Zynga Files for Trademark on “Ville” in Europe — Fusible.com has noted that Zynga has filed for a trademark on the word “Ville” in Europe, this week, at the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM).

SEGA of America Gets Into Social Games — SEGA of America marks the latest big name game developer getting into social games. The company officially launched its first social title, SEGA PLAY! Baseball earlier this week.

Meteor Games Focuses in On Facebook Games — According to VentureBeat, Meteor Games is changing its company focus. Having originally started with core online games, the developer is now noted to be shifting its focus to Facebook games, with the launch of its new title Serf Wars.

Apple Changes In-App Purchases Policy — Apple has stated that its new iOS 4.3 comes with a new feature to protect against accidental in-app purchases, says The Washington Post. Now, whenever an in-app purchase is attempted, a password will be required.

Zynga PokerCon Announces Full Lineup — Zynga has announced the full poker celebrity lineup for its first ever Zynga Poker event, PokerCon. It will take place on March 18th and 19th at the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas and will include Annie Duke, Doyle Brunson, Scotty Nguyen, Gavin Smith, Antonio Esfandiari, Vanessa Rousso, and Mike Sexton.

Angry Birds Coming to Facebook — It looks like the popular iOS title Angry Birds may be expanding its horizons to Facebook. Though there is no exact date given, a new splash page for Angry Birds can now be found on the social network.

One Developers Experiences on Facebook — There are a number of new startups seeking to find success with their games through the Facebook platform, and the blog from Wild Bunny outlines, in detail, one example of being a new startup on the network.

Hudson to Focus on Social Games — Another developer is shifting its focus to social games this week notes Gamasutra. Hudson Soft, who was recently purchased by Konami, is cutting around 40 employees and is stated to be shifting its focus to creating social games.

Bryan Reynolds, Chief Game Designer at Zynga, revealed facts about same-sex marriage in FrontierVille and the success of sexual innuendos in his solo panel “The New Frontier of Social Gaming” at South By Southwest Interactive Conference. He noted that FrontierVille has triple the number of same sex marriages as are reported in the US, and that adults will frequently click-through and share posts containing sexual innuendos when published by games.

Reynolds also explained that  word “sex” is the most shared word on Facebook when included in posts by games and Pages, while “Facebook” comes in second. These insights can help game developers improve their viral reach and turn bland posts like “[Name] leveled up” into fun posts that engage players.

Same-sex marriage in FrontierVille was originally a bug that users discovered and immediately took to. Zynga decided to leave the option in the game, and now there are 646,000 same-sex marriages in FrontierVille. That means 3.5% of  its 18.8 million monthly active users create a same-sex marriage, according to our data tracking service AppData. This dwarfs the 150,000 same-sex marriages in the United States, showing their may be pent up demand for the public display of this type of relationship.

Game designers should consider allowing same-sex relationships in their games to allow users to identifying themselves however they want. Facebook shows this type of tolerance, recently adding civil unions and domestic partnerships as relationship options for users.

Reynolds also discussed FrontierVille’s viral success from using sexual innuendos in the form of text and images in the posts that users can share with their friends. He described how posts such as “Scott just got wood” and “Margaret needs a few good screws” receive a high click-through and share rate from adults, but don’t offend younger users as they don’t even recognize the jokes.

He described how Zynga’s data focus has helped them recognize the reach of fun posts game, and evolve from the bland Mafia Wars “[Name] leveled up” posts the company’s games use to generate. Even now that only users who already play a game see posts about that game shared by friends, reducing their virality, innuendos still helps re-engage users who’ve stopped playing. They also inspire these user to comment on the posts by friends and initiate playful discussions, making both parties feel that the game enhances their lives.

While developers need to be careful not to make sexual innuendos or other potentially objectionable content too overt, by walking the line they can make games more social. Reynolds explained “friends don’t want to know about what you’ve done in a game, they want to know something funny about you or something they can start a conversation with.”

[Image Credits: FrontierVille Info and Swd8880]

While much of Zynga has been occupied launching and growing CityVille over the last few months, the FarmVille team has been working on its biggest game expansion yet. Rolling out to users in the next few weeks, FarmVille English Countryside will allow all players level 20 or above — basically those who have played steadily for a couple weeks, or about 75% of the user base — to start a second farm, a long-standing player demand.

The theme, which Zynga says users overwhelmingly favored when polled, introduces some new elements to the game that are intended to make it more interesting for more experienced players without overwhelming the broad audience with complexity.

The storyline has a fictional character, the “Duke,” crash-land his airship into each player’s farm, then taking the player with him to England to repair his family farm. FarmVille general manager Todd Arnold told us in an interview yesterday that the aim is to layer a shared new experience into the game: it will start all players off exploring the new territory at the same time, and it will include a guide map showing friends’ progress to each player. There will be ways to go back and help friends going slower or get help from those going faster. Every player can keep everything they’ve created and earned in their first farm.

In this sense, the company is building a slightly different type of play into the simulation game, somewhat similar to the quests that it has characters doing in FrontierVille.

English Countryside doesn’t just feature a different visual theme. It cuts down on the amount of clicking players need to do to farm, offering a combine at the start that both tills and plants the soil. Instead, the expansion directs users to do things like buy a sheep pen and start breeding wildly colorful lambs. Players pair any two sheep, send them off into a humorously curtained part of the pen, and then spend “love potion” to speed up breeding and pregnancy from hours to instant birth.

To keep users coming back, the FarmVille team has created algorithmically selected colors and designs for each new lamb — there are thousands and thousands of different variations that users can generate, based on the appearances of each parent sheep that they breed. Ranching isn’t the only new thing to do in the game, as the expansion also allows you to build a pub and sell dishes, although it’s far more simplified than what you’d see in Restaurant City or Café World.

The expansion is built into the existing FarmVille Facebook app. Switch locations through the toggle button on the main screen and you and the Duke will go sailing in his airship to the other farm.

We’ve only seen the game during a press briefing, however, and more questions remain, like how it will implement Facebook Credits.

All in all, English Countryside shows Zynga’s commitment to the title, even as it nears its second birthday and continues to dip from all-time highs of 83.8 million monthly active users and 32.5 million daily active users. As of today, it has nearly 50 million MAU and 13.9 million DAU — still easily the second-largest game on Facebook behind CityVille, according to AppData, our data tracking service for applications. The fact that the game has stayed this big this long is impressive in and of itself.

But the company has generally excelled at keeping older titles going, with Mafia Wars (the first Zynga game to push expansions, and quite successfully at that) and Texas Hold’em Poker having been hits since the early days of the platform. FarmVille, until recently its biggest hit ever, clearly also has a lot of life in it. If this expansion goes well — which we expect it will, given Zynga’s marketing know-how, the overall quality of the game, and the 1.5 million Likes its Page has already gotten — look for Zynga to introduce more.

IMVU (pronounced I-M-V-U or im-view) has long been known as a web-based avatar chat system. Founded on the premise of creating an emotional connection through the use of avatars, in 2004 five co-founders from There put together the idea of fashion and chat; but it suffered, quite frankly from a lack of any There there.

With the rise of multiple chat clients and the social networks as the decade proceeded, the virtual chat client found itself needing a bit of reinvention in order to survive it what had become a competitive environment. To accomplish this IMVU first placed music for sale à la iTunes in 2008. Six months ago with partners OMGPOP and Viximo, more than 20 games were brought to what had become a platform of its own.

Long before titles such as Ravenwood Fair, Fishdom, and Backyard Monsters landed on IMVU, the gamification of its elaborate fashion system had become a monetizing staple and a stickiness factor that allowed the platform to expand to the Mac, iOS, and 13 different languages. With more than 50 million registered users, around 10 million of whom visit each month, there are more than enough interactions to create a fashion extravaganza. Adding games put a very thick icing on the cake: 10% of outstanding credits in the ecosystem were sunk into the first three games.

“Players” of IMVU are of two flavors: creators and users. Creators use programs such as 3D Studio Max to create the “items” that make up an avatar; users and creators review each item for appropriateness; once the process is complete more than 7000 new items are uploaded per day to a catalog that boats more than six-million virtual items.

I asked Senior Vice President of Product Management Lee Clancy how it was possible for so many new items to be found it such an enormous catalog. He explained that they have an exceptionally long tail: the top 20 selling items account for only .20 percent of total revenue.

This is achieved through a daily outfit challenge in which more than 150,000 users vote and participate. A theme is presented each day from “toxic” to “Elizabethan attire.” Players then create the most unique outfit possible while voting up or down other unique outfits. This keeps the players viewing and purchasing new content on a daily basis.

Other methods of direct monetization include over seven thousand user-designed game rooms and 28-thousand RPG rooms. Using a 3D game designer, players have added a Flash overlay for simple games such as chess or poker. The RPG rooms are nothing more than MUDs without any tools. Users sell the 3D designs and IMVU takes a portion of the sales.

It’s a robust system that includes sales tracking tools for creators, an internal Twitter-style system called Pulse to notify Users of new items or sales, and badges and awards for winning daily contests.

With a demographic that is 70-percent female, 65-percent over the age of 18, and only 50-percent US-based, IMVU reaches the holy grail of casual game users. The addition and success of social games makes IMVU a viable alternative to other networks and one to watch.

This week’s list of the top emerging Facebook games (as identified by those games still under 1 million monthly active users) contains some familiar titles as well as a slew of new games that we haven’t seen before. According to AppData — our analytics service for measuring the traffic in the top Facebook games — Galaxy Online II has had the strongest growth over the past week. The sci-fi strategy game by IGG grew by 500% this week, and now has over a half million MAU.

Another familiar title is Pirates Saga, the treasure seeking game with traditional MMORPG elements that we reviewed back in December. While Pirates Saga has seen some fluctuation in its daily active users, its MAU has been climbing steadily since the end of February. Another game that is growing fast is DDTank. We took a closer look at this Worms-inspired game earlier in the week and felt that it was overwhelmingly full of features that made it seem bloated and shallow.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

Name MAU Gain Gain,% 1. Galaxy Online II – Most Competitive Strategy Game 507,001 +422,648 +501% 2. 無限德州撲克 758,071 +270,805 +56% 3. Pirates Saga 574,035 +242,211 +73% 4. Super Billares 667,707 +206,415 +45% 5. Spot The Difference 472,176 +194,212 +70% 6. Poker Texas Boyaa 694,630 +137,414 +25% 7. Townster 339,727 +129,474 +62% 8. Slotomania – Slot Machines 753,784 +128,790 +21% 9. Footy! 698,672 +124,759 +22% 10. DDTank 321,043 +115,003 +56% 11. แฮปปี้ฟาร์ม ๓ 142,654 +102,713 +257% 12. Galactic Trader 545,597 +97,954 +22% 13. Clash of Kingdoms 478,803 +96,259 +25% 14. Twilight Wars 246,964 +92,735 +60% 15. NBA Legend: Official NBA Game 195,216 +92,384 +90% 16. Ultimate Poker PRO 270,600 +90,677 +50% 17. Okey Plus 602,842 +88,175 +17% 18. 101 Oyna (KAMERALI) 445,459 +76,140 +21% 19. Castle & Co 610,266 +75,195 +14% 20. Mucit Köy 354,651 +71,396 +25%

Twilight Wars is an action game launched at the end of February that pits players up against randomly matched teammates in an “every man for himself” battle. Players are matched according to skill level and can pick up weapons on the ground within the stage. Twilight Wars — developed by Gamelet — has a very retro gaming feel with pixel art characters and environment and a top-down view. Players shoot or slash each other with weapons and are scored based on the amount of kills and deaths they have within the match. Rankings and leaderboards allow players to compare their score with their friends, or with everyone who plays the game. Everything about Twilight Wars feels very simplistic and is lacking polish, however there is a element game below that could be viable with core gamers if synchronous gameplay ends up gaining legitimacy on Facebook. Twilight Wars currently has almost 250,000 monthly players.

Spot the Difference is exactly what it sounds like, a game in which the objective is to find all of the differences between two pictures. This Lunatic Games title is a simple single player title that is lacking in social features aside from a rudimentary leaderboard. Players have a set amount of time to find all of the differences before their time runs out, and incorrect clicks result in the time depleting faster. Free clues are given out sparingly as they are driving the game’s monetization (in addition to banner advertising). This genre of game is popular in the casual games market, but at this point it doesn’t feel as if Spot the Difference has brought an innovative and social experience to Facebook. The game launched in October of 2008 and only had a recent resurgence over the past week.  At its peak, Spot the Difference reached 683,000 MAU.

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

As Facebook becomes crowded with successful titles, developers are looking for other ways to publish their games. Some are looking at alternative platforms. Still others are using the Facebook platform as a method to create a community. Supercell of Finland is one such developer.

GunShine, a semi-traditional MMOG we previewed in February, has no plans to run inside the Facebook canvas, yet it will use players’ feeds and friends list for virality. Eschewing the dogma of asking the player to post for help to complete a mission, Gunshine will instead ask the player to post only “brag” posts.

While this may sound appealing on a personal level, at first blush it appears as virtual suicide in game design. At this year’s Game Developer’s Conference Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen, COO Janne Snellman, and Creative Director Mikko Kodisoja clarified their strategy and explained their plans for launching a successful MMOG using Facebook.

“We believe that if the game is good enough,“ commented Paananen, “it will sell itself through word of mouth. People will talk about it and that should increase our community. But this doesn’t mean we don’t have ideas on how best to use Facebook to our advantage.”

Upon entry, a user will be able to see which of their Facebook friends are currently active in the game. A message can then be sent to that player, allowing for synchronous play. If no friends are available and the user chooses not to play with strangers, Facebook friends can be hired like henchman in an asynchronous atmosphere.

While this works to bring together groups or find friends already playing, it does little to encourage a user to post to the wall. After several false starts at finding the answer due to language differences, I found the question that would elicit the answer I was looking for.

“You are depending upon people talking about your game to get them to start playing it. Brag posts are how they will know it even exists. Why would I even want to brag?”

“Credibility,” they told me in unison.

Credibility is a player stat that can either be purchased for significant Diamonds (the in-game microcurrency) or increased by posting brag posts to a user’s wall. The key to Credibility is in what it gives you — additional content. If Supercell makes this content compelling enough, they may have struck just the right balance to have created a mechanism that is both viral and monetizable.

Another mechanic that has been anathema to traditional MMOG designers but Supercell seems willing to embrace whole-heartedly is having durability on purchaseable items. Those these items can be repaired creating a never-ending money sink, they do eventually wear out and require replacement. Puzzle Pirates has existed successfully on this model for five of its seven years but it is a mechanic other North American designers have been unwilling to attempt.

Durability not only places a dependence between players (those who repair and those who need it), but it allows for a dependable revenue model as gameplay and monetization become one and the same.

With GunShine still in the first two weeks of closed beta it is difficult to make a determination as to whether the players find it a compelling game. Beta is invite-only and much can change before launch. But Supercell seems to be willing to the risks necessary to be successful by using Facebook without being part of Facebook.

Shooters are not exactly common amongst social games, regardless of their form. However, we recently came across a Facebook title by the name of Twilight Wars, and no, it doesn’t involve any sparkly vampires. Developed by Gamelet, this top-down shooter currently garners over 246,000 monthly active users, but while this metric continues to grow, its daily active user count falls short at around 16,000.

A team based shooter, Twilight Wars marks a distinct minority on the Facebook platform with only a handful of other shooters, such as Cmune’s UberStrike (formerly Paradise Paintball), which hosts around 500,000 MAU and 49,000 DAU. Regardless, Gamelet is hoping to incorporate some minor social mechanics in line with synchronous multiplayer in both a battle-style and cooperative mode.

Players can catch on to Twilight Wars pretty quickly. The game places the user down into a top-down map with the simple rule of survive. The general idea is to battle it out with one’s allies and defeat all opponents. The basis of this concept is seated in the game’s multiplayer facet, supporting up to eight players at a time.

Each player navigates in a simple W, A, S, D fashion, using the mouse to shoot and aim, functioning similarly to old, top-down, Rambo shooters on the original Nintendo. Scattered about the map are a variety of weapons of both the projectile and melee variety; with players able to carry two at any given time. Each comes with its own unique benefits (e.g. more damage, longer range, etc.) with the more powerful items slowing the user down. That said, other than elements like damage, there is nothing terribly distinctive, which is where the melee items, theoretically, come into play.

The addition of melee in Twilight Wars shows some potential on two fronts. Not only do melee weapons do tremendous damage and allow the player to move significantly faster than when wielding a gun, but the also allow players to activate special melee abilities.

As players compete and earn total kills, they will earn Prestige within the faction of their choosing (Royal Knights, Skydow Warriors, or The Third Force) and be able to start using special melee abilities. The big problem with this is that the kills are tracked, in total, across all games played, which basically means that new users aren’t going to see anything significantly unique about this game until they have played for some time. Additionally, when introduced to this mechanic, it’s not clearly stated that this is an overall measurement of play, and new players will likely spend a good amount of time trying to figure out where their Prestige is measured before just starting to ignore it all together.

If team battle royals aren’t one’s preference, users can enter into some cooperative play as well. In a separate Mission mode, players can take on ever increasingly difficult missions against AI opponents. From here, users can play together (with a set number of players allowed based on the mission) to overcome the various challenges, and quite frankly, synchronous play is almost required due to the difficulty. Of course, should one be a loner through and through, a basic single player mode against AI is also available.

With each game played, players will also earn in-game currency. Like most free-to-play shooters, this is then used to purchase various items and arsenals in the Twilight Store (virtual currency, Facebook Credits here, can be used as an alternative). As one would expect, purchased items will boost things like damage, ammunition reserves, armor, health and so on. The most interesting one, however, is an item dubbed “Emergency Help.”

In a more uncommon use of asynchronous play mechanics, using this item will randomly summon a friend (who plays) to the battlefield to help out. The downside, is that they will always have only half of their health. Beyond this, the only other social game mechanics implemented are all fairly basic and standard. This includes unlockable badges, leaderboards, and lobby chat rooms.

As for any other aspects worth noting, the multiplayer, in general seems a bit clunky. Whenever placed into battles with other users, latency often seemed an issue with players teleporting about the battle field. Moreover, there didn’t appear to be a matchmaking system based on player experience. As an example, in one of our first matches, we were pitted up with a player that could use the special melee abilities, while we were brand new, giving that user a distinct advantage.

Overall, Twilight Wars is an okay game, but has past shooters have shown us, such a genre rarely, if ever, does significantly well on Facebook, regardless of whether or not they are fun. The social gaming population, or at least the format available to them, just isn’t looking for fast-paced and twitchy shooters. It doesn’t help either that the most unique aspect of the game, melee abilities, is something that new players aren’t going to see until they’ve played for a while. In the end, this Gamelet app seems like a decent title, but is a genre whose growth tends to plateau early.

After a long list of new hires last week, the new activity in the social gaming space this week has continued. According to LinkedIn updates and other sources, ten social game companies have hired new team members, with the individual numbers per company keeping only to a handful at most. The only exception to this has been Zynga, who also hosts major hires this week.

Neil Roseman is joining the company as vice president and is set to head up Zynga Seattle. One of the first VPs of engineering at Amazon.com, his most recent experience stems from the semantic web service Evri, where he was CEO. Along with him, Develop has noted the hiring of Louis Castle as the new vice president of studios. In addition to this, Deal United let us in on the hiring of Markus Wiedeman, former managing director for central Europe for Sega Germany, who joins the team as head of sales. And to round out the list, RockYou brings on Julie Shumaker as their new senior VP/GM of media.

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:

Deal United

• Markus Wiedeman, Head of Sales — In a hire just today, Markus Wiedeman joins Deal United. Wiedeman was previously the managing director for central Europe for Sega Germany.

Digital Chocolate

• Iulian Agapie, Lead Artist — Now at Digital Chocolate, Agapie was previously a concept artist at CCP.

GSN

• Rachel Mehaffie, Account Executive — Joining GSN, Mehaffie was previously a marketing manager at The Genesis Foundation.

Kabam

• Eddie Hsu, Research Analyst — Now at Kabam, Hsu was previously a master’s candidate at UC San Diego.
• Justin Pumpr, UX Designer — Also joining Kabam, Pumpr was previously a 2D/UI artist at Monumental Games.
• Maurice Li, Associate Producer — The final new hire at Kabam, Li was previously an associate brand director at Leo Burnett.
• Erik Zwerling, Senior Producer — Zwerling was previously a senior games producer at Ohai, Inc.
• Peter Glover, Executive Producer — Joining Kabam, Glover was previously an independent consultant for casual games at Games Industry.

LOLapps

• Joshua Angeles, Animator — Joining LOLapps, Angeles was previously a student at The Art Institute of California.
• Jim Otermat, Flash Developer — The second hire for LOLapps, Otermat was previously a contract programmer at Macguffin Games.

Loot Drop

• Cody Miles, Senior Artist — Now a part of Loot Drop, Miles was previously a lead artist for Metamoki, Inc. 

Playdom

• Wendy Mitchell, Associate Product Manager — Now at Playdom, Mitchell was a part of property management at H30 Properties, Inc.

RockYou

• Julie Shumaker, Senior VP/GM of Media — Now part of the RockYou team, Julie Shumaker’s prior role involved brand integration for Electronic Arts’ The Sims franchise. She also comes with experience from 4INFO, Double Fusion, and Yahoo.

SVnetwork

• Carrie Goldstein, Account Executive — A part of SVnetwork now, Goldstein was previously a “traveler” at World Traveler.
• Jason Koenigsknecht, Midwest Sales Manager — One more addition to SVnetwork. Koenigsknecht was previously the east coast digital sales director at Jumpstart Automotive Media.

Zynga

• Neil Roseman, Vice President, Zynga Seattle — Joining Zynga, Neil Roseman will head up Zynga Seattle as vice president. He was most recently CEO of Evri.
• Louis Castle, Vice President of Studios — Also joining Zynga, Louis Castle, is the new vice president of studios. Most recently, Castle was CEO of InstantAction.
• Wilbur Liang, 2D Artist — Now at Zynga, Liang was “Cinequest Film Festival Signal Film” at House of Chai.
• Pratik Chopra, Software Engineer — Before Zynga, Chopra was a developer at Maxil Technology Solutions Inc.
• John Kuhns, Talent Coordinator — Prior to Zynga, Kuhns was an analyst for ICF International.
• Rick Robertson, Technical Recruiter — Robertson was previously a contracted, senior technical recruiter for MySpace.
• Christopher Hickey, DAM Archive Assistant — Hickey was previously an editorial intern at Salon Media Group.
• Elizabeth Montana, Jr. Account Coordinator for Events — Now a part of Zynga, Montana was previously a media advertising intern at Electronic Arts.
• Steve Fulton, Senior Developer — Fulton was previously a manager of web development for Mattel.
• Chuck Flores, Software Engineer — Joining Zynga, Flores was a software engineer for Rocket Gaming Systems.
• Riccardo Fino, Accounting Manager Europe — The last new hire for Zynga, Fino was previously a senior auditor at Fiditalrevisione.

[Editor's note: In the article below Adparlor chief executive Hussein Fazal discusses data his company is seeing around user acquisition on the Facebook platform through the Ads API.]

In previous articles, we have discussed the factors that affect user acquisition pricing overall and the interesting sub-topic around the rising cost of user acquisition over time. In this guest post, we will examine user acquisition in the “big four” English speaking countries – United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. Most Facebook games launch in English and many of them remain exclusively in English. So the goal of this analysis is to determine the ‘market attractiveness’ of these four countries by looking at three key indicators – available volume, advertiser competition, and user quality.

Available Volume

Looking at the table below, we can see that the United States makes up a large portion of the overall population and the Facebook population relative to the other three. This also translates when we compare the number of targetable game players in these countries. In fact, out of approximately 60 million targetable game players across these four countries, the United States encompasses 74% or almost 45 million of these users. (Note that targetable game players is different from total game players as Facebook ads allows you to target users who “like” the game – and not all of the games users.)

Many application developers, upon launching their game, focus strictly on the United States given the large user base available.

However, it is of course not just the user base that matters. Outside of the big four – there are many countries that have a significant Facebook population and consequently a large game player community. We also need to take a look at how competitive it is in advertising to these users versus how valuable they really are.

Advertiser Competition

For any particular country, the competitive landscape around Facebook ads is always changing. Tens of thousands of small advertisers constantly modify their ad spend – while the power players with large budgets strategically ramp up and slow down their marketing efforts at often unpredictable times. While the general consensus is that competition is increasing overall across Facebook Ads and that CPC bids are rising, we see that effective creative/copy along with efficient micro-targeting can still result in cost-per-install pricing being just as competitive as it was over a year ago.

Successful game developers will dig deep at the micro level and examine the competition specifically for targetable game players – and even deeper to determine the competition for players of their particular game genre. Trying to advertise a city-building game when other large advertisers are bidding on those same keywords will significantly increase the competition for those impressions, increasing CPC prices, and hence the cost of user acquisition.

Given that the market for game specific advertising is always changing, it is difficult to predict how much competition you will run up against when starting your campaign. However, some analysis can be done at the macro-level. We see that competition within a country remains relatively consistent over short time periods – with the exception of holidays like Christmas. Hence, by following CPI prices at several points over the past few months from the millions of acquisitions delivered for Adparlor’s gaming clients, we have been able to come up with a relative competition scale for all four countries on Facebook. The graph to the right has been normalized to give the US a relative competition score of 1.00 so we focus on the difference between the United States and other English speaking countries. We can see from the graph above that the US is in fact the most competitive and Canada is the least competitive. The section below on user quality points to why this is the case.

User Quality

Now we come to the most important part of the analysis – user quality. Regardless of the volume available and the competition – the quality of the users is paramount in deciding which countries to advertise in. While this is normally difficult to measure, AdParlor has run hundreds of campaigns for game companies and we often measure deep metrics. We have combined the three most important metrics and devised a Retention, Engagement, Monetization (REM) score for these countries by giving a certain weight to each component – i.e. monetization has more weight than the other two metrics. It is important to note that these scores can vary widely per game based on many factors. The number and types of payment providers as well as the associated payment flow can have a significant impact on monetization and hence REM score.

We see some general trends — females perform better than males, older users perform better than younger users, and hard-core games perform better than casual games. However, there are also differences at a very granular level where we see certain genders and age ranges within certain countries monetize better for certain game genres. To protect the IP of our clients, we have decided to keep the specifics internal and simply publish these scores on an aggregate level for these four countries.

Conclusion

Now that we have looked at available volume, advertiser competition, and user quality, let’s relate that to market attractiveness. The data above shows that the REM score for Australia is higher than the United States while the competition for those users is lower. This is a clear indication that your marketing efforts should include the Australian users – however, does this mean you should shift your budget away from the United States?

The answer is no if you understand the relationship between volume, competition, and quality. You will notice that while those initial Australian users provide some very positive ROI, CPI rates will quickly increase given the limited population of game players available in this market. The fact remains that there are over 15 times more targetable gamers in the United States compared to Australia, meaning that CPI rates increase slower over time despite more competition for these users. For large campaigns, the United States will quickly catch up to Australia in terms of ROI as there are simply more users available at lower price points.

While the analysis of volume, competition, and quality on the big four English speaking countries is interesting, the ‘fairness’ of the open market and an educated game developer community has balanced out the economy, making it difficult to gain a strong competitive advantage with this data. However, the breakdown across Europe, South-East Asia, and other areas prove to be more interesting where we see countries that have relatively high volume, low competition, and high REM scores. It is important to keep these three factors in mind, when assessing how valuable a country can be and deciding where to put your advertising dollars.

Hussein Fazal is chief executive of AdParlor, an ad management company for Facebook campaigns with social gaming clients including Ubisoft, PlayFirst and Five Minutes, as well as other clients on Facebook including deals site Groupon.

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 Jagex Games Studios, NaturalMotion, Funcom, EverTold, Diversion Inc, Arkadium, and Digital Chocolate.

• Head of Studio / Vice President of Product (Cambridge, UK)
  
• Head of Acquisition Marketing (Cambridge, UK)

• Designer – Social Games (Oxford or London, UK)

• Vector Artist – Facebook Game (Oslo, Norway)

• Lead Engineer (San Francisco, CA)

• Flash Game Artist (Hollywood, CA)

• VP of Game Design (New York, NY)

• VP Product Management (San Mateo, CA)
  
• Lead Game Designer (San Mateo, 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.