January 25th | San Francisco

Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011, our second conference on the future of monetization on social platforms, is happening January 25th in San Francisco. We’re excited to see all of the developers and entrepreneurs that are planning to attend!

The agenda for Inside Social Apps is now live online. We’re also excited to announce 3 new speakers today: Kristian Segarstrale, Founder & CEO of Playfish (now part of EA), Paul Bettner, the new GM of Zynga with Friends (formerly Founder & CEO of the just-acquired Newtoy), and Asokan Thiyagarajan, Director of Mobile Platforms at Samsung. They will be joining our full list of speakers below.

Finally, if you’re considering attending Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011, this is your last chance to take advantage of early registration pricing. A limited set of early registration tickets are currently available at the Early Admission price of $299. This price will be good through Friday December 17th only, so we encourage you to register now.

Who’s Speaking?

At Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011, executives and experts from Facebook, Google, leading social networks, mobile platforms, social game and app developers, media companies, virtual goods and payment services, and investors will be discussing the future of social platforms and virtual goods monetization in social games and apps.

We’re honored to present the following confirmed speakers at Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011:

	Bret Taylor CTO, Facebook		Eric Chu Group Manager, Android Platform, Google
	Kristian Segarstrale Co-founder and CEO, Playfish (now part of EA)		Vish Makhijani SVP Business Operations, Zynga
	Kevin Chou Co-founder and CEO, Kabam		Peter Relan Executive Chairman, CrowdStar
	Rick Thompson Co-Founder, Playdom (now part of Disney), and Investor		Jason Oberfest VP Social Apps, ngmoco:) (now part of DeNA)
	Rex Ng Co-Founder and CEO, 6waves		Deborah Liu Commerce Product Marketing, Facebook
	Sean Ryan EVP and GM Games, News Corp		Bill Gossman CEO, hi5
	Anil Dharni Co-founder, Funzio; Founder, Storm8		Paul Bettner GM, Zynga with Friends
	Jens Begemann Co-founder and CEO, Wooga		Eric Goldberg Managing Director, Crossover Technologies
	Carey Kolaja Senior Director, Digital Goods Operations, PayPal		Raph Koster VP Creative Design, Playdom (now part of Disney)
	Atul Bagga VP Equity Research, Games, ThinkEquity		Manu Rekhi GM Games and Platform, MySpace
	Matthaeus Krzykowski Founder, Xyologic		Asokan Thiyagarajan Dir. Platforms & Tech. Strategy, Samsung
	Justin Smith Founder, Inside Network		Eric Eldon Editor, Inside Network

Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 – January 25th in San Francisco

Social applications first emerged in 2007, and are today maturing into a global media ecosystem. With the launch of the Facebook Platform, followed by platforms from MySpace and other social networks, developers worldwide could leverage the social graph to create new kinds of social experiences never before possible.

Now, three and a half years later, what started out as sheep throwing and vampire biting has quickly become a profitable billion-dollar industry, punctuated by numerous major acquisitions by the world’s leading media companies and developers. But now, new challenges are emerging, affecting big players and new entrants alike.

Inside Social Apps will investigate the latest trends and challenges for social applications, and look at what’s to come for developers throughout the space – including the growth of virtual goods and social applications on mobile devices.

What are the biggest uncertainties and opportunities facing the future of social games and applications in 2011, and who is leading the way?

Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 takes place January 25th, 2011 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, and brings together the world’s leading entrepreneurs to weigh in on the future of social app and game monetization.

Inside Social Apps will be a one-day summit led by Inside Network’s Eric Eldon and Justin Smith, and will take in-depth investigative approach to the day’s discussions. At Inside Social Apps, Inside Network will work alongside founders and executives of the top social networking, social gaming, mobile social gaming, payments, and virtual goods infrastructure companies to analyze the most important issues affecting the industry. Inside Social Apps is geared towards developers on Facebook, iPhone, Android, and emerging online social platforms.

Inside Social Apps will be a content-rich day of critical discussion, followed by an evening and nighttime of casual networking.

Register Now

A limited set of “Early Admission” tickets is available through Friday at a special price of $299. This price will change after Friday, and space will be very limited, so we encourage you to register early.

From all of us at Inside Network, we hope to see you on January 25th in San Francisco at Inside Social Apps!

A week ago, the number of hires suggested that a holiday slowdown had begun. Nevertheless, this past week is showing a surprising level of activity in the social hiring world according to data from LinkedIn. Of those, some major new hires included Christine Lau, who is now the Director of Sales Operations at RockYou, and Joe MacDonagh, who joins PopCap as their new Director of Production. In addition to these two, Meteor Games also announced the appointment of Michael Walrath to their board of directors.

As always, if your company is hiring new people or making a notable promotion, please let us know. Email editor (at) insidesocialgames (dot) com, and we’ll get it into this or next week’s post.

And for those searching for new jobs, be sure to check out our Inside Network Job Board.

Here’s this week’s full list:

Digital Chocolate

• Reko Ukko — An internal change for Digital Chocolate as Ukko shifts from lead game designer to design manager.
• Nick Esquerra — Previously a software engineer for LiteracyPro Systems Inc., Esquerra is now filling the same role at Digital Chocolate.
• Tomi Joki-Korpela — Another internal shift as Joki-Korpela moves from lead server engineer to server programming director at Digital Chocolate.

Kabam

• Michael Pierce — A former account strategist for Google, Pierce joins Kabam as an SEM analyst.
• Karla Ortiz — Ortiz joins Kabam as a new 2D game and concept artist. Prior to this, Ortiz was a concept artist for Paragon Studios.
• Lisa Dedrick — Now a benefits administrator for Kabam, Dedrick was previously a human resources manager (domestic) for OmniVision.

Meteor Games

• Michael Walrath — As noted prior, Meteor Games has announced the appointment of Michael Walrath to its board of directors. Walrath is the co-founder of WGI Group and former CEO of Right Media.

Metrogames

• Iara Senez — Joining Metrogames as an “analista Jr de recursos humanas,” or junior human resources analyst, is Senez whose prior role comes from IT Convergence, where she was an HR assistant.

Playfish

• James Cook — Cook joins Playfish as a server-side developer. Before this, he was a Java web services developer at weComm.

Playdom

• Erik Osaben — Previously the technical director and co-founder of PassionFruit Games, Osaben joins Playdom as a software engineer.
• Jason Dickson — In an internal change, Dickson is now noted as a production manager for Playdom International. Previously, Dickson was a QA lead.

PopCap

• Andrew Federspiel — Now a monetization designer for social games at PopCap, Federspiel was previously a game designer for SilverTree Media.
• Joe McDonagh — Another one for the noted major hires as Joe McDonagh joins PopCap as their new director of production. Prior to this, he was the creative director for LucasArts.

RockYou!

• Christine Lau — Christine Lau is now the new director of sales operations for RockYou. Before this, she was a manager of pricing and yield management for YuMe.

TeePee Games

• Lauren Omond — New updates from TeePee Games as they announce Omond as their new project manager. Omond’s prior experience stems from mobile media company, Player X.

Wooga

• Francesco Tosato — Only an internal changes from Wooga this week as international online marketing intern, Tosato, joins the team as a product manager.

Zynga

• Thibaud Queneuille — A former senior agent from Yahoo!, Queneuille is now a game lead for Zynga.
• Renee Lawson — Lawson joins Zynga as an associate general counsel. Prior to this, Lawson was a partner at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP.
• Phil Wohr — Now a concept artist for Zynga, Wohr was previously filling the same role under the recently acquired Bonfire Studios.
• Eric Topf — Previously an artist for EA subsidiary Maxis, Topf joins Zynga as a QA analyst.
• Zach Shubert — Zynga gains a new senior software engineer in the form of Shubert. Shubert’s prior role was as VP of engineering at Amie Street.
• Michio Nikaido — Formerly a senior software engineer for CA Technologies, Nikaido joins Zynga under the same job title.
• Frances Zou — Zou is now a recruiter for Zynga. Before this, Zou was a staffing consultant for Hewlett-Packard.
• Jin Huang — Huang joins Zynga, this week, as a new software engineer. His prior experience stems from RockYou, where he was a front end developer.
• Gil Shafir — Now a data analyst for Zynga, Shafir was previously an associate for Revolution Ventures.
• Alex Shoykhet — The former director of product management at Mobile Money Ventures, LLC, Shoykhet joins the Zynga team as a senior product manager.
• Sterling Reames — Now officially an animator under the Zynga tag, Reams was previously an animator under the acquired Conduit Labs tag.

The rate of new simulation releases on Facebook shows no signs of slowing. Instead, the genre seems to be metastasizing into every possible niche: malls, resorts, hospitals, bakeries and a dozen commercial activities are all possible. Rather than pigeonhole you into a single theme, Pretty Simpl’s new title My Shops lets you choose the type of shops you’d like to manage.

My Shops begins with the fast and furious experience of running a bakery. Each shop has a pyramid of pre-assigned customers. In the case of the bakery, you start with four whimsically-named Nice People whose every baking desire you must satisfy by keeping up to eight different types of goods in stock and ensuring the building meets the “Beauty” standards of the more finicky shoppers.

Goods are kept in stock by sending delivery trucks out. The more expensive the item, the longer it takes. Successively larger trucks can be built by asking friends to send parts or by purchasing the items with Cash, My Shop’s micro-currency. Having the item in stock will earn coins, the in-game currency used to purchase further stock or upgrades to the building to increase its size or Beauty.

Increasing the Beauty of a particular shop (including a cake shop, pet store, clothing store, and candy shop, plus five as-yet-unannounced slots) is where My Shops truly shines — and where it also begins its uphill climb towards drudgery.

Each shop has a level associated with its size, with expansions of width or height unlocked by ever-increasing expenditures of Coin. This allows the shop to carry more goods and gives the player the ability to modify the exterior of the building to reach different Beauty goals.

There are a dizzying array of options to expand, starting with the shape of the building. Three components have set placements: roofs, building shape, and doors (so that the hefty customer Chuck Morris can get in) but you can have two roofs and five doors. Free placement makes for an architect’s playground (or nightmare) with 15-45 choices in outside decorations, wall decorations, windows, signs, doors, and wall materials.

Themes exists for each type of shop and once purchased can be used on other shops – who says a cupcake isn’t an appropriate wall decoration for the pet store? There are also themes within the options – Japanese, haunted, igloo, Hawaiian – to build your shop just so.

But with Beauty a requirement for new customers and the function of beauty based upon the amount spent, not any combination of theme, it quickly becomes expensive to make your customers happy. The player learns very quickly that no bonuses are given for using a particular theme, and only the simple outlay of coin (and particularly real cash) that will satisfy the next customer. This detracts from any true ability to be creative with the store fronts.

Your social network has no real bearing on success or failure, except possibly to speed up the arduous process of leveling to buy the next shop for a prodigious outlay of coin. Experience levels are based upon the Love your visitors have for your shops, which you click them to receive. But this is based on a timer, so the best one can hope for is to visit every two hours, order more goods if necessary and click 18-25 customers.

Once every 24 hours, you can also click a friend to earn 500 coins and some love. Beyond this, there’s no direct social interaction — no working in the shop, earning the friend additional experience, nothing. Friends can gift, and this is the only way — other than cash — to purchase upgrades for delivery trucks. But friends interact so little that the discussion boards are rife with links to trade truck parts.

Other than the ability to customize your shop into an abomination of loveliness, My Shops does have one of the best UIs I’ve come across in a Facebook title. It is clean, friendly and fast. Not only is it easy to get to the information needed, but there are multiple pathways, most achieved with one click. And as should be required in any half-way decent economic simulation, there are graphs comparing sales on the street, by shop, by week and by month. Again, these are all user-friendly and easily accessible.

But despite its great design, from the tutorial onward, My Shops is balanced in such a manner that it is difficult to earn the very large sums of coin needed to advance in any reasonable time frame. One must either buy more coin or grind all day, hoping never to make a mistake, miss a delivery time, or upset a customer. If this balance is fixed, My Shops do quite well, with a level of personalization and accessibility unique to Facebook.

Mobile social gaming network OpenFeint is launching an app called Game Channel today, its latest attempt to find new ways to illuminate individual games in the crowded mobile market.

Game Channel’s headline feature is called “Fire Sale”, an attempt to spin the Groupon model of advertising a deal and to attract the attention of a sizable group of people. Once enough people have joined the deal, the price drops to a set point and the purchases of the group go ahead.

Rather than selling the deal of the day, Fire Sale will have users “vote” for a deal, and when enough votes are collected, each voter will get a push notification about the sale price — likely because mobile billing systems can’t be easily set up for an automatic, timed transaction.

So Fire Sale isn’t exactly Groupon for games – the developer is not assured of a sale from every voter. That doesn’t necessarily matter, though. Most mobile app sales are less about the people buying at sale price than they are about driving up the ranking of the game in the App Store, assuming the sale takes place on the iOS, or getting it into the world, if on Google’s stunted Android Market.

With that in mind, Group Channel also has a “Free Game of the Day”, in which an app that would otherwise be a paid download is made free to push it into the rankings.

This appears to be the true direction of the market — other networks are also pushing daily free game deals, and earlier this month OpenFeint also released its own set of tools for developers to go freemium.

Virtual worlds may be in general decline, but every once in a while an interesting concept for one rolls around. Today the world is Woozworld, and believe it or not, it’s a tween-oriented title that advertises not only its ability to build social skills but basic economics and finance skills that younger audiences will need later on in life.

In actual play, Woozworld includes all the basic concepts of other virtual worlds, along with a more interesting approach in its primary currency mechanics. Giving young audiences a chance to work on their own, and be creative in their own right, the concept is sound. However, with a tremendous number of things one can do, the game hardly does a quality job of explaining “how” to do it.

After creating a free account directly through Facebook Connect, players jump into Woozworld right away with the creation of a “Woozen” avatar. Randomly placed somewhere in the world, players must learn to swim by being kicked in the river, for the game gives no direction whatsoever. For the record, yes, there is a help menu with dozens of topics that explains what everything is, but without a context to put it all in, this help blurs into a game of trial and error.

Thankfully, the game is not terribly complicated — not that most virtual worlds are — and players are typically able to speak with any of the Woozens walking about where they started off. Starting up a conversation is the most prudent step for two reasons: First, it’s probably the best way to figure out what’s going on (if not, the only other option is to follow some vague, goal-oriented achievements), and second, popularity is rather useful.

One of the major goals for users in Woozworld is to create both the best looking Woozen and “Unitz” (a personal virtual space). Every day, users can vote on the avatars and virtual spaces that they like best. At the end of the week, these are tallied and the winner receives a respectable chunk of game currency. Of course, this is more of a personal accomplishment than a reliable means of income.

Fact of the matter is, that in order to win such votes a good stream of revenue is needed to buy all the virtual items necessary. There are a couple of game-like ways to earn money in Woozworld, that are pretty basic, dubbed “Jobz” and “Infestations!”, which involve random objects popping up throughout the world that are removed with a click to get a bit of the in-game currency, “Beex.” Jobz pop up a single object, while an Infestation is when multitudes of them appear in any given area.

It’s also worth noting that the occasional job may require a very basic mini-game, such as clicking a frog repeatedly in order to burp it. More coin can be earned through finishing achievements and voting. But these methods aside, the real earner is being the salesman.

This is where finances come into play, as users can set up shops called Shop Podz in their virtual spaces. These can be stocked with virtual items from décor to clothing (there are even mannequins one can buy and use), with the idea being to search the world for items others might want — buy low, sell high. Sometimes users will be able to find exclusive or rare items, find specials, order from catalogs, and so on. The process is actually pretty simple; it’s the finding of products that’s a challenge but also part of the fun.

Oh yes, advertisement is necessary too. After all, how can one make sales if no one knows the store exists? Advertisements come in the form of a neat little feature called “Events.” Once a user has a Unitz, they can create events that range from group games, to parties, to sales, and any other user can search for them. These become venues for earning votes and popularity, boosting revenue, or just meeting new people. Granted, events are user generated, so not all will be good, but it’s a pretty cool option that enables younger audiences to be both creative and entrepreneurial. Believe it or not, there’s a decent number of these events going on at any given time.

In the end, these are only the major highlights of Woozworld, and there are dozens of other features within the virtual world. Most are fairly minor, like the “Spellz” that cast special effects on other users, or can even turn players into a temporary vendor, but all add their own little bonuses to game play. At its core, Woozworld is like any other virtual world in the sense that it gives the players some toys and says “go,” and that’s part of the problem.

There is no real direction to Woozworld, and the game often leaves the user wondering what they should do next. The game does do a decent job of promoting the need for social interaction,and turns the play into something that teaches basic life-skills. Free-to-play (though users can subscribe for added benefits), and with the ability to log in with just Facebook, Woozworld feels like a safe, interesting, and somewhat educational title for tween audiences.

Shortly after the Japanese mobile gaming giant DeNA acquired Ngmoco for $403 million, CEO Tomoko Namba told Inside Social Games that she hoped to quickly quadruple the revenue of her company in about four years, which already tops $1 billion yearly. As unlikely as that ambition sounds, the details of the plan are now emerging.

DeNA’s profit center in Japan is Mobage Town, a mobile gaming network with 22 million members. With Ngmoco’s Plus+ network as a starting point, DeNA will take Mobage to the international market. Samsung will be an initial equipment partner, with its Android smartphones, while developers like PlayFirst, SGN, Square Enix and Take-Two have also signed up.

These outside developers are necessary for the plan to work. While DeNA will take a cut of revenue – a large one, if it follows the Japanese model – it will also release a software development kit and tools to make development easier. Part of this will be an Ngmoco engine, long in the works, that allows developers to code their games just once and have it work across the range of Android and iOS devices.

Other companies are also looking to build mobile gaming platforms, especially for Android: PapayaMobile is a Chinese company attempting to do a full-featured platform, while OpenFeint and Scoreloop, which started out just adding social features to games, are branching out as they grow larger.

There could be even greater competition for DeNA, at least in America, with carriers like AT&T and Verizon. The carriers are well aware that there’s money in mobile gaming, and could well strip out third party software from mobile phones for their own.

But in the long term, the international market is both large and lucrative enough to merit a serious push. Both companies and venture capitalists believe that 2011 will be the year that market size will converge with platform innovation to create a coherent market with real leaders. For now, DeNA may be pouring more resources than any other player into becoming the dominant player.

The Inside Network Job Board is 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 NaturalMotion, Villain, Pileated Pictures, and Ubisoft.

• Designer – Social Games (Oxford, UK)
  

• Vice President, Social Game Design (Cary, NC)

• Network Engineer (Telecommute)

• Web Operations Architect (San Francisco, CA)
• Analytics Engineer (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. 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.

Role-playing games on social platforms are in a constant state of evolution. Now Glu Mobile is seeking to upgrade the genre once again for the iOS with its newest release, Hero Project. Available free on both the iPhone and iPad, Hero Project attempts to merge the social and classic RPG genres.

That’s a tall order for sure, but Glu does a decent job at pulling it off. Somewhat repetitive and slow to start, Hero Project still somehow, magically, consumed well over an hour on the first play through, without us even realizing it.

Players have joined the “Parliament of Heroes”, and they are as green as they come. An isometric-perspective game, players move about their hero headquarters in search of missions to complete. Based on one’s level, a set number will be available, consisting of everything from training, to quirky, nonsensical jobs, to actual story elements.

As one might expect, these missions are the primary source of experience and income, so it’s in the player’s best interest to do some. Players can run as many missions as they have energy for, with each taking a set amount of time to complete; the longer it takes, the greater the reward. The only obnoxious element about this, is that the game doesn’t really alert the player when they are done.

Interestingly, some of the missions have a semblance of story associated with them, that goes into an actual plot as the user levels up. This progression is created through the descriptions of each task, which appear to be written from the perspective of the player. To further enhance this story, dialogue between mentor, non-player characters, as well as the occasional enemy (more on that in a minute) is also presented.

It is also worth mentioning that Glu worked closely with Phil Campbell (Tomb Raider, The Godfather, and Heavy Rain) on the storyline. That in mind, while the story is slow to start in the early levels, it is likely to pick up drastically later on.

Getting back to the enemies, combat is also part of the mission system. Rather than starting and waiting a set amount of time, players are whisked away to a sort of Final Fantasy-like battle arena in which they take on various villains. In order to fight, the player’s special abilities will fill up over time. Once full, the ability can be tapped and a directed at an enemy. Furthermore, each battle is an Action Time Battle (ATB), meaning that enemies will not wait for users to attack before doing so. It is not turn-based in any way.

As players complete missions and battles, and earn enough coin, they will be able to add to their super-power arsenal with new, and more powerful, special abilities. From ice shards to lightning bolts, players will be able to unleash these slower charging attacks in battle — for a cost. These consume “Stamina” (essentially mana) which can only be recharged, at a reasonable speed, by using purchasable, consumable, potions. In fact, the same goes for health.

To further augment battles, players can customize their avatar’s stats of health, stamina, melee damage (for basic, non-stamina attacks), power (for abilities that cost stamina), speed (for recharging attacks), and luck (for increased critical strike and dodge chance). Curiously, equipment appears to have nothing to do with character improvement, and is merely present as an aesthetic reward.

There is a tremendous variety of outfits one can make for their hero, so that alone is a nice addition, but the real showcase is the “REC-CON” section of the game. Using Apple’s Game Center, players can see all of their friends’ avatars in one place. Unfortunately, while this sounds nice, it turns out to be a bit underwhelming, as no real interaction could be found in game. It’s a bit ironic that Glu has incorporated many of the single-player aspects of social RPGs, but not so much the truly social ones. That said, it’s a brand new game, so updates in this department are likely in the works.

Hero Project even has a bit of farming in it. Players can actually purchase special harvest tubes and grow crystals in them. These crystals start as “seeds” that can be either bought or found during missions, and grown into full crystals over time; earning supplemental income.

Our only other complaint is the visuals. Initially, yes, Hero Project looks good, but other than the different avatar outfits, the game consists of only a handful of screens — three in the headquarters, and a few battle screens) At least in the more traditional Facebook RPGs, there is plenty of artwork ranging from environments and items, to boss characters and NPCs. Additionally, many of the animations are stiff and choppy, and detract from the overall aesthetic quality.

But Hero Project still feels like a promising game. It’s certainly a step above the rest in terms of quality, and its issues don’t hinder the title very much at all. Fact of the matter is that we still ended up playing the game for extended periods of time (which was actually lost), and it’s hard to say anything bad about that.

Two years after microtransaction-based Flash games started becoming significant on the web, there’s still a major problem with payments: initiating one in most web games, by clicking “Add Coins” or an equivalent button, bounces users out of the game itself and to a separate, secure HTML page. More than a minor irritation, this standard payment flow dissuades many users from paying at all.

RubyCoins, a lesser-known payments company, is announcing its solution to that problem today: in-game payments with PayPal, with users never required to move away from their game experience. The company is currently testing out the system with Aeria Games and Menue Americas.

Closing the security holes that microtransaction games present has become RubyCoins’ specialty, according to CEO Jim Nguyen. It’s not limited to Flash or web games; it also extends onto Android and downloadable client games, and the system can integrate payments from Facebook Credits or Apple.

“Cross-platform gaming, that’s just taking off right now, and it’ll be more of an issue a year from now,” says Nguyen. “There will be companies saying, I’ve got this one game, on four destinations, but why do we use four vendors? I think cross-platform will be a critical necessity going forward.”

We’ve also had companies like Plimus and Jambool tell us that they are working on or can do in-game payments, but most Facebook games still push their users into a separate windows; over time, as this problem is corrected, revenues should improve slightly as a result.

By now, everyone in the game industry knows that Zynga’s new game, CityVille, is growing explosively. But what about Zuma Blitz? The new Popcap game, which was in closed beta until this week, has taken off over the past couple days, reaching second place on our weekly AppData list of fastest-growing Facebook games by daily active users:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	CityVille	11,555,697	+10,504,044	+999%
2.	Zuma Blitz	769,683	+748,594	+3,550%
3.	Monster Galaxy	187,912	+161,825	+620%
4.	Café World	3,742,255	+160,199	+4%
5.	德州撲克(中文版)	1,321,500	+108,683	+9%
6.	Okey	765,698	+80,238	+12%
7.	Island God	248,687	+76,503	+44%
8.	Texas HoldEm Poker	6,655,654	+67,233	+1%
9.	Jet Velocity 3D	65,614	+63,894	+3,715%
10.	แฮปปี้คนเลี้ยงหม	555,791	+62,442	+13%
11.	Cafe Life	529,732	+59,008	+13%
12.	Crime City	866,213	+57,641	+7%
13.	It Girl	811,772	+54,801	+7%
14.	Birthday Cards	482,811	+49,382	+11%
15.	Backyard Monsters	785,539	+42,877	+6%
16.	UNO™	165,158	+39,834	+32%
17.	Trial Madness 2	59,430	+38,119	+179%
18.	Mighty Pirates	231,892	+36,725	+19%
19.	Mynet Çanak Okey	259,147	+34,407	+15%
20.	Tetris Battle	337,957	+34,245	+11%

It’s important to note that none of the new games on this list have as many DAU as are being reported, if one thinks of daily actives as players who come back reliably day after day. In their early phase of growth, games like CityVille end up reporting extremely high DAU, since a large proportion of their players only showed up the day before. If CityVille’s stickiness, or percentage of monthly active users that can be counted as DAU, ends up being around the level of FrontierVille or FarmVille, its real count today would be six to seven million DAU (admittedly nothing to sniff at).

Zuma Blitz is based on one of Popcap’s most successful game series, following Bejeweled. The initial growth rate may not last, since PopCap’s initial press burst will wear off, but it’s a great arcade game that should have long-term prospects.

Moving down the list, Monster Galaxy, is a new effort on Facebook from Gaia Online, which is best known for its eponymous kid-oriented MMO. It’s quickly drawing in traffic, perhaps owing to its open, Pokemon-inspired gameplay, although its openness could also hinder monetization, as we covered in our review of the game.

Most of the remaining games on the list are nothing new. With the exception of Zynga, the only developer to get two on the list was CrowdStar, which placed both It Girl and Mighty Pirates with a combined gain of about 90,000 DAU.