Japanese mobile giant DeNA has been ramping up its US presence for several months. Part of its strategy is to acquire a number of Western companies. The latest is Astro Ape, which makes Office Heroes for the iPhone.

The larger plan for DeNA Global (the American subsidiary) is to create a new platform, MiniNation, as well as find content to take back to its successful Japanese mobile social network, Mobage Town. Instead of persuading developers to try out the platforms, DeNA is buying them outright.

DeNA also recently acquired GameView, which made a series of mobile social games, and Icebreaker, as well as making an investment in Aurora Feint and opening a $27.5 million fund for Western developers.

Zynga has announced its latest acquisition today, the German company Dextrose AG, which released a development platform called the Aves Engine earlier this year.

The news hasn’t been widely commented on yet, but this could turn out to be one of Zynga’s most important acqusitions. Aves is an HTML5 engine designed for high-end 2D and 2.5D graphics.

Since it’s in HTML5, Aves can run on both the web and on mobile devices browsers, like the iPhone’s Safari. More than just a potential tweak to Zynga’s Facebook games, the Dextrose buyout means Zynga could potentially develop a new game simultaneously for both web and mobile.

With FarmVille and its other apps on the iPhone, Zynga hasn’t done spectacularly well, but that’s probably in part due to the higher graphics expectations of mobile users. The Aves Engine hasn’t been widely used, so we’re not sure of its full capabilities. But Zynga probably wouldn’t have bought the company if it weren’t impressed by Aves’ graphical capabilities.

Here’s a video of Aves released by Dextrose for an April conference, and a more recent one from E3 2010 below it:

Like Zynga’s past acquisitions, Dextrose will take on a new name, Zynga Germany. Co-founders Paul Bakaus and Rocco Di Leo will become chief technology officer of Zynga Germany and country manager, respectively.

[Curt Bererton is the CEO and co-founder, with Mathilde Pignol, of social game developer ZipZapPlay. Their company recently came to prominence with a social game called Baking Life, a bakery sim that grew to a peak of 6.7 million monthly active users in just three months.

The below story is an "as told to" monologue, drawn from a recent Inside Social Games interview with Bererton.]

ZipZapPlay started up in late 2007 to build PlayCrafter, which is still active. The short and slightly sad story about PlayCrafter is that it’s one of the better, if not the best game creation platforms that has been made. The idea was to make it as easy to create a game as it is to write a book. If Mozart needed to write a book, code a game and create music all at once, you wouldn’t have these great masterpieces. Game design is like that because you need to know multiple fields.

But the core flaw for PlayCrafter was the business model and the youth of the target audience, which inherently meant they didn’t monetize as well. It broke our hearts a bit that it didn’t totally take off and make us a bunch of money, because that meant we had to leave it behind and move on to another space.

So to some extent that was the origin – starting with something very hard and learning some hard business lessons. In retrospect it was our own naivete to assume we could do PlayCrafter when there wasn’t an industry around that concept. LittleBigPlanet should have been a sign for us to stop sooner. That was supposed to be the platform example, but its sales were not as high as Sony had hoped.

When we started to look at Facebook, the first game we built was called Cat’s Cove, in August 2009. You had these cat pirates, and they would attack each other in turn-based combat. Really the point was, we’re gonna build this Facebook game and get it out the door really fast, because we know we’re gonna screw it up. When we built that game it was about learning technology, what processes worked and what didn’t and doing a lot of split tests.

We did a lot of things wrong there. But the one thing we learned from PlayCrafter after working on it for so long, was if it’s not working out, you need to kill things and move on. And even at that time, the money was getting tighter. Lack of money is a significant motivator.

After Cat’s Cove we started seeing the world in a different way, which now is part of how we think. There’s a spectrum from pure innovation to low-risk products. I’d say PlayCrafter was way over on the hisk risk side, just short of crazy indie games. Zynga is on the other side — they almost exclusively place smart bets now, and they clearly have a recipe that works. Baking Life is more on the conservative end of the spectrum. Part of the reason was that we needed a win, otherwise we were going to sell the company.

But we always need to do something new that hasn’t been done before — it’s part of our DNA. So how do you balance the risk without dying? Baking Life, we felt, was a good compromise. We did a bunch of testing of various themes. Baking did fairly well, and we knew Restaurant City and Cafe World had done fairly well. So we changed the core mechanic to be more of a retail store with cashiers and customers that waited in front of them, and we did our new viral design based on user-generated content. Those things combined to make what we felt was a relatively smart bet.

We also knew that baking was popular outside this space, but hadn’t been done on Facebook (at least to our knowledge). Even if you think about Hollywood blockbusters, if it’s similar but different in some way, people will still like the next blockbuster. To use a hardcore gaming metaphor, people loved Quake, but then also loved Halo and Half Life. We’ll be adding new things based on successful core pieces.

What I hope to see is us moving towards more and more innovation, but as a small company, if we start way over here in crazy town, we might be successful, or we might crash and burn. I believe the best approach is to build revenue with smart bets and then use that revenue to fund the cool innovative ideas that could change the way social games are made and experienced.

Having built several things before, we knew fairly quickly, based on the metrics, that Baking Life would probably do pretty well. We didn’t know that it was going to do as well as it did. I like to believe that when you’re making any game, there’s a combination of skill and luck. So I think there was a fair amount of skill because of what we’d learned from previous games, but there was some luck as well. Who knows, maybe the retail store mechanic could have been boring and people wouldn’t have liked it at all, or creating cupcakes and baking wouldn’t be interesting or fun.

It did work out pretty well, and looking at our metrics, we’d already worked out a process by which we could improve them. Are people finishing the tutorial? If not, where are they dropping off? There’s a general philosophy — we look at metrics a lot, but don’t make decisions solely off them. They should influence design, but not drive the design, because you’ll end only being able to optimize or split test your way up to a certain point, past which you can’t make a big step over to a new idea.

Why is Baking Life successful? The art style, people like to bake, a solid tech stack, tasty cupcakes — there are a lot of pieces that came together to make it popular, and a lot of lessons that came back on what did and didn’t work about the tutorial, architecture, etc. With features like the CupCake Creator, we were trying to bring a little bit of our user-generated content flavor to something we think is important in the social space: the viral aspect, making something more directly meaningful to the person you’re sending it to. We like that idea, that UGC can be powerful, but we learned some hard lessons about how not to do it early on. Now we still like to include that flavor, but you can’t make the whole thing about it.

We could have a 10 hour conversation on what did and didn’t work. One thing people underestimate is that social games look simple, but they’re actually pretty hard. On the technical side alone, if you’re not moving fast you’ll lose users to people like Zynga, who have it down. We think the production values are only going to go up, and that’s where we want to be.

The success was to some extent a pleasant surprise, and we didn’t have a lot of money, so we didn’t have a big team to start chugging away on the next game. The big problem was getting the right people in place, and we set a pretty high bar for who we hired. If we were another company, we’d be at 30 people right now. Instead we’re 10, and may be 12 or 13 soon. We set a high bar not just for skill, but for personality.

Our philosophy is that we aren’t looking for prima donnas or drama queens, just smart and cool people who love games and get things done. Turns out this combination is pretty hard to find. Probably the most significant factor in our success is the people I work with: my co-founder Mathilde and our awesome team of great people. Having fun, highly skilled people without egos working together means you can move quickly without getting bogged down in drama or politics. Speed is the probably the most important factor in the success in almost any business, and this is doubly true in social games. I’m just happy to go to work every day and make great games happen.

Now that we have the revenue, we’re hiring. With social games you can’t just let the ball drop – we’ve been down a bit lately because we’ve focused on hiring, but we’re getting good people on board and getting up to speed quickly and getting to where the next game can pick up more steam.

The other thing is that it’s much easier to recruit technical people because there’s often a right answer. Designers and producers are harder, mostly because there isn’t a “right answer” you can test them for, rather you have to look for great organization and deep understanding of design. But at the end of the day, it has to be a company that I would want to work at too. I didn’t put in three years of startup level effort to hate coming into work.

I also know how much we’re making, so even if you look at some of the acquisition prices in terms of dollars per MAU or DAU, Playdom got a pretty nice number, but to some extent we know that’s based on real revenue. At minimum, a social game should have half a cent per DAU, up to 10 cents per DAU or higher.

If we can show that we aren’t a one-hit wonder, I’d say our story is, we tried one thing and it totally didn’t work, learned from our mistakes, tried another and it worked better and kept on trying and learning until we got something pretty great. We’ve learned a lot that makes me think that the probability of doing it again is much better now than it ever was before. Eric Ries is on our board of advisors and influenced us a lot with his ideas of a lean startup, although we think about a minimum viable game instead of a minimum viable product.

It’s about design know-how and knowing what features you can cut while still leaving something appealing to players. Keeping only the core features allows you to build and test your game with the real market as fast as possible, the beauty of social gaming (and the online space in general) is that you can always change it later via smart design or smart A/B testing.

I think at the end of the day, if you know what you’re doing, you can make something successful on Facebook. It’s still an order of magnitude better than other platforms for getting your game in front of a large audience and its great communication channels.

Maybe we’re a counter-example, but we built and maintained Baking Life with just six people up until the last few months. At least a few small companies have figured out how to do it. Either they got really lucky, or they figured something out.

Madden NFL Superstars has finally hit the top of one of our weekly AppData lists. The Electronic Arts spinoff of its Madden franchise has been picking up steam as it goes, an added over half a million players during the past week. Of course, EA has also promoted the game heavily, so it can’t yet be considered successful.

Here’s our emerging games list, which counts fast-growing titles still under a million monthly active users:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Madden NFL Superstars	946,835	+541,879	+134%
2.	Critter Island	976,255	+324,537	+50%
3.	Ranch Town	798,462	+274,016	+52%
4.	La Tomatina	362,796	+227,923	+169%
5.	Green Farm	219,596	+195,078	+796%
6.	i Like Slots	511,004	+190,368	+59%
7.	小小戰爭	550,530	+181,595	+49%
8.	Candy Shop	376,427	+169,956	+82%
9.	FantaBook	593,890	+161,967	+37%
10.	Cupcake Corner	366,505	+155,329	+74%
11.	Robot Unicorn Attack	336,398	+149,092	+80%
12.	Warstorm	413,619	+148,826	+56%
13.	Chucke la taupe	371,303	+143,018	+63%
14.	Bubble Town: Party Planet	869,627	+142,249	+20%
15.	Gone Amazon	125,764	+124,252	+8,218%
16.	My Sweet Shop	310,562	+120,622	+64%
17.	CBSSports.com Franchise Football	553,260	+119,670	+28%
18.	Mahjong Trails	485,047	+117,129	+32%
19.	Ultimate Fan	223,960	+111,200	+99%
20.	Univers des Trois Royaumes	288,754	+107,337	+59%

Critter Island, by LOLapps, isn’t growing quite as fast as the EA title, and the game appears to be having trouble with its retention as well, drawing only nine percent of its MAUs back as daily active users. But like EA the game is crossing the important million MAU mark, and it’s possible the DAU picture could improve with time.

Ranch Town is a much older title farming title. We recently talked to the CEO of its maker, Meteor Games, and heard that the company is focusing in on more in-depth games; in the meantime, it appears to be putting fresh resources into promoting its older games.

La Tomatina, although a rare Spanish-language game, is not particularly notable, involving a fairly simplistic mechanic of hurling tomatoes at friends’ portraits. At number five, Green Farm is a lot more interesting. The recently-released farming game by mobile developer Gameloft is suggesting that better graphics could revive the farming genre.

We’ve recently reviewed Green Farm, as well as Candy Shop and CupCake Corner, which also appear within the list’s top 10 — just click through the links to see our takes.

Every once in a while, browser based games successfully use of Facebook to bring in new users. We’ve seen this in the past with titles such as Evony and Age of Ocean. Now it’s Gameforge’s turn, with Ikariam, a title that just blew past a million monthly active users in under two weeks, all of whom it’s directing back to its stand-alone website.

Ikariam puts users into the world of ancient Greece, with the task of building up a bustling empire. Within this world, players must manage numerous resources in order to succeed, including a military, workers, research, physical space, and so on. That in mind, the game is a very slow burn sort of title in that most everything takes hours to produce, except for some of the earliest buildings.

Veterans of other browser-based strategy games like Evony (which makes use of a very similar engine, suggesting that both games could be licensed from the same source) will be more than well-versed with the basics of this app. Players place buildings on specific plots of land and earn some benefit from them. It uses the typical strategy game mentality, in that players build these structures (e.g. an academy) in order to unlock different ones in a technology tree. Unfortunately, that tree doesn’t appear to be terribly visible.

The only major difference between this game and, say, Kingdoms of Camelot, is that there are no resource structures for the player to worry about early on. Instead, users are able to access a map of the island their city is located on and send workers to the various resource locales, which for us consisted of a crystal mine and lumber mill. In order to earn these resources, players must allocate a set amount of their population to work there. The more that work, the more coins it costs, but they also produce more of that resource per hour.

While the resource of lumber appears to be a stable (as it is used in making buildings), the second resource will vary from island to island. This is part of the social element, in that users must set up trade (via ports), colonize nearby areas, or simply wage war on everyone.

Whatever the choice the player makes, all three are well beyond our current level of power, and with the painfully slow pace of the game, likely to be out of reach for some time. In fact, this is actually a curious choice made by the developers. Usually, new players are given enough resources to get a decently respectable city going right from the start, but for Ikariam, within the first couple of tutorial instructions, there were not enough resources left to do anything. This forces the player to wait for hours until they can do anything else. Granted, this is typical of many games, but at least let them finish the whole tutorial!

Despite the slowness with which many of Ikariam’s features are revealed, some of them are worth noting. As a social element, there is obviously the ability to attack other users, but players can also, as expected, form alliances with one another for mutual benefit. There is even a nice leaderboard system built in. In addition, each island has a section called the “Agora” that allows for different forum-like posts, that can be viewed by other players that also inhabit that island.

There’s also an interesting means of defense in the form of a statue representing a Greek god on each island. Though new players start out under its protection from the get go, it appears that users who donate set amounts of resources (such as wine from vineyards, marble from quarries, and so on) for protection can briefly drive away 10-100% of enemy troops.

Eventually, players will have to defend themselves, manage their population with housing, and upgrade their buildings. In addition, they’ll have to continually research new technologies to further advance their society in the forms of gathering, military, and travel. It’s a tremendous amount to take in, and even for a veteran traditional gamer, Ikariam and its ilk can feel very bloated.

But that’s the interesting thing to note about Ikariam’s growth on Facebook. Unlike most games that do so well, Ikariam is overwhelming to the new user, and this complexity is likely to drive away many potential users. Unfortunately, we won’t be able to see how successful Ikariam is at retaining new users, since it does its best to redirect them to its site.

For most users, if you don’t play Kingdoms of Camelot, or Evony, or any of the other browser-based strategy titles, then Ikariam is probably not for you. All the same, the game is a fast grower.

[The following is a guest post by Joel Augé, the co-founder of Facebook developer HitGrab. His company is best known for its RPG title MouseHunt, while Augé himself also leads a parallel life as a solo recording artist.  This post first appeared on Augé's blog.]

So Tuesday evening I was privy to an event put on by Facebook and their games team at FBHQ in Palo Alto. Eighty or so attendees watched as Zucks and team announced their dedication to games, the launch of some new features, and the closing down or tweaking of some others. One of the features which is being tweaked is the newsfeed. It’s being modified so that if you don’t play a game, you won’t get newsfeed items from that game. Some people are livid. I’ve even had conversations where a leading developer has gone as far as saying, “It’s been fun. Good knowing you all”.

The fact of the matter is, every time the rules change, opportunity knocks. I’d even go one step further and say that a lot of Zynga’s success is due to their ability to capitalize on shifts in the platform.

Example #1: Multi-photo posts to the wall from within apps. This was a feature, made available to developers, to allow users the ability to share “photo” content to their walls in an easy way. Zynga saw an opportunity and used it extensively (in Mafia Wars at least) as a way to post game leveling and cool in-game art to the walls of users with the end-goal being new user acquisition. The stream was now Zynga’s play thing. I’m sure they acquired millions of users using that method.

Example #2: Incentivizing the gathering of user contact details. Seeing as Facebook was “clamping down” on friend spam in late 2009 with some further tweaks to the feed, invites, and requests, Zynga promptly countered, and was (arguably) the first to incentivize the gathering of permissions to email via in-game bonuses. A giant bar was placed across the top of their apps with a message stating something of this sort: “Do these four things to become a complete human being”. One of those things was giving Zynga permission to email you directly without Facebook as the proxy. Zynga now has a war chest of millions of gamer emails.

My point is, the limitations (read: rules) of the platform instigated Zynga’s creativity to build new acquisition and engagement channels. Now (ahem..)… “creative” and “Zynga” aren’t commonly used together in the same phrase, but where game creativity may have lacked, their recognition of this space as a land-grab Wild West is to be commended. I’d be very surprised if Frontierville isn’t a real-world tongue-in-cheek metaphor of this very truth.

Where does that leave HitGrab and others like us? Doom and gloom? Sorry. You won’t find whining here. The fact is, gamers love games. Plural. We make great games. And as the acquisition costs and channels fall under the pressure of a growing platform, we need to keep creating and innovating great games. I personally love the fact that Zynga has invested so heavily in training non-gamers to become gamers. Eventually, those gamers will spill out of Zynga’s game-loop (either by accident or by advert) and find their way to our games. The communities are tighter, the customer experience better, the relationship with the development teams are real. Some companies are out to grab as much land as possible. For HitGrab it’s not the amount of land that counts, but the communities living on the land we do have, that matters. Lots of land means nothing if it’s fallow. (Thanks for that training, Farmville!)

(Some might mistake this previous paragraph as blind idealism and devoid of any understanding of the cost of acquiring users and retaining them — to that I say look at our track record. Forty percent of the first 100,000 players who installed MouseHunt are still with us, 3 years later.)

HitGrab is focused on making our players the happiest and most tightly connected communities around. Want proof? Go play MouseHunt and when you run into trouble (because it’s quite tough), ask for help on the forums. One of our many groups of dedicated hunters will pick you up and dust you off and a life-long friendship will be born.

Welcome to the new world. It’s been found. We’re here. Now it’s time to make it fun to live in.

Following a surge two weeks ago in new hires and promotions, the last round was a bit low. It’s been back up over the last seven days. According to LinkedIn data, 10 of the top social gaming outfits are hiring new people including Zynga, Metrogames, and the usually quiet 6 Waves. In addition to these 10, a smaller outfit called Flying Wisdom Studios gains a new product manager, and Slide continues its internal reorganization within Google; an endeavour that has been going on for nearly two months now.

If your company is bringing on new people or doing a notable promotion, be sure to let us know. Email editor (at) insidesocialgames (dot) com.

If you’re looking for a job yourself, be sure to check out our Inside Network Job Board.

Here’s this week’s list:

6 Waves

• Billy Chan — Formerly a Production Supervisor from Imagi Animation Studios, Chan joins 6 Waves as their newest Associate Product Manager, making him their first noted hire in many weeks.

CrowdStar

• Paul Cattrone — Now a Database Architect for CrowdStar, Cattrone comes with experience from Crushpad where he was their Chief Technology Officer.
• Paul Pierce — A former Senior Artist for LucasArts joins CrowdStar this week. Pierce joins the social developer as their newest UI Artist.
• Pawel Jawor -- Now a Community Manager for Happy Island at CrowdStar, Jawor was previously an English Customer Service Team Leader for Warhammer Online at France Telecom/GOA.

Digital Chocolate

• Mari Mäntylä- Mäntylä moves up within Digital Chocolate from Junior Game Designer to Game Designer.
• Michail Katkoff- Prior to joining Digital Chocolate as their newest Associate Product Manager, Katkoff was the Strategy & Process Development Coordinator for Digita Oy.
• John Hollingworth – Formerly a Games Quality Assurance Assistant for France Telecom, Hollingworth joins Digital Chocolate as a Junior Game Designer.

Flying Wisdom Studios

• Japheth Dillman — Flying Wisdom Studios (FWS) announced a new product manager for Social Games in the form of Japheth Dillman. According to IGN, Japheth first came to FWS sharing his knowledge of social and viral mechanics for games.

Kabam

• Matthew Curtis — Joining Kabam this week is a former Senior Associate from Triage Consulting Group. Curtis joins the Kabam team as a new Associate Producer.
• Daniel Williams — Leaving his role as Software Engineer at Playdom, Williams joins Kabam as a Back-End Software Engineer.
• Mike Lulham -- Also coming from Playdom, Lulham leaves his QA Analyst role there for the same title at Kabam.

MetroGames

• Agustine de Cabrera — Previously a Project Lead Developer for Gameloft, Cabrera joins MetroGames as a new iPhone Games Developer.

MindJolt

• Cristina Sparks — Now the Office Operations Manager at MindJolt, Sparks’ prior experience stems from an Office Manager role at TrueBrand.

Playdom

• Shawn Hymer — A former System Administrator from InstantAction, Hymer joins Playdom as their newest QA Engineer.

Playfish

• Tomasz Likus — Formerly a Senior UNIX Systems Administrator for Glu Mobile, Likus joins Playfish as a new Systems Operations Engineer.

RockYou!

• Priscillia Pun — Pun joins RockYou! as their latest Flash Illustrator & Animator. Prior to this, she was a Student at the Art Institute.

Slide

• Shane Sofos — Slide continues its Google transition with Sofos whose role of IT & Office Technician for Slide changes to that of Slide IT Support for Google.

Zynga

• Nathan Etter — Though not a new hire, the Zynga‘s Director of Business for FarmVille, Nathan Etter, changes to the Executive Producer for FarmVille.
• Stephen Scott — In another internal Zynga change, Scott changes roles from Custom Support  Representative to Quality Assurance Tester.
• Sean Dornan-Fish — Previously a Senior Writer for Vigil Games, Dornan-Fish joins Zynga as their most recent Designer & Writer.
• Jeff Smits — Formerly a Sr. Software Engineer – Front End for VMIX, Smits joins Zynga as their new Software Engineer for Mobile.
• Erin Hoffman — A former Lead Designer from HumaNature Studios, Hoffman is now a Lead Systems Designer for Zynga.
• C.J. Larsen -- Joining Zynga as a CS Lead, Larsen was previously Advanced Tech Support at Fourth Dimension Software.

Following in the footsteps of Golden Nugget, competitor Pechanga Resort & Casino, the largest casino in the Western United States, is creating their own take on casino games with Pechanga Slot Wars. Inspired by the classic game Parking Wars, the game uses simple mechanics to market the brick and mortar Pechanga business.

Rather than a virtual space game like Golden Nugget Vegas Casino, Slot Wars is a combination of Parking Wars and Ubisoft’s first Facebook title, TickTock. It’s a cleanly made game and better than many branding or promotional games we’ve seen. That said, the core mechanic is purely luck-based with no opportunity for creativity or planning.

The goal of Slot Wars is to acquire the highest score possible. To do this, you play the slot machine of either a friend or another random user. You start with 100 points and use them as currency to spin the slots. Like real slots, different combinations of icons earn different points. The idea is to hit the “bomb jackpot.”

Similar to TickTock, players blow each other up to earn more points. In fact, you don’t earn points — you steal them. In order to plant a bomb, three bomb icons must land on your slots. This will arm a single explosive. Once a slot machine accumulates three bombs (from anyone), the bomb explodes and each player steal points for each bomb they planted.

You can spend a small amount of points to defuse any bombs threatening you before three are accumulated. According to the developer, the average player remains logged in for about 40 minutes to protect their score. Some players have been recorded at 15 hours straight.

Users can also purchase items with special abilities. At the moment, there is only one — the “Super Bomb.” It costs 750 points and causes its victim to lose 1,000 points. It’s a revenge item, because you don’t gain anything from their loss.

Pechanga has also, evidently, incorporated tangible prizes. It’s not 100 percent clear how these work, but it appears that you can enter drawings for prizes, such as Pechanga gift cards.

Virtually every spin earns some points and thus far, most spins have been worth more than the cost of spinning. Basically, you have to try hard to lose points unless you are successfully bombed. But if your slot lands on three sirens, an “Alarm” will go off and deduct a fair chunk of points.

It can take quite a while to plant a bomb. Eventually, you will get the three-bomb combination, but clicking a single button again and again is tedious. When there are more items, beyond the Super Bomb, there might be more strategy or creativity needed.  As it stands, the only effective strategy is to outlast other players, and stay online, blocking bombs to protect your score.

Our only other complaints are minor usability issues . Players cannot directly invite friends. Currently, clicking the “Invite Friends” icon only allows players to post to their wall. There is also no legend indicating the payout values of the different slot combinations.

Pechanga Slot Wars has a charming simplicity to it. The game does lack any strategy or challenge, but so do slot machines. More purchasable items may add more complexity to the game in future. We also hope to see more prizes. But even as it is, Slot Wars is a superior promotional game.

Although the Japanese tech giant Softbank is now best known in Silicon Valley for its massive $150 million investment in Zynga, the company is also active in smaller rounds. MocoSpace, a growing mobile social network, is the latest to get one.

MocoSpace is announcing a $3.5 million addition to its second round of funding from SoftBank today. The aim is to use the money toward a new initiative: browser-based gaming on mobile devices.

That sounds like an odd idea — mobile gaming has been strongly tied to downloaded apps since the advent of smartphones. But MocoSpace sees an opening. “We think there’s a huge opportunity, and it’s an uncrowded space,” says CEO Justin Siegel.

There may be something to the idea for MocoSpace. Most of its six million monthly uniques visit in a browser, and Siegel says there’s “strong user interest” in gaming.

The question of what kind of social games mobile users would play in a browser window is also important. Siegel thinks that Facebook-style social titles may well be successful. “Users are logging in first for the social, then gameplay is a close second,” he says.

Aside from MocoSpace’s relatively small size, there will be one major challenge for developers looking to put a game on the platform: the technology. Developers will have to use WebKit and HTML5, which many may find unfamiliar.

However, some developers are interested in learning to use HTML5 anyway, while there are also service firms created to port into HTML5, like Moblyng. “The smaller development shops we’re talking to are saying, A it’s an opportunity to make more money, B leverage existing assets, or learn more about mobile,” says Siegel.

Including the SoftBank investment, MocoSpace has raised $10.5 million to date. The company was founded in 2005.

Word puzzle games have long been popular among casual and social gamers. Arkadium, in conjunction with Merriam-Webster, is launching a new one for Facebook called Writer’s Blox. That doesn’t mean it’s a standard issue title, though; the game doesn’t feel anything at all like the trove of word scramble titles currently peppering the space.

Instead, the game is more like a combination of Scrabble and Tetris, and it’s surprisingly challenging and fun, with virtual zero problems.

Players start out with an empty board that is reminiscent of a Scrabble board: it’s a basic grid with randomly placed spaces for word and letter multipliers. In addition, the player is granted a sizeable collection of letter blocks, and tasked with placing them in the grid spaces to form words and score as high as possible. Users can spell a word either from left to right or top to bottom with each letter earning 100 points before multipliers. Any letters that are used for two words are worth 500.

This is where the Scrabble aspects end and the game takes a very different turn. First off, new letters do not have to be placed next to existing ones. Second, there are a slew of Tetris-like blocks that the user must deal with. For example, one block might be an L-shape with three letters, while another might be a box with four. Obviously, this makes the challenge significantly harder, as any letter placed that forms a word not found in the Merriam-Webster dictionary will score zero points for the entire word.

Thankfully, users can undo everything that they’ve done and even save their layouts to come back to later. Additionally, the primary social mechanic is leaderboards and the challenge to score higher than one’s friends, or, if they don’t play, all other global players. What makes this relevant is that only this highest score, for the current puzzle, will be displayed. Even should the player place something poorly, this will not change, and the game has a nice feature to revert the puzzle layout to that of their high score.

Unfortunately for word game advocates, there is only one free puzzle a day (called the “Daily Freebie“), with a new board layout, letters, and shapes coming the following day. In truth, however, it is already extraordinarily hard to use every single block successfully, thus one puzzle is more than enough. Should players want more, they can use Facebook Credits to purchase extra “Big Blox” puzzles.

These are, more or less, the same as the Daily Freebie, except much harder. The reason is that users have larger, and more, block shapes to deal with. It’s certainly a nice addition, and Arkadium is kind enough to give users a freebie of this puzzle challenge right from the get go, before charging for it. Should users like it, they can purchase more for one, seven, or 30 more days. However, like the Daily Freebie, only one can be played per day.

In the complaint department, the only significant issue is that the social mechanics are rather dull. The whole, “beat my high score” concept is not only old, but it’s never felt all that social, unless highly competitive friends are in the mix. Even then, there’s a disconnect that makes the multiplayer feels very impersonal. That said, leaderboards are fine, but it would be nice to have more.

Beyond this, the only other qualm is that the game never actually tells the player how much letters and words are worth. As the game looks like Scrabble, one would expect point values on the letters. One has to consciously hit the “Help” button to see what is worth what. It’s not a big deal though, as the score updates as soon as blocks are placed down.

All in all, Writer’s Blox is a phenomenally challenging and enjoyable puzzle game. Moreover, even though the player only gets one puzzle a day, they can easily spend an exorbitant amount of time trying to arrange the blocks into the maximum potential score. Granted, the social elements are a bit dated, and there are some extremely minor user feedback complaints, but nothing terribly significant. In fact, users don’t’ seem to mind eithe,r as the games monthly active user count has recently begun growing drastically over the last few day, rising from virtually nothing to over 94,000 MAU.