A relatively new iPhone and iPad title called FruitZen has been in the recommended apps section of the Apple app store lately, daring players to check it out. Developed by Sector3 Games, we expected this simple puzzle title to be like other match-three games. Using a few new features, FruitZen turned out to be refreshing. However, it is based more on twitch reactions than you would assume. Though not terribly difficult, the game isn’t peaceful, thought-provoking or zen.

FruitZen is is a match-three game, but it is more similar to Collapse than Bejewelled. You tap three or more matching tiles of the same fruit in order to remove them from play. The object is to prevent the tiles from reaching the top of the screen before time expires.

In FruitZen you can not only actively increase the rate at which fruit tiles fall, but also slide the rows left and right in order to make matches. If nothing is beneath a tile that you have moved, it will fall to the row below it. This creates very different possible strategies. You can go beyond just trying to find matches, to also finding potential matches.

Other mechanics were added as well. Should four tiles match, a wild card that cycles through all the fruit appears. Should five or more match, a tile that will erase an entire row or column appears. As levels progress, different fruit tiles worth more points begin falling, along with the the occasional acorn. You can only remove acorns with one of the tiles that eliminates entire rows or columns.

While all of this adds to the game, it doesn’t create a particularly zen feeling, as everything is done within a time limit. The player must “survive” for a given time, with each level getting progressively more demanding.

In FruitZen, you’re constantly watching the time, how high you tiles are, and when they get too tall, searching for blocks to remove. It’s not exactly frantic play, but for a “zen” game, the pacing should be at the player’s choice.

Once a wild card becomes active, it doesn’t simply “match” with any tile on the board (it would be madness for a “wild” card to do such a thing!) but cycles through tile types. This makes the game difficult because cycling forces you to wait until a fruit you can use appears — which is tough at higher levels. It cycles one fruit per second, so you have to be quick enough to tap before it changes. For a casual game, this twitch mechanic is a bit obnoxious, and feels particularly out of place in this game.

The sound in FruitZen is also peculiar. Typically, we avoid critiquing sound. Social games, regardless of platform, obviously don’t have the orchestral quality. But FruitZen’s soundtrack, while attempting to invoke serenity, loops the same handful of piano keys and becomes grating after a while. Thankfully, the most recent update allows you to integrate your iPod music collection.

Along with Facebook and Twitter postings, FruitZen is built on the Open Feint social gaming network. It has sharable achievements and leaderboards for all three of the game’s play modes: Survival (going through all the game’s levels), Timeless (play until you lose), and Countdown (play until you run out of time; with matches granting bonus time).

The leaderboards are also connected to both versions of the game, allowing players to individually view iPhone and iPad scores. The core of the game is the same on both devices, but the smaller screen size of the iPhone means that there are less tiles at any given time.

FruitZen costs $0.99 for the iPhone and $1.99 for the iPad. That’s hardly a lot of money, but FruitZen is no better than other free games. It has a few novel mechanics, but is still not terribly unique. It also just doesn’t have the relaxing feel that Sector3 was apparently striving for.

In a big push to bring more developers on-board with its virtual currency, Facebook said it now has the capacity to add three or four times as many partners to the Credits program as it did before. Credits is now offered in more than 50 percent of game sessions logged on the social network.

The company, which earns a 30 percent cut of all transactions in Credits, has been working aggressively to make its virtual currency a universal payments option across the platform. Before today, developers only had limited access to join the Credits program and there was a lengthy waiting list.

Facebook is also adding more 20 more payment options for users to buy Credits through a partnership with PlaySpan.

After testing Credits for more than a year, the social network is pushing to have it adopted by all developers on the platform. So far, it’s being used by more than 75 developers in more than 200 games, assisted by recent long-term deals with Zynga, Crowdstar, RockYou and LOLapps among others. That’s up from the 150 games figure Facebook reported as recently as last month.

Deb Liu, a product marketing manager for Facebook Credits, said that a universal currency will encourage users to spend more on digital goods because they won’t have to switch between different currencies offered by separate games.

Continue reading at Inside Facebook >

It’s been some time since we last came across any fantasy role-playing games on Facebook, but we recently got the opportunity to look at an up-coming RPG called Endless Chaos, from Peerflux. Still in closed testing, Endless Chaos is far from finished, but brings some new, or at least rare, concepts to the genre.

While Endless Chaos is text-based, like Facebook’s early RPGs, the game is based around more than just leveling up and growing a “mafia,” or any fantasy equivalent. Rather, it’s centered on an evolving, linear storyline of quests, with a choice and morality element spun into it. Along with more deeply customizable characters, choice appears to be the big seller here.

Players are presented with an important choice right from the get go, with the ability to choose the race in which they will start. It’s hard to say if the story changes depending on race, as we only got the chance to pick one, but users can select from the naturalist Kaal, steam punk humans called the Madoch, and an ethereal arcane type called the Ohmron. As it stands, these choices could more aesthetic than not, but with different classes to choose from, the next set of decisions are not.

We went with the Kaal, and next had to choose from the standard RPG classes of, essentially, warrior, mystic, and ranger. These in turn offer different sets of spells one can earn.

Along with improving raw stats, upon leveling, players can also train and improve different spells. Initially, these are all the same, doing a set amount of damage, but over time, players can visit a trainer inside “The Town” and for a fee, learn a new spell over a few days. Once acquired, spells then appear to augment battles with both players and monsters (e.g. doing damage and reducing magical resistance).

As far as the battling goes, it’s automated with the player’s avatar, using whatever skills are within their repertoire. Battling, however, also comes with a very MMOG feel to it, in that players must venture out into “The Wilderness,” which, for all intents and purposes, is the world map. From here, they can enter specific zones (should they be high enough level) and battle monsters for experience and loot. This is where one of the core social mechanics comes into play.

Beyond adding friends as Allies — which will help the player in battles — the player versus player aspect is done with a little more respect to traditional, online RPGs. In order to attack other users, players don’t go to just a page called “Battle,” but can actually see every user currently within a Wilderness zone and can attack them right then and there. Sadly, since Endless Chaos is still in testing, the feature wasn’t something we got to try out.

Moving on to the quest system, this is the primary focus of Endless Chaos. Players don’t get a half a dozen missions to complete, but, thus far, one heavily story oriented quest at a time. Players are sent out to zones in the wilderness where they must defeat certain enemies, collect items from slain monsters, or simply explore the region in search of loot. As an aside, players click a button to simply explore a region like a gathering profession in traditional MMOGs.

Each quest starts with a moral choice asking the player how they will accomplish the quest, with the decision making them either more good or more evil. At the moment, it’s too early to tell if this has an effect on quests, abilities, or anything, but it would be surprising, and disappointing, if it didn’t.

Overall, Endless Chaos looks like it could be a very high quality RPG. Of course, as an early test version, a lot of the noted features have yet to reveal their purpose or have any sort of payout, but they hold a lot of potential over other Facebook RPGs that don’t have  them. The moral choice system, in particular, could be interesting, and the player versus player element could also turn out to be very fun.

Recently, we launched the Inside Network Job Board – dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities in the Facebook Platform and social gaming ecosystem.

Here are this week’s highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at PlayFirst, Rocket Ninja, Mindgames, and 6waves.

• Art Director (San Francisco, CA)
  
• Product Manager, Social Games (San Francisco, CA)
  
• Game Designer, Social Games (San Francisco, CA)
  
• Creative Director, Social Games (San Francisco, CA)
  
• Software Engineer, Social Games (San Francisco, CA)

• Lead Game Designer/Systems Designer (San Francisco, CA)
  

• Lead Programmer: Sports Casual Games (Los Angeles, CA)
  

• Business Manager (San Francisco, CA)
  

Listings on the Inside Network Job Board are distributed to readers of Inside Facebook and Inside Social Games through regular posts and widgets 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 industry today.

A number of older games are scattered throughout this week’s AppData list of fastest-growing games by daily active users, among them FarmVille, YoVille, Social City, Pet Society and Cafe Life. However, it’s probably best to look past those titles — on a timeline longer than a week, none are showing any appreciable growth (most, in fact, are slowly shrinking).

Here’s the full list:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	FarmVille	17,032,212	+149,827	+0.89%
2.	YoVille	1,031,805	+128,641	+14%
3.	ESPNU College Town	381,210	+127,658	+50%
4.	Millionaire City	2,188,062	+114,984	+6%
5.	Texas HoldEm Poker	6,189,492	+102,205	+2%
6.	Backyard Monsters	499,367	+88,578	+22%
7.	FrontierVille	7,270,764	+88,134	+1%
8.	Crime City	155,355	+84,989	+121%
9.	It Girl	402,670	+77,838	+24%
10.	Social City	617,225	+72,782	+13%
11.	Pet Society	2,332,964	+66,209	+3%
12.	Games	1,349,743	+64,001	+5%
13.	Ninja Saga	1,025,936	+60,155	+6%
14.	Fashion World	1,016,279	+55,795	+6%
15.	Critter Island	175,387	+54,301	+45%
16.	Ikariam – The free browser game	68,276	+49,819	+270%
17.	Cafe Life	491,041	+48,352	+11%
18.	Gourmet Ranch	116,016	+46,771	+68%
19.	Mall World	859,925	+44,864	+6%
20.	Monster World	735,031	+44,302	+6%

ESPNU College Town, the new city-building game from Playdom, is the first game on the list that’s making real strides. It’s followed by Millionaire City, from Digital Chocolate. The two showed up in the same order atop Monday’s monthly active gainer list.

Backyard Monsters, by Casual Collective, is making considerable gains at number six, with 22 percent DAU growth over just a week. The monster-based strategy game has been growing since August, but it may be accelerating somewhat as it crosses half a million daily players.

Crime City is an interesting new hybrid of a Facebook-style RPG with 2.5D graphics and city-building elements, as we covered in our review. It edged out It Girl, the latest from CrowdStar, although the latter is a far larger game overall.

The rest of the list bears a few more newer games that are making genuine gains. There’s also one older game worth noting: Ninja Saga, the long-running anime-inspired RPG, appears to be very slowly adding DAU (over a period of months, not just weeks), which is normally quite difficult for older titles to do.

Mob Science is taking its shot at sim-like games with its most recent title, Coffee Bar. A new entry to the business management genre, Coffee Bar  has been growing quickly. It made our fastest-growing Facebook apps list this week with around 155,000 monthly active users and 45,000 daily active users — all earned in the past 7 days.

However, we found that while Coffee Bar is technically sound, the game feels almost identical to similar games in the past.

The concept behind Coffee Bar is perhaps the only noticeable difference between it and other cafe/restaurant games that came before it: players try to make a popular coffee bar. You buy and place coffee makers, then choose from a variety of coffee shop menu items to make (black coffee, lattes, hot chocolate, etc.). When a menu item is ordered, you click a couple times to “add” ingredients and, after a set amount of time, the brew is ready.

You then place the drink on a serving bar and your waiters or waitresses serve it to customers until the stock runs out. The higher level the drink, the longer it takes to make, but the more the profit you earn.

The happiness or unhappiness of your patrons will affect the rating of your coffee bar. When your rating is higher, more customers walk in. Of course, it’s also possible to upset customers. If no drinks are prepared or there are not enough staff to serve, the non-player customers get angry and leave, lowering the bar’s ratings.

The social aspects of the game are familiar too. You can hire friends as waiters. The game gives you two temp workers initially, but as your bar gets larger and more successful, more will be needed. The number of workers is gated by level, and any workers beyond the two temp employees will require a friend to play — unlike Restaurant City where any Facebook friend can work for you, whether they play or not.

You can also visit friends’ bars and leave messages via a cell phone icon, which in this beta version, does not appear to work. But, other than gifting purchased decorative items or servings of food and drink, there are no benefits from social play.

Coffee Bar also offers a more in-depth feature, allowing you to dress your avatar and decorate the bar in very modern styles. But again, this is exactly what we’ve come to expect from games in this genre.

In the end, there’s nothing unique about Coffee. Other management games that we’ve reviewed have also copied mechanics and features, but the developers typically also make an attempt to add new, if minor, concepts into the mix. In Coffee Bar, there are no original mechanics or concepts. There’s even a daily quiz for money that is copied from Restaurant City.

Of course, it’s hardly unheard of for a Facebook developer to closely follow past games. As 2010 as progressed, many developers have said that being unique or unusual counts for something — that the day of fast follows and copies is coming to a close. But players also have to recognize and care about cloned mechanics. In this case, it looks like the new theme may be enough to carry a game that is otherwise no different than a dozen others that came before it, taking every core element from the top titles.

It’s telling of our modern world that the famous often cease being people and become tightly controlled brands. This brand control can make life difficult for others: for example, sports games, where only a few favored titles are allowed to use the names of real players, and the rest must struggle along with made-up names.

PageFad, a Facebook sports game developer, can’t solve the existential problem of commodified personalities, but it has at least found a workaround for its game Premier Football, by partnering with a company called Virtual Greats to add celebrities and real soccer players to its game.

Virtual Greats has dedicated itself to getting branded virtual goods into social games. In this case most of its “brands” are in fact people, including both recognizable soccer players like David Beckham and, for Premier Football users who aren’t big soccer fans, non-players like Snoop Dogg.

These branded players will be premium purchases only, and they won’t come cheap, ranging from about $5 to $20. PageFad co-founder Josh Viner says the price point isn’t a problem, though. “A lot of our users convert at higher price points, and we sell more at higher price points,” Viner says. “That’s because the users are very competitive. If we can present them with a value proposition of instead just asking them to spend pounds to train their team, they’ll be more willing to pay.”

Virtual Greats’ CEO, Dan Jansen, further breaks virtual goods purchases into three categories: aesthetic-only goods, which players won’t pay much for; goods that show affiliation or have a concrete use, at the mid-point; and an item with special powers and a recognizable concept at the high end. Jansen says individual virtual goods can have a high price ceiling; for instance, a branded good in another game has been selling for $50.

Brands, for their part, have been excited about the action on Facebook. We’ve seen a number of entertainment brands head online of late, and Disney is of course trying to capitalize on social gaming through its Playdom acquisition.

But teams like Virtual Greats and PageFad are still pretty rare. One reason may be the history of brands in core games, where brand owners were often extremely difficult to work with, allowing big companies like Electronic Arts to get near-exclusivity for games like Madden NFL (which is now also on Facebook).

However, many of the market forces that made companies like EA hugely powerful offline don’t apply on Facebook, so it’s possible that the Virtual Greats model could grow significantly in the future.

As for PageFad, the company intends to keep working on its sports titles. Premier Football, like other sports games we’ve looked at recently, includes both city-building and management elements; you can check it out here.

Chillingo, the publisher behind mobile titles such as Modern Conflict and Angry Birds, has yet another hit on its hands with its most recent release from developer ZeptoLab, Cut the Rope. Having been released for the iPhone on October 5th and on the iPad October 7th, the app, $0.99 and $1.99 respectively, has already climbed to #1 on both of Apple’s iDevice paid app charts, not to mention #1 top grossing for the iPhone and #3 for the iPad. Even the free, lite versions are #1 in their category on both devices.

Cut the Rope, like past Chillingo games, takes simple physics and controls to create a quaint, yet quirky puzzle title. A game whose quality is virtually indistinguishable between iDevices (save for resolution), it’s an ideal title that can be played for either or few minutes or over an hour at once.

The plot of Cut the Rope is that the player has, for some reason, received a package containing a bizarre dinosaur, lizard, monster… thing. The game informs the user that all they need to do to care for it is feed it candy. Of course, the method of doing so is a bit trickier than one would assume.

Sitting in a random portion of each level is the little pet monster, and dangling from a rope is a nice chunk of hard candy. Using a cutting motion, the player can cut the rope and, lo and behold, the candy falls with accurate physics. The objective is to hit the creature with it. Obviously, just these basics aren’t all that much fun, so each level comes with new obstacles and toys to play with.

Of all the different, level-based mechanics, the most used in the game is the attachment of candy to multiple ropes of varying lengths. Players can cut one, or many simultaneously, and the candy will fall based on the directional momentum. Nevertheless, once the ropes are cut, should the treat not hit the creature, the player will fail. It becomes a task of cutting the rope(s) at the right time.

Depending on the level, this will vary in pacing. Occasionally, players will have all the time in the world to figure out a puzzle, and other times, only a few seconds, due to obstacles such as spikes or electricity that will break the candy should it swing or fall into them, or spiders that climb down ropes to eat it (they will fall should the rope they’re on be cut).

This is only the tip of the iceberg, as players will encounter dozens of other challenges including bubbles that cause the candy to float upward, ropes attached to moving platforms, ropes that extend only when the candy is near, air bags that allow the user to push the candy in a particular direction, and so on. Each of these plays a role in dozens of unique puzzles and are all controlled with a simple tap (e.g. popping bubbles or using air bags).

All these mechanics make each level feel very different then the one before it, presenting a challenge progression that rarely repeats the same problem. At times, similar conundrums will present themselves, yet they must, almost always, be solved in a different manner.

To add to the challenge, Chillingo incorporates the collection of stars in each level, as well as a scoring system based on collecting said stars and time for completion. As one might expect, the stars are not always in the most convenient of places. Not only does this increase the difficulty, but also plays part in the game’s social mechanics.

Part of the Crystal social gaming network, Cut the Rope comes with competitive leaderboards for each of the game’s stages, as well as a handful of achievements. Unfortunately, the latter is somewhat lacking at the moment, but everything the user does is connected to the Crystal network, which allows for the finding of friends, game recommendation, and both Facebook and Twitter integration. While the network has the support for player challenges, these do not appear available for Cut the Rope.

Overall, Cut the Rope, for either the iPhone or the iPad, is a game well worth the price tag. With the level of quality expected from any of Chillingo’s developer divisions, it makes for an excellent addition to any iDevice app collection.

Over the past few months, we’ve heard regularly about a Japanese company, DeNA, that’s seeking to make waves in the US social and mobile game markets. DeNA has actively pushed the story of its own size and vigor, opening its own venture fund, claiming to be bigger than Zynga and making multiple small-company acquisitions.

Despite all, DeNA’s name still isn’t big in Silicon Valley. That will likely change today, though, as word of a $403 million deal to acquire the mobile social developer Ngmoco spreads. Rumored by Techcrunch a week ago, confirmation of the deal was posted this morning on Ngmoco’s site.

Setting aside the price for a moment, it’s not hard to see why DeNA was drawn to Ngmoco. The latter company is by far the most visibly successful at putting social games and mechanics on smartphones, with games like We Rule, We Farm, Touch Pets and Godfinger.

DeNA itself is in the mobile social space back home, as owner of the highly successful mobile social network Mobage Town. Although Mobage only has about 20 million players, a small number compared to Facebook’s legions of social gamers, Japanese players do monetize at a much higher rate.

The match between the two companies will help each spread already-proven titles and content more easily overseas, reaping extra rewards on the way.

What will have the mobile and social game communities talking about this deal for weeks to come, though, is the price. DeNA is paying $303 million in stock and cash up front for Ngmoco, with another $100 million based on earnouts.

For reference, the Electronic Arts acquisition of Playfish last November was for just a hair less, with about $300 million up front and another $100 million in earnouts. In July, Disney announced its $563.2 million acquisition of Playdom with $200 million in potential earnouts, a price that many in the industry felt to be stratospheric.

But because those two Facebook developers both had very public stats, viewable through services like our own AppData, others in the industry could at least see the metrics that led to the acquisitions. Ngmoco, by contrast, mostly operates on the iPhone, on which Apple extends a corner of its own cloak of secrecy over the developers on its platform.

While it has been clear that Ngmoco has found significant success with its “We” series — We Rule, We Farm and We City — few would have guessed that its success was so significant as to justify an acquisition price equal to what Playdom fetched in November, when it had just ballooned to over 50 million monthly active users and was on track for $75 million or more in yearly revenues.

In fact, it may be the case that Ngmoco hasn’t yet reached that level of growth. Multiple other factors may have weighed into this deal, including Ngmoco’s Plus+ social network, the company’s industry-leading reputation, the rapid growth of the Android and iDevice platforms, the strong exchange rate for Japanese Yen, and DeNA’s own intense ambition to corner the market. (Tomoko Namba, the CEO of US subsidiary DeNA Global, has often expressed urgency in her growth strategy.)

Even taking the above factors into account, this acquisition says that Ngmoco was likely highly successful with its strategy of offering free-to-play titles with microtransactions to mobile gamers, a strategy that only a small handful of companies have pursued. The DeNA deal is a convincing testament to the virtual goods model, if nothing else. We cover the fast growth of the US mobile virtual goods market in our newest Inside Virtual Goods report, check it out for more details.

Ngmoco had taken about $40 million in venture funding since 2008 from iFund, Norwest Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins, Institutional Venture Partners and others.

Casual gaming company PlayFirst, best known for publishing the Diner Dash series, is announcing a $9.2 million funding this morning, split between venture capital and debt.

Venture fundings for social game companies have been relatively thin this year, but PlayFirst has the right reputation — Diner Dash has been downloaded over half a billion times on various platforms, with other franchises hitting the tens of millions.

The company’s achievements on Facebook are more modest, with its only game on the platform, Chocolatier: Sweet Society, taking over four months to pass 800,000 monthly active users. Like many other games from first-time Facebook publishers, Chocolatier appears to have had some scaling and stability issues that discouraged users.

PlayFirst CEO Mari Baker says that Chocolatier was essentially a practice run. “We were researching social game companies and looking at what their path was, before CrowdStar got to millions, or ZipZapPlay hit it big with Baking Life. Most of these companies had several games under their belt, and months of learning time if not longer. So we think Chocolatier was a good effort, just not what we view as being success or the end game.”

Now that PlayFirst’s learning period is over, it’s time for the company to put more valuable IP on the table.  “There’s a benefit to entering with some brand awareness , it increases virality, decreases acquisition costs. Over time we’ll move to introducing new IP, but [our history] gives us an advantage,” says Baker.

Whether that specifically means Diner Dash is next for Facebook, Baker wouldn’t say, but it’s probably not unreasonable to expect that a social version of the game is already in the works.

Mayfield Fund, Trinity Partners, DCM and Rustic Canyon Ventures provided the $5.2 million in venture financing; the rest was debt. All of the money will be turned towards PlayFirst’s social efforts.