John Schappert has left his role as chief operating officer at video game publishing giant EA for a senior executive position at Zynga, the Wall Street Journal reports. This is Schappert’s second move in as many years between video game companies.

Schappert joined EA in 2009 as COO after leaving Microsoft’s Xbox Live team where he served as a corporate vice president. Prior to that, Schappert was a longtime EA executive and founded its Tiburon studio, home of EA Sports Madden NFL franchise. In the Microsoft-to-EA move, Schappert replaced John Pleasants, who went on to Playdom and later became president of Disney Interactive.

Zynga appears to be bulking up its traditional video games pedigree with the new hire. Just last month, the FarmVille developer appointed longtime Tecmo Koei CEO Kenji Matsubara CEO of its Zynga Japan studio. There is speculation that the company could be staffing up executive positions ahead of an initial public offering sometime next year; Zynga has reportedly been finalizing a $500 million round of funding worth $10 billion to that purpose.

Zynga declined to comment on this story. EA did not respond to a request for comment before press time.

[Editor's note: Charles Hudson is a co-author on our Inside Virtual Goods series of industry reports, a co-founder of Android game developer Bionic Panda Games and a partner at SoftTech VC. Bionic Panda recently began using Google in-app billing, which finally came out to consumers at the end of March after several months of anticipation from the Android developer community.]

We recently decided to launch Google In-App Billing in our first game, Aqua Pets. As a matter of background, we had been using PayPal to monetize our original game and were beginning to get user requests for support for credit cards. About one week ago, we released Google In-App Billing for Aqua Pets and decided to see how it would perform.

Our one major reservation with moving forward with Google in-app billing was the relationship between the 30 percent commission and what we anticipated the payment-enabled customer audience to be. While we don’t develop for the iOS platform, there are two compelling reasons why we think the 30 percent that Apple takes makes sense:

> Continue reading on Inside Mobile Apps.

EA gained a new senior vice president of global media sales last week as WildTangent’s Dave Madden jumped ship to the video game publisher. Video advertising in EA’s social games probably isn’t far behind.

Madden oversaw the launch of BrandBoost at WildTangent, one of several video advertising platforms for Facebook games. Like competitors TapJoy and SocialVibe, WildTangent’s service allowed brands light level integration into social games by offering players virtual currency or branded virtual goods in exchange for watching a video ad. Madden previously told us that through BrandBoost, WildTangent hoped to create a more direct user experience than the two-clicks removed offer wall advertising.

“This biggest challenge [at EA] is engagement scalability by platform,” Madden tells us today. “Our users at EA appreciate content on multiple platforms. The biggest thing we’ve learned in social gaming is adding value to the user, putting the user in control.”

With video advertising, Madden says he thinks advertisers can solve the challenges of engagement and scalability in social games. The trick is allowing the user to feel in control of the experience, as in not forcing them to watch an ad while playing game, and to slot the experience into the game in a targeted way. As a hypothetical example, he talked about how when a user hits a proverbial wall in a game where they cannot progress without spending real money, the game could offer them the video ad as a means to get past the barrier. Like if we were playing Dragon Age Legends and ran out of energy, but didn’t want to spend Facebook Credits buying Crowns to purchase more, we could watch a video ad for HBO’s Game of Thrones TV series. The experience would ad value to us because we’d get the Crowns we needed and the video ad is for a brand that shares a common fantasy setting with Dragon Age Legends, so we’d be more likely to engage with it.

As tailored as Games of Thrones might feel to Dragon Age Legends, however, Madden says that the future of advertising in social games is moving beyond intimate customizable campaigns. It can be very rewarding for a brand to build an elaborate gameplay experience around its product, but Madden feels that the most cost efficient and scalable means of advertising lies more in video ads combined with in-game content.

“That lets the brand tell the story,” he says.

To find out more about brand integration into social games, be sure to read our ongoing article series on the subject and sign up for The Facebook Marketing Bible.

Brand engagement through social games covers a wide range of efforts from labeled in-game items to entire games built around a recognizable name. This week, we continue our exploration of the three levels of brand engagement with social games by examining light integration.

Light integration can most easily be characterized by branded items available for sale or display within a game for a limited amount of time, like Coca Cola branded energy boost or a Ford Prius car decoration. Light integration can also be characterized by simple “adver-games” where a brand features a playable simulation on its own site or Facebook page, something like the Super Bowl browser ad powered by digital advertising company SocialVibe in conjunction with Zynga as part of a Kia Motors campaign. Anything beyond this level of integration, say, a character from a motion picture with whom players can interact or branded items only available through a playable quest longer than a two-click interaction, we will confine to medium integration and beyond, which we’ll examine in future articles.

In social games, light integration evolved out of offer walls where players could watch a video, complete a survey, or sign up for a service in exchange for in-game currency. To add value to users, games began rewarding players with more than just virtual currency for their participation, sometimes giving them branded items in-game that served a specific gameplay function. For example, AVG Technologies recently ran a campaign with Zynga’s FarmVille where players could earn a free Biplane item and three Instant Grow boosts in-game by purchasing AVG’s PC Tuneup between February 24 and March 2. The Biplane is purely a cosmetic item while the Instant Grows actually provide utility to the player, making the brand integration more valuable to them.

Costs and Benefits of Light Integration

Light integration campaigns are comparatively cheap and easy to execute for established social games. Chris Cunningham, CEO of brand-to-game integration service appssavvy, says that the typical sales cycle for planning and executing a campaign is between three and six months. In the case of Zynga, which worked with appssavvy on brand campaigns for McDonald’s and Coca Cola in FarmVille and Cafe World respectively, there are several options that allow the developer to activate a brand campaign even more quickly, like integrating video ads, user surveys — or both.

The result, Zynga Global Director of Brand Advertising Manny Anekal tells us, is that his company really only needs six weeks to activate on a brand.

“To put that into perspective, in the traditional console space, you really couldn’t integrate into a console game in six weeks or less, so I think that’s an advantage Zynga has,” Anekal says. He describes the successful relationship the developer enjoys with movie studios who like partner with Zynga for short-term campaigns to promote upcoming film or DVD releases. “In general, movie studios plan in advance so we’re lucky they have very long [lead] times in their planning schedule, but we can execute in the near term if needed.”

Anekal goes on to describe how a movie may sometimes want to increase light integration within in a game with less than a week’s notice. To pull that off, Zynga partners with SocialVibe to deliver combined video/survey ads in-game that rewards users with virtual currency.

“We recently did a program for Disney’s Toy Story 3,” he says. “What SocialVibe has told us is that for our video engagement ads, you’re seeing time spent north of a minute long. People are not only sitting there watching [the] trailer and getting exposed to that, they’re actually engaging with the brand.

“So for Toy Story 3 it was actually ‘Watch the Toy Story 3 trailer, then tell us about your favorite childhood toy.’ You can then share that into your Facebook feed, so there’s a viral element to that. And then, the user gets something. ‘Thank you for watching our trailer, thank you for participating with us, here’s some virtual currency.’ That’s a way in which we can execute very quickly.”

As for costs, it varies both by brand type and by game. Larger games with monthly active users in the millions and daily active users north of 500,000 offer advertisers a more valuable audience with the potential to reach new customers, while smaller games with a niche audience are more about deepening the brand connection with existing customers. Light integration is usually paid for via flat rate fee to cover production costs. We’ve heard that small niche games can fetch between $10,000 and $25,000 per month for brand integration, and mid-sized games range between $25,000 and $50,000 per month.

Beyond the fee, payment comes from cost per engagement or impressions from social game players. In cases where a branded virtual good is for sale, the developer and advertiser share revenues from the sale.

The Future of Light Integration Is Depth of Engagement

Light brand integration depends heavily on how much an advertiser feels a game’s audience is worth, but the real power in the dynamic comes from developers. Most game developers will not do campaigns with brands that don’t offer some added value to players, no matter how much money the advertiser offers the developer.

“The brand target needs to match the target of the game,” Anekal says. “We have said no to brands where it would detract from the gameplay or take away from the audience. We’re taking baby steps to make sure our advertising is done right.”

As the market evolves, we expect to see light integration formalize into specified relationships between games and brands and also to see a set of advertising companies try to position themselves as campaign brokers between the two. For Zynga’s part on light integration, Anekal hints at a more regular set of weekly campaigns to promote upcoming Friday releases of films. Cunningham, meanwhile, describes appssavvy’s upcoming platform service for advertisers that would allow them to purchase a specific in-game activity (e.g. buying a good, completing a poll, etc.) as opposed to planning out an entire campaign.

As these relationships develop, we expect to see the price of light integration shift upward as advertisers try to work out how much a user’s action is worth compared to the current value of cost per engagement or impressions measurements, while the overall cost to developers shifts downward through standardized integration mechanics like the Toy Story 3 video ad. Join us next week for a look at medium level brand integration with social games. To find out more about specific branded campaigns within social games, sign up for The Facebook Marketing Bible.

[Toy Story 3 promotion image via Games.com]

This week’s list of fastest growing Facebook games based on monthly active users is lead by Playdom’s new game Gardens of Time. We reviewed this hidden object game earlier this month and thought that the road to fast growth might be particularly difficult for the game, given the lack of success of other hidden object games on Facebook. So far, Gardens of Time is showing impressive early numbers that have already proven it to be the most successful Facebook game of its genre to date. In just a couple of short weeks, Gardens of Time has gained 2.2 million MAU and does not seem to be slowing any time soon — although it’s not clear if the growth is mainly due to ads, or other more organic factors.

Another newcomer to this week’s list is yet another hidden object game, Game Insight’s Mystery Manor. According to AppData, our metrics service for monitoring the top games on Facebook, Mystery Manor grew 27% over the last week and now has 1.3 million MAU. We took a closer look at both Gardens of Time and Mystery Manor last week and compared the two games.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Gardens of Time	2,808,546	+2,212,494	+371%
2.	Diamond Dash	5,280,036	+1,131,291	+27%
3.	Zombie Lane	2,968,106	+1,014,474	+52%
4.	Monster Galaxy	10,609,602	+782,563	+8%
5.	Bubble Saga	1,420,215	+747,996	+111%
6.	Gourmet Ranch	3,671,512	+510,671	+16%
7.	TrainCity	1,350,059	+468,420	+53%
8.	Texas HoldEm Poker	36,142,185	+398,508	+1%
9.	Bubble Island	7,018,260	+282,568	+4%
10.	Mystery Manor	1,307,813	+276,450	+27%
11.	Happy Hospital	2,314,839	+261,813	+13%
12.	Crime City	6,998,803	+210,447	+3%
13.	King.com	932,506	+209,675	+29%
14.	FameTown	856,562	+196,604	+30%
15.	Mahjong Trails	2,476,796	+186,337	+8%
16.	CSI: Crime City	2,309,698	+182,224	+9%
17.	Jersey Shore	1,579,223	+180,563	+13%
18.	UFC Undisputed Fight Nation Game	495,495	+169,519	+52%
19.	แฮปปี้เกาะ	401,098	+166,839	+71%
20.	Monster World	6,715,004	+163,411	+2%

A brand new game to the leaderboard this week is UFC Undisputed Fight Nation, the officially branded MMA game developed by THQ. This game feels very similar to other branded Mafia Wars-style clones, such as the official Jersey Shore game (also on this week’s list). In UFC Undisputed Fight Nation, players spend energy to train up various fighting skills that are used in ‘battle’ with other players. Leveling up in the game allows players to allocate statistics to give themselves more energy, stamina, or strength. Win/loss records are prominently displayed and players are encouraged to add friends to the game to give them additional sparring power. Though heavily polished, the game seems to be lacking in depth and originality. Whether the UFC branding will be enough to keep this game on an upward trend remains to be seen at this point.

Stay tuned for our look at the top weekly gainers by DAU on Wednesday, and the top emerging Facebook games on Friday.

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

New Company Shadow Government Aims to Model the Real World for Social Gaming — In what promises to bring together real-world data and gaming features, the startup is hoping to help predict actual events. It has $1 million in backing from angel investors, and a partnership with The Millenium Institute, which sells government-modeling software. “Now, for the first time, anyone with an iPhone or Android can ‘play’ at what it’s like to simulate running a real country,” chief executive Margaret Wallace said in a press release. “Let’s see if, using the model provided by The Millennium Institute, this Shadow Government can do a better job of managing actual events and world crises compared to our real-world counterparts.”

Playfish CoFounder Now EIR at Index Ventures — Sami Lababibi wasn’t the best known of Playfish’s four cofounders, but he was its technical leader, overseeing the company’s rapid growth on Facebook, and the first phases of its integration into acquirer EA. Having left last month, he’s now an entrepreneur-in-residence at Playfish backer Index Ventures.

Capcom Opens Subsidiary in Japan to Develop New Mobile Content — The established developer intends for the new organization to create original intellectual property game, and focus on developing its mobile social gaming market outside of the US, witha a special focus on Japan and Asia. More details from the company here.

Zynga Closing Mafia Wars on MySpace — Other developers have shut down some games on the struggling social network, as we’ve been covering. Now Zynga, which so far has only closed one game, is ending formative hit Mafia Wars (the Facebook version is meanwhile still going pretty strong despite a gradual long-term decline).

Hi5 Recategorized as Gaming Site by comScore — It is now the sixth largest such property in the world, with 21.7 million unique visitors — a far smaller user base than when it was a social network, but still something to work with as it continues its positioning as a social gaming platform.

FooPets Maker Raises Second Round — Rivet Games, formerly known as FooMojo has added a $5 million second round to its initial funding of nearly $10 million, as it plans more social and mobile games. The money is from existing investors Softbank, Baseline Ventures and Floodgate.

Hidden object games recently got a lot of love on Facebook from publisher 6waves‘ Mystery Manor and developer Playdom‘s Gardens of Time despite the genre’s historically poor performance on social networks. With both games completely live and mostly populated, we compare and contrast the two to see who wore it better.

Mystery Manor was the first to market with a playable product live in mid March that officially launched in the first week of April. The game comes from Russian developer Game Insight, which has two other medium-sized games on Facebook via 6waves’ publishing platform. Players take the role of a character trapped in a mysterious manor where each room represents a hidden object puzzle. Rooms can be replayed numerous times to increase an overall mastery level and earn items and experience points. New rooms unlock as the player gains levels.

Gardens of Time hit Facebook about a week later, right around the time developer Playdom also launched the role-playing game, Deep Realms. Interestingly, it seems as though Deep Realms enjoyed a lengthy alpha test phase on Facebook beginning as far back as February when the app first appeared on AppData. Gardens of Time appeared literally overnight and already surpasses Deep Realms in traffic (ISG contributor Tami Baribeau goes into more detail about the competing launches on her blog). The game adds a decoration meta-game to its design where players earn reputation by decorating their gardens, and the reputation unlocks new levels, each being a hidden object puzzle.

At a glance, Gardens of Time is killing Mystery Manor on traffic. At 2.2 million monthly active users and 941,000 daily active users, Gardens is roughly twice the size of Manor in user base. Its percentage of DAU/MAU is also much higher at 42% compared to 12%. But which is the “better” game? While we’d like to think a game’s quality determines its size, we are aware that ad spend and cross-promotion can have a significant impact on a game’s MAU and short term DAU. It’s important to remember that Playdom has the larger network from which to leverage cross-promotion and it also is a much larger company than Game Insight, which would indicate that it has more resources to dedicate to advertising campaigns.

Gameplay-wise, there is a subjective element in determining which game is the better hidden object game. Rather than make that judgement for you, however, we’ll present the ways in which the two games differ:

• Mystery Manor changes the locations of items in a puzzle each time a level is played. Gardens of Time keeps objects in the same places.
• Gardens of Time features different hidden object puzzle types such as spot-the-difference and spot-as-much-as-you-can-in-60-seconds. Mystery Manor uses the same puzzle type, but features modes where the words of the objects you’re looking for are scrambled, or only the silhouette of the object is displayed instead of its name.
• Mystery Manor is punitive with players that do not complete puzzles within a time limit, kicking them out of the level if they fail to find all the specific objects. Gardens of Time rewards players with a scoring multiplier for finding objects quickly, but never kicks users out of the puzzle.
• Gardens of Time is punitive with players that click the screen too much, suspending player action for five seconds with a chiding message. Mystery Manor doesn’t appear to have any punitive actions for click-happy users.
• Mystery Manor organizes its quests around earning specific items through completing puzzles more quickly. Gardens of Time has a plot-based quest system that moves the player forward as they gain a reputation score by decorating their gardens.

On the monetization front, Gardens of Time appears to have an edge because of its decoration component through the garden and through special premium puzzles. Both games monetize through the sale of special items that make the puzzles easier or more rewarding for the player in terms of experience points or item drops. Mystery Manor has some premium puzzle payment options for players that want to unlock higher level rooms early and could easily implement paid-only puzzles in the future.

The bottom line is that both these games benefit in traffic from each other’s existence. We can see from their MAU and DAU charts that both have enjoyed growth in their first few weeks of life, which disproves the idea that one would take the audience away from the other. If anything, having two hidden object games with energy restrictions on players is a boon because players can wait out cool-down time in one game by killing time in the other. They trick to making the relationship work is targeted advertising so that Gardens of Time users know that there is another hidden object game out there; Facebook’s new game discovery methods may come in handy here.

We’ll keep an eye on the traffic trend for both Mystery Manor and Gardens of Time as they post-launch climbs level off. You can follow each game’s progress on AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

It has been an intense week for freemium game developers on Apple’s iOS platform — and the drama has yet to be resolved, as we’ve been covering over on Inside Mobile Apps. By last Sunday, a number of service providers for iOS developers were reporting odd changes in Apple’s top apps rankings in its iTunes App Store.

Some apps rose to the top after months of lower rankings for no apparent reason, while others were buried. Facebook, for example, suddenly became the most popular top free application on iOS despite not having made any recent changes and not having been #1 since at least July 2009 — which suggested that daily and monthly usage could be newly important factors. At the same time, some games lost their ranking spots. But as of Tuesday, the rankings changed back to favoring new games that apparently had high downloads rates. It’s not clear what factors Apple is considering now in the rankings.

Meanwhile, developers began receiving rejection notices starting late last week from Apple for new submissions that contain offer walls where users can get rewards for downloading other developers’ games. The rejection notices argue that offer walls have an “excessive influence” on the chart ranking.

Apple has been mum and many service providers have also gone quiet as they try to come to up with solutions. We’ll be covering these changes as we learn more, over on Inside Mobile Apps.

In the meantime, we’ve been leading coverage of the issues over the past week. In case you’ve missed it, be sure to check out the following articles, in chronological order:

• Apple May Have Tweaked App Store Ranking Algorithm, Making Downloads Matter Less
• Facebook’s iPhone App Vaults to #1 on Suspected Ranking Algorithm Changes
• Apple Appears to be Cracking Down on Incentivized Installs
• Odd Rankings Fluctuations Continue in Apple App Store
• Mobile Game Developers Grapple With Apple Crackdown on Incentivized Installs
• Pocket Gems’ Tap Pet Hotel Scales to #2 on iOS Free & Grossing Charts, Offer Wall Conspicuously Absent