This week’s list of emerging games on Facebook is headed up by Wooga’s new puzzle game, Diamond Dash. We reviewed this game last week and mentioned that it was a decent game but seemed to be far from complete. The easy-to-understand gameplay and the addictive nature of a Bejeweled Blitz-style countdown timer make for a nice implementation of a social version of Collapse. Diamond Dash picked up 532,000 monthly active users this week for a total of 610,000.

This list shows games that gained the most MAU and are still under 1 million monthly active users according to AppData, our service for tracking the top titles on Facebook.

The number two position goes to Lionside’s NBA Legend, the official Facebook game of the NBA, which grew by over 50% this week up to 735,000 MAU. Galaxy Online II, a strategy game by IGG is now nearing the 1 million MAU milestone as it too showed huge growth this week of 234,000 new players.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

Name MAU Gain Gain,% 1. Diamond Dash 609,417 +531,940 +687% 2. NBA Legend: Official NBA Game 734,852 +253,811 +53% 3. Galaxy Online II – Most Competitive Strategy Game 959,959 +234,942 +32% 4. Dragon Age Legends 430,519 +215,430 +100% 5. Happy Kingdom 431,334 +159,969 +59% 6. Pirates Saga 949,445 +151,197 +19% 7. Treasure Land 217,878 +147,415 +209% 8. Townster 620,492 +146,749 +31% 9. 101 Oyna (KAMERALI) 652,085 +115,051 +21% 10. แฮปปี้ฟาร์ม ๓ 370,290 +102,103 +38% 11. CityZen 401,835 +96,114 +31% 12. Banzai Slot Machine 121,123 +93,114 +332% 13. Big City Bingo 403,873 +88,023 +28% 14. Bubble Speed 719,383 +71,333 +11% 15. Horse Academy 319,587 +71,259 +29% 16. 開心探寶 908,067 +64,486 +8% 17. Spartacus: The Game 991,731 +63,336 +7% 18. Bar World 841,328 +60,813 +8% 19. The Stratagems 412,232 +57,367 +16% 20. Grand Poker 543,093 +57,307 +12%

Big City Bingo is a bingo game launched last September by Product Madness. The bingo gameplay is passive — players sit and chat while numbers are being called off. The numbers are automatically marked on any bingo cards that the player has purchased with in-game coins while the players chat or play minigames. Winning earns players coins so that they can purchase more bingo cards, and winning is determined automatically. Coins can also be purchased with real currency. Big City Bingo is not a game about skill, it is entirely a social chat experience with a light game thrown on top. It has only recently started to gain traction with around 404,000 monthly players enjoying it.

Bar World by DNA Games is a Nightclub City-inspired game that allows players to run their own bar. We reviewed the game back in November when it first launched and noted that it was a very polished hodgepodge of many other successful games that have come before it. We felt that its avatar matchmaking feature was distinctive and should be played up more by the developer to show off its unique mechanics. Bar World peaked in December at 1.7 million MAU and slowly declined down to about 660,000 earlier this month. It is now back on track and has gained 61,000 new players in the last week, bringing it up to 841,000 MAU currently.

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

Nintendo’s Pokemon series roared back onto Nintendo DS consoles in early 2011 and in that time frame, Pokemon clones on Facebook have seen a steady climb in monthly active users (though not necessarily in daily active users).

According to AppData, our traffic and growth tracking system for apps and developers, Monster Galaxy, Miscrits: World of Adventure, and even the newly-launched MinoMonsters saw a climb in MAU following Pokemon Black and White’s early March launch in the U.S. and Europe. MinoMonsters saw the strongest recent growth, nearly tripling its MAU to 114,196 as of March 24. Monster Galaxy enjoyed an approximate 18% uptick to almost 7.9 million MAU, while Miscrits increased by 8% to 1.4 million MAU.

Each of these three games follows the same format as existing Pokemon games: players find, receive, or capture monsters that they then direct to fight other monsters to the purpose of collecting more monsters. Where they differ is in level of polish and style choices. Gaia Online’s four-month-old Monster Galaxy has the most refined art and music while the newly-released MinoMonsters still uses very basic animations during battle phases and suffers from early phase bugs — although it’s built by a much smaller company, and does quite well considering the early stage it is at. You can get more gameplay details in our reviews for Monster Galaxy, Miscrits, and MinoMonsters.

Generally speaking, simple RPGs like Pokemon clones can monetize reasonably well. RPGs have a relatively smaller but devoted audience who purchase premium goods like time or energy power-ups and special items, as we go into detail on in our Inside Virtual Goods: The US Virtual Goods Market 2010-2011 report.

We’ll keep an eye on Monster Galaxy, Miscrits: World of Adventure, and MinoMonsters in the coming months to see if any gameplay changes occur now that Pokemon Black and White is hitting its sales stride. It’ll be interesting to see if the developers pursue changes that make their Pokemon clones look more like Black and White or somehow less like Pokemon in general. Innovation is admirable, but why mess with a winning formula?

Deko-Deko Mail is an animated messaging system that allows the user to choose from nearly 2000 animations to accompany a wall post. The combination app/game from HumaNature Studios launched mid-February, 2011. According to our traffic and growth tracking system, AppData, it has picked up 50,000 MAU as of launch.

The idea behind the game comes from a Japanese concept of animated images called emoji. It’s not uncommon to see Japanese teenagers sitting in a group texting one another so it is no surprise that emoji – the animated images, far more elaborate than emoticons – in text messages originated from the island. It is based upon this idea, that Deko-Deko Mail was developed.

Created by the designer of Toejam & Earl and Orly’s World, Deko-Deko Mail allows users to send messages or embed them in blogs or e-mail. Keywords within a message are tagged to indicate associated images (as in the message above). Categories of images also exist, as does a free search. Some images are free while the majority cost five Keys — the in-app currency — which is where the game element comes in.

Keys are easily earned as purchased. Initially, the standard “liking” the app and providing e-mail earns Keys at every level; ten experience for each post and 50 experience for each new friend. Additional Keys are earned each day simply for logging in; successive days earn more Keys. Friends can also request and send Keys at a rate of one Key per friend per day. A gift option of 30 FB credits worth of Keys (300 Keys) is available.

Using a premium animation costs five Keys but does not unlock the animation permanently; it’s a usage fee paid each time a user adds it to a message. The exception to this rule is avatars and pets. Users can choose an avatar and pet to represent themselves in their friend bar. Each level unlocks more options, but early unlocks are available by paying five Keys.

Greg Johnson, Captain and Designer-guy (it’s on his business card) at HumaNature Studio conceived of the idea after his wife visited her home in Japan, where she purchased the latest cell-phone to keep up with her friends and their emoji craze. Before she’d purchased the phone, some of her friends accused her of being angry with them for not sending the appropriate emoji with her messages. At that time, Johnson had assets in his possession from a canceled Nintendo DS game. After hearing his wife’s story, he adapted his game concept to a messaging system and named it Deko-Deko Mail based on the Japanese term deko-mail (decorated mail).

Demographically, Deko-Deko Mail appeals to a younger female audience. But Johnson has been experimenting with advertising sales for this this very viral app and is seeing some appeal to both younger males and older females. For example, the animations lend themselves to cute and amusing messages aimed at younger children — perhaps an animated “hug” by a parent or grandparent. However, the app tags words and acronyms like “suicide” or “FML,” so an older audience can express a more mature message (see above). Johnson’s goal doesn’t seem to be targeting one audience over another, but rather building an animation set that reflects the way people talk in general.

You can find Deko-Deko Mail here and review its progress in AppData here.

Amazon has spent more than 15 years becoming the undisputed leader in online retailing for physical goods like books. While it does sell music and e-books, it has yet to figure out virtual goods sales in games with the same precision.

That’s why the conspicuous absence of in-app payments in Amazon’s developer distribution agreements for its newly-launched Android appstore is intriguing. And we know of several companies that are going to make a move on this in the next few months.

“The Amazon Appstore supports one-time, up-front purchasing for apps,” said Amazon spokesperson Anya Waring. “We recognize that downstream monetization features are important to developers’ business models, however, and don’t restrict their use in our developer agreement.”

This is very different from how Google is approaching its officially sanctioned Android Marketplace. Google has stressed that if Android developers want to sell goods or virtual currency in their apps and be listed in their marketplace, they need to use Google’s preferred payments methods such as Checkout or direct carrier billing. These terms have rankled Android developers who have been waiting months for a full consumer launch of Google’s long-delayed, in-app billing. (In app billing is currently in beta to developers.) At the same time, the complicated user experience on Google Checkout has made it difficult to get paid downloads on Android despite the platform’s explosive trajectory and growing market share.

> Continue reading on Inside Mobile Apps.

It might have been a slow week last week, but evidently the new hiring activity was just marinating a bit. This time around data from LinkedIn and other sources is showing a number of new faces across ten different major social developers. In fact, quite a number of these companies filled some major leadership positions as well including SocialVibe, Loot Drop, Kabam, and Lolapps.

SocialVibe (also known as SVnetwork) brought on a new vice president of category sales and director of account strategy, hiring Karina Montgomery from AOL. Loot Drop has a new creative director with former Sony Online Entertainment senior producer, Laralyn McWilliams. Kabam hired three new vice presidents including Chris Ko as VP of product strategy, Stephen Pelletier as VP of engineering for Kabam San Francisco, and Olivia Dillan as VP of engineering, Kabam Studio. As for LOLApps, they found a new Design Director with Glen Dahlgren.

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:

Kabam

• Chris Ko, VP of Product Strategy — A major hire for Kabam, Chris Ko was previously involved with strategic planning and consumer research at Electronic Arts.
• Stephen Pelletier, VP of Engineering, Kabam San Francisco — The second noted executive hire for Kabam, Stephen Pelletier was most recently the chairman and CEO of Silent Capital Corporation.
• Olivia Dillan, VP of Engineering, Kabam Studio — The last executive hire for Kabam, Olivia Dillan was VP of engineering and services at AtHoc.
• Victor Robin Chyo, 2D Game Artist/Concept Artist – Now at Kabam, Chyo was previously a concept artist at Ignition Entertainment.
• Miles Dulay, 2D Artist — Also now at Kabam, Dulay was most recently a concept artist at Electronic Arts.
• Tuan Vo, Junior Artist — Joining Kabam, Vo was most recently a concept artist for SiXiTS Inc..
• Eli Maffei, Senior Concept Artist — Maffei was previously a concept designer at KingsIsle Entertainment.
• Alex Chu, Senior Artist — Now at Kabam, Chu was was previously a concept artist at Bungie.
• Jason Courtney, Senior Artist — Also now a part of Kabam, Courtney was most recently a visual development artist at PDI/Dreamworks.

Happy Elements

• Wesley Barbosa, Global Operations — Joining Happy Elements, Barbosa was previously the marketing director for overseas – Beijing/China at Elex-Tech.

LOLApps

• Glen Dahlgren, Design Director — A new face at LOLApps, Glen Dahlgren was previously the lead game designer at Hands-On Mobile.

Loot Drop

• Laralyn McWilliams, Creative Director — Joining as a big hire for Loot Drop, Laralyn McWilliams was most recently a senior producer at Sony Online Entertainment.

Metrogames

• Gabriel Delfino, Analista BI — Now a part of Metrogames, Delfino was previously a pricing analyst at Telecom Personal.

Mindjolt

• James Park, Email Marketing Manager — Joining Mindjolt this week, Park was most recently a senior research assistant at the University of California, Riverside.

Playfish

• Flavia Ceccarelli, Associate Art Director — An internal change at Playfish as Ceccarelli moves up from senior game artist.

PopCap Games

• Chris Tabor, Web Designer II — Now at PopCap Games, Tabor was most recently a graphic designer at Alchion Design Lab.

SocialVibe

• Karina Montgomery, VP of Category Sales — A major hire for SocialVibe, Karina Montgomery was most recently the director of client solutions at AOL.
• Jason Koenigsknecht, Midwest Sales Manager — Also a part of SocialVibe now, Jason Koenigsknecht was previously the East Coast digital sales director at Jumpstart.
• Lesley Flood, Director of Account Strategy — Now at SocialVibe, Lesley Flood was previously an account manager at MySpace.
• Jessica Henderlight, Account Executive — The last hire for SocialVibe this week, Jessica Henderlight was most recently an account lead at Yahoo!.

Zynga

• Richard Leas, Data Center Technician — Now a part of Zynga, Leas was previously at George Mason University.
• Riccardo Rossi, Community Specialist — Joining Zynga this week, Rossi was a community team leader at SCEE.
• Stratos Christianakis, Product Manager — Also now at Zynga, Christianakis was most recently a consultant at Deloitte Consulting.

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  6waves, NaturalMotion, Games Cafe,  Inside Network, RealNetworks, and Zynga.

• Software Integration Engineer, Social Games (San Francisco, CA)

• Game Metrics Analyst (Oxford or London, UK)

• Senior Flash Game Programmer (Calgary, AB)

• Operations and Sales Support Coordinator (Palo Alto, CA)

• Senior Social Marketing Manager (Seattle, WA)

• Data Analyst (San Francisco, CA)

Listings on the Inside Network Job Board are distributed to readers of Inside Facebook and Inside Social Games through regular posts and widgets on the sites. Your open positions are being seen by the leading developers, product managers, marketers, designers, and executives in the Facebook Platform and social gaming industry today.

Having shifted from simple quiz-style apps to branded games to its own in-house games, Lolapps has found its place on social platforms. Now, it’s killing off its other titles to focus on Ravenwood Fair, a social simulation created with the help of veteran game designers John Romero and Brenda Braithwaite, that has users ”clear a scary forest and build a fun fair.”

While the two designers have gone on to start their own company, Loot Drop, Lolapps is pushing forward. It has brought in another gaming veteran, Dave “Dr. Cat” Shapiro, of Ultima and Furcadia renown, and plans to introduce a major Ravenwood expansion, Ravenstone Mine, as well as a new game. A far cry from its early apps, Lolapps’ introduction of “designers from the traditional game space who have a bias towards more proscriptive answers” has helped position to capitalize on the increasing sophistication of social games.

Ravenwood Fair, its hit game, now reaches more than 25 million monthly active users across five networks, the company says — not only on Facebook but on IMVU, Japan’s Mixi, Germany’s StudiVZ, and Orkut. Expansions have been a slow but growing trend for app developers, with Zynga adding them for Mafia Wars in 2009, and now for FarmVille with English Countryside. The overall goal is to extend what has traditionally been the short life of the social game.

A Preview of Ravenstone Mine

One of the charms of Ravenwood Fair has been its oft-appreciated non-level restricted design. After level 15 — about the time the player retention is ensured –any restriction on items is removed. It is at this point that the level curve starts its stratospheric climb, players start are saturated with currency, and buy multiples of darned near anything they please.

But for all of the six months of its existence, the six US holidays, multiple themes, three seasons, there has been no extra space for players’ accumulations of virtual goods. Every new feature means packing everything ever tighter into a confined space or creating a new fair. This will change, sort of, with the upcoming expansion Ravenstone Mine.

When last we viewed it, rather than the standard building out of land, Ravenwood Fair will be building down, allowing players to work an optional fully-fleshed Ravenstone Mine underneath the fair. Though the general mechanics of the mine are similar to the fair, the two are different and unique areas. Flowers won’t grow underground and ore carts and track won’t be laid above ground.

One of the ongoing frustrations of Ravenwood Fair has been obtaining resources from nodes that don’t respawn and were consumed at lower levels, with crystals being a prime example. With the ability to mine for mineral resources in your own as well as neighboring mines, this is solved.

But Ravenstone Mine is not simply a mine-themed extension of the fair above. The same pool of energy is shared between them requiring the player to choose between the experience-heavy mine and the food-heavy fair. One will level the player faster; the other allows the player to refill his energy more frequently. Though some resources will be needed up top from down below and vice versa, the majority will be used where found and with limited-edition items, players must choose wisely or spend Facebook credits to complete construction. It is a subtle but effective mechanic.

With more than a few weeks still before launch, LOLApps has been trying new approaches to monetization by introducing sales on items in-game. With the game spread across so many diverse platforms, it is difficult to accurately say just how well it is performing overall. It is one of the largest games on Facebook, with 11.5 million monthly active users and 1.12 million daily active users as of today, according to our tracking service for top apps, AppData.

All in all, with its focus squarely on the franchise, LOLApps appears to have matters well in hand.

Excluding Daily Horoscope (which isn’t actually a game), Mafia Wars is back on top of the fastest growing Facebook games by daily active users this week. A heavy promotion for the game has placed a link to Mafia Wars along the bottom of CityVille, helping to spur massive new growth. The cross-promotion does appear to have come to an end, and Mafia Wars is heading back to its normal traffic numbers.

Monster Galaxy, the Gaia Online pet fighting game inspired by Pokemon, has been having some ups and downs this month according to AppData (our platform for monitoring and analyzing the top Facebook games). This week, Monster Galaxy has made up for the downs with a decent spike in player traffic — the game now has over 800,000 DAU and just under 8 million monthly active users.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

Name DAU Gain Gain,% 1. Daily Horoscope 962,558 +637,547 +196% 2. Mafia Wars Game 2,688,709 +409,468 +18% 3. Monster Galaxy 804,490 +163,921 +26% 4. Diamond Dash 94,956 +94,939 +558,465% 5. Monopoly Millionaires 642,588 +86,126 +15% 6. Pet Society 1,677,049 +58,518 +4% 7. Galaxy Online II 133,382 +57,340 +75% 8. Dragon Age Legends 98,623 +51,161 +108% 9. Slotomania – Slot Machines 284,676 +44,734 +19% 10. Komşu Şehir 73,065 +43,828 +150% 11. Miscrits: World of Adventure 221,142 +42,088 +24% 12. Crazy Taxi 65,096 +41,421 +175% 13. World War 103,345 +40,393 +64% 14. FarmVille 中文版 492,151 +39,298 +9% 15. NBA Legend: Official NBA Game 125,662 +39,162 +45% 16. Dragons of Atlantis 363,520 +32,581 +10% 17. 無限德州撲克 166,109 +32,152 +24% 18. Treasure Land 40,099 +29,994 +297% 19. Battle Pirates 31,845 +28,522 +858% 20. Foursquare 331,211 +27,670 +9%

Treasure Land is a treasure hunting game released by Kudos Media in November that has only started to take off. Kudos Media have been developing non-game applications such as Astrology, and this is their first Flash game attempt on Facebook. It is a surprisingly good first effort — though the gameplay is nearly identical to titles like Treasure Isle or Treasure Madness, Treasure Land is very polished and well-paced. Instead of focusing on exploring tropical islands, Treasure Land puts players within ancient tombs. It features a deeper story similar to FrontierVille, in that players have to complete objectives in order to uncover more pieces of puzzles or stories. Treasure Land itself is still rather small with only 170,000 MAU and 38,000 DAU, but it is a good enough game with all of the elements in the right place.

Diamond Dash is a brand new puzzle game by Wooga. Diamond Dash’s objective is to click on groups of consecutive like-colored puzzle pieces to remove them from the game board, similar to Collapse. Doing this quickly will give players a “Magic Fire” boost that adds a multiplier to their score. Players level up by completing games and can invite friends to join them in weekly tournaments. When we reviewed this game last week, we noted that Wooga have put a hard cap on progression by only allowing players to reach level 4. This was done in an attempt to garner early feedback about Diamond Dash to help guide the development of the game. Right now, Diamond Dash is a rather simple arcade game, but there are plans to add more levels next week and deeper game mechanics at an unknown point. Wooga have been doing well — this is their 6th game on Facebook and they are currently the 5th largest developer.

Tapjoy, the little and increasingly pricey secret that many app developers use to power their way up the charts, said today that it’s launching a “self-publishing” program. Essentially, that means that the company is willing to offer tens of thousands of dollars in free credits in exchange for exclusive distribution rights to new mobile titles.

For background, Tapjoy is a pay-per-install advertising network: developers pay for enough app downloads so they can ideally crack the top of the iOS or Android charts, get visibility in front of consumers and then gain downloads from more valuable, long-term customers. Tapjoy gets these downloads for its advertisers by putting offer walls in hundreds or thousands of apps, which award gamers virtual currency if they download other apps. It usually costs north of $30,000 to break into the top 25, but it varies widely. If an app is good, it will be cheaper. If it’s poorly designed, it will fall off the charts quickly and no amount of spending will save it. The company’s network includes more than 7,500 Android and iOS apps and reaches 200 million customers (as measured by unique device IDs). It says apps that work with it earn more than $35 million a month.

At the beginning of the year, we wrote about how Tapjoy’s model resuscitated the company, which used to be known as Offerpal and was struggling with a less profitable landscape on the Facebook platform. But the field has dramatically changed in the last three months with about 10 new competitors rushing into pay-per-install advertising like Sponsorpay, OpenFeint and Adknowledge.

> Continue reading on Inside Mobile Apps.

Digital advertising technology company SocialVibe today announced a $20 million round of funding led by investor Norwest Venture Partners. The company plans to use the money on global expansion of its brand engagement advertising strategy.

SocialVibe has been a long-time advertiser partner for Zynga, running its ads as part of the offer walls in games like PetVille and CafeWorld. Like many other offer wall advertisers, users earn virtual currency in these games by watching a video, completing a survey or otherwise participating in a branded promotion; but SocialVibe distinguished itself with high-quality advertising, plain, easy-to-follow instructions and quick turnaround time on redeeming participation for virtual currency. Clearly, the approach worked as Zynga’s offer walls now offer dozens of advertisers instead of just the four we noted in PetVille last year.

SocialVibe has been expanding to interactive ads that reward participants with a sense of play or accomplishment. We’ve covered its Thanksgiving ad engagement Facebook app that drew in users by offering charitable donations to the United Nations World Food Programme in exchange for filling a virtual table with virtual food; the company has offered a range of similar types of ads, notably the Kia Motors engagement app that SocialVibe ran during Super Bowl XLV in February.

The Kia app allows players to pit one Zynga game against another in a mini-Super Bowl experience. Players select a Zynga game character set to form their team (e.g. FrontierVille’s avatars against the pets of PetVille) and one of three plays to run toward a touchdown in seven-second animations. A “halftime show” by Kia Motors presents players with a three-question survey and then returns them to the “game” portion for the second half.

The entire activity takes a little over a minute; SocialVibe claims that its engagements average around 63 seconds with an 80% completion rate. Of those totals, the company says, 41 percent click through to a Page or website, 30 percent show purchase intent, and 15 percent share the experience with friends for a viral effect.

In addition to Norwest Venture Partners’ participation in the round, SocialVibe also secured participation from existing investors Redpoint Ventures, Jafco Ventures and Pinnacle Ventures. Jeff Crowe of Norwest Venture Partners now sits on SocialVibe’s Board of Directors.