Disney’s first quarterly conference call since its $563 million acquisition of Playdom took place late yesterday, and as one might expect, the discussion between analysts and company execs often turned to Disney’s social plans.

Much of what CEO Bob Iger had to say was fairly obvious: Disney acquired Playdom because it thought it could profit more from directly publishing games than licensing its brand, and that between Playdom and Tapulous, which Disney acquired in July, the company will now be publishing games across all platforms.

However, Iger did have a few comments that added color to Disney’s acquisition of Playdom (thanks to Seeking Alpha for the call transcript):

I mentioned in my remarks that the customer base is pretty diverse from 18 to post 50. It’s dual-gender, meaning it doesn’t skew just in the men’s direction, which we know a lot of other games do. It seemed tailor-made for not only Disney-branded games, but Marvel and ESPN, and we really like the opportunity.

The other thing that was really interesting to us is that we now have over 50 million people, who are members of various Disney, ESPN, and ABC Groups on Facebook. So, we began with a very, very solid base of people to market to and when you add to that the over 40 million people, who are playing Playdom games already, that seemed pretty compelling to us.

Further into the call, Iger said that he’d been pursuing licensed social games with ESPN and Marvel, but decided that Playdom looked fairly cheap — although it was also noted that the Playdom buyout is expected to be dilutive to earnings for several years.

Another interesting tidbit came when Iger was talking about online monetization opportunities:

We believe long-term that monetization will occur in compelling ways, we think it will be diverse in terms of how it is delivered from micro payments, we will see for instance on the social games front to subscriptions, which will see from places like Hulu and obviously, on the social games front to advertising to varying forms of pay-per-view. We’re pretty pleased with how we’ve entered the market as broad and diverse as it is.

Micropayments are what most social game companies survive on, so that part is another obvious call. But read back over this part: “to subscriptions, which we’ll see from places like Hulu and, obviously, on the social games front…”

What Iger is referring to sounds more like a massively multiplayer online game, in which players are engaged enough to pay a set, recurring fee. With that in mind, it seems possible that Disney has a more in-depth and engaging future in mind for its social game development.

Finally, Iger had an interesting response when asked whether he felt threatened by Facebook’s dominance as the only real social gaming platform:

I think it’s already been demonstrated that game playing on Facebook is good for Facebook, and it’s good for the creators and owners of the games. Clearly, the addition of Facebook currency, while in some cases can be viewed as Facebook acting like a gatekeeper, the existence of that currency I think will enable more people to spend money in their games experience. So I think it’s mutually beneficial.

The other thing that I think as to be considered is that these games exist on multiple platforms and we’re going to take a platform agnostic approach to the distribution of these games, not only to other social networks but just to other platform. There is no reason why you can’t play some of these games on, what I’ll call traditional dot com sites or on mobile devices and we intent to distribute rather broadly, particularly as we move our IP through Playdom into the system.

Disney is obviously ready to deal with Credits; immediately following the acquisition, we were able to report that Playdom had signed a deal to use Credits exclusively on Facebook, a decision that their new corporate bosses must have had a say in.

However, Iger also makes it clear that Facebook is just a part of Disney’s social gaming plans. Whether the company will be more successful than Zynga in finding good alternative platforms to Facebook will only be told with time, but with its brand heft and experience in distribution, Disney should prove a powerful force in evolving social games.

Zynga has removed its hit game FarmVille from MSN Games, one of the bigger game portals around, we’ve learned. Zynga first added FarmVille to MSN in February.

This is not the first time that Zynga has pulled a game from a platform. The company did the same with the social network Tagged, canceling a much-discussed partnership.

The departure from MSN looks much more notable, in the grand scheme. MSN itself claims to have about half a billion monthly users worldwide between Games and Messenger — equal to what Facebook claims for itself.

One of the big stories in social gaming right now is that developers are interested in moving beyond Facebook, keeping a line back to the social network’s graph with Connect. With partnerships like FarmVille on MSN, Zynga has been a leader in that move.

But it appears that Zynga didn’t find the traffic MSN produced meaningful enough to continue running FarmVille on the Microsoft platform. Since MSN is traditionally one of the biggest gaming sites on the web, Zynga’s departure suggests the traffic other social developers are hoping to find off of Facebook may be more difficult to find than expected.

A lackluster performance for FarmVille on MSN may also serve to explain why Zynga appears to be putting much of its energy into mobile apps, and international markets like Japan and China. There’s still hope for the US market, though, at least judging by Google’s investment of up to $200 million in Zynga and plans for a new social effort.

[Update] A Microsoft spokesperson offers the following comment: “Farmville is not currently available on MSN Games. We have a great relationship with Zynga, and will continue to work together to provide robust games experiences for casual and social game players in the future.”

It has only been a few short weeks since gaming analytics company Mixpanel told us that it had followed up its popular Facebook suite with analytics for the iPhone, but the company is already back with another new product: Android analytics.

Mixpanel’s argument is that current mobile analytics programs keep developers from producing the best games possible, because they only provide a limited view of activity, unlike the tools available to Facebook developers (which are also offered by other companies).

Hundreds of customers signed up for Mixpanel’s iPhone analytics since its launch, according to the company’s head of business development, Jeremy Richardson.

There won’t be much to differentiate Mixpanel’s Android offering from its others, although that’s partially the point; the idea is to offer something similar to full-featured web analytics for mobile apps, so that developers have the info to make granular improvements (like button positioning) as they already do with web games.

You can check it out here; there’s also a video introducing the Android analytics platform below.

Mixpanel Android Analytics from mixpanel on Vimeo.

A few niche social networks are, unlike most of their peers, actually growing. MyYearbook claims to be one of them, with a youthful user base and emphasis on meeting new people.

MyYearbook has grown since its 2005 founding to 4.5 million unique visitors each month, according to CEO Geoff Cook, with 50 percent growth since last November. It also clocks an average of 167 minutes per user, per month. The new user growth may be driven by the tendency of teenagers to look for a place of their own (in this case, besides Facebook), but the high engagement is driven by the site’s games.

When it comes to the games, MyYearbook is again a bit different. For two years, casual gaming company Arkadium has been behind MyYearbook’s in-house selection of games, with relatively little involvement from other companies.

Now, however, MyYearbook is opening up to outside developers, starting with Omgpop, which runs its own teen-dominated platform. Omgpop will get its own tab on MyYearbook’s site, with integration of games like Balloono and the Pictionary-like Draw My Thing.

Omgpop’s games will also feed off MyYearbook’s in-house virtual currency, called Lunch Money. Unlike Facebook’s Credits, Lunch Money is given out in large quantities as a free promotional tool.

Lunch Money is easy to get, but it’s also won, lost and otherwise used all over the site, so sales of additional Lunch Money end up driving about a third of MyYearbook’s total monetization; Cook says the revenue run rate is up to about $24 million a year, and has grown 64 percent since the start of the year.

Any developers adding their games to MyYearbook’s site will also end up working with Lunch Money, which can be converted into other currencies, like Omgpop’s Coins. That works well for the latter company, since it has a similar model, giving out some Coins for free.

Going forward, sites like MyYearbook could drive an interesting alternative to Facebook’s social gaming ecosystem. On MyYearbook, games are an integral part of the experience; some even feature in the site-wide news feed, which is called Chatter.

Also, though it hardly seems possible, MyYearbook’s games are generally faster and lighter experiences than your typical Facebook farming or city building game, with a heavier social interaction component.

Part of the difference is that MyYearbook and Omgpop both promote interaction between unassociated users. “People have a desire to play not just with friends, but based on level, genre, skills, and to meet new people,” says Omgpop chief revenue officer Wilson Kriegel.

That means more synchronous gaming, but with the same social networking features that made Facebook’s games more successful than their casual counterparts.

Fans of casual games might recognize this one. Having found its way to the top of the App Store charts last week, we came across the OpenFeint enabled iPad title Tesla Wars (also on the iPhone) from Pavel Tarabrin.

A combination of tower defense and Storm the House style games, Tesla Wars is a simple app that gives users the ability to deep fry hordes of ravenous stick figures with the power of lightning. The game also has elements of both strategy and twitch reaction, as users vainly attempt to defend themselves against an ever growing onslaught.

The goal of the game is simple enough. Players control a single tesla tower and fence at the center of the map. From both sides, waves of enemies will charge the defenses and attempt to bring it down. With each level, these waves become more difficult and it is up to the player to live for as long as possible.

The controls are easy enough, as merely tapping on an approaching enemy will zap him with a massive jolt of electricity. However, one zap only knocks him down, and the resilient little fellow will quickly get back up and charge again. In order to kill them, users will have to hold their finger down until they explode into a gruesome display of sticky body parts. Truth be told, it really is quite gratifying.

Here’s the catch: The longer one’s finger is held down, the more energy is drawn from the tesla tower. It does regenerate slowly, but users must still be aware of how much they have as the only time to refill it fully is at the end of a level.

This is where strategy comes into play. Before starting a new level, players earn money based on how many kills they got in the previous one (as well as from bonuses like not taking any damage). This income is then used to not only repair an damage or lost energy, but also purchase and upgrade both the tower and powerful special abilities. These include increased damage, health, and energy regeneration for the tower as well as actively used abilities such as mines, air strikes, or lightning storms. There are also passive bonuses such as shooting double lightning or chaining lightning strikes from one target to another.

Without going into the specific abilities of each power, we’ll just say that each is very strong. However, users must actively pause the game, select a power, then target where it strikes. In the case of the mines or air strike, they will target where the mines/bombs are placed, while the lightning storm will simply go off in one big explosion, hitting everything. Once an ability is used, though, it must recharge, with the more powerful ones taking longer, making timing very important.

Interesting as they are, special abilities are the first complaint to be had with Tesla Wars. The fact that one has to pause the game to use an ability creates a very unnatural and awkward break in game flow. Additionally, one has to pause it again to check on if it is ready. Never does it appear while defending. Part of the fun is the chaos and fast pace, but to just bring everything to a screeching halt doesn’t feel right.

On the positive side, it is pretty gratifying to take out the hordes of enemies. Beyond exploding, sometimes you will do enough damage to leave them crawling toward or away from you. Sometimes you will just blow up their top or bottom half, leaving the other half running away (or, in some cases, still trying to kill you). Moreover, there is such a wide variety of enemies — kamikazes carrying explosives, lightsaber swordsmen, jet pack riders — that there’s plenty of challenge in figuring out on who to blow up first.

Unfortunately, this is where controls work against Tesla Wars a second time. Since you have to hold your finger down to target and kill the baddies, half the time, the carnage is covered up. The enemies are just that small. It’s less prevalent when there are lots of enemies on screen, and far less annoying than pausing the game to activate specials, but it does take away from the experience.

Though there are some control issues, the game’s unlimited play — one plays until they are defeated — does give it a great deal of longevity. Additionally, its OpenFeint integration makes that potential length even longer. There aren’t a whole lot of leaderboards to compete in (only three, based on the difficulty levels), but there are a ton of shareable achievements.

Overall, Tesla Wars is a fairly fun game with some satisfying ways to slay thousands of faceless stick figures. With an ever increasing difficulty, it’s a title that comes with a well placed difficulty curve and should appeal to many tower defense or Storm the House fans. All the same, the controls do feel a bit ill thought out as the holding down of one’s finger often covers up the action and the pausing to use specials destroys the fast game flow. Regardless, the game did make it to the top of the App Store lists once, so it’s obviously a complaint that many are looking past.

As part of Google’s latest attempt to build a social platform alternative to Facebook, the company is reportedly buying virtual monetization service provider Jambool. The price is $55 million plus an earn-out worth between $15 million and $20 million, according to TechCrunch.

Reached by phone, Jambool cofounder Reza Hussein gave us a firm “no comment.”

Jambool, maker of the Social Gold virtual currency payments wrapper, has been busy building its business both on and off of Facebook — but mostly off, these days, as Facebook has been indicating that it plans to make its Credits virtual currency the exclusive payment option in games. Major developers including CrowdStar and Playdom have already signed on to Credits, essentially removing the need for Jambool’s multi-payment service on Facebook’s platform.

As it has been squeezed out of Facebook, Jambool’s approach has been to argue publicly against Facebook’s idea of Credits — see this recent guest post from cofounder Vikas Gupta for more on that — and to expand with other partners. One of those partners is MySpace, also a Google ally against Facebook.

Given that Google is trying to create an alternative to Facebook, and that Jambool can only really function off of Facebook, this deal seems like a good fit. Jambool’s founders, Amazon payments veterans, can help Google figure out how to integrate payments as part of a social platform. Of course, this follows Google’s recent purchase of Slide and its investment in Zynga, other moves designed to bolster its social leadership and product portfolio.

Jambool had raised $6 million in two rounds of venture funding.

Mentez, a Latin American game publisher with its main presence on Orkut, is announcing today that it raised an undisclosed amount of money from Insight Venture Partners, a New York fund that also has an investment in the Asian social game publisher 6waves.

By Mentez’s own count, the company has 22 million weekly active players with 21 social games on Orkut and seven on Facebook. Notably, it publishes two Playdom games, Bola and Tiki Resort, on Orkut.

Like several other international publishers, Mentez operates its own payments network, called Paymentez, which it says processes 45,000 transactions daily. It focuses on alternative payments, with 100,000 retail locations in Brazil selling its virtual currency.

The company also notes heavy involvement with consumer brands like Walmart and 20th Century Fox, which run campaigns within its games.

Brazil is a growing Facebook market with 5.3 million users, but Orkut still far outweighs it in the country of 191 million people. It’s a viable but relatively untapped market for US-based developers, so it wouldn’t be surprising to see Mentez striking more deals this year.

Hong Kong publisher 6 Waves has put out yet another Facebook title, called Legacy of Rome, which was developed by a European company called innoWate. First spotted by the folks over at Gamezebo, the ancient Roman city-builder takes a page out of Playfish’s My Empire’s concept, placing it into a much more in-depth, and realistic, premise.

As a game still in its early beta stages, Legacy of Rome doesn’t yet appear to have all the bells and whistles its tutorial segments talk about. All the same, it’s still a game with a tremendous amount of depth and breadth to it, that at times almost seems overwhelming. Once one does get the hang of it, though, it’s sure to impress.

Legacy of Rome starts out with Caesar charging the player with expanding the, well, legacy of Rome in the ancient territories of Germany. The idea is to build a fully functional and successful empire, worthy of ancient Rome. Right off the bat, there is a tremendous amount going on, and any number of menus within even more menus.

Essentially, players must manage the physical space they are granted with means of producing gold, stone, and lumber while managing population, happiness, water supplies, and sanitation. Starting with the most obvious elements — stone and lumber — these resources are gathered over a set amount of time by placing buildings such as a quarry or lumber mill atop stones or trees on the map. These, along with gold, are necessary to construct and upgrade new and existing buildings.

Gold, on the other hand, is directly linked to population in the form of taxes. In order to increase population, players must construct different sizes of housing, ranging from slaves’ quarters to upper class patrician houses. Obviously, the bigger the house, the more people it can hold. However, it does not automatically fill up. As the town grows, new non-player characters will arrive, and for a small sum of gold, permanently populate a residence, paying periodic taxes. If one has friends that play, they can be added to the population for free.

These are the most visible of the resources, but there are others that are important that aren’t clearly shown (though they need to be). Water will be a fairly new one to Facebook city-builders. First off, players must build roads to connect to the nearby pond so that fresh water can be brought into their town. However, it seems that water can only be carried a short distance, so users actually have to create reservoir and aqueduct systems to transport it throughout their empire. Coupled with Roman Baths that use this water supply, this appears to be what determines the sanitation level of a town. Unfortunately, this feature does not do anything as of yet, but the game says that there are bonuses coming soon for ideal cleanliness (which can currently only be seen through the advisor menu, to be touched on later).

One thing water may also affect is the somewhat elusive element of happiness. Unlike other city-builders, there is no gauge to watch on the main user interface screen, but players must build certain structures (e.g. a pavilion) to keep their citizens happy. If they get too upset, there seems to be increased chances of “riots” which require authoritarian structures like a prefecture to quell.

It’s a lot to manage, but actually pretty fun once you figure it all out. The biggest issue is that the game is very vague as to what exactly things do, at the moment, and there is no clear cache of resources to view save for gold, stone, and lumber.

One clarifying mechanic is advisors, which can be appointed to give advice on sanitation, happiness, and population. These advisor positions are best filled by friends that play, and work for a set amount of time. Unfortunately, they don’t really do much beyond state the obvious (like say “you need more houses” when you try to add population that you don’t have houses for).

Beyond these advisors, another social element involves visiting friends’ empires. What’s interesting here is that one can either help them out or send slaves to steal from them. Sadly, neither element appears to be functional as of yet.

The last major element of the game is not exactly a resource. It’s another type of building dubbed “Traders.” There are only three to build, but constructing them is supposed to unlock new types of buildings down the road. That said, the game is a very slow burn title, in that it takes hours, if not days, to build some things. Beyond this, all structures can be upgraded to yield a greater amount of whatever it is that they produce.

As far as complaints goes, the biggest is clarity on some of the game elements. There are some very detailed quests (tasks) that explain a number of the nuances, but there really needs to be more user feedback and direct reference areas. Another annoyance is that taxes need be tediously collected building by building rather than all in one lump sum like in My Empire. Finally, and oddest of all, there is no audio at all, although this is hopefully a temporary omission.

Overall, Legacy of Rome looks like it could be a very successful game. It’s a little overwhelming and confusing at times, but with a little work, it could easily succeed as one of the most in-depth city-builders on Facebook. One way or another, it will be curious to see just how well this more realistic Roman title does.

Early in 2009, we got our first look at SupersonicAds, a European offers company that creates in-game advertising offers for users to earn virtual currency from. The self-funded company held off on raising money for quite a while, but it has finally taken its first funding, a $2 million round led by former Skype CEO Michael van Swaaij, according to VentureBeat.

Based in London, SupersonicAds is one of a handful of European startups, including SponsorPay and TokenAds, that established a foothold in the payments industry by specializing in their continent’s diverse mix of mostly affluent, but otherwise very different markets.

All of those companies emerged in 2009, and appear to have made fairly fast progress spreading through Europe. Now we’re hearing that they’re making contacts in the United States and elsewhere with a more international expansion in mind.

SupersonicAds, for instance, just announced deals with BigPoint, Playdom and Watercooler (now Kabam). Of course, any individual partner can (and usually will) make deals with multiple platforms; the real challenge is becoming the dominant partner, which none of the European monetization companies can yet claim.

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

Monday, August 2nd, 2010

• This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Apps by MAU Shows Unusual Gains for Some Apps
• Top 25 Facebook Games for August 2010
• Q&A with Vitrue on Facebook Marketing Tactics, Metrics, and New Open Graph Tools
• With More Traffic, Facebook Plans to Double Size of Its Oregon Data Center
• Custom Tab Width Reductions Coming Soon to Facebook Pages
• PayFone Introduces One-Touch Mobile Payment Service

Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010

• Facebook’s Top 20 Pages: Coca-Dola, Eminem, Gaga and TV
• PayNearMe Lets 7-11 Customers Pay Cash for Facebook Credits, Giveaway Bonuses
• The United States and India Led Facebook’s Growth in July 2010
• The Facebook Global Monitor August 2010 Edition is Now Available
• Facebook’s “Suggest an Ad” Feature Pulls Text and Images from Web Sites to Create Ads
• Facebook Finally Upgrades Its Android App

Wednesday, August 4th, 2010

• Facebook Introduces Browser Tab Alerts
• Facemoods Brings Emoticons to Facebook Chat, Gets Millions of Users
• The Facebook Marketing Bible – August 2010 Edition is Now Available
• Facebook Questions Now Included on Pages and Home Page, Still Buggy
• Mobile Site m.facebook.com Gets Privacy Controls
• Through Strategic Deal with Friendster’s New Owner, Facebook Expands Patent Portfolio

Thursday, August 5th, 2010

• Facebook Job Listings: Mobile, Legal, Partnerships, and New International Locations
• Facebook’s US Traffic Back on Pace in July
• Highlights This Week from the Inside Network Job Board: Lolapps, Context, ZipZapPlay, Ohai, Slide, and More
• RootMusic’s BandPage: A Cheap, Powerful, Customizable Way For Musicians To Use Facebook

Friday, August 6th, 2010

• New Partnerships and Promotions Show Facebook’s Focus on Expanding Credits
• Mexico Gets Ready to Pass Canada as North America’s Second-Largest Facebook Market
• Become a Birthday Star with American Greetings’ New Facebook-Driven Video Greeting
• Facebook App Profile Box and Page Tab Changes Coming on August 23
• Facebook Roundup: Ads, the Like Button, Media, Photos, IPO Bets and Your Ethnicity
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