Poseidon’s Realm by Reiner Knizia from Zabu Studio is a unique take on the match-3 arcade game genre made popular by PopCap Games’ Bejeweled franchise. The game challenges players’ spatial awareness with rotating boards and changing the direction of gameplay from down to up. The game’s designer, Reiner Knizia, is an award-winning German-style board game designer.

Poseidon’s Realm is played on a seven by seven game board set against an underwater background. Like other match-3 games, the goal is to connect bubbles of matching color to remove them from the game board, however, the direction of gameplay moves upward instead of downward with bubbles rising through the board. The game contains similar power-ups as other match-3 games such as exploding items and score multipliers, and uses a 60-second timer that awards additional seconds scoring four and five in a row. The board can also be turned 90 degrees per click in the direction of the arrows on each corner of the board, providing more scoring opportunities. Mega-bubbles can be formed which take up a grid of four spaces. These provide a multiplier effect when connected to a chain of like-colored bubbles, but increase the spacial challenge by taking up so much of the board. An additional gameplay twist allows players to pop any bubble even if it doesn’t result in a match, but it costs the player one second per “useless” bubble popped. Taken altogether, these features make Poseidon’s Realm a more deliberate, strategic match-3 than other Facebook offerings in the same genre.

Players start each game session with 12 energy to spend on games at a rate of one energy per game. Energy regenerates one point every 15 minutes. At the end of each game, players pick one of three treasure chests that award different sets of gems which can be spent on power-ups for the game board such as exploding blowfish, extra mega bubbles and extra time. Gems can also be traded for rewards in any of Zabu Studio’s other games like Pickomino and Lost Cities Solo.

The game monetizes by selling power-ups and energy with Facebook Credits. Power-ups are bundled in packs of 3, 10, or 20 with the cheapest goods costing only one Credit and the most expensive costing 19 Credit. Social elements include the daily and weekly high scores rankings with your friends who also play the game, a daily bonus feature where players earn extra gems and power-ups by logging in daily, and an invite bonus feature where players can give introductory gems and power-ups to friends whom they send a game invite.

Poseidon’s Realm was released on March 28. Given its twist on a popular game genre, we’re curious to see how it will do on Facebook where arcade games sometimes struggle to monetize. Follow this game’s trends on AppData, our data service tracking application traffic and growth on social platforms.

Applifier, a cross-promotion network for games on Faceook, has launched a games portal application this as part of its “leveling the playing field” strategy the company shared with us in September.

At that time, Applifier CEO Jussi Laakkonen told us that larger developers like Zynga and Playfish were better able to build and maintain games portfolios. The goal with the cross-promotion bar was to give games from smaller developers access to similar tools that Zynga built for its own games. The newly-launched Games on Applifier service furthers that goal by providing developers even more tools similar to the ones Zynga uses in its games, like an inbox system that allows developers to provide players with consistent updates on content, events, and social activities. The inbox tool will be live on the service in about two weeks.

On the end-user side, Games on Applifier provides users a game discovery tool that recovers some of the virality lost when Facebook clamped down on games publishing stories to the news feeds in September. The service groups games from participating developers into categories Top Games, For You, Favorites, and Friends. Top Games displays what’s most popular across Applifier’s network, while the remaining tabs use demographic information and algorithms to sift through what you and your friends games to determine which you like best.

Based on this data, Games on Applifier makes recommendations of new games “for you,” and displays what your friends are playing much like Amazon will tell you what other customers who bought the same item as you also purchased.

Example: We signed up for the app and went to the For You tab, which immediately asked our age and gender. After filling those in, the tab suggested Salon Street and City Wars. The first appears to align with the demographic information we entered while the latter could speak to just how much time we’ve been logging in CityVille.

Applifier CEO Jussi Laakkonen told us that the company plans to constantly refine the discovery algorithms in the coming weeks based on user feedback. Additionally, users can also alter settings to appear virtually invisible to other Games on Applifier users if they’re not comfortable sharing their games preferences with others. “We care about the user before the publisher,” Laakkonen said. “The user is always in control [of the experience.]”

Even so, Applifier’s service to developers is significant. The service represents over 100 games and apps with a reach of 55 million monthly active users. Developers can install the cross-promotion bar for free and Applifier takes a commission on any clicks exchanged through the network. In the next week or so, Laakkonen tells us, a new Applifier cross-promotion bar will display personalized recommendations and top lists.

You can follow Games on Applifier’s post-launch progress on AppData.

Munich-based social game developer MegaZebra netted a “multi-million Euro” amount in its latest round of funding today led by early-stage venture capital fund, Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures. Also in on the round were private investor Markus Stolz and Kizoo Technology Ventures, which went in on the last round of funding in late 2009.

MegaZebra caught our attention last October with simple, zen-like Mahjong Trails on Facebook. Throughout 2009 and 2010, the developer shifted its social game development from various social networks to a Facebook-only strategy, releasing a total of 19 games on the platform to date. Mahjong Trails seems to be the strongest of these titles with 2.4 million monthly active users and over 300,000 daily active users a month, according to our traffic tracking service, AppData. Across all its games, MegaZebra’s MAU sits at 4.1 million MAU and around 600,000 DAU as of today.

19 Applications By MegaZebra GmbH

		Name	MAU		DAU
1.		Mahjong Trails	2,413,481		327,254
2.		Mahjong	623,213		154,947
3.		Jewels Rock	187,192		21,126
4.		JellyBombs	171,463		17,559
5.		Sudoku	157,206		14,449
6.		Zazzy	116,732		13,695
7.		CrazyBunnies	115,800		13,378
8.		Taxi	89,620		4,687
9.		Dragon Mahjong	64,048		3,538
10.		Nuzzle Puzzle	43,430		4,298
11.		Zebra Blox	38,229		1,964
12.		Zebra ActionBlox	36,757		2,869
13.		Blackjack	26,202		1,283
14.		Revello	25,807		1,238
15.		Magic Islands	11,733		341
16.		Tooniez	3,063		85
17.		Zebra Surprise	2,345		55
18.		Zebra AquaTwist	1,540		72
19.		KickerBuddies	531		17

The company is one of only a few independent European developers operating on Facbeook. Between its mahjong and Bejeweled variations, MegaZebra appears to attract a female audience ranging from 26 to 46. Its top-trafficking games attract an audience from France, the United States, Canada, and Turkey.

MegaZebra says it intends to use this latest round of funding to hire more staff to its Munich offices, likely to work on the company’s unannounced titles due on Facebook in 2011. MegaZebra’s latest game, CrazyBunnies, launched in September 2010.

The social game’s space continues on a steady hiring trend this week with nine major developers bringing on new individuals, according to data from LinkedIn. However, while the overall hires have remained fairly high, the number of major executive hires, as compared to last week has dropped. The first update of note comes in the form of Dennis Duan, who joins Happy Elements as an engineering vice president.

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. Also, please note that information about most new hires, below, comes directly from company updates from LinkedIn.

Looking for new opportunities? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.

Here’s this week’s full list:

Digital Chocolate

• John Hollingworth, Games Designer — A single internal change at Digital Chocolate: Hollingworth was previously a junior games designer.

Kabam

• Sonny Saldua, Facilities Coordinator/Project Manager — Now a part of Kabam, Saldua was previously an operation director at Lavish Lounge.
• Jacqueline Gonzalez, Player Experience Associate — Also joining Kabam, Gonzalez was most recently a mobile community manager for FunMobility.

Happy Elements

• Dennis Duan, Engineering VP — A single big hire for Happy Elements comes with Dennis Duan. He was previously a senior test manager at OpenTV.

LOLapps

• Dr. Cat, Director of Game Design — A new face at LOLapps appears. “Dr. Cat” was most recently the owner of Dragon’s Eye Productions and a director of game development at Zippity.com. More details here.

Loot Drop

• Christian MacTernan, Lead Artist — MacTernan joins Loot Drop as a lead artist on John Romero’s new title. Prior to joining Loot Drop, MacTernan worked as an independent freelance artist. MacTernan was previously employed by LOLapps as Lead Artist on Romero’s Ravenwood Fair.

Mindjolt

• Ben Levinson, Graphic Designer — Now a part of Mindjolt, Levinson was previously a staff tutor at Unlimited Learning.

RockYou!

• Shiaw-Ling Lai, Associate Producer — Now at RockYou, Lai was previously an office manager at Lambodar Inc.
• Anna Stutfield, HR/Office Manager — Also joining RockYou, Stutfield was most recently a digital agent at Aquent.

Zynga

• David Phalaris, Customer Agent — Joining Zynga, Phalaris was previously a fraud agent at eBay.
• Samer Ead, Game Designer — Now at Zynga, Ead was most recently a game systems design intern at Bioware.
• Jeff Fulton, Senior Game Engineer — Also at Zynga, Fulton was a manager of website applications at Mattel.
• Ruma Nair, Software Developer — Nair was most recently an intern at Akiban Technologies.
• Anand Ramachandran, Game Designer — Ramachandran was most recently the creative director of interactive media and gaming at A Bellyful of Dreams Entertainment.
• Rick Cohen, Desktop Support Technician — At Zynga now, Cohen was previously a “Mac Exorcist” at MacCentric Solutions.
• Maria Perdana, Linguist — Perdana was previously a novel translator at Mizan Publishing.
• Angie Hu, Concept Artist — Hu was previously an Art Intern at Neopets.

Sports games make up only a small fraction of top games on our traffic tracking service, AppData, and of those, the soccer (or football, if you live outside the United States) looks like it’s the only sports sub-category to break the top 40. As the English Premier League season winds down in Europe and the Major League Soccer season kicks off in North America, we check in with the five largest soccer games for any emerging trends.

1. EA Sports FIFA Superstars, Electronic Arts — 3.5 Million MAU

FIFA Superstars at one point had 4.9 million monthly active users during the FIFA World Cup tournament in June 2010. The game declined steadily after that, but not dramatically, landing just below 3.1 million MAU in early March. Looks like its on the rise again, however, increasing by 13% in the last 25 days. The daily active user count tend to hover between 500,000 and 800,000; today it’s almost 650,000.

FIFA Superstars puts players in the manager’s role, choosing team members and “watching” games purely from a statistics and play-by-play point of view. The social element comes from challenging friends to one-versus-one matches and a gifting system. Like all of EA’s games developed by Playfish, FIFA Superstars is very polished and has the benefit of real life licensed players and leagues through FIFA’s partnership with EA.

2. Bola, Playdom — 2.2 Million MAU

Bola also enjoyed a massive spike in MAU during FIFA World Cup 2010, peaking at an all time high of 4.6 million in early July of that year. It suffered a steeper decline that FIFA Superstars after that, dropping almost 54% to around 2.2 million as of today. The DAU suffered a similar decline from a little over 700,000 at peak to just under 200,000 today.

Bola actually puts players in the role of both manager and team members, having them select sponsors and players and then play out a player versus AI match with 3D character sprites. While not as sophisticated in graphics or art, Bola is free from any restrictions an official license might impose and can appeal to a whimsical type of player — like the kind who wants the new Tron film as a sponsor.

3. Top Eleven Football Manager, Nordeus LLC — 2 Million MAU

Top Eleven Football Manager launched just before FIFA World Cup in May 2010, but didn’t enjoy a major spike in users. Rather, the game grew steadily over time, just reaching about 2 million MAU as of today. The DAU graph reflects the same steady climb to today’s all time high of 477,000.

Top Eleven plays like Bola, using both the manager style of play and the playable simulated games, but it looks like FIFA Superstars because it focuses so heavily on charts and tournament brackets. Players can buy or trade squad members with friends as well as engage them in versus matches.

4. Footy!, Power Challenge — 880,000 MAU

Footy launched around the same time as Top Eleven last year, but didn’t experience a growth spurt until late February and early March. Looks like it broke 900,000 MAU just this week, although that number slid back a bit today. The DAU growth overall shows the same pattern, although there was sharp spike to 97,000 earlier this month that may be the result of advertising. Today, the DAU clocks in at 40,000.

Footy is a soccer sim with no real management gameplay, although players are expected to build stadiums in addition to playing soccer games. What makes Footy unique among the top five soccer games is the cartoon art style and apparent appeal to a younger audience.

5. Footbo City, Pixofun — 325,000 MAU

Footbo City is a Turkish game that launched late in 2010 and seemed to be growing steadily since the beginning of 2011. This month, however, the MAU and DAU are sliding with the former dropping 19% its present-day level. DAU had a steeper decline by 30% down to 57,000 today.

The game seems to combine a bit of the cartoony appeal of Footy! with the manager-and-player approach of Bola.

It was surprising to see that the FIFA World Cup tournament didn’t guarantee a player spike for all soccer games, regardless of whether they were manager simulations or virtual soccer games. It wasn’t so surprising to find that regardless of game type, soccer games seem to be played mostly by males under the age of 25. We also weren’t surprised to see from what demographic information we were able to collect from Bola and Top Eleven that a significant percentage of the players come from Turkey, Indonesia, Italy and Mexico. They don’t call it “World Cup” because soccer isn’t played everywhere, right?

If you want to follow along with these games as the English Premier League season closes and on into the future when we start gearing up for FIFA World Cup 2014, sign up for AppData Pro.

EA2D officially launched Dragon Age Legends in early March to coincide with the release of BioWare and Electronic Arts’ Dragon Age 2 on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC/Mac. Like most Facebook RPGs, the game walks players through a series of encounters on a map as part of a quest-driven storyline, with each encounter costing certain amounts of energy. At the end of each successful combat encounter, players earn experience points, gold and items like potions, equipment and/or armor. Though Dragon Age Legends allows players to unlock content in Dragon Age 2, the game is intended to stand alone as a separate entity from the console game.

What makes this game different and fun are two-fold: the character development and party system combat and the integration of castle building into the economy. To the first point, each of three character types (Mage, Warrior or Rogue) has four skill trees that they can invest a point in each time they level up. Players recruit their friends into their party for each combat encounter, making use of their characters as their friends have developed them. This is also the social aspect of the game; the more friends that players have playing the game, the more options they have for party members. The game also provides AI party members, but they level a step slower than the player. After each encounter, a cool-down timer is applied on any party members used so players have to use different characters for the next encounter.

With castle-building, players develop their castles by buying rooms for the structure. Each new room allows players to create consumable potions such as health, mana, stat boosts and bombs to assist them in combat. Room upgrades allow players to complete these tasks more quickly. What makes it unique is that the castle-building system effectively closes the economy loop. Any gold earned in combat is funneled back into the castle via upgrades and consumables creation and players use the consumables in combat where they earn more gold to go back and spend on more consumables or room upgrades. Other RPGs have a similar loop that uses a static developer-controlled store, but it tends to leave players with excess gold that is never spent once they’ve bought everything in the store. Dragon Age Legends doesn’t appear to have a cap to how much money you can sink into castle-building.

Aside from gold, Dragon Age Legends uses a premium currency known as Crowns. Players begin the game with a gift of 60 Crowns, an equivalent of about $1.50. Some items available for purchase with Crowns include potions, armor, castle upgrades, energy as well as the shortening of friend timers. Many items are far more attractive than found items in game as they are more powerful, ranging from a kit that removes a crippling effect and increases health, to a powerful weapon that has several different power boosts, a unique graphic and animated effects. Prices range from 25 cents for a standard potion to $15.00 for a powerful level 10 item.

In the short time since it launched in open beta form, EA2D has implemented several updates in response to player requests including the ability to reset character skill-sets and non-combat encounters that earn Crowns in random locations across the map. Dragon Age Legends has already made our top weekly gainers list twice in March.

Readers can follow this game’s trends on AppData, our data service tracking application traffic and growth on social platforms.

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 TinyCo, Pocket Gems, Digital Chocolate, Betfair, Playfish, and EA.

• Games Executive Producer (San Francisco, CA)
• Product Manager (San Francisco, CA)
• Game Designer (San Francisco, CA)
• iPhone Developer (San Francisco, CA)
• Android Developer (San Francisco, CA)

• Game Designer (San Francisco, CA)
• UI Artist (San Francisco, CA)

• Senior Server Engineer (San Mateo, CA)
  
• Post Production Engineer (San Mateo, CA)

• Online Optimization Specialist (London, UK)
  

• Director of Integrated Marketing (San Francisco, CA)
• Product Manager (Redwood City, CA)
• Senior Product and Marketing Analyst (San Francisco, CA)
  

• Sr. Business Intelligence Analyst (Redwood City, CA)
• Sr. CRM Manager (Redwood City, CA)
• Paid Acquisition Manager (Redwood City, 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.

This week we have many older titles making an appearance on the leaderboard of fastest growing Facebook games based on daily active users. Some of these titles include FarmVille (which released its English Countryside feature giving players a second farm), Texas HoldEm Poker, Bejeweled Blitz, Zoo World, and FrontierVille. According to AppData, our analytics and metrics service for monitoring the top games on Facebook, DAU gains overall were slightly lower than usual — allowing some older games to resurface that we haven’t heard from in awhile.

CityVille takes the number one spot (due to Daily Horoscope being miscategorized as a game). Though Zynga’s city builder has fallen from its peak of 101 million monthly active users down to just under 90 million MAU, the game is still holding strong with over 20 million DAU. The only game that remotely comes close to this amount of daily traffic is FarmVille, with 13 million DAU. CityVille has over 25% of its monthly players logging in to play each day, and with that kind of engagement the game will continue to see strong revenue.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

Name DAU Gain Gain,% 1. Daily Horoscope 1,502,706 +540,148 +56% 2. CityVille 20,174,981 +320,985 +2% 3. FarmVille 13,076,301 +263,750 +2% 4. Monopoly Millionaires 839,158 +196,570 +31% 5. Texas HoldEm Poker 7,143,470 +175,778 +3% 6. Diamond Dash 263,712 +168,756 +178% 7. 開心寶貝 352,359 +119,818 +52% 8. Zoo World 644,125 +118,322 +23% 9. Bejeweled Blitz 3,500,523 +115,316 +3% 10. Ravenwood Fair 1,217,303 +112,952 +10% 11. Birthday Cards 572,150 +111,093 +24% 12. Zombie Lane 207,752 +110,221 +113% 13. CSI: Crime City 398,588 +106,362 +36% 14. Ninja Saga 979,410 +100,185 +11% 15. Bubble Island 1,132,052 +95,471 +9% 16. FrontierVille 4,784,123 +85,613 +2% 17. Zuma Blitz 971,819 +70,536 +8% 18. EA SPORTS FIFA Superstars 646,403 +64,860 +11% 19. Slotomania – Slot Machines 346,372 +61,696 +22% 20. Backyard Monsters 952,876 +58,603 +7%

開心寶貝 (translated as Happy Baby) is a Chinese game that is too close to EA’s Pet Society for comfort. We first wrote about this clone in January of 2010 when the game first released and mentioned that it might as well be the Chinese localization of Pet Society. Happy Baby was released by Boyaa, a company that does not appear to have any relation whatsoever to EA or Playfish. The game has been on a steady decline for the past 6 months and a sudden spike in traffic in the last week seems to be from a cross-promotion or ad spend. At this point, it looks as if Happy Baby is a long way from its former peak and probably won’t see those numbers again.

Ubisoft’s CSI: Crime City is a game that has been on and off the leaderboards since it launched in October of last year. Crime City was developed by Area/Code (which was purchased by Zynga in January) and impressed us enough to make our top 10 games of 2010 list. Crime City peaked in January and has been on a downward spiral ever since, but is picking up steam again over the past week. With a big publisher like Ubisoft and an established television brand like CSI, Crime City could have what it takes to rebound. At this time, it is the best performing Ubisoft game four times over, with Castle & Co barely comparing.

The data in this post comes via AppData, our data service tracking growth and trends across the Facebook platform.

Struggling social network MySpace announced updated functionality for the OpenSocial Activities API yesterday. Now, Activities return all activity types and can be sorted via filters.

This update to the existing OpenSocial Activities endpoint lets developers see richer data on activities and display it either in headline or full-detail form, and then filter said data by activity. The endpoint still allows developers to view metadata on supported fields, activity types and object types.

The updated API call brings MySpace’s feeds a little closer to Facebook’s style of filters, corralling games into one activity type. Although many developers have been turning off their MySpace games in recent months, MySpace still offers less restrictions on some parts of feed formatting – for example, the “Play” button shown above.

The Dating Game is an adaptation of ABC’s classic TV game show developed by 3G Studios, a former console game developer. The company’s first Facebook game, Brave Arms, peaked at 15,000 MAU last summer, according to our data service tracking application, AppData. The Dating Game is the first of several licensed brands 3G plans to release as Facebook games as part of an agreement with Sony and Paramount Pictures over the next two years.

The Dating Game follows the game show format of the TV series. Players take the role of a male or female panelist or contestant and either ask or answer a series of questions in three rounds. The panelist player awards contestants points based on how much they like the answers and at the end of three rounds, a winner is declared. In the actual show, the winner would go on a date with the panelist paid for by the TV network; the Facebook game instead creates a postcard image of the two avatars on a date. The most interesting feature here is that during gameplay, the player has no idea who the other players are in the round; only when a player wins a “date” does the veil of anonymity drop to reveal who the person on the other end of the avatar is.

The game monetizes through selling premium currency (hearts) and the standard currency (points). Hearts can buy virtual gift items to “bribe” panelists with and points can buy virtual items to customize your avatar or to buy game hosting tokens, which increases the numbers of games you can start per week. Points can be bought only with Facebook Credits or PayPal, while hearts can also be purchased with Social Gold, Spare Change, or via special offers. 3G tells us we can expect to see Google Checkout and Amazon QuickPay as payment options in the coming weeks.

We’re seeing a push for licensed games on Facebook and we’re also seeing a spike in dating service app users on Facbeook. You’d think both factors would make The Dating Game a natural hybrid game/dating service, but as it turns out, the game struggles a bit with brand recognition because the name of the show itself is a popular culture cliche.

“We’re never going to get 100% brand recognition out of it,” 3G CEO James Kosta tells us. “But the game matches the target audience on Facebook, [40-year-old] women. Those people generally do remember The Dating Game.”

As for the dating service potential, The Dating Game is affiliated with Match.com and displays ads for the paid dating service in-game. Kosta, who incidentally met his wife on Match.com, told us that additional integration between the dating service and The Dating Game is “something we’re definitely exploring.”

Kosta also says there could be potential for more game features through Facebook Groups in the future. As an example, he talked about the possibility of limiting a Dating Game play session to a specific Group. Currently, the game allows you to limit to just your friends or to open it up to everybody. In Kosta’s example, a new student at a university could use The Dating Game to meet and interact with other students within the school’s Facebook Group.

The Dating Game officially launched March 23. You can follow its progress on AppData, our data service tracking application traffic and growth on social platforms.