It wasn’t an exceptionally busy week of hires in social gaming, according to data from LinkedIn and from our readers. We’ve found out about a few interesting ones, though, including a new stealth studio from a social gaming vet, a new Chief Marketing Officer at Kabam, a string of mobile-focused moves at Zynga, and a new job for a Disney executive. Here’s more.

As always, please email us with any new hires: editor (at) insidesocialgames (dot) com. And be sure to check our Inside Network Job Board for current openings.

Bossa Studios

• Henrique Olifiers — After more than a year as a studio director at Playfish, Olifiers left the company this past month to co-found a stealthy new social gaming startup called Bossa Studios.

Kabam

• Manvinder Saraon — Joining Kabam from Intuit, where he led the Web and Direct Channel Marketing Group, Saraon will be the company’s new Chief Marketing Officer. He was previously the CMO at Homestead before it was acquired by Intuit.
• Tim McCloud — McCloud joins Kabam as the Marketing Partnership Manager. Prior to this, he was a Senior Campaign Manager at Cadreon/Interpublic Group.

Playdom

• Aaron Joseph — Having worked as a user acquisition associate and then campaign manager at Playdom, Joseph has been promoted to User Acquisition, Senior Analyst.

Electronic Arts/Playfish

• Stephen Courtney — A veteran game developer who has most recently focused on mobile, Courtney joins Playfish as a Game Developer on Restaurant City.

Zynga

• Hemant Berman — Leaving a systems engineering job at Yahoo, Berman now has the same job title at Zynga.
• Gerald Broas — With more than a year’s worth of experience creating art for PetVille, Broas has switched to focus on create art for Zynga’s growing line of mobile games.
• Chris Dodge — Another mobile hire, Dodge has left an engineering job at SRRN Games to become a Zynga Mobile Engineer.
• Darren Huang — Departing Google’s China group, Huang has joined Zynga’s China operation as Financial Controller.
• Chang Liu — Having spent the last nine months at RockYou, Liu has moved on to become a Software Engineer on the FrontierVille team.
• William Marsden — Following stints at gaming companies large and small, Marsden has become a Software Engineer at Zynga.
• Steve Parkis — Disney may have bought rival Playdom, but Zynga has hired former Disney Online senior vice president Parkis to be a new Vice President of Studios.
• Glenn Wichman — After three and a half years at online group software startup Grouply, Wichman has become a Principal Engineer at Zynga.

If you missed last week’s post you can find it here.

Western game developers have often held South Korea up as an example of an advanced market that they can only seek to catch up with. But a local company, Dbros, think that there’s room for Western social games to succeed in Korea.

Dbros is banking on the continuing growth of Facebook in its home country. Since July, when we first wrote about South Korea’s growing Facebook presence, it has burst upward from 1.1 million monthly active users to its current 1.7 million MAU. While Facebook is still only a tenth the size of Cyworld, South Korea’s biggest social network, Facebook can also claim Korea as its second-fastest growing market over the past 12 months.

The vital difference between Cyworld and Facebook is that the concept of gaming is built into the latter. Casual MMOs may have big audiences in South Korea, but significant games typically have their own websites. “Cyworld didn’t really have the concept of games in it until earlier this year,” says Jay Kim, a manager at Dbros. “At this point, Facebook is the ultimate platform for social games.”

Rather than developing its own games for Facebook, Dbros wants to localize existing, successful games.

There are several factors to consider when localizing any game: the translation into the native language should be carefully completed, and local billing methods need to be accounted for. Dbros says there are two more factors specific to Korea, though.

One is customer service. While social gamers in the United States and elsewhere are used to not having any personal communication from the developer, Korean users expect strong customer support, according to Kim and Dbros director Chris Hwang.

The company also has an unusual plan for customer acquisition: advertising off of Facebook, on the web and in print media. “Since we see a lot of potential for Facebook user numbers to grow, we’re focusing on marketing activities toward people who aren’t already on Facebook,” says Kim. Part of the campaign will be letting Koreans know that Facebook is about gaming as well as social networking.

Korean users haven’t played social games before, so Dbros can’t predict exactly what the reward for its efforts will be. The data the company does have on play times and monetization comes from casual MMOs, where play times range from 30 minutes to an hour and ARPPU from $8 to $10 dollars. It estimates the entire Korean game market at $5 billion.

Dbros’ first partner in Korea is Metrogames, which is offering up its biggest game, Fashion World.

For more stats and demographics on over 160 Facebook’s country markets, check out Inside Facebook Gold.

Over a year and a half after publishing its first social game, Bejeweled Blitz, on Facebook, Popcap is finally back with another: Zuma Blitz, an ultra-fast, one minute version of its hit game Zuma.

Zuma, like many Popcap games, has an odd premise. You control a ball-spitting frog at the center of a spiral-like maze of colored balls steadily rolling towards the open mouths of hungry, golden Gods. Your goals are two-fold: first to prevent the balls from advancing far enough to be consumed by a God mouth — because you’re next on the menu — and second, to earn as many points as possible before time runs out.

Although a bit psychedelic, the aesthetic adds spice to the sometimes routine world of casual games. On Facebook, there’s also a tight one-minute time limit, just like Bejeweled Blitz, which forces you to be think a few steps ahead to maximize points.

As you advance through the game, you level up and earn experience through the number of games you play and how often you avoid being eaten. You also earn Mojo, which is essentially energy, based on the number of balls you destroy in a game. After you move up a few levels, you begin earning Powers. The first you earn is the Bomb, which destroy the balls around it and can be particularly useful in setting off large chain reactions.

Setting off chain reactions is the only way to earn big points in Zuma Blitz. Whenever three or more of the same color ball smash into each other, they explode. Then balls from either end will roll in to fill the empty space and collide. If that results in three or more same color balls colliding, the reaction will continue. Well played hits will set off some very impressive and very high-scoring chain reactions that grant you tens of thousands of points in a few seconds.

Powers are kept in your “Temple” and before each game, you can chose a new Power to use, or stick with the last one. Powers cost Mojo to use each game, but very often pay back what you spend with a higher score. Using different Powers, means adopting different strategies. For instance, using Chrono Balls means you have to sacrifice some shots to destroy the balls that give you more time.

Keeping yourself alive is somewhat independent of destroying balls and earning points. You have to make sure that at any given moment, balls are not about to roll into the open God-mouths. At the beginning of the game, the concentric rings of balls can be a bit baffling, but before long it’s easy to keep your frog from being eaten and focus on scoring more.

Lives, Mojo, Potions and Powers can be bought with the game’s premium virtual currency, Idols. Potions either increase your Mojo or grant you lots of experience points, which allow you to skip levels and unlock Powers. Idols are accumulated slowly throughout the game or can be purchased with Facebook credits. But the game doesn’t always make clear exactly how each Power works until you have it, so neither Potions nor Powers seem as compelling as they could be.

Finally, Popcap has settled on leaderboards and achievements as its main social feature. To the right hand of the main screen, a leaderboard always shows your exact position among your friends; there’s also a stats board for each player showing achievements.

Zuma Blitz is fast, addictive and more dynamic than most casual arcade games, so it’s easy to imagine it gaining millions of players on Facebook, just as Bejeweled has. Hopefully, we won’t have to wait almost two years to see another Plants vs Zombies for Facebook.

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 Perfect World Entertainment, Gameloft, Glu Mobile, and A Bit Lucky.

• QA/Release Engineer (Foster City, CA)

• Lead Online Developer (Paris, France)

• Senior Server Engineer (San Francisco, CA)

• QA Lead at A Bit Lucky (San Mateo, 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.

Long after Zynga, Playdom and other top social game developers have given up on making new Mafia Wars-style RPGs for Facebook, a small studio near Sacramento called 5th Planet Games is still releasing new titles in the genre.

The latest is Legacy of a Thousand Suns, a space opera reminiscent of Star Wars. While 5th Planet hasn’t iterated much on the mechanics of its RPGs, it has made significant advances with the story and style of the game over Dawn of the Dragons, the company’s first title.

Thousand Suns doesn’t actually look a lot like Mafia Wars — more on that in a moment — but the setup and mechanics are quite similar. Your character is only seen in a profile screen, while missions are accessible through a tab. As in all similar games, missions don’t require any skill, just enough energy to click through and get to the next mission. There’s also crafting, alliances, boss battles and player vs player battles.

The centerpiece of Thousand Suns, though, has nothing to do with mechanics. 5th Planet has used its game to slip an almost novel-length text story to users, with each mission and boss battle illustrated by beautiful, sometimes full-screen art created by 5th Planet’s development partner, Concept Art House.

Thousand Suns’ story is interlaced throughout the game. Your first mission is a daring escape from jail, assisted by a Leia-like Princess. The game’s tutorial guides you through the first part of the story, and then leaves you to find the rest alone.

It’s not hard to find. Each new area comes with a Zone Intro, a button near the top of the screen that opens the story for that area. Unlike Dawn of Dragons, which required users to seek out the story for missions, the mission start button automatically pops up the continuation of the story. And bosses, which show up in one out of every five missions, have both an intro and an encounter story, which combined usually run several pages long.

To 5th Planet’s credit, the company has used a professional writer for the game — the plot, which follows the conflict between a human and alien empire, has an engaging arc for as far as we made it through the game. And even beyond the many mission-related text boxes the game’s elements stay faithful to 5th Planet’s lore, from the items to ships and non-player characters.

In one sense, 5th Planet’s doubling down on narrative gives a sense of where Facebook RPGs could go. There’s a substantial niche audience who will be interested in playing through fairly standardized games for the storyline and feeling, much as has happened with Japanese RPGs. 5th Planet has also inspired some loyalty among this group by emphasizing player clans and interacting with users in forums.

But Dawn of the Dragons, despite the promising retention and monetization metrics that 5th Planet showed us in July, never became a large game, maxing out at around 300,000 monthly active users. Thousand Suns, with its new story and somewhat slicker interface, may attract more, but is unlikely to become a breakaway hit.

After playing Thousand Suns for a while, it’s hard not to feel like there’s promise of a significant evolution in the old Facebook RPG mechanics.

Funzio recently showed a more action-based possibility with Crime City, which to many developers feels like a graphical skin of Mafia Wars; 5th Planet, for its part, might benefit from something more like a graphic novel. With the art and text combo in Thousand Suns, it’s already half way there.

As if it weren’t enough for Digital Chocolate to keep Millionaire City on our app lists for months on end, the company now has two twins of the city-building game on this week’s AppData list of fastest-growing Facebook apps by daily active users: Hollywood City and Vegas City.

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	FarmVille	16,633,830	+193,316	+1%
2.	Simply Hospital	300,175	+179,280	+148%
3.	Hollywood City	149,383	+149,375	+1,867,188%
4.	Restaurant City	2,087,647	+97,268	+5%
5.	Cafe Life	522,260	+75,630	+17%
6.	Crime City	663,390	+61,062	+10%
7.	小小戰爭	416,682	+56,940	+16%
8.	FrontierVille	7,033,571	+52,688	+0.75%
9.	Warstorm	256,902	+51,705	+25%
10.	Baking Life	1,074,416	+50,312	+5%
11.	ESPNU College Town	400,401	+48,732	+14%
12.	Vegas City	46,475	+46,474	+4,647,400%
13.	แฮปปี้คนเลี้ยงหม	399,888	+45,134	+13%
14.	德州撲克(中文版)	1,079,048	+41,948	+4%
15.	Millionaire City	2,630,354	+39,402	+2%
16.	Mynet Çanak Okey	157,980	+32,496	+26%
17.	Armies	93,148	+31,354	+51%
18.	Little War	33,688	+30,345	+908%
19.	แฮปปี้เกาะ	59,237	+29,693	+101%
20.	Lil’ Pirates	28,574	+28,565	+317,389%

The two City games are, as we noted in our review of Hollywood City,  fairly straightforward reskins of the highly-successful Millionaire City. In one, you build a movie empire, in the other, gambling. The theme of unfettered greed carries between all three titles (in the game, at least — we’re not taking a swipe at Digital Chocolate). Hollywood seems to have the edge on Vegas, at least for the moment.

FarmVille, of course, is the top game on the list, but neither it nor any of the other older games shown — Restaurant City, Cafe Life and FrontierVille — has really grown. All just recovered slightly from dips prior to the past week.

Simply Hospital is the number two game, which as you may recall was renamed from Sim Hospital. Despite the odd name, the hospital management game is really taking off, showing that even with a different format and appearance, some Facebook users love a business sim.

Zynga’s Warstorm continues to do well; it’s now almost three times as large as it was at any point when Challenge Games, which Zynga acquired, owned it. Finally, Playdom’s ESPNU College Town is showing signs of improved player retention, with DAU as a percentage of monthly active users is up several points over the past few days.

We’ve just learned that Tapjoy, formerly Offerpal, has bought the social gaming cross-promotion service AppStrip. Charles Hudson first spotted the news, and was quickly followed by a TapJoy blog post.

AppStrip was created by Broken Bulb Studios, a mid-sized Facebook developer. Like Applifier, which the service was started to compete with, AppStrip is a simple bar that sits above or below a social game, containing links out to other games.

Two factors have made both Applifier and AppStrip successful. The first, and most important, is that Facebook’s viral channels have been becoming less effective, leaving advertising or cross-promotion as the only alternatives.

Second, the two promotion bars are mostly quid pro quo — if your game can send a user out, it will automatically get one back from the network for free. Most developers that aren’t large enough to run a cross-promo network from their own apps alone thus install one or the other bar.

Neither company has given us any further information yet, but it’s possible that Broken Bulb decided AppStrip wasn’t growing quickly enough to keep.

While Applifier had well over 50 million users in its network in September, and likely more today, AppStrip’s network appears to be hovering at around 10 million users, by our back-of-the-envelope count [Update: we now hear that number is far too low, more on this tomorrow].

It’s also not clear yet whether TapJoy plans to change AppStrip, but the bar does complement SocialKast, a service that TapJoy launched in July to promote apps across different social networks.

2010 will be remembered as the year that games on social networks became a billion dollar business and transformed the way millions more people socialized with friends online. With an up-to-$750 million acquisition of Playdom by Disney, Playfish’s integration across Electronic Arts, the continued growth of Zynga, the rise of CrowdStar and Kabam, and continued venture investments, social games are impacting businesses across the media landscape. Despite the challenges facing the market, it’s become clear that there are still substantial opportunities for social game developers with virtual goods revenue models, but the market is still evolving rapidly.

Inside Network is proud to announce a new original research report by Justin Smith and Charles Hudson that is exclusively focused on the future of the social gaming market, entitled Inside Virtual Goods: The Future of Social Gaming 2011. This is Inside Network’s second annual edition of the Future of Social Gaming report. It will be released on November 16, but is available for discount pre-order now.

How big is the market, and where will social gaming go in 2011? How will existing players fare as Facebook shifts the social gaming landscape through the rollout of Facebook Credits and continued changes to the platform? Inside Virtual Goods: The Future of Social Gaming 2011 provides deeper insight into social game monetization, development, customer acquisition, and the key questions facing the space in 2011 than you’ll find anywhere else.

About the Report

Inside Virtual Goods: The Future of Social Gaming 2011 gives you an inside view of the future at this critical juncture in the intersection of social networking and online games.

We have compiled months of original research from dozens of top executives and entrepreneurs from all parts of the social gaming ecosystem to produce eye-opening source data and analysis that is not available anywhere else. Inside Virtual Goods: The Future of Social Gaming 2010 takes the closest look at the present state of social games and the future of this strong but still rapidly changing industry.

What We Cover

1. Social Game Development and Studio Models – There is an emerging consensus around how social game developers are choosing to organize themselves for game development. How do small, medium, and large developers organize their teams? What do development cycle times for original titles and “expansion packs” look like? What is the role of testing and metrics in the development process?
2. Social Game Design and Mechanics – The emergence of a few key game genres with proven mechanics and monetization have spawned dozens of fast followers. Understand how publishers are continuing to innovate as we head into 2011.
3. Monetization Data and Payment Trends – Now that developers have proven the virtual goods model, what are ARPUs, ARPPUs, and LTVs really like for different game genres? What is the lifetime value of users, and how long do players stick around? We take an in depth look at monetization methods and rates, and shed light on where payments are headed in the coming quarters. One more note on monetization – you may be wondering about everything you’ve heard about the rollout of Facebook Credits. We cover:
   • Both the goals and benefits, and challenges and costs, of Facebook Credits for developers
   • Changes that developers have – and haven’t – made
   • How the rollout of Facebook Credits will affect the payments ecosystem (looking at both direct and alternativee payment methods globally)
4. Customer Acquisition and Marketing Trends – As the social gaming landscape has evolved over the past three and a half years, so have the ways that developers acquire and retain new users. How have user acquisition costs changed, and what do Facebook’s changes spell for the future of the marketing funnel? We take an in depth look at data and trends.
5. Facebook’s Platform Changes, Credits, and What’s In Store for the Future – Facebook has continued to change Platform communication channels and functionality over the last year, significantly altering the way social games reach users through Facebook. Continued change is likely – what will it be, and how will it impact the industry? In addition, as Facebook rolls out its much-discussed Credits currency, how will monetization and the payments landscape be affected? Finally, will we see another dominant platform emerge? Our overview covers these developments, their impact on the industry, and what else is in store.

What you get

In addition to our deep dive into key aspects of the social gaming ecosystem, the report also offers extended coverage on:

• A brief history on the evolution and growth of this space in the US, including a description of all key players and how they rose to the top.
• Total social gaming market size estimates for 2011, including estimates on the “big four” developers.
• Our take on the key issues facing the growth of social gaming, including our outlook and projections for 2011.

See the full table of contents below:

Table of Contents

Section I – Overview

1. The Evolution of Social Gaming

• What is Social Gaming?
• Social Games as a Unique Games Genre
• A Brief History of the Major Eras in Social Gaming
  • Era I – The Virality Era
  • Era II – The Emergence of Paid Distribution
  • Era III – The Rise of the Big 4 and the Network Model
• Key Changes in the Social Gaming Landscape in 2010 as 2011 Begins

2. Social Game Development and Design Processes

• Studio Composition
• Small and Medium Developers
• Large Developers
• Platform Services
• Development Cycle Time
• Developing Franchise Titles
  • Expansion Packs
  • True Serial
• Role of Testing and Metrics
• Multi-platform Development

3. Social Game Design and Design Mechanics

• Resource Management and Simulation
• Gambling
• Caretaking
• Casual and Arcade
• Emergence of New Popular Genres
  • “Hardcore” Strategy Games on Facebook
  • Continued Rise of Sims and Appointment Games
  • Branded Games
  • Social and Mobile: Is It Going to Work This Time?
• Category Coverage for Major Facebook Developers
• Intellectual Property
  • Fast Followers vs Innovators
  • Building Games with Third Party IP

• The Importance of Templates and Engines

4. Monetization

• How do social games monetize?
  • Virtual Goods
    • Functional Virtual Goods
    • Decorative Virtual Goods
    • Consumables
  • Advertising
    • Sponsorships
    • White Label Games
    • Branded Virtual Goods
• Monetization Rates
  • Defining terms: Understanding the user acquisition and conversion funnel
    • Registered Users
    • Active Users
    • Average Revenue Per User (ARPU)
    • Average Revenue Per Paying User (ARPPU)
    • Lifetime Value (LTV)
  • How do social game developers manage their businesses?
  • Monetization Rates of Key Social Game Genres
    • Role Playing Games and “Hardcore” Mini-MMOs
    • Simulation and City-Building Games
    • Pet Games
    • Poker Games
    • Arcade Games
    • Flirting Games
  • How has monetization changed over the last year?
  • Consumer Demographics
  • Whales in Social Games
• Impact of Facebook Credits
  • Goals and Benefits
    • More Paying Players
    • Less Friction
    • Higher Trust
  • Challenges and Costs
    • Loss of Control
    • Facebook’s Fee
    • Breakage
  • Developer Sentiment
    • Large Developers vs Small Developers
    • Different Implementations
  • Impact on Payments Ecosystem
    • Offer Providers
    • Direct Payment Providers
• Payment Methods Breakdown
  • Understanding Offers and the Offer Controversy
    • The Offers Controversy
    • Offers in Social Games
    • Increased Competition
  • Direct Payments
    • Direct Payment Methods Breakdown in Social Games
    • Direct Payments vs Offers
  • Mobile and Alternative Direct Payments
    • Mobile Payments
    • Pre-Paid Cards
    • New Payment Providers
• Lifetime Value of Social Games Players (LTV) – What do we know?
  • How long do players stick around?
  • When in their lifecycle do users monetize best?
  • Seasonality and monetization lifecycles in social games
  • Banner advertising’s role

5. Customer Acquisition and Marketing: The New Distribution Landscape

• The Rise, Fall, and Re-rise of Viral Acquisition
• Impact of Facebook Platform Changes on Viral Distribution
  • News Feed
  • Invitations
  • Notifications
• Cross Promotion
  • Large Developers vs Small Developers
  • Publishers and New Third Party Cross Promotion Networks
• Paid Acquisition
  • Facebook Ads
  • Third Party Facebook Platform Ad Networks
• A Look at Growth and Decay of Games Launched in 2010
• Off-Facebook Promotion
• Network Strategy and Economies of Scale

6. The Big 4: Head Count, Strategy, Challenges, and Revenue Estimates

• Zynga
• Playfish
• Playdom
• CrowdStar

7. 2011 Market Size Estimates

• 2011 Social Gaming Market Size

Section II – The Future

1. Facebook Platform Changes and the Relationship Between Facebook and Application Developers

• Impact of Platform Changes
• Facebook Platform Policy and the Lolapps Example
• Developers and Advertising Spend

2. The Future of Facebook Credits and the Changing Monetization Landscape

• Impact of Facebook Credits
  • Rollout Timeline
  • Off-Facebook Credits Availability
• Offers and Performance Advertising
• Role of Alternative Payment Systems

3. Key Customer Acquisition Questions for Small and Medium Sized Developers

• Impact of the Rise of the Big 4
  • Growing Value of Cross Promotion
  • Marketing and Customer Acquisition
• How can small/medium developers succeed in a “cold start” situation?
  • Reasonable Goals
  • Examining Success Stories from 2010
• Can an independent developer dominate a category?

4. Off-Network Games with Facebook Connect

• Intersection of Social and Mobile
• Open Internet and Facebook Connect

5. Will Another Platform Other Than Facebook Emerge?

• Google
• MySpace
• Twitter
• International Social Networks (China, Japan, Russia)
• Casual/MMO Portals
• Global Portals: Yahoo, MSN, and Others
• Mobile Social Networking Platforms

6. Competitive Response in the Broader Media and Games Industry

• Casual Game Developers
• Console Games Companies
• Casual MMOs and Virtual Worlds
• Media Companies

7. Investment Landscape

• Venture Capital
• M&A and IPO Landscape

Appendix – Related Companies

More Data, More Actionable Insights

In 2010, social games began to show what kind of value can be created on top of social networks. 2011 will be an even more important year.

Social gaming, powered by virtual goods, is this year’s industry to watch. If you’re involved, or are considering jumping in, Inside Virtual Goods will be one of your most important tools.

One year of original data and exclusive in-depth reports delivered on a quarterly basis is $2,495 and contains:

• A detailed overview of the current state of the industry
• Specific estimates on market size by segment
• Diagnosis of key opportunities and issues by segment

In recent months, we’ve been finding more businesses that help create social games for others, instead of building everything for in-house use as Facebook’s largest developers do. One of the latest to hit our radar is Enteraction, a new studio in the United Kingdom.

Enteraction is the product of frustration. When Andy Rogers, then an executive at British broadcaster ETV Media, started trying to find a developer to work on branded games using IP from ETV’s shows last year, he couldn’t find a single company that was willing to do the work.

ETV eventually decided to just create its own studio, but the problem shifted — the company couldn’t find any homegrown studios to acquire, or any Silicon Valley developers willing to move to London.

“In the UK it’s really obvious that the social gaming business is very similar to the online gambling business,” says Rogers, who is now CEO of Enteraction. After giving up on Californians, Enteraction decided to instead hire developers from top gambling sites like BetFair.

The result so far is a group with about 20 employees and a game development platform called GameShaper. With its platform, Enteraction plans to both develop games of its own, and enter partnerships with companies that have their own IP — like ITV, a large British media group with which Enteraction has created its first game, Corrie Nation.

Rogers hopes that Enteraction will become expert at partnering with big companies who are looking for someone that can speak their own language. “We’re under no illusions, this is rapidly moving to something like the TV or film business,” says Rogers. “It’s a hit driven business. Not all of these games will fly, we make that clear to our partners. What we need to prove is that we’ve got all the studios and people in place.”

Our own look at Corrie Nation, which is based on a popular British show suggests that Enteraction has some ground to cover — the game feels rough in places, compared to those recently released by veteran companies.

But if Rogers is right in thinking that his company is one of the only, especially in Europe, to offer third-party social game development studios, Enteraction won’t be wanting for practice.