For over two years, Tetris Online has operated quietly as a small developer on Facebook with its two moderately successful Tetris games, Tetris Battle and Tetris Friends. But the Tetris rights owner appears to be branching out, publishing high-quality Japanese RPGs to the social network — first Lost Trails, which we reviewed a couple weeks ago, and now Monster Fantasy.

From its lengthy beginning, Monster Fantasy looks nothing like other social games, both in style and operation. Instead of placing players directly into an engaging tutorial, as most social games do to prevent Facebook’s notoriously impatient users from immediately bouncing out, Monster Fantasy starts with an intro that clocks in at three and a half minutes. For many games made earlier this year, that would be an entire play session.

If users make it past the intro (which admittedly has a skip button) and the equally-intimidating requirement of downloading extra Flash content, they can enter the tutorial. But there’s another immediately distracting feature: freedom. Monster Fantasy is an attractive 2.5D open world, in which your character can run around and interact freely. This unusually complex environment is also the reason for the extra download.

Monster Fantasy packages itself into square rooms, large enough to run around in without feeling like you’re in a box; series of these rooms make up larger areas. Each room can contain items, monsters, characters and buildings to interact with. After a short intro to the controls, the game pushes you into the beginning town, which is spread over half a dozen squares.

Although the initial tutorial extends into the town, it doesn’t remain a prominent part of gameplay, allowing you to forget what you’re doing. Without the tutorial telling to exactly what to do, the town becomes a confusing warren, full of characters, houses and shops of unexplained significance.

Anyone who has played smartphone RPGs will be able to recognize the layout. At any given time you’ll have a quest telling you what to do, and the quest will almost always involve the same basic action: killing monsters. Movement between areas is controlled through a world map.

But for the average Facebook player, Monster Fantasy will present a problem. Quests, character screens, skills, shops and most other information are hidden away in windows that don’t feel particularly intuitive, at last by the standards of Facebook’s inexperienced gamers.

Away from the various menus and pop-up windows, the game could still be too much. It’s not always clear where you’re supposed to go, either to talk to a particular person or kill a specific monster. Compounding the problem, there’s no visible way to make the game window become full-screen, so the dialogue, menus and everything else are too small to comfortably interact with.

Monster Fantasy appears to have been originally created for one of Japan’s bigger social networks, Mixi, by a company called Headlock. While it was probably successful at home, among much savvier Japanese players, it’s not likely to make much headway here, unless Tetris Online spends more time on localization.

But even with the problems, it’s interesting to see this kind of game appearing on Facebook. Although Monster Fantasy is a far cry from the simplicity of an RPG like Crime City, the 14,106 monthly active users it has gotten so far suggest that there’s also room for a more complex RPG than those we’ve gotten used to.

Path-drawing games have been around on both the iPhone and the iPad for some time now, but they usually involve steering object A to a stationary B. Blue Fang Games takes that concept to a different level with a new iPad title, Lion Pride HUGE — a complement to the older iPhone version, Lion Pride.

Rather than steering airplanes, as in Flight Control, or flies in Fly Control, you help a pride of lions hunt down packs of animals along the Serengeti. A game of both strategy and quick thinking, Lion Pride quickly becomes challenging

You control a pack of lionesses, and as the female lions of the pride, it’s up to you to hunt down food. In each level, different African animals will wander onto the plains, and you must draw a path from your lioness to an animal in order to catch it. As time goes on, the supply of food will drain and you must catch these animals in order to replenish it. This process continues until a set number of animal packs have entered the level.

Sounds simple right? Well, as your lioness approaches the animals, they will run away and many of them are faster than lions. In order to catch them, you must slowly draw a path — represented by a white, dotted-line. This allows your lioness to stalk its prey unnoticed until close. Once near, a quickly drawn path, indicated by a red dotted-line, will cause your lioness to sprint (making the it more visible). Even if the animal is still faster, you can double tap prey to temporarily stun and slow it.

It gets better. As the game continues, you control more and more lionesses and bigger prey will enter the field. Larger prey, such as zebra or even elephants, will require more lionesses to take it down. For example, a zebra will take two lionesses while the elephant will take four. Furthermore, you will often need to steer lionesses into ambush positions, in order to catch speedier meals. Oh, and some larger animals fight back, stunning the your lionesses (which can be fixed with a double tap).

More lionesses makes the game a bit more difficult, because prey is more likely to see any individual lion and run off screen. To make the challenge even greater, later levels include hyenas that will steal prey, forcing you to chase them off. In a special night mode, hyenas will also try to steal the pride’s cubs.

Some levels will also have the male lion. Of course, Discovery Channel aficionados will recall that male lions tend to sleep around 20 hours a day and let the females do all the work. Double tapping male lions will wake them up, but they just wander about where they like and only catch prey if happens to be near them.

At the end of each level, there is a break down of how well you did. Including an overall score, a letter rating, number of kills, number of stuns, and any other bonuses you may have earned. These scores tie-in to Lion Pride’s social elements.

Integrated with the OpenFeint mobile, social network, there is a different leaderboard for each of the game’s levels, as well as the night mode and a survival mode. As you rack up high-scores, you can share and challenge your friends to play via email, Twitter, or Facebook. You can also post scores online through the game itself (not through OpenFeint.)

Lion Pride does have some minimal usability issues. The game is not clear on how much you have progressed in a level until it is almost over, and you never really know how much time you have remaining in a level until then. There are also minor precision problems with the controls. When you use multiple lionesses to take down a target, it is often problematic to send two, or more, off in separate directions. The game tends to end up drawing paths from the same lioness, when you intend to draw them from separate lionesses.

Even with these minor problems, the game is fun, challenging and a nice change of pace from the traditional path-drawing games. Of course, for $4.99 on the iPad ($2.99 for iPhone) if you aren’t a fan of the genre, it’s probably not the game for you. But, fans of games like Flight Control will likely have a good time stalking the Serengeti with Lion Pride.

Mobile game developer Mig33 is announcing $8.9 million in fresh funding this morning, taken in to accelerate its growth in the developing world and transition to a platform model with other companies making most of its games.

There aren’t many businesses quite like Mig33, which may be one reason that it doesn’t get talked about as much as companies in more crowded spaces. Since launching in 2005, Mig33 has secluded itself in markets that, according to the conventional wisdom, aren’t worth much, like Indonesia, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

One problem with those markets is a lack of high-powered devices like the iPhone. But the bigger barrier is monetization. Not only are individual users typically much poorer than those in the developed world; they also lack payment infrastructure like credit cards or bank accounts.

Mig33 has developed a startling workaround to these problems, according to CEO Steven Goh. In countries without convenient payment systems, individual users will begin acting as distribution nodes for virtual currency, learning the steps to buy credits in large amounts — sometimes in the thousands of dollars — and then selling smaller units on to other people in their locality or second-degree distributors somewhere else.

In Indonesia, five percent of users are paying over $2 a month, according to Goh, mostly through virtual gifts and goods. The company is just starting to add games with social features, so revenue could rise when there are more.

For partners, Mig33 could offer a good alternative to crowded channels like Facebook or the iPhone. And there’s more possibility for development than a year or two ago; even though smartphones aren’t yet widespread in developing markets, ordinary phones have improved significantly, and the company’s app can run games in Flash Lite. It’s also busy adding support for more types of handsets across its markets.

Although Mig33 doesn’t release many more numbers than those given above publicly, the company does have 40 million registered users and 1.1 million daily uniques, giving an idea of how much it could be making. The $8.9 million round was led by an Indonesian telecom entrepreneur, Pak Sugiono Wiyono, and Gree, a Japanese social network. Mig33 has raised over $34 million to date.

Crime City has finally climbed to the top of our weekly AppData list of fastest-growing Facebook games by monthly active users. The Funzio game, which has been out for just over a month, has quickly become one of the most successful games from a developer outside the top four this year.

Here’s the full list:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Crime City	3,914,363	+1,189,145	+44%
2.	Ravenwood Fair	2,437,040	+865,539	+55%
3.	Texas HoldEm Poker	36,854,573	+751,762	+2%
4.	Zoo World	8,245,210	+724,970	+10%
5.	My Kingdom	1,902,183	+667,271	+54%
6.	Simply Hospital	1,156,790	+448,768	+63%
7.	Car Town	6,468,587	+365,863	+6%
8.	It Girl	4,812,542	+332,909	+7%
9.	BRAAAINS	1,269,885	+309,443	+32%
10.	Pogo Games	591,251	+301,285	+104%
11.	Millionaire City	12,130,456	+286,258	+2%
12.	Evony	817,957	+280,524	+52%
13.	World War	1,951,231	+259,941	+15%
14.	CSI: Crime City	595,620	+232,362	+64%
15.	Mall World	5,623,170	+227,853	+4%
16.	Legacy of Rome	1,201,689	+216,399	+22%
17.	Backyard Monsters	2,883,049	+203,364	+8%
18.	小小戰爭	1,128,458	+198,470	+21%
19.	Route du Rhum – La Banque Postale	253,666	+195,336	+335%
20.	Monster World	4,542,559	+192,652	+4%

The success of Crime City is doubly impressive considering that Funzio is a virtual unknown in social gaming — though the company does have experience in both Facebook and mobile gaming. Funzio isn’t alone on this list, in terms of combining great success with a low profile; Cie Games, which has Car Town at number seven this week, is much the same in that regard.

Number two is Ravenwood Fair, from LOLapps. As we noted in a story on the rapid fall of LOLapps’ other, suspended apps on Friday, Ravenwood’s viral channels have been suspended by Facebook for some separate infraction and will, apparently, return this Wednesday. In the meantime, the strong growth seen above is probably being significantly dented; the results of the suspension appear in the app’s DAU:

My Kingdom is the latest Chinese-language game to grow quickly — very quickly, in fact, given that the population of users that can read it is only a fraction of those who might be able to play a game like Crime City. It’s a kingdom management game with a strong farming element, much like We Rule.

Few of the games on this week’s list are new to it. Only Pogo Games is really a newcomer; Electronic Arts seems to have finally decided to promote the game portal, which is a small subsidiary of the gaming giant.

Halloween may be over, but zombies are immortal, at least in the new Halfbrick Studios iPad and iPhone title Age of Zombies.  A quasi-sequel to the platforming title Monster Dash, Barry Steakfries returns to this game in all his monster slaying glory, but in a new top down, Rambo’esque shooter full of glorious cartoon gore and a sharp, fourth wall-breaking wit.

After a brief introduction to the game’s red-shirt villain — who makes some very amusing call-backs to Monster Dash — players are whisked into the past, where the evil doctor antagonist has sent his hordes of zombies. Not the immediate past, either: it’s the Stone Age, full of dinosaurs, cave men, and modern-day zombies.

This is where the flavor of the game is set, as each level has a different type of infected creature, with varying levels of style and amusement. More on that later, though: the shooting takes priority. For this,, players use digital analog controls on opposite sides of the iDevice to steer and shoot simultaneously.

The problem with this setup is that players can’t feel where the controls are, and often find themselves hitting the wrong part of the screen, thus not moving or getting stuck. Halfbrick is aware of this, and while it hasn’t recreated the true analog stick, it mitigates this issue by actually having the controls drift with one’s thumbs. Basically, as players are playing, a digital stick that starts in the bottom left, could end up in the upper right, should the players’ thumb drift that way. With this mechanic, control of the avatar is never lost.

So what about the zombie slaying itself? Well, players are granted an infinite supply of ammunition and a basic, slow-shooting gun to take them out, earning points along the way for consecutive and mass kills. As hordes of zombies (and we mean hordes) appear through time vortexes, so will different types of weaponry. From flamethrowers to shotguns, there is a very wide assortment of weapons to pick up, with more appearing in each level. There is no inventory, so any item discovered overwrites the weapon currently equipped. Additionally, special weapons have a finite amount of ammunition.

Beyond guns, players can also pick up various explosives such as mines, grenades, and rocket launchers. These are, as one would expect, used to obliterate large groups of zombies, but are the subject of the game’s only, minor, complaint. In order to use them, players must tap an area above the shooting analog controls, but must return to the shooting control if the aim needs to be changed.

Age of Zombies has a wide variety of enemies. There are gangster zombies with guns, giant zombies, kamikaze zombies, and even, in all its glory, a zombie tyrannosaurus. Of course, that last is a boss.

There’s also a very unique health mechanic that’s worth noting. Players do have limited lives, but there is no visible health system. Unlike similar games, where one hit is death, players can actually take a number of zombie bites. It is not until they take a high number at one time (basically getting swarmed) that they die.

Age of Zombies would not be complete without some social play. The game is integrated with OpenFeint, Facebook and Twitter. Regarding the first of those, there are a handful of leaderboards for total zombie kills and the game’s different levels in survival mode (basically pick a level and live for as long as possible). As for Twitter and Facebook, these are integrated with story publishing when players finish some key objective, like killing a zombie t-rex.

The last element of merit worth mentioning is the sense of style and wit Age of Zombies comes with. While not every line is a gem, Barry Steakfries is constantly spouting out one liners that frequently break the fourth wall of immersion. Even so, many of them are very funny, referring to everything from Monster Dash to the game’s music.

In the end, Age of Zombies comes highly recommended for either the iPad or the iPhone. Of course, due to the nature of the game, it lends itself better to the larger size of the iPad. On either device, from creative bosses to gratifying game play, it’s a must-have.

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

Sunday, October 31st, 2010

• Special Purpose Investment Vehicles Snap Up Facebook Shares

Monday, November 1st, 2010

• Dress Up for Halloween on This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Apps by MAU
• Tag Your Friends in the Stands this World Series with MLB’s Facebook Integration
• Facebook’s Latest Punishments Hit LOLapps, Other Developers
• Friends’ Popular Places Module Reveals Check-In Trends to Facebook Users
• Top 25 Facebook Games for November 2010
• Dallas Mavericks Use Ifeelgoods to Let Users Earn Facebook Credits for Following Twitter Accounts
• Facebook Builds Its First App for a Foreign Market: A Job Search App in Japan
• Facebook Adds “Unlike Page” Button to Page Stories

Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010

• Top 20 Growing Facebook Pages: Disney, Converse, Music, Jackass and Jackie Chan
• Facebook Helps U.S. Users Vote through Polling Locator App
• Announcing Inside Virtual Goods: The Future of Social Gaming 2011
• Facebook Releases Details on the High Resolution Photos API
• EA/Playfish Also Signs Five Year Deal to Exclusively Use Credits on Facebook
• Facebook Adds “Like this Open Graph Object” Button to Open Graph Activity Stories
• Indonesia Eclipses the UK as Facebook’s Second Largest Market
• Amazon Lets Users Send Gift Cards Via Wall Posts, which Recipients Must Redeem through Facebook

Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010

• Old Guard Tech Companies Lead This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebok Apps by DAU
• Live-blogging Facebook’s Key Mobile Releases
• Facebook’s Mobile Products Have 200 Million Users
• Facebook Announces New Versions of the Facebook for iPhone and Android Mobile Apps
• Zuckerberg Gives a Definitive No on a Facebook Phone
• Facebook Updates Mobile Platform with Location APIs, Single Sign-On, and Deals
• Facebook Launches Local Deal Service for Places
• Highlights This Week from the Inside Network Job Board: A Bit Lucky, Glu Mobile, PlaySpan, EA & More
• Facebook for iPhone 3.3.1 Includes Groups, Deals, Photo Check-Ins

Thursday, November 4th, 2010

• Facebook Wins Another News Feed Patent
• The Facebook Global Monitor, November 2010 Edition, is Now Available
• ISA 2011: How Will Small and Medium Social Game and App Developers Grow on Facebook Next Year?
• Facebook, Other Companies, Promote Green Efforts on Facebook
• Still Shy of 2 Million Users, Facebook Quadruples in South Korea

Friday, November 5th, 2010

• Puma, Sonephone and More on This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Apps
• Web Measurement Firms: Facebook Had Mixed Growth in August, September 2010
• Social-Focused Group Deal Provider Dealpair Offers Alternative to Facebook Deals
• Facebook Roundup: Voting Data, eBay, Drop.io, Narcissism, Hires and More
• Thanks to Our Sponsors

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 A Bit Lucky, Glu Mobile, PlaySpan, EA, Playfish, Sneaky Games, OMGPOP, MetroGames, and Playdom.

• Flash Production Designer/Developer at A Bit Lucky (San Mateo, CA)
• Flash Game Engineer at A Bit Lucky (San Mateo, CA)
• Senior Backend Engineer at A Bit Lucky (San Mateo, CA)

• Executive Producer (San Francisco, CA)
• Producer (San Francisco, CA)

• Systems Operations Engineer (Santa Clara, CA)
  

• Ad Product Development Manager – Online, Social & Mobile (Redwood City, CA)
  

• Head of Acquisition Marketing (Redwood City, CA)

• Game Developer (Austin, TX)
  

• Game Developer (New York, NY)
  
• iPhone Developer (New York, NY)

• PR / Marketing Specialist (San Francisco, CA)
• Business Developers (San Francisco, CA)
• Business Development Manager (San Francisco, CA)

• Software Engineer – Disney (Boulder, CO)
  
• Game Design Lead (Mountain View, CA)
  
• Art Lead/Producer (Mountain View, 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.

Electronic Arts Reports Q2 Results — Electronic Arts has reported its fiscal numbers for the second quarter of the year. Non-GAAP revenues were around $884 million, a 23% decrease year-over-year, while digital revenues, which include mobile devices, Facebook and the web, rose 20 percent to $166 million. VentureBeat has more.

DeNA Reports Second Quarter Numbers — Tokyo-based social games company DeNA reported its second quarter results for the fiscal year with a total of $336.4 million in revenue, marking a 216% year-over-year increase. The company is also boasting of average revenue per user (ARPU) 15 times higher than Zynga and 30 times higher than Facebook, though it didn’t give exact numbers.

OMGPOP Raising More Funding — Social and casual games developer OMGPOP is considering a round of $10 million, says All Things Digital. The round is reportedly still being closed, but the investors could include Bessemer Venture Partners, Spark Capital, and Softbank Capital NY.

News Corp Acquires Making Fun — Media company News Corp has acquired a small social company, Making Fun, this past week, again reported by All Things Digital. The year-old startup will be added the the company’s games unit and focus on making social titles for Facebook, MySpace, iPhone, and Android.

Vindicia Raises $20 million — In yet more financial news, online payments company Vindicia is also raising funds this week. VentureBeat notes that the the company has raised $20 million in a fifth round of funding.

[Rumor] BOKU Considering a Buyout — Mobile payments company BOKUcould become the latest acquisition target of either Apple or Google, according to TechCrunch, which reports that both BOKU president and CEO Mark Britto and co-founder Ron Hirson met with execs including Google director of engineering Michael Morrissey (who oversees parts of Google Mobile Services for the Android).

Chinese Government Policing Social Games — The Chinese state has taken under-the-table action against social games ranging from publishing propaganda about specific titles to creating unfavorable terminology, according to a post from TechCrunch. Although China doesn’t appear to be readying out outright ban, it is also “harmonizing” games to remove even the most remotely violent or anti-social concepts.

Virtual Goods More Important Than Ads — EA senior executives found that advertising was far inferior to virtual goods marketing in Battlefield Heroes, according to the London Games Conference covered by GameSpot. Replacing ads for outside brands with ads for virtual goods produced 300 times more revenue. Additionally, John Earner of Playfish’s European studios suggested that within two years, 20 percent of the company’s revenue would come through virtual goods.

Zynga Becomes a Top Target for Internet Scammers — Internet navigation and security service OpenDNS released new statistics from PhishTank.com this week. Among all targets found, Zynga was marked as the number 6 most targeted brand by Internet scammers.

Inside Social Games extends a big thank you to our sponsors for supporting the continued growth of Inside Social Games. Check them out below!

Kontagent is a developer of analytics solutions for social application developers.

Sometrics is a provider of virtual currency monetization solutions for social app and game developers.

AppStrip is a network of game developers that provides game distribution and promotion.

Frima Studio develops social games for big brands.

Joyent provides public cloud hosting for social application and game developers.

6waves is an international publisher and developer of gaming applications on the Facebook platform.

Super Rewards is a monetization solution for applications and games running on social networks like Facebook.

Alchemy provides management and optimization tools for creating and buying ads on Facebook.

RightScale provides cloud computing management for social application and game developers.

AdParlor is an official Facebook Ads API Partner and manages large Facebook advertising campaigns – with a focus on growing social games.

SoftLayer provides cloud and dedicated hosting services for social application and game developers.

Facebook’s communication channels are central to social game distribution, retention, and engagement, but there’s rarely an opportunity to see what happens to a game when all of its communication channel access is cut off.

It has now been about a week since Facebook suspended all viral communication channels for most LOLapps games. Although changes will take a while to cycle into a monthly active user graph, an AppData graph of LOLapps’s Critter Island game’s daily active users shows why a communication channel suspension is almost as bad as an outright removal of an app:

The first dip is from Facebook’s weekend suspension of the entire app, while the second is from the more recent loss of viral channels.

The only app to escape was Ravenwood Fair, which worked fine until the middle of this week but has now has its channels blocked as well. From the gap between the suspensions of LOLapps’ other titles and that of Ravenwood, it seems possible that the two policy enforcements are at least somewhat unrelated.

On the other hand, if Ravenwood is subject to the same six-month moratorium as the rest of LOLapps’ titles, or even a large fraction of that time, it’s going to see almost all of its active users diminished. [Update: Ravenwood will be back on the 10th; see below.] The Critter Island graph shows how quickly players stream out of a title when its channels are suspended; it also shows that the game was already having trouble recovering its DAU after the first suspension.

During the course of this week, LOLapps launched RavenwoodFair.com, a version of the game on a separate website. But even on its own website, the game uses Facebook Connect, and is still subject to the moratorium.

Zynga, too, facing the challenge of being so dependent on Facebook, has been rumored to be planning its own stand-alone game portal for a while, but the company hasn’t launched anything yet. It’s possible that Ravenwood will undergo some changes, but as it is, a presence outside of Facebook won’t be enough to sustain the game.

Update: We asked LOLapps for more information about Ravenwood Fair’s suspension, and received the following response:

“We have worked closely with the Facebook team to ensure that our applications and games are in compliance with their policies and look forward to contiuing to partner with them to bring the safest possible experience to our users. Fans of Lolapps should look forward to a new focus on gaming and exciting developments. Ravenwood Fair and all of it’s viral channels will be restored November on 10th.”