The day of mega-fundings in the social game space is not yet done. Kabam, formerly known as Watercooler, is announcing a big $30 million funding today led by Redpoint Ventures and Intel Capital, with previous investor Canaan Partners also returning.

Kabam is a bit of an odd man out among the well-funded social game companies. With 7.7 million monthly active and 1.1 million daily active users, it’s several times smaller than a competitor like Playdom, which raised $33 million last June on about 42 million MAU and 6 million DAU.

CEO Kevin Chou considers his company part of a different breed. “Our games don’t really aggressively push the Facebook viral channels, it’s about creating great content,” he says. “We’re much more focused on serving an existing userbase than pushing our DAU numbers higher. Everyone in the industry knows that there is a relatively small percentage of players that actually pay, so you can have a much higher MAU / DAU and not make as much as another company.”

Venture capitalists aren’t great judges of potential quality or creativity, of course. What they can evaluate is technology, which is the other side of Kabam’s story. Right now, Kabam’s only big hit is the strategy game Kingdoms of Camelot, while its next two largest games, Dragons of Atlantis and Glory of Rome, follow in a very similar mold.

These titles all emulate a genre whose rules and typical gameplay were defined much earlier by games like Travian. But Chou envisions a technological evolution toward ever-larger worlds. “We’re really interested in this idea of real time, synchronous gameplay experiences where hundreds of thousands of people are interacting in real time with each other,” he says.

In the typical online strategy setup, players split onto different “shards”, or worlds run on separate servers. Thus multiplayer games can scale from a handful to a few thousand players, but not over that number. Chou thinks Kabam can figure out how to create a single, persistent world containing all its players, though.

“Those are things that are pushing the envelope in terms of massively multiplayer games,” he says. “It’s not something we have in the market today, but it’s something that crazy smart technologists out there are talking about. And consumers are saying they want experiences where they interact with even more people.” The scaling challenges and high server costs incurred by this model are the reason for Intel’s investment, according to Chou.

Besides continuing to add new creative elements to its games and working on the tech, Kabam also plans to continue growing — it’s currently over 250 employees — and potentially make more acquisitions, as with its October acquisition of WonderHill, which netted it Dragons of Atlantis. It’s also looking at continuing its experimentation on Facebook (as with Hero Force) and branching out to mobile.

And while all this is going on, Kingdoms of Camelot, which has been around for well over a year, is not suffering the same decline other social games have experienced. After reaching of 6.5 million MAU peak last September, it has settled down to the six million MAU range and, for the most part, stayed there. Quite a few users have more than a year under their belt, according to Chou, and seem happy to stick around.

Kabam had previously raised $9.5 million between its first and second rounds of funding.

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, Meteor Games, King of the Web, Speeddate, and MdotM.

• Digital Marketing Analyst (Oxford, UK)

• Game Designer (Beverly Hills, CA)

• Ruby on Rails Software Developer (Seattle, WA)

• Lead Product Manager/ Director of Product (Millbrea, CA)

• Account Manager / Account Executive (Burlingame, 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.

Late last year, BringIt launched with the idea of adding skill gaming mechanics to social games on Facebook, in order to increase monetization. It’s announcing its second major partner today, CrowdStar, and a couple of new ideas and improvements.

BringIt is integrating with two games for CrowdStar: Happy Aquarium and Pop Boom. The latter, a match-3 game, is the actual skill game being used in both. Players sign up for tournaments, pay with virtual currency to enter, and the winners get multiples of their bet.

These games have already produced an improvement in BringIt’s metrics over its performance with RockYou, its first partner. The average player using BringIt plays for seven minutes per session, and the ARPDAU (revenue per daily user, per day) has risen to 11 cents per player within BringIt’s skill games.

For a game like Happy Aquarium, where only three to five percent of players click through to a BringIt skill game, that number is incremental income. But in Pop Boom, every user is effectively playing using BringIt, leading to a larger boost relative to the game’s existing income.

Bringit’s new idea is to use Facebook Credits as the betting currency, while paying out in the game’s own premium currency, in order to help games capture unused Credits that might otherwise be spent elsewhere. Of course, some of the Credits might be promotional, but BringIt CEO Woody Levin says acting as a sink to get seeded Credits out of the system is also part of the plan.

The other idea, not yet implemented, is to reward tournament players with special edition virtual goods. It’s not hard to imagine users skill gaming to get certain items, but the idea hasn’t been tested yet.

CityVille’s gains have dropped almost to the level of the other leading games on this week’s list of fastest-growing Facebook apps by daily active users, with a few mid-sized games also performing strongly. Here’s the full list:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	CityVille	18,985,046	+287,118	+2%
2.	Kingdoms of Camelot	900,104	+255,010	+40%
3.	Ravenwood Fair	695,519	+142,613	+26%
4.	Epic Fighters	204,912	+125,768	+159%
5.	購物天堂	147,982	+117,522	+386%
6.	Texas HoldEm Poker	7,175,754	+116,218	+2%
7.	FrontierVille	5,789,842	+94,631	+2%
8.	World War	181,418	+76,766	+73%
9.	Bubble Island	959,079	+73,912	+8%
10.	樂業超市	93,299	+64,660	+226%
11.	The Pokerist club — Texas Poker	94,547	+63,334	+203%
12.	Farmandia	223,795	+56,645	+34%
13.	Monster Galaxy	414,411	+54,745	+15%
14.	GodsWar Online	149,470	+49,837	+50%
15.	Gambino Poker	122,277	+49,011	+67%
16.	德州撲克(中文版)	1,142,602	+48,184	+4%
17.	SNSplus	45,800	+44,063	+2,537%
18.	Mynet Çanak Okey	345,175	+42,402	+14%
19.	Paradise Life	135,165	+35,442	+36%
20.	Happy Hospital	182,916	+34,814	+24%

A week ago, CityVille had slowed but was still able to add 1.6 million new DAU. This week, as you can see, it’s down to a gain of 287,118 DAU. After breaking past 100 million monthly active users, Zynga seemed to scale back its push on CityVille, although the game is still growing today.

Growth looks good across the rest of the list, but much of it is being spurred by MAU growth, meaning the daily actives may fade away along with whatever promotions caused the gains in the first place. Still, Kingdoms of Camelot and Ravenwood Fair are performing admirably, considering that both stabilized long ago.

Both have publishing partnerships with 6waves and began rising on the same day, so it’s possible that 6waves has been putting more money into its marketing:

Digital Chocolate, Inc. appears to have resumed promoting its MMA Pro Fighter reskin, Epic Fighters, with growth popping up late last week. That’s more or less where the interesting part of the list ends, though, at least for English-language games — most of the remaining games that gained significantly are only showing minor fluctuations to traffic, not real growth.

For several weeks, the small community of domainer blogs (written for people who invest in domain names) have been following a small mystery: Zynga appeared to have bought a site called RewardVille.com, based on a snippet of source code.

Last night a domainer blog called Fusible caught the site launching. For now, it’s just a splash page with a popup, on an attempted login, that says RewardVille is coming in the next few weeks.

However, there are bits of information. On RewardVille’s front page it lays out the idea: play Zynga games, and you’ll earn something called zCoins, which can be used toward virtual goods.

[Update: Zynga's statement. "As a company focused on innovation we're constantly testing new products and features. When experimenting with new products we take the feedback we receive and apply it to deliver the best possible user experience. We look forward to hearing how our users like RewardVille." The company is going to slowly roll it out to a small group of users in the coming week.]

Fusible found a little more info on Zynga’s customer help website — more than Zynga wanted to release, apparently, as the page now appears to be gone. Here it is:

What are zPoints?

Zynga writes: zPoints are points you earn for playing Zynga games. You can earn a maximum of 80 points per game per day, with a maximum of 300 points across the entire Zynga network each day. As you earn points you increase your zLevel and earn zCoins. Currently, you can earn zPoints for playing the following games: FarmVille, FrontierVille, Mafia Wars, Treasure Isle, Zynga Poker

What are zCoins?

“zCoins are awarded when your zLevel increases. zCoins are redeemed in RewardVille for in-game items.”

How do I sign up for zPoints?

“You automatically earn zPoints for playing all Zynga games. To redeem zCoins in RewardVille, you must register for a Zynga account.”

RewardVille looks like it might be a new iteration of the ideas Zynga tested with zLotto, a promotion lasting a few months in which users who came back to play the lotto every day could win limited-edition virtual goods. The catch was that you might not get items in the game of your choice; Zynga could thus get zLotto users to visit games they wouldn’t otherwise try to redeem prizes.

For RewardVille, the idea becomes even more clever: players who want to max out the rewards in their game of choice will have to play games they might not otherwise want to, every single day. To get all 300 points, one would presumably have to play all five games.

Zynga has put more effort into figuring out cross-promotion and retention than any other social game developer so far, so moves like this are worth watching. We’ll keep an eye out for when RewardVille launches.

January 25th | San Francisco

Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 is just one week away!

Tickets are close to sold out, and we do not expect any to be available at the door. Make sure you get a spot and register today.

Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 is our second conference on the future of monetization on social platforms. This one-day summit features industry leaders from every corner of the social app and game ecosystem. Executives and leaders from Facebook, Google, leading social networks, mobile platforms, social game and app developers, media companies, virtual goods and payment services, and investors will all be there to tackle the most pressing issues facing the industry in 2011.

Register now to join top developers of today and tomorrow at Inside Social Apps.

Who’s Speaking?

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 Segerstrale 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		Dennis Ryan EVP Worldwide Publishing, PopCap Games
	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		Martin Essl Strategic Software Partner Management, Sony Ericsson
	Matthaeus Krzykowski Founder, Xyologic		Asokan Thiyagarajan Dir. Platforms & Tech. Strategy, Samsung
	Justin Smith Founder, Inside Network		Kim-Mai Cutler Lead Writer, Mobile & Social Applications, 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 of casual networking.

Register Now

The countdown has begun and Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 is just one week away! We’re expecting a full house for the event; to make sure your spot is reserved, please register now.

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

When the first Cooking Mama title hit the DS as a budget title in September, 2006 I placed it at the top of my list for birthday gifts. I’d played it at that year’s E3 and was one among many who instinctively  knew it would be a hit. Three malls and seven stores later, I had a copy in my hands. Mama’s charming Japanese accent, the strange dishes she asked to be prepared, and the game’s perfect use of the DS controls made it an instant classic. Two additional DS titles, two Wii titles, and a gardening spin-off later, Mama has come to the PC in the form of Cooking Mama for Facebook.

Players of the series will immediately find the game familiar and comforting. Bright, loud colors abound with music that sounds like Sesame Street on a visit to New Orleans Square. Images are drawn with simple lines, few colors, and nearly but not quite out of proportion. Mama has yet to attend any ESL courses; her accent is as thick and charming as ever.

Gameplay centers on creating menus for Mama’s Kitchen, a 24-hour diner. Initially, the player is both limited in what can be cooked and the number of items that can be served. There are four types of recipes: drinks, appetizers, entrees, and desserts. Recipes are level restricted – I still can’t serve chocolate cake – and players can eventually serve three types of each recipe per menu.

The key to playing the game well is determining which items to serve. Waiting outside the diner will be ten customers with thought bubbles to indicate what each would like. Place that item on the menu and you will satisfy that customer, earning bonus experience and coin.  All other items will earn experience and coin based upon the level of the item, modified by the length of time the menu runs for.

How long a menu is available is determined by the player, with 30-minute menus being free, and anything longer costing additional coin in addition to earning less experience and coin per serving.  Though some benefit is gained by running longer menus, the gain is minimal. At most, it allows friends to complete missions by tasting and rating menus.

Missions are a key part of earning coin at the beginning of the game. Without the missions, ingredients are cost prohibitive. Each costs a minimum of 500 coins, with the maximum reaching 750 coins. The cost isn’t based on intrinsic value; one unit of water is no different than a unit of chicken.

Certain ingredients rotate through “out of stock” status. When this is the case, the player must purchase an item using Mama Money. Other items are hard-to-get and can be purchased using either Mama Money or coins. Gifting between players is not yet active but promises to allow the exchange of foodstuffs thereby reducing costs – something much needed.

There isn’t much in the game design to truly set Cooking Mama apart from other cooking games on Facebook except for the one thing makes that it Cooking Mama: gestures. This is, unfortunately, where Cooking Mama shows its weakness. The mouse is a poor input modality for gestures; the track pad only moderately better and then only for specific movements; and the trackball fails in all respects.

In addition, problems inherent in Flash – a preference for higher-end machines, memory allocation issues, and variable input lag – make some of the twitch movements common in the Mama experience difficult to achieve with any success. This is not to say that the game is unplayable — Cooking Mama has never allowed complete failure. But it’s not always clear exactly what the motion difference is between a score of 99 and 100 on a recipe, or why does one earns 75 experience and the other 100.

Majesco and Arkadium have made changes to the game design try to compensate for the deficiencies of Flash and the available input modalities. Unfortunately, they yet to strike the right balance, a problem that will certainly compound with the many other as-yet unreleased features of the game. As it stands, Cooking Mama’s Facebook version has a significant distance to go before it can live up to the brand first created on Nintendo’s platforms.

[Editor's note: Hussein Fazal is CEO of AdParlor, an ad management company for Facebook campaigns with social gaming clients including Ubisoft, PlayFirst and Five Minutes.]

One of the most frequent questions we are asked is ‘How much will it cost to acquire users for my Facebook game?’ The answer to this question depends on many factors.

A brand new casual game targeting both genders and all ages in Indonesia can pick up tens of thousands of users very quickly, for pennies per user. On the flip side, a poker application with a large existing user base and a laundry-list of permissions, targeting 40-year old American males, can pay several dollars per user. Important background information on the many factors that affect pricing is discussed in our longer white paper – this post instead examines an interesting sub-topic around user acquisition. We dig deep into the rising cost of user acquisition over the length of a campaign, and why this occurs.

On average, for every 100,000 users you attract to your application via Facebook Ads, you can expect your cost of user acquisition to increase by 10%. Before examining why this happens, we’ll first take a closer look at click-through rates (CTR) and how Facebook makes money on a cost-per-click ad campaign.

CTR and its value to Facebook

If you were to bid and be charged $1 per click with a CTR of 0.01%, you then have an effective cost per thousand users, or CPM, of $0.10 to Facebook. For every 1,000 times Facebook shows your ad, they are only making 10 cents.

If you can double that CTR to 0.02%, your ads will have the same value to Facebook, even if you’re paying only $0.50 per click. By increasing your CTR, your ads can be much more valuable to Facebook, allowing you to significantly drop your bid.

The screenshots below highlight a target market in the US and compare the suggested bid for a new ad versus a proven high CTR ad. In the case of the high CTR ad, we can get a fair amount of clicks even at $0.10!

Why does the cost of user acquisition increase over time?

Once we look at why the cost of user acquisition increases over time, you’ll understand why we started by examining CTR. But first, remember that user acquisition pricing and volume goals go hand-in-hand. For the same application, you may be able to acquire users for $0.30 or $3.00. For the purpose of this discussion, we’re going to assume that the daily volume desired stays consistent – while other factors need to be changed to sustain this volume.

Let’s say we build a brand new city-building game on Facebook application and decide to launch a Facebook Ads campaign. We have several good things going for us. There are a ton of users who are ‘low-hanging fruit’ which we can go after – the subset of hard core Facebook game players who are constantly looking for the hottest new game to play. We can also leverage interest targeting and go after players who are fans of other city-building games. The game and the creative in the ads are brand new, and hopefully spark interest in those users you’re targeting.

Given these favourable conditions, a click-through-rate (CTR) of 0.15% and a conversion rate (CVR) of 65% is very achievable. If you’re willing to pay $0.50 per user given these metrics, you should be able to bring in 15,000 users per day in the prime English speaking countries – US/CA/GB/AU. The question now is, how long can this last?

As you continue your advertising campaigns, a few things are happening. Users are starting to get tired of your ads, despite an attempt to keep refreshing new images and copy. More importantly, the most hard core game players are starting to dry up.

The market of active targetable users who are interested in other city games is starting to diminish, and in order to keep the volume of users up without increasing the rate, we must open up keyword targeting on the users. While these other keywords / interests also work well, the CTR will not be as high as when specifically targeting city-building games. Gradually there’s a drop in CTR across the campaign. (Click the image below for a higher resolution.)

From the anecdote above, we saw the effect a drop in CTR can have on the value of that ad to Facebook. On an aggregate level across our ads, we’re now getting fewer impressions for our same CPC bid. Additionally, the conversion rate (CVR), or the percent of users who end up clicking on allow and entering the game post-click, also begins to drop, having a direct effect on our cost of user acquisition.

As CTR and CVR gradually declines, and if we want to maintain a consistent volume of new users, we eventually have no choice but to increase the price we’re willing to pay per user. Our cost of user acquisition begins to rise roughly at the rate mentioned above – 10% for every 100,000 users we bring on.

Is this always the case?

Every application is different in terms of its appeal and the size of its target market – hence, the speed of its CTR and CVR erosion. With constant refreshing of creatives, an appealing application, and a commitment to finding the target markets that work on a granular level, it’s quite possible to fight off the rising cost of user acquisition. We’ve worked with applications that were able to drive half a million US users at $0.50 within a relatively short period of time, without having to increase the CPI rate. But even in these cases, the market forces eventually win, and in order to sustain volume CPI rates must be increased.

NOTE: Please join me on January 25th at Inside Social Apps for a lunchtime roundtable discussion “Purchasing Facebook Ads – user acquisition pricing & strategies” and provide your feedback on this article in person. Look forward to the open discussion.

There must be some sort of tax break for companies incorporating zombies into their games, because no matter which platform you look at, there’s always a high undead population. The most recent to join in the design of undeath is a company by the name of Menue Americas, with their new Facebook game, Zombie Mosh.

A more bizarre interpretation of both farming and virtual space type games, this rocking rendition of zombies has found itself on one of our more recent emerging apps list with, currently, around 346,000 MAU. Both different and higher quality in some ways than the norm, Zombie Mosh is interesting, to say the least, but feels limited in what it allows the player to do, as well as low on rewards for playing and painfully slow paced.

Greeted by Death’s daughter, players discover that they are, in fact, dead. Well, undead anyway. So what does one do as a zombie? Why throw a party, of course. Like Nightclub City, users set out to create a rocking concert of mosh pitting zombies — with the business element of the game taking a back seat to its clubbing counterpart.

As players play, they’ll occasionally notice wandering undead enter their concert/club. As the game’s name suggests, players mosh with them, earning experience, coin, and extra energy upon doing so. Depending on the type of zombie, more moshing can be done with them. However, they don’t wander in often, so this is where farming comes into play.

Farming, that is, without crops. Foolish humans tend to walk into the concert fairly often, and players must, ahem, “harvest” them. Basically, instead of plowing plots of land, players purchase graves that will produce different types of zombies. The longer the zombie type takes to grow, the more valuable it becomes and the more moshes it can endure. As for the “seeds” for this harvest, these are the humans themselves, as players pick them up and drop them in the grave to be buried alive and reborn as the undead. It’s a little creepy, when you think about it.

This element is original, but also causes the first problem with Zombie Mosh: zombies spoil. Granted, this isn’t unusual for any game with farming, but they seem to spoil far too fast in some cases. While this will likely scale for the graves that take a day or more, one of the more quickly growing zombies we planted had spoiled within 10-15 minutes after finishing. This suggests that the slower graves, relatively speaking, will require users to be annoyingly precise in their harvests. Thankfully, friends can revive spoiled “crops,” but this doesn’t seem like a viable solution unless players ignore the grave for long periods.

The other half of Zombie Mosh is the virtual space itself. The game is wrought with pretty good animations and surprisingly good music, but what players can currently use as decorative elements feels extremely limited. This isn’t so much because of a lack of items, as a whole, but rather that most of the styles feel the same. One of the attractive elements to virtual space and business sim games of the past is that people can make clubs or restaurants that fit everything from western to metropolitan looks. Yes, we realize this is a zombie rock concert, but there are plenty of other zombie types. What about zombie pirates? Zombie ninjas? There are even zombie dinosaurs out there!

A number of the items also cost a pretty penny, and income is very slow (at least early on). Players are only earning a handful of coins with each mosh or piece of debris they clean up on a daily basis. The problem is that most items cost hundreds or thousands of coins. To add further insult to injury, the energy pool that gates how many actions the player can do at any given time, is very small.

The only way to earn significant income is to have a number of friends playing, in which case users can visit them and perform up to five actions at each virtual space. This generates the same amount of cash and experience as it would in one’s home space, but also earns an extra stat called “Fame.” Unfortunately, the game never says what exactly this does, and it only appears when visiting friends, making it feel a bit pointless.

The game is made even slower paced by the fact that players are, speed-wise, a traditional zombie. While users can make their avatar look hip and cool, they still shamble about very slowly in between actions.

In the end, Zombie Mosh is an interesting idea that looks and sounds great, but comes with a number of small issues that add up very quickly. Everything just feels too slow, and the novelty of zombie mosh pits tends to wear off after the user realizes they’re not really getting anywhere. The game just takes too long to hook the player, and even when it does, offers only limited décor elements and seemingly pointless social stats. So while the game’s MAU has grown fast, its stickiness has lagged, with only around 20,000 daily active users. With some polish, Menue Americas could easily improve the prospects of Zombie Mosh..

In an ever growing list of Facebook games tailored directly to the female demographic (Mall World, It Girl, etc.), yet another has appeared on our radar. Popping up on one of our recent emerging apps list, a game by the name of Totally Spies! Fashion Agents, from OUAT Entertainment, has been doing quite well in recent weeks, boasting an MAU that is closing in on 1.2 million and a DAU of over 143,000.

A sort of treasure hunting fashion game, Totally Spies is a hodgepodge of social gaming concepts intended appeal to the younger female audience. Using elements from games like Treasure Isle, virtual spaces, It Girl, automated fighting games, and a handful of other games, one might think the game a bit bloated. Surprisingly, however, all the elements work together in such a way that the game modes are constantly changing, and it never really gets too boring, despite repetitive core mechanics.

Part of the reason the range of game modes works is because they’re based off a real animated series, Totally Spies!. The show is about three high school girls that are actually super spies, complete with “girly” James Bond’esque gadgets (e.g. a blow drier gun). Players take on this same role as “WOOHP” agents attempting to save the world, while still trying to be “normal” teenagers. Since there are more game modes than average, perhaps the best starting point is the spy missions themselves.

Missions come, randomly, via a WOOHP gadget called a “compowder” (a powder makeup container that’s actually a holo-phone) and are whisked away to a Treasure Isle-style map. Rather than digging up tiles, however, players are presented with crates, enemies, and an objective. Everything is interacted with via clicking, and players must locate a key to unlock a door that leads to the mission objective (save a kid, stop a bomb, etc.). Thus far, missions have not been more complicated than this.

For each element interacted with, players consume energy (that recharges over time), but will gain bonuses such as experience, coin, or extra energy. It’s simple, but there is some gratification in discovering the bonuses and watching the cartoonish scuffle with bad guys. This element lacks the collection aspect that comes with the treasure hunting games, but it does introduce dangers as the player progresses through missions in that sometimes booby traps will be present, draining large portions of energy if triggered.

While missions can be repetitive, this issue takes a while to come up, as they cannot be done back to back. Once a mission is complete, the compowder will not go off again for some time, leaving the player to the other aspects of the game. Of course, if players still have energy and want to earn more coin and experience, they can visit the WOOHP headquarters for a little training.

This is sort of a hybrid of automated fighting games and the above mentioned treasure hunting elements. For the former, players can choose to train with weights, jump rope, punch bags, or combat train at the cost of energy. Unlike the fighting genre game, the reward isn’t stats, but varying amounts of coin and/or experience.

The next mode of Totally Spies is where the girls-only flavor starts to truly kick in. Since players are supposed to be high school students, they can visit the mall and shop to their heart’s content. While it serves no purpose other than aesthetic pleasure (on that note, players can take pictures of their avatar), players can peruse a rather sizable selection of clothing and are able to try all of it on, It Girl-style, before purchase.

In addition to wardrobe, players can also shop for items around their virtual house. Spies need a place to live, after all. Starting with a respectably sized place, players decorate it with a very large variety of indoor and eventually outdoor furniture – many of which are animated with “on” and “off” states – and any number of overly cute pets. Like most games hosting a virtual space, though, a good chunk of these items do cost virtual currency. In addition to this, the house will get dirty and unkempt in the player’s absence (sort of like the many Facebook restaurant games).

This is actually where yet another female-oriented mechanic comes into play. Other than clothing, what is one other very important aspect of high-school life for young women? Think about it for a second. Yes, boyfriends, and yes, this makes an appearance here as well. It’s actually an amusing use of monetization too, as they cost virtual currency.“Dating” one of these bought men will give a boost to the player’s maximum energy.

Socially, Totally Spies is still fairly basic, consisting of visiting friends’ virtual spaces and “helping” them on a daily basis for minor rewards. Beyond this, leaderboard systems and gifting are all in place. Nevertheless, not all mechanics are available for us yet. There is one that looks rather promising called “My Team.” In the television show, the spy team is of three girls, and such is the case here too. However, players must complete certain objectives to unlock the team.

If there were anything to complain about with Totally Spies, it’s that the game play is somewhat shallow and repetitive. But the game’s constant switching between the different game modes, the repetitive nature of the game’s core isn’t apparent right away. In fact, it’s actually a lot of fun, even with no over-arching rewards or objectives.

Overall, Totally Spies! Fashion Agents is certainly one of the better games we’ve seen on Facebook, and even though it’s tailored to girls, it is, for the most part, appealing to either gender. Of course, it’s unlikely that most guys will make use of the boyfriend feature, but if you’re a person that enjoys shopping, treasure hunting, or virtual space mechanics, then this fast-growing game is one you should certainly give a try.