While many developers consider the farming genre to be yesterday’s news on Facebook, they may have to reevaluate when faced with the growth of FarmVille 中文版, the Zynga port of FarmVille to the Chinese-language market, and Farmandia, which has a mostly English-using userbase. This week’s AppData list of fastest-growing Facebook games by monthly active users shows the two games pulling in almost 1.4 million new MAU.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	CityVille	100,256,070	+3,678,154	+4%
2.	FarmVille 中文版	2,832,729	+823,326	+41%
3.	Farmandia	1,776,561	+567,823	+47%
4.	Monster Galaxy	5,503,284	+540,745	+11%
5.	GodsWar Online	848,335	+388,094	+84%
6.	It Girl	7,671,328	+362,992	+5%
7.	Texas HoldEm Poker	36,337,038	+332,647	+0.92%
8.	寵物戰爭	657,795	+300,872	+84%
9.	購物天堂	393,876	+256,586	+187%
10.	Casino City	2,235,754	+238,557	+12%
11.	Dragons of Atlantis	910,313	+201,637	+28%
12.	Texas HoldEm Poker – Deluxe ★★★★★★	754,209	+191,791	+34%
13.	Bingo Island	690,352	+188,272	+37%
14.	Mahjong Zen	1,688,821	+184,530	+12%
15.	Hero	1,133,791	+162,549	+17%
16.	YoVille	6,348,169	+158,118	+3%
17.	Mahjong Trails	1,945,942	+157,591	+9%
18.	Totally Spies! Fashion Agents	1,147,353	+138,373	+14%
19.	德州撲克(中文版)	6,313,617	+134,956	+2%
20.	Mynet Çanak Okey	1,621,459	+127,114	+9%

CityVille is still the overall leader with 3.7 million new MAU. But its growth has fallen to a couple hundred thousand MAU per day, and could slow more in the coming week, assuming Zynga doesn’t increase its ad spend.

However, Zynga is doing a great job at growing FarmVille 中文版, the significantly upgraded version of the original game, that it released for the Chinese market. The new FarmVille went more or less unnoticed by most; we first pointed it out on the day before Christmas, when few readers in their right mind were around to see. There’s just one potential problem: unlike other Chinese-language games, which typically display excellent stickiness, FarmVille 中文版’s is quite low, at around a 12 percent conversion of MAU to daily active users.

Going back to Farmandia, promotion also seems to be playing a role with this game. Developer Plarium is one of the top app publishers on Russian social network Odnoklassniki, but it has been growing steadily on Facebook since last August. About a week ago, growth in its top two apps (the other is Fashion City) kicked sharply upward.

Whatever promotion Plarium is engaging in is not enough to make an app grow alone, though. Farmandia looks and feels significantly different from other Facebook offerings; like FarmVille 中文版, it uses enlarged farm plots and avatars, in the Chinese style. It also appears to have dispensed with the concept of energy altogether, which rules most American social games.

Most of the remaining games on the list have appeared one or several times in recent weeks. The exception is 購物天堂, a Chinese-language game by SNSplus that was declining until recently. If you can follow the gameplay, it’s worth a look for its up-to-date design and resemblance to Hotel City and similar games.

Mobile publisher Gamevil’s first Facebook release, developed by newcomer Lifo Interactive, is a cute and brightly colored city builder game called Train City. With a number of other games featuring trains, including Zynga’s new title CityVille, Train City hopes to attract users with a new city building experience focused on the buying and running of trains through a single city.

Altogether, Train City is an enjoyable game with cute graphics and simple mechanics. Though it lacks in depth, the numerous quests, collections, and tasks can keep players occupied and entertained for long stretches of time. And with the removal of the energy mechanic, players can play for as long as they like and achievements and quests give a constant stream of accomplishments to aim for.

Train City sets you up as mayor of a small town, in charge of growing it into a sprawling, modern metropolis. In order to do so you have to increase the population, keep the people happy, create sources of income, and manage the rail system. As in other games, you construct buildings using coins and gain access to better items and buildings as you gain levels. There is no energy mechanic, so growth is restricted by how much money you have and earn.

Building houses and other dwellings increases your town’s population, but your population can only go as high as your happiness level. Happiness is increased in Train City by building decorations like trees and playgrounds, as well as public buildings like fire stations and preschools. On top of increasing happiness, public buildings also increase the effectiveness of other buildings. For example, the hospital increases the happiness from decorations by one percent. Higher level buildings require special resources such as bricks or glass, which the player must manufacture from factories.

Houses and decorations all cost coins, which are primarily earned through commercial buildings, and your rail line. Commercial buildings, once built, generate a coins over time. Like other games using this mechanic, income is only collected when the player clicks on the building, encouraging players to check in often to get the most income possible out of their buildings. Similarly, factories can be tasked to create materials to build advanced buildings, which you must gather at the end of the production period.

Despite trains being the central theme of Train City, the train and rail system is not central to the game’s progression. Supposedly, the goal of the game is to build an extensive system of tracks, and improve both your stations and trains over time, as well as choose conductors optimal for your needs, but in the end the train system acts as just another source of income in the game, and a less forgiving one than the commercial buildings.

The locations of train tracks, like roads, has little impact on the game except that you require certain amounts of both for some quests. Train station position is similarly not accounted for, and the only purpose of train stations is to increase income. The various trains you can purchase all have stats for capacity and horsepower, but those also appear unimportant.

Your choice of conductor is the most important choice you can make, as each conductor requires an upfront hiring cost and set period of time to work in, with the rewards scaling. Essentially though, all choices you make with regard to the rail system only increase the amount of income gained, with no other impact in the game.

Like other games of this genre, Train City incorporates many social aspects, as well as options to pay for resources. Visiting your neighbor’s cities gives you tourism bonuses of either happiness or population, encouraging you to visit your neighbors on a daily basis.

You can also assist your neighbor’s commercial buildings both earning money for you and your neighbor after the proper amount of time has elapsed, after which you can assist another building. If you’ve run out of coins, you can purchase large amounts of those with real money. “TCash”, which is used to buy special buildings and trains which are more effective than their mundane counterparts, is also available for purchase.

Train City shows a lot of polish, and great art design, with all the pieces of the game fitting into a unified theme. Though some small bugs present themselves on occasion, the play experience is largely unmarred, with all aspects of gameplay being easily accessible and understood. As well put together as it is, Train City may not develop into a hit, given the light gameplay and large variety of competitors in its genres.

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

Monday, January 10th, 2011

• Games, Dating and Marketplace Do Well on This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Apps by MAU
• Featured Facebook Campaigns: Carl’s Jr., Hardee’s, Schweppes and Adam Lambert
• Facebook Rolls Out December 210 Profile Redesign to All Users
• Facebook Allows Users to Upgrade to the New Messages Product, Why You Should

Tuesday, January 11th, 2011

• Pixable’s Photofeed App Is the Best Way to Discover and Browse Facebook Photos
• Top 20 Growing Facebook Pages: Zynga, Call of Duty, Harry Potter, Rihanna, MTV and Football
• Data on Facebook’s Traffic, Advertising, and Company Health at Inside Facebook Gold – January 2011 Edition
• Facebook Adds Seven More Ad Providers to Approved Lists for Developers
• Facebook’s Big Credits Push Shows Itself in CityVille, Other Top Social Games
• Facebook to Distribute AMBER Alerts Perhaps Other Emergency Info

Wednesday, January 12th, 2011

• Tagged, Formspring and More on This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Apps by DAU
• Facebook Displays Old Status Updates in Memorable Stories Sidebar Module
• Formspring Closes $11.5M Round, Sees New Growth with Facebook Users
• Highlights This Week from the Inside Network Job Board: Digital Chocolate, Cie Games, TheBroth & More
• Facebook Returns “What’s On Your Mind?” Prompt to the Home Page
• 53 Local AMBER Alert Facebook Pages Will Post Missing Children Feed Updates

Thursday, January 13th, 2011

• Redbox’s Movie Awards App Complements TV Content
• Facebook’s Webinar for Social Goods Provides Nonprofits Tips
• Only a Handful of Tickets Left – Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 on January 25th
• Facebook Careers Post: Dublin, Data Centers, Marketing, Singapore and Recruiting
• Moontoast’s Impulse is a Dedicated Ecommerce Facebook App for Musicians
• Facebook Displaying Unread Messages from Pages in a New Updates Module

Friday, January 14th, 2011

• Chinese and Russian Both Appear on This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Apps
• Friendly, Facepad Grab 2 Million Monthly Actives on the iPad as Facebook Holds Off on Official App
• Next Video App Streams the Most Popular YouTube Links on Facebook
• Facebook Roundup: Media, Facebook Phone, Pages, Early Facebook-Like Site, Taiwan and More
• Platform Update: Facebook Lets Developers Ask a User for Their Address, Phone Number in the Graph API

Saturday, January 15th, 2011

• Highlights This Week from the Inside Network Job Board: Ubisoft, NaturalMotion, & More

CrowdStar CEO Out, Relan In — After less than a year as chief executive of CrowdStar, Niren Hiro is leaving, making way for chairman Peter Relan to take on the role, according to VentureBeat.  Although the VentureBeat story does not mention further layoffs it lists the employee count as 75, which is a quarter less than what we’d heard the company had several weeks ago. The internal turmoil at CrowdStar has circulated as rumors for several weeks.When we asked co-founder Suren Markosian about it yesterday, during a separate interview, he responded that Facebook’s clampdown on viral channels and app growth had pushed the company to restructure for maximum efficiency.

CrowdStar is still making a profit, Relan told VentureBeat, and plans to double its workforce in 2011, as well as potentially raise funding. Relan, who has no plans to immediately find a replacement CEO, will also scale back his duties as head of incubator YouWeb.

Playdom Set to Launch First City of Wonder Expansion — Our top pick for the best social game during the second half of 2010, Playdom‘s City of Wonder, is slated to get its first expansion in the near future. Dubbed “City of Wonder – Colony Expansion,” players will be able to spread their civilization across the world with over 80 new buildings, 15 new technologies, new currencies, and the introduction of naval power.

Bigpoint Acquires Planet Moon Staff — Game developer Bigpoint has announced the acquisition of 37 former Planet Moon Studios developers and artists this week. All 37 new team members have been added in to the San Francisco office.

Digital Chocolate Debuts Games on Android with GetJar — Social developer Digital Chocolate has announced the debut of it’s popular Facebook titles, Millionaire City and MMA Pro Fighter, on Android. The games have premiered on GetJar, the world’s largest open app store.

Scoreloop Grows Over the Holidays — Cross-platform, social-mobile gaming network Scoreloop has reported significant growth over the Christmas holidays. The holiday week saw a total of 1.3 million new users, a 209% spike increase (over the November average) on Christmas Day across all mobile OS platforms, and a 216% growth in virtual currency revenues over the entire week, according to the company.

MySpace Layoffs & Plans — MySpace troubles continue as the company has laid off a whopping 47 percent of its staff, equating to roughly 500 employees, according to PaidContent.

To add to the drama, Bloomberg reported on a company-wide meeting from earlier this week where MySpace spokeswoman, Rosabel Tao, noted that News Corp. is “assessing a number of possibilities including a sale, a merger and a spinout.”

Most large developers already on Facebook have passed on the idea of making a massively multiplayer game for the platform. But a growing number of smaller outfits and new entrants are looking to try out the genre, including the Oregon-based developer Mad Otter and its German publishing partner, Neonga.

Mad Otter is working on A Mystical Land, a light MMO based on the open-source Torque engine built by Prairie Games. Like any browser-based MMO, A Mystical Land (henceforth AML) will require players on Facebook to download a file to play.

That download, combined with a casual Facebook crowd that’s averse to almost any extra steps, are one big reason that most developers won’t try a Facebook MMO. But as we point out on this morning’s emerging games list, there are already a couple with hundreds of thousands of monthly active users.

AML lead designer Damon Slye has a partial solution for the download, having broken it into chunks within the game. He doesn’t think the download alone is a big reason for slow adoption of Facebook MMOs, though.

“The ones that I’ve seen were just not very good,” Slye says. “The model is a little different, I think, for a game like this. You’ll have more engaging gameplay in our game, and we’ll have players playing for longer, but the challenge we’ll meet is that it’s still casual and easy to get into. It’s not a hardcore, stat-based MMO.”

Some of the play in AML will revolve around the typical fetch and fight quests that most fantasy RPGs have, with some level of grind involved in leveling up. But it will also include time management mechanics — for instance, the ability to eat a meal several times a day in order to make your character stronger or hunt daily bounties.

Mad Otter is also cognizant that many Facebook gamers might have no idea what to do in the game. “We’re learning more and more to put the game on rails for some people. If they want to say hey, what’s the next thing I should do, then it tells them,” says Slye. “It’s definitely still open with movement and freedom of choice. But when we get to a fork in the road and there are two choices — how do we let players know what the normal choice would be?”

Once players get into the game, they’ll be able to pick from various professions, including some that are peaceful or crafting-based. Although it won’t be a feature at launch, Mad Otter plans to eventually offer villages for groups of players to live together in, with player populations who naturally support one another.

For now, most of the work is going into getting a basic version of the game launched. It’s still in closed beta, but the artwork and style looks great; the challenge will just be finding Facebook players patient enough to learn the ropes.

There may be a message for small developers in this week’s list of emerging Facebook games, defined as those growing fastest but still under a million monthly active users. Among the 20 diverse games on the list, only a handful are in Facebook’s current most popular genre, sim games.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	GodsWar Online	748,651	+366,237	+96%
2.	寵物戰爭	646,130	+362,838	+128%
3.	Texas HoldEm Poker – Deluxe ★★★★★★	729,028	+333,434	+84%
4.	Dragons of Atlantis	844,590	+170,897	+25%
5.	Bingo Island	641,438	+162,517	+34%
6.	Age of Champions	549,200	+140,180	+34%
7.	UNO® Boost	697,682	+127,170	+22%
8.	MilMo	435,566	+107,473	+33%
9.	Paradise Life	775,377	+97,482	+14%
10.	Clash of Kingdoms	483,398	+83,366	+21%
11.	Pool Master 2	889,830	+81,787	+10%
12.	Post Season Fantasy Football	279,601	+78,972	+39%
13.	Fashion City	313,257	+76,099	+32%
14.	Habbo Hotel España	940,814	+76,087	+9%
15.	Tavla	524,120	+73,856	+16%
16.	Wildlife Refuge	128,417	+69,054	+116%
17.	Gourmet Ranch	554,361	+66,824	+14%
18.	My Shops	410,801	+59,345	+17%
19.	GooBox – Gratis Spiele	158,574	+48,211	+44%
20.	R2Games Caesary	118,124	+47,743	+68%

GodsWar Online is enjoying a second week of strong growth with a lightweight MMO experience that seems to be appealing mainly to young men outside of the US. It’s not the only MMO listed, with MilMo also enjoying another good week, and GodsWar developer Igg is also doubling up on the list with Texas HoldEm Poker – Deluxe ★★★★★★.

寵物戰爭, at number two, is a Chinese combo of the pet raising and fighting genres. That gives all of the top three spots to Chinese developers, since Igg also seems to be based in that country.

Dragons of Atlantis is the online strategy game that Kabam picked up in its acquisition of WonderHill. Despite having three very similar games now, including Kingdoms of Camelot and the newly launched Glory of Rome, Kabam seems to be doing well with Dragons.

Few of the remaining games on the list are new, but there are a few exceptions to watch: Paradise Life, Wildlife Refuge and My Shops are all well-designed games that are enjoying their first real growth on Facebook.

Six months after Disney acquired Playdom for up to $763 million, a host of senior executives and producers have already left to start new companies or join early-stage ones.

Notably, a couple of these are mobile gaming-related ideas. Playdom co-founder Rick Thompson’s Wild Needle Games just scooped up $2.5 million in funding from Shasta Ventures and Thompson himself. The plan is to build mobile games that really take advantage of the phone’s location awareness and “always-on connectivity” to social networks. Booyah’s MyTown might serve as a forerunner to what Wild Needle plans to ship.

There are others too. Craig Dos Santos, who headed up Playdom’s mobile games group, is working on an e-commerce project called Portable Cupcake out of Tapjoy headquarters in San Francisco.

> Continue reading on Inside Mobile Apps.

Quality television tie-ins for social games have been few and far between, but as the numbers for past games like Jersey Shore have shown, the popularity of such shows can boost the success of their game versions (at least initially). 6 Waves is looking to add a TV-inspired title of its own by publishing a social rendition of the popular gladiatorial series Spartacus. Though the game is still in closed beta, we got a chance to take an early look.

Considering the bloody nature of the Starz show, it’s not hard to guess that Spartacus: Gods of the Arena, which is developed by Large Animal Games, is an automated fighting game such as MMA Pro Fighter. Of course, the game is a bit more primal than previous titles of the genre, in keeping with the show itself. Bits and pieces of the game still feel a bit clunky and vague, but with beta far from over, such issues are likely to be remedied soon.

Players are in charge of running their very own ludus, which is basically a place to house and train their gladiators. Unlike the fighting games before Spartacus, however, players are able to purchase a multitude of fighters for battle, training them in speed, brawn, and vitality.

Like the Superstars games from EA/Playfish, players must train their gladiators over periods of time to boost the respective stats. Speed will increase the number of attacks characters get in a bout, while strength bolsters the raw damage they do. As one might expect, vitality increases their health. Furthermore, players can augment their gladiators by purchasing equipment in the form of weapons, armor, and shields. Unfortunately, since the game is not even yet, the selection is a bit minimal. While training costs nothing but time, gear tends to cost a pretty penny (as well buying as new gladiators), so what better way to win some by sending them off to the arena?

This is where things start to get a bit more interesting. Like previous fighting games, players don’t have any real control, but they can influence the outcome. As users watch the sequence of animated violence, they will have the opportunity to cheer their gladiator and jeer the other. The idea is to cheer when their gladiator does something good in the sequence and jeer when the opponent does well.

Successfully timing cheers and jeers will adjust the crowd’s favor, and should the user win, extra coin will be earned. This seems superfluous, yes, but what if the player’s gladiator loses? Well, anyone that knows anything about gladiatorial history knows about the thumbs up or thumbs down rule. Should the player earn the crowd’s approval, they will be able to save their fallen combatant free of charge. If they do not have the crowd’s favor, they can still save the character, but at the cost of what appears to be a virtual currency.

The game is vague on how this works at the moment. There is an unnamed virtual currency that can be used to purchase powerful items or perform instant training, but as it’s closed beta, it’s not purchasable. Players also seem to earn some of this currency as their gladiators improve.

Premium currency is used for yet another nifty feature that allows players to rig the fights in devious fashions, such as poisoning the opponent.

As players continue to play and level up their gladiators, and their lundus as a whole, they’ll gradually unlock new tiers of enemies as they work their way to Rome. But as users can, at any time, lose their gladiators in battle, it becomes prudent to train many. The problem is that a single user can only train one at a time. This is where the key social incentive comes into play, as more friends playing equals more simultaneous training. In addition to this mechanic, users can gift one another, and make wall postings to heal wounded gladiators.

As it stands, Spartacus is a pretty decent game its early stage. The only big problem at the moment is that the cheering and jeering mechanic is rather clunky. Players have to click the buttons rapidly to get the crowd favor high, and sometimes the animated fight sequence changes scenes so quickly that players can end up cheering for the wrong person. In addition to this, players still have to watch the entire fight, and the visual get a little boring to watch after the fifteenth time.

Still, Spartacus has the advantage of its theme and television tie-in. Our #9 pick for the top games of the second half of 2010, CSI: Crime City, recently topped two million MAU,  making it the biggest so far that’s not based on a game show; Spartacus might be able to reach similar heights, if its design becomes more polished.

The hiring world in social games continues on strong, according to data from LinkedIn. As opposed to last week, however, only seven developers showed new hiring activity. Even so, correspondence from four other developers have filled us in on a few new hires of their own.

Rahul Daterao, formerly of KickApps, is the first on the list, joining appssavvy as their new chief technology officer. The second major hire this week, comes from Winster.com who has hired Jonathan Simpson-Bint as their new executive vice president and chief revenue officer. Of course, the LinkedIn data also showed a major hire for RockYou as well, who brought on Jonathan Knight as SVP of games.

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:

Appssavvy

• Rahul Daterao — Rahul Daterao joins appssavvy as their new chief technology officer. His most recent experience stems from KickApps where he served the same CTO role.

Atommica

• Egar Román Almeida — Atommica gains a new game manager with Almeida, a former senior game designer for Sabarasa Games.
• Pablo Iglesias — The former game programmer from Sabarasa Games, Iglesias, is now a game programmer for Atommica.
• Iván Vodopiviz –Vodopiviz joins Atommica as a lead game programmer. Previously, he filled this same role at Sabarasa Games.
• Sabrina Miller — Miller is now a senior game programmer for Atommica. She was a development analyst for Telemedia Latin America.
• Jeremías Babini — Atommica gains a new game artist with Babini, a former freelance illustrator.

Digital Chocolate

• Kevin Hogan — Joining Digital Chocolate as a product manager is Hogan. Before this, he was a web 2.0 intern at ESADE.

Kabam

• Sirio Brozzi — Kabam gains a new concept artist with Brozzi, who filled the same role, previously, at Runic Games.
• Zach Oldenkamp — Now a 2D production art intern for Kabam, Oldenkamp was previously a production art intern for Massive Black.

MindJolt

• Dan Fearing — Now a software engineer for MindJolt, Fearing was previously a software test engineer for Demand Media.

Playdom

• Florian Menesses — A former development tester for Electronic Arts, Menesses joins Playdom as a QA analyst.

Playfish

• Alexander Syed — Syed joins the Playfish team as a senior Actionscript engineer. Syed was previously a Flex developer for KIT Digital, Inc.
• Henriette Myrlund — Now a game designer for Playfish, Myrlund was previously a research assistant at Hedmark University College.
• Jordan Grader — Playfish gains Grader as a new video production manager and office manager. Before this she was part of business affairs for Lionsgate TV at Lionsgate.

Nordeus

• Miloš Marković — A quick note from the folks over at Nordeus let us know of Marković joining the team as their newest software development engineer.

RockYou!

• Jonathan Knight — Jonathan Knight joins RockYou as the new SVP of games. Prior to this, he was a vice president and executive producer for Electronic Arts.
• Josh Forester — Now a community advocate for RockYou, Forester was previously a localization lead and community manager for Changyou.com (US) Inc.

Winster

• Jonathan Simpson-Bint — As noted prior, Jonathan Simpson-Bint joins Winster as their new executive vice president and chief revenue officer. His prior experience stems from 20 years of magazine publishing and interactive entertainment, but he was formerly president of Future Network USA.

Zynga

• Eric McDougal — The former interim COO for TCHO, McDougal is now a director and “Minister of Cool” at Zynga.
• Adam Flesher — Once a software developer for Mercurial Communications, Flesher is now a senior software engineer for Zynga.
• Russell Patterson –Patterson is now a senior software engineer for Zynga. Prior to this, he filled the same role at Electronic Arts.
• Alex Vaughan — Zynga gains a new game designer in the form of Vaughan, a former designer from Be-Rad Entertainment.
• Dennis Scheyer — Scheyer joins Zynga as a consulting game writer for CityVille. Hew previously a record producer for Davis Fountain.
• David Schreck — Previously a web developer for Deniro Marketing, Schreck is now a Mafia Wars systems manager for Zynga.
• Kent Evans — Now director of accounting operations at Zynga, Evans was previously an accounting manager for Ellison Machinery Company.
• Somu Arumugam — Arumugam joins Zynga as one of their new game artists. Before this he was a senior project lead at ADYes.
• Tyler Parkinson — Formerly a student assistant at CCAD Packard Library, Parkinson is now a 2D/3D artist for Zynga.
• Emily Anadu — Zynga gains a new marketing team member with Anadu who was previously director of brand marketing at Capcom Entertainment.
• Melody Sadowy — Previously a quality assurance analyst at 3xLOGIC, Sadowy now joins Zynga as a quality assurance engineer.
• Gabe Leung — Leung joins Zynga, this week, as their new university relations recruiter. Prior to this he was part of engineering staffing at Google.