up their game for distribution elsewhere.

Hi5 Developer Portal

Hi5 has been extremely vocal about its desire to attract Facebook developers, launching a developer program in March. Today it released the next step in its plan, a developer portal that seeks to give companies a painless way to add their game to Hi5′s network.

While Hi5 itself is still trying to make the conversion from a social network to a social gaming platform, its aim also isn’t to pull developers entirely away from Facebook. Instead, Hi5 is using Facebook as much as possible, cloning its APIs and using its social graph. What Hi5 does have is its own viral distribution channels — though as-yet unproven — and monetization services.

It’s not clear how many developers Hi5 is working with, but the company’s press release includes quotes from Bigpoint and Sneaky Games.

Sony Home

The most unusual of the four announcements, Sony is trying to get social games onto its console, the Playstation 3.

Sony’s platform already exists: the Home virtual world, which is available on all PS3s and has 14 million registered users. It also has a partner in Codename, an indie game publisher. Rather than simply opening Home to any developer, Codename will be working with selected companies to build social games for Home over the coming year.

From VentureBeat’s descriptions of the first games, it seems that Sony will be focusing more on synchronous play — which suggests that users may not be playing just with real-world friends, which is the usual social group on Facebook. That may be a necessary compromise for Home, which has a tiny pool of users compared to online social networks.

WildTangent Games

Like Oberon, WildTangent is already a well known casual gaming services company, and also publishes both downloadable and web-based casual games.

However, it’s taking a slightly different route today by creating its own downloadable app. The app is actually about more than just gaming; it also includes tabs for movies, music and social networking sites. However, given WildTangent’s history, it’s obvious that the other functionality is simply a bonus to the games.

One of WildTangent’s specialities is game advertising, which it also plans to incorporate into the app. However, downloadable clients are a tough sell for users, so the company has also set itself a higher bar.

In 1980, George Lucas released the sequel to end all sequels with Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. 30 years later, FluffyLogic, THQ Wireless, and Lucasfilm are releasing the an iPhone app centered around one of the film’s most memorable scenes. No, not the father part, but the epic snow battle on the ice planet Hoth in the tower defense app Star Wars: Battle for Hoth.

Though it may be a tower defense game, Battle for Hoth brings enough new tricks to the table to keep things interesting. Coupled with classic elements as well as newer micromanagement possibilities, and very basic social features, it’s a game that is well worth the $2.99 price tag. The bad part is that it comes with a handful of usability and intuitiveness issues. The good part is that its enough to give Star Wars lovers a complete and total geek-out.

The basics are easy enough. Imperial soldiers are trying to reach Echo Base, and it’s up to you to stop them. Any troops that get through will cause damage to the base, and when its health reaches zero, it’s game over. In order to defend, players place “towers” that consist of everything seen in the movie. This ranges from cheap foot soldiers to heavy ion cannons to x-wing and snow speeder air support.

Like all tower defense games, players must manage income – Command Points – and placement. However, while both of these are similar to their predecessors in basic ways, they are also just as different. Command Points, for example, are not earned passively as enemy units are destroyed, but must be picked up (they are green wrenches), before they disappear, when they are dropped from random Imperial units; typically these are the ones at the end of a wave.

Placement is also prudent, as enemies do not simply funnel from Point A to Point B. On the contrary, many levels can have multiple entry points, and units can attack from either, or both, at any given time. In order to compensate for this, players must balance the quality (units can be upgraded) and quantity of their own forces.

To help in this, players can build trenches, like in the movie, to funnel enemies where they want them to go. Moreover, soldier units can be placed inside them to gain a defensive bonus. Unfortunately, as the game progresses, and enemy TIE fighters and AT-AT walkers get introduced, the trenches do considerably less, in that they simply get bypassed.

It goes without saying that fighting units are going to take more than soldiers, so players must begin adding various gun placements to take them out. Additionally, some can only hit ground and others can only hit air, so, again, variety is a necessity. Beyond this, Battle for Hoth also incorporates an energy mechanic. This means that any tower must have a power generator in relative proximity to work. Also, that power generator can only power a finite number of turrets (up to four when upgraded).

Another cool aspect of the game is air support. It’s not anything extravagant, but players can also power x-wing and snow speeder control towers that will send out the various air units to support the ground forces as needed.

The strategy aspects of the game don’t stop here either. In a majority of tower defense games, towers are not attackable: Not the case in Battle for Hoth. Imperial troops can, and will, destroy player defenses.

Players can actually adjust the AI of their units to attack specific targets. These commands can apply to a single unit or all units of that type and consist of attacking targets with the most/least health or the closest to Echo Base or land/air targets (assuming it can target both). Also, since the Imperials appear to use similar AI, using all units at one’s disposal is a very wise venture.

In the complaint department, the issues are minor at worst. Though the game is pretty easy to figure out, there isn’t much instruction as to what new units do when the player earns them each level. There is a separate page that explains each one, but having to stop the game and look it up really breaks the game flow. Additionally, the game’s difficulty curve is a bit awkward. Each level is not necessarily harder than the last once you figure out how to use the new, unlocked, defenses, but in a level of, say, 30 waves, it’s fairly easy until the last three to five. Beyond any of this, the upgrade and command buttons on each individual unit is a bit small for those with bigger fingers.

On the social side of things, the game comes with the OpenFeint basics, including a leaderboard for each level and a fairly sizable number of achievements. We’re still hoping for the mobile, social games to start thinking outside the box in the social department, but with the game itself already pretty solid, it’s not a big complaint.

All in all, Star Wars: Battle for Hoth is definitely a must-have for Star Wars fans. Whether or not it’s a strong recreation of one of the film’s most astounding moments is debatable, but it is fun, nonetheless. Hoth also tries its best to bring back that nostalgia by integrating clips from the movie as well, but that’s a trick seen in a majority of Star Wars titles already. Overall, with a strong amount of strategy and a depth-level  that is perfect for beginners and advanced strategists alike, it’s a game well worth the price tag.

Time and time again we have seen Facebook games used as a catalyst to market something greater. With the tremendous growth of the platform, it can hardly be unexpected, but this time the company behind the game is Trident with the new Facebook title Trident White Puzzle Smash, developed by Funtank.

The game itself is quite simple, centered around the casual block-breaker puzzle style. Moderately addicting for those who enjoy that sort of game, it’s an app that doesn’t feel terribly different from its predecessors, yet the developers do make an effort to try and socialize the game in more ways than just standard leaderboards. Moreover, it’s a branded title that makes a much better attempt than many we have seen in the past.

Puzzle Smash is a game of only one objective: Beat your high score. Pairs of different colored blocks fall from the sky, Tetris-style, and players must orient them into blocks or rectangles of at least 2×2. Doing so will multiply their value when broken.

In order to break them, one of the blocks in each falling pair will periodically be a colored orb with a Trident flavor (peppermint, spearmint, etc.). These will break all blocks of the same color, so long as they are touching and, in some way, connected to the initial block hit with the orb.

This makes the basics of the game. Coupled with a Trident brand orb that works on all colors, and an every increasing speed, players attempt to last as long as possible before their stack of blocks reaches the top of the board and the game ends.

On the social side of things, the primary mechanics are typical, consisting of leaderboards. However, what is respectable with Puzzle Smash is that while leaderboards are a proven standard for games of this style, Funtank is not satisfied with it alone and actually adds some bonuses for playing with friends. It isn’t much, but for each friend added, players will receive a 2% bonus to their final score when they finally lose.

On an additional note, it is also worth mentioning that players that “Like” the game will also receive in-game power-ups that will allow them to use some “emergency” items that will break all blocks of their corresponding color.

Technically speaking, there isn’t anything wrong with Puzzle Smash, but it’s also not the most innovative or addicting game either. Granted, it might be a ton of fun for those that enjoy block-breaking puzzlers or others of that type, but there’s nothing terribly new to be had here save the added social elements beyond leaderboards. All the same, it’s a game that does not appear to be intended as solely a game, but rather, it’s a title intended to capture further customers for Trident gum itself. That in mind, the game marks a significantly better attempt at other similarly goal-oriented titles in the past such as LEGO Indiana Jones and Emusicon Pinball. It’s still not the best, but it is nice to see the quality of branded games improving.

This year is going to be a defining one for in-game monetization companies like Offerpal Media. Having been forced to shift its focus away from Facebook with the focus of Credits and its workforce layoff, the offers and payments company is now trying to figure out whether there’s a future off the social network.

Rather than sitting still and waiting for a company like MySpace or Google to offer a viable alternative, Offerpal wants to take matters into its own hands. This morning it’s announcing a new platform called SocialKast, which is designed to make it easier for developers to move off Facebook.

SocialKast doesn’t bring any major innovations to the table; instead, it simply promises to link together multiple platforms. For example, SocialKast could allow a developer on Facebook, Yahoo and MySpace to let its users send messages or notifications onto any of the platforms at once, or all simultaneously. The developer could use the same connections to reach out to new users across platforms.

This sort of integration is technically possible because almost every major platform now offers an API. The challenge is smoothly linking together multiple platforms, given the major differences between them. That’s one reason that most social game developer still exclusively operate on Facebook.

We’ve seen a number of other companies move toward a cross-platform model, including Heyzap, Viximo and Sibblingz. The difference for Offerpal is that it’s aiming specifically at large web platforms like Yahoo and Google, which have their own plans to get gamers off Facebook.

“We think that social gaming, if it’s going to continue to grow, will need to be on other platforms. The growth has been stunted on Facebook lately,” says Matt McAllister, Offerpal’s director of marketing. “Everyone realizes that the big problem in social gaming today is distribution.”

The interesting twist in Offerpal’s case is that it doesn’t want to directly benefit from SocialKast. Instead, says McAllister, the company is simply hoping to stay at the top of developers’ minds. “Our bet is that if we help you get all this distribution across all these sites, you’ll pick us as your monetization partner,” says McAllister. “Our play is still to be the monetization company.”

Of course, Offerpal hasn’t put all of its eggs in one basket with SocialKast; the company also has a separate agreement with Yahoo, and is in the process of moving into mobile monetization.

But SocialKast is also emblematic of the difficulties all the monetization companies that got their start on Facebook face this year. With Credits becoming ever more vital, and more companies choosing to use the Facebook virtual currency exclusively, it’s vital for these companies to help developers move onto the open web. If they fail, they may well face worse than a round of layoffs.

When we last left the folks over at Ngmoco, they were crafting new worlds with the god-sim GodFinger on the iPad and iPhone. But however well that game may be doing, it’s We Rule, another popular iDevice title Ngmoco released this year, that the company has chosen to become a franchise with the release of a new iPhone title, We Farm.

Ngmoco has made a habit of testing its games in Canada, which is the only place We Farm is available for now — although the company promises that it will be available on an international level soon. Regardless, the time until then is easily killed, as We Farm feels quite similar to We Rule. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but aside from the premise and visual content, not a lot feels terribly different.

Basically, rather than a kingdom, players are set to build up as large and as nice a farm as possible by buying and placing gardens of various crops, which are then sold to earn income. With more advanced levels, more crops become available, ranging in growth time from about a minute to days. Like most farming games, the crops rot if the user doesn’t return to harvest them. Thankfully, there is an option for push notifications when they are ready, for those that are more forgetful.

An important to the typical crop mechanic is animals. Players can purchase various animal enclosures, for example a chicken coop. From here, they can buy different animals that will mature over time and can be petted for added experience. What is most interesting, however, is that once mature, players can send them off to the “fair,” where they can win awards. These awards don’t appear to do much besides slightly alter the animal’s building with a ribbon, but that visual reward is often enough.

Like We Rule, We Farm is also a visually appealing game. More realistic than the more common cartoony games in the genre, We Farm has any number of decorations that can be scattered about the virtual space, and comes with a convenient redesign function that lets you pick up and move everything with a touch and drag, rather than go through a sea of menus.

When starting out, players don’t have a tremendous amount of real estate to work with. Luckily, expansion is fairly natural, as players earn gold and upgrade the farm house at their virtual space’s center. As it is improved, it not only looks better, but expands the physical amount of space on the farm itself. The additional means of expansion is through adding friends as neighbors.

This, obviously, is one of the major social mechanics, as players can invite friends that play via Facebook, Twitter, or the Plus+ network. Once invited, their farms display on an overworld map, and can be visited to help out and earn rewards. Unfortunately, as the game is only available in Canada, and we’re using a special promo code… we are very lonely at the moment, and thus cannot provide greater detail on these elements.

What we can confirm, however, is that the game is part of Ngmoco’s Plus+ platform. Working as an enhancement to the game’s core, players can share various achievements as well as take part in the games competitive leaderboards.

As far as monetization goes, Ngmoco appears to be taking a similar route as it did with We Rule. Along with advertisements and offers that appear as “Free Gold” on the overworld map, the game appears to be monetizing most with a virtual item called Gro. Purchasable in quantities ranging from 20 to 800 ($2.99 to $89.99), it’s an item used to speed up crop growth, increase animal happiness so they can be petted again, or speed up animal maturation.

Overall, there is little to complain about We Farm other than the fact that it is not all that different from We Rule. That fact may not affect the game’s success; the different flavor may appeal to a slightly different demographic, and Zynga  and others proved the tactic can work in its early years, while cloning Mafia Wars with a sea of virtually identical role-playing games on Facebook. In that light, We Farm can also serve as an experiment for Ngmoco as to whether this method will work for it, both with We Farm and another previously-announced spinoff that’s yet to be released, We City.

As Inside Network has grown over the years, we’ve received an increasing number of inquiries from companies working on Facebook and social gaming to post listings for open positions. Today, we’re excited to announce the Inside Network Job Board – dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities in the Facebook Platform and social gaming ecosystem.

When you place job listings on the Inside Network Job Board, they’ll be distributed to readers of Inside Facebook and Inside Social Games through regular posts highlighting new job listings, as well as through widgets you see here on the sites. That way, you can be sure that your open positions are being seen by the leading developers, product managers, marketers, designers, and executives in the Facebook Platform and social gaming world today.

We’re offering a special launch discount code for new listings placed this week on the Inside Network Job Board. Just use the discount code “INSJOB30” by this Friday, July 23rd, to receive a 30% discount on all jobs you post.

Several companies in the social gaming place have already posted jobs. Check out these jobs posted by A Bit Lucky, a social gaming startup based in San Mateo, CA, wooga, one of Europe’s largest developers of social games, Slide, one of the earliest companies on the Facebook Platform that has moved heavily into social games, and Playfirst, a large casual game developer that is also moving heavily into social gaming.

• Analytics & Product Manager (San Mateo, CA)
  
• Marketing & Community Manager (San Mateo, CA)
• Lead Game QA-Build Engineer (San Mateo, CA)
• Senior Backend Engineer (Mateo, CA)

• Senior Software Engineer – iPhone & iPad Games (San Francisco, CA)
• Senior Product Manager / Director, Social Gaming (San Francisco, CA)
• Software Engineer, Data Warehouse (San Francisco, CA)
• Software Engineer, Social Games, PHP (San Francisco, CA)
• Senior Software Engineer – Web Engineer (San Francisco, CA)
• Software Engineer – Social Games in AS3 / Flex (San Francisco, CA)

• Product Manager (Berlin, Germany)
  
• Senior Flash Developer (Berlin, Germany)
  

• Jr. Web Developer (San Francisco, CA)
  

Stay tuned over the coming weeks and months to find out about cool job opportunities at the most exciting companies in the industry!