Role-playing games lost some ground in our list of top 20 emerging games on Facebook, but Hollywood industry RPG FameTown was able to grab the top spot. Going farther down the list, we’re pleasantly surprised to see THQ’s UFC Undisputed: Fight Nation clawing its way up to number three only a week after its official launch. Give our ongoing interest in brand integration with social games, UFC Undisputed is definitely one to watch in the coming weeks. Other than that, we see a healthy smattering of gambling-themed games covering everything from slots to poker. Much as we’d like to draw a correlation to the FBI crackdown on the three largest online poker websites last Friday to the apparent growth in this genre, most established poker and gambling social games saw no discernible impact in the seven days following the shutdowns.
It looks like Japan’s GREE is feeling the heat from rival DeNA to break into Western markets for mobile-social gaming.
The company said today that it acquired Burlingame-based OpenFeint for $104 million, which follows on DeNA’s purchase of ngmoco:) last fall for $400 million. The idea is that together, GREE and OpenFeint will build better distribution channels for mobile game developers globally, although their solution will not be a unified global network, but rather a set of locally-targeted services.
OpenFeint provides social features for games like leaderboards and ways for players to share achievements with their friends. It says it reaches 75 million users through 5,000 games and it produced a net loss of $6.6 million through the end of the fiscal year 2010, according to financial documents accompanying the announcement. It had net sales of $282,500. Chief executive Jason Citron and the rest of the employees will stay on board with incentive packages to keep them.
With Diamond Dash eating its way through traffic on our weekly gainers lists and Bejeweled Blitz allegedly monetizing better than one might think, we turn our attention to the match-3 genre of arcade game for a look at the Facebook leaders on our social game traffic tracking service, AppData.
The match-3 genre is unique among arcade games because of its simplicity; just the name of the genre alone tells you exactly how to play the game. Many games within the genre build upon the basic game by incorporating rules and mechanics to create a slightly different game that still fits the genre. In the case of Diamond Dash, for example, players try to cluster three or more like-colored gems in any formation to clear them from the board as opposed to the classic match-3 gameplay of laterally swapping like-colored items to line up three in a row. Carry the match-3 variations too far, however, and you wind up with a different kind of arcade game. For example, Zuma Blitz has players trying to match like-colored balls to clear a board; but the balls roll along a path toward the player’s avatar and the player shoots matching balls at the rolling column in a way that relates the game more to pinball or a shooting gallery.
For the purposes of this analysis, we limit our definition of match-3 to games with the objective of clearing a board full of items that otherwise do not move without player interaction. This eliminates “Tetris clones” where the player starts out with a completely empty board bombarded with moving items and games where the player shoots a projectile into a cluster of items to match colors. Note that we also exclude games where match-3 is only offered as a mini-game or as part of a larger arcade games portal.
It should come as no surprise that “the original” match-3 game tops all others on Facebook. Interestingly, it also tops all other arcade games of any description by a margin of at least 2 million users. Players swap like-colored gems into columns or rows of at least three to clear the gems from the board and earn points. The game monetizes through the sale of power ups that increase score or somehow change the layout of gems on the board.
German social game developer wooga has several titles in its library that come close to being match-3s, but of them all, only the newly-released Diamond Dash fits our definition of the genre. Players attempt to cluster like-colored gems in groups of three or more to clear them from the board. The game doesn’t appear to have any monetization features or power-ups in place at this time.
Though once a very popular game with an MAU north of 2 million and a DAU over 400,000, this classic match-3 game hasn’t seen much traffic in the last three months. Jungle Jewels adds something the core gameplay through a collection mini-game where players try to complete the image of a statue by completing levels. The game appears to be suffering from technical difficulties on Facebook as of press time.
Fortune Stones launched last month and doesn’t seem like its hit its high point in growth yet. The game adds a strategic level of gameplay and lets users customize the game board.
*Note: Due to a miscategorization, Fortune Stones was previously left off this list.
Much like Diamond Dash, Collapse asks players to click on clusters of like-colored squares to clear them from the board. Like Jungle Jewels, the game’s long term appeal doesn’t seem very strong, having decreased in MAU and DAU by more than half from its all-time high numbers.
*Note: Due to a misinterpretation of the game’s description, Collapse was previously left off this list.
This game adds an adventure game element to the match-3 gameplay where users navigate to different points on a map to trigger a match-3 engagement. Unlike Jungle Jewels, it looks like Jewels Rock never really caught on with Facebook players, reaching barely double its present-day numbers eight months after launch before dropping off. When we interviewed MegaZebra’s CEO some weeks back after a new round of funding, he indicated that this and other older MegaZebra games might be getting updates in the future.
Jewel Stars is perhaps the least aggressive when it comes to iterating on the match-3 core gameplay, which is perhaps why it doesn’t seem to have reached a very large audience. The game also notably slows down the pace most match-3 tend to keep, suggesting that it’s aimed at a younger audience.
Conclusions
Looking at this list, it’s clear to us that merely copying the base game of match-3 isn’t enough to create an arcade game with mass appeal. Clever iterations, however, may not be enough either as we see that Poseidon’s Realm just missed the top five match-3 games despite some significant tweaks to the core gameplay (including a shifting board). Rather a more subtle quality issue seems to be at the key to a match-3 game’s success, where one game’s gem drop rate and speed of registered clicks just “feels” better than another.
Knight’s Story is a Facebook game that blends exploration, building and combat gameplay. The game is developer Anute.com‘s first Facebook game in a planned range of games that will share the same universe and art style. Knight’s Story is currently in open beta and has reached 1,990 monthly active users and 356 daily active users on our data service tracking application, AppData.
The game places players in the role of a male or female knight, the colors of whom can be customized in a relatively robust character creation system. Anute intends this avatar to be transferable between Knight’s Story and their future games. Players start with a bare plot of land and two half-finished buildings which can be completed immediately to provide an initial income of coins and keys. Coins are spent on both building materials and items which the player’s knight can use in the field. Keys are used to open areas on the map and can be traded with other players. Different players obtain differently-colored keys, so much of the social aspect of the game comes from collecting enough friends to cover all possible key colors.
Outside their city, players can explore grid-based maps one square at a time to uncover items, coins, experience points and non-playable characters who need assistance. Sometimes this is a simple matter of bringing them an item they need, while at other times it requires defeating an adversary through a very simple turn-based combat system. As is the norm for this type of game, everything costs energy except moving through already-explored squares. This energy is used both for exploration and building, so players will need to plan their energy use in advance if they want to expand their castle as well as make discoveries in the world.
The game is monetized primarily through the sale of premium items and batches of virtual currency. The most obvious form of payment is Facebook Credits, but virtual currency can also be bought in batches with PayPal, direct payment and offer walls. Some building materials and energy-restoring items can only be acquired via Facebook Credits.
Anute believes that the genre-spanning gameplay of Knight’s Story makes it stand out in a field of similar games. “At the moment you can build your city, travel and fight,” says Angel Maze of Anute. “In most other games, you usually only do one or two of these. We tried to include multiple different mechanics.”
Maze says the game has a clear expansion strategy, with the introduction of an Arena area for players to battle each other planned for mid May. New buildings, maps, characters and regions are also planned to be rolled out gradually and keep people interested. Soon, players will also be able to trade with their friends for quest items as well as keys, which will add another layer to in-game social interaction.
Knight’s Story open beta launched on February 23. You can follow its progress on AppData, our traffic tracking application for social games and developers.
Playdom Co-Founder Rick Thompson puts a lot of faith behind original intellectual property in the social games space. So much so that his investment project, Idle Games, spent 18 months and four cloud gaming-related patents crafting a God game for Facebook unlike anything the platform has seen so far. The title, IdleWorship, is due to go live in June.
Inside Social Games met with Thompson and Idle Games CEO Jeff Hyman in the developer’s San Francisco office for an early look at the game. The only exposure IdleWorship had prior to this showing was at stage demo from Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch during an Adobe MAX 2010 keynote last year (see video below). In our demo, Hyman showed us video captured in-game as well as brief selections of gameplay actions from the closed beta version of the game.
At the outset, we marked a similarity between IdleWorship and Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield’s browser-based game, Glitch, which we previewed yesterday. Both games put high value on art and on player-created environments, and even have a similar development history having both been in development for about 18 months before entering closed beta. The key difference here is that IdleWorship is for Facebook while Glitch is not.
Core Gameplay
IdleWorship puts players in the role of an actual god overseeing a society of primitive island people called Mudlings. Through traditional city-building tools, the player can impact the lives of the Mudlings by creating structures, wildlife, landmarks, and even new islands for them. The primary goal of player interaction with the Mudlings is to inspire Belief, which is used as the game’s default virtual currency. Players spend Belief on the city-building component of the game, on premium decoration items, and on “God events” that directly affect the Mudlings — such as lighting strikes or healing.
Players have the option of being a benevolent or a malevolent force in their Mudlings’ lives, but the game does not directly penalize players for morality choices the way good/evil dichotomies in traditional console games sometimes do. If a player neglects interaction with the Mudlings, they become agnostic and eventually atheist, making it harder for the player to order the Mudlings to perform tasks. At the other end of the faith spectrum, a player that interacts with Mudlings frequently and on a large scale (think inflicting a natural disaster) will inspire god-fearing Mudlings with nervous facial tics. No matter how the player interacts, the world is balanced in a way that does not allow higher level players any special gameplay advantages. For example, you can build the best boats to collect the most fish — but your Mudlings will get fat eating the fish and eventually starve when they run out of fish altogether.
Social Features
All of the above is the asynchronous aspect of IdleWorship; but the real sell for the title is the synchronous gameplay among other “God” characters. Players can visit a friend’s island and interact with their Mudlings, either benevolently or malevolently with the previously mentioned God actions. These visits can turn competitive as players can “steal” Belief from each other by converting Mudlings of wavering faith. Alternatively, players can set up shrines of their friends within their own Mudling populations to award their friends free Belief.
Many of these actions are coordinated such that players can actually see another player’s interaction with their Mudlings in real time when they log in instead of just receiving a in-game notification screen. For example, you would log in to the game and actually see a giant hand come down from the sky to flick one of your Mudlings off your island as opposed to only seeing a pop-up window with the words “AJ flicked your Mudling! Would you like to smote one of hers?” There is a window that does keep track of these God interactions and clicking on it will either take you to a friends island or open up a real time chat window with that friend (if they’re online).
By far the most intriguing thing about IdleWorship is its technical advances in network-building and friend-finding. Rather than peopling a friends bar along the bottom of the screen with your actual Facebook friends, the game interface only displays your island at the center of a vast ocean filled with other islands ruled by other “God” players. Some of these players will in fact be your friends, but the game’s friend-finding technology also peoples the landscape with players that engage with IdleWorship in similar ways. In other words, a 45-year-old woman who generally plays a benevolent role in her Mudlings lives will find islands of players within her demographic and her play style around her, as opposed to being introduced to 19-year-old malevolent college players that like dropping Mudlings in volcanoes.
IdleWorship breaks the ice between unacquainted Gods through its social features. For example, a Mudling you flick off your island might land on the island of another player not on your Facebook friends list; that player then has the chance to meet you by thanking you for the additional Mudling or by visiting your island to try to convert your Mudlings away from this mean God that flicks them. The islands of players with whom you interact the most will drift closer to your island over time while players you rarely or never interact with will drift to the edges of the ocean and eventually disappear, thus visually representing your social graph.
Design and Art
Aside from the technical advances made toward friend-finding, IdleWorship also built custom technology to support cloud gaming and persistent environments. The game is an unsharded experience, meaning that all players play in the same world at the same time as opposed to being divided by various servers the way many traditional massively multiplayer games are. This increases the efficacy of the friend-finding mechanic and makes it possible for players to impact multiple other players through a single social interaction (e.g. summoning a sea monster that ravages dozens of islands at once).
The final feature that separates IdleWorship from all other Facebook games live to date is the visual quality of the experience. The art is all handcrafted 2D cel-shaded animation with an incredibly high level of detail that scales effectively when zooming in or out, or toggling full screen mode. Players still view the game from the fixed “God” angle perspective typical of social games, but the details are still visible in tantalizing flashes that prompt the player to replay actions over and over again looking for more visual treats. For example, during the video portion of the demo, we watched two Mudlings go inside a hut to procreate. When the doorway expanded to let the two lovers in, we caught a brief glimpse of what looked like a heart-shaped bed and a disco ball.
Monetization
Monetization, as it turns out, is one place where IdleWorship is similar to other social games on Facebook. The game uses Facebook Credits as its premium currency, which players can spend on Belief, on premium items, and on reducing the amount of cool down time on God powers. Idle Games hopes that players will invest Credits mostly in customizing their Moai, the idols that represent the player’s God status on their islands. This seems like a reasonable assertion as some of the Moai are very desirable; one of the ones we saw was an arcade cabinet idol that actually displayed an animation of a Donkey Kong-style game cast entirely with Mudling characters. IdleWorship plans to use both Frictionless Credits and Buy With Friends as part of its monetization system. The developer is also considering releasing the title on mobile and other social networks outside the United States.
IdleWorship is a significant title for Facebook, pushing the boundaries of what developers think is technically possible with Flash and pushing our conceptions of what goes into a social game’s development. Should the game be successful, it will mark a shift in social games away from the quick copy model Thompson isn’t fond of to the creative-driven studio model that gave rise to modern Hollywood that he envisions the social games ecosystem becoming.
According to data from LinkedIn and other sources, the big flow of new hires listings, that began last week, continues. Ten social developers have brought on new faces with a handful of new major hires as well from Atakama Labs, Kabam, and Playfish. Tara Einis joins Atakama Labs as their new director of marketing and business, while Aaron Loeb, whose hiring we highlighted after the new hires post last week, is now the general manager at Playfish in San Francisco. Kabam, meanwhile, has not only hired more individuals than even Zynga this week, but they brought in Andy Riedel as their new vice president of mobile.
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, and is only as current as people’s profiles.
Looking for new opportunities? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.
Tara Einis, Director of Marketing & Business — As noted already, Tara Einis joins Atakama Labs this week. She was previously the director of marketing for Gala-Net.
Antti Hattara, Vice President of Product Management — In an internal change at Digital Chocolate, Antti Hattara changes roles from director of product management for social games.
Jason Wigle, Community Manager — Joining KlickNation, Wigle was previously a product manager for Prima Games.
Paul Durbin-Johnson, Senior Systems Administrator — Also joining KlickNation, Durbin-Johnson was most recently a Linux systems administrator at William Sonoma.
Paula Escuadra, User Acquisition Specialist — Escuardra was previously a senior game advisor for GameStop.
Aaron Loeb, General Manager, San Francisco — Though we highlighted his hiring at Playfishafter the hires last week, the LinkedIn data for Aaron Loeb is now updated. He was previously the chief executive officer of Planet Moon Studios.
Glitch is a web-based “social” massively multiplayer online game developed by Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield at his studio, Tiny Speck. The developer recently closed a $10.7 million round of funding ahead of entering closed beta, which Inside Social Games got a taste of this week.
The game is interesting for several reasons, notably for the part where it plans to use mobile components to supplement its core browser gameplay, which would provide more revenue streams than what a lot of social games have. These components aren’t in place in the beta, yet, but Butterfield elaborated on some future plans to monetize through paid iOS and Android mini-game apps. The game also plans to feature APIs that players can use to incorporate art from Glitch into other mediums. Facebook Connect integration is planned to get users started playing the game, but Tiny Speck doesn’t think it could get enough screen real-estate out of Facebook to justify a full Glitch app.
Butterfield describes Glitch as a “collaborative simulation,” and claims it draws its inspiration from influences as diverse as hardcore MMO space simulation EVE Online and the turn-based strategy Civilization series. The team wondered what SimCity would look like from the perspective of the tiny people on the street, and Glitch is an attempt to realize that while drawing visual inspiration from stylized titles such as the Katamari Damacy and LittleBigPlanet series. Butterfield says the biggest influence on Glitch is “games that have their own unique style.”
The game allows players to explore, socialize, gather materials and learn skills — and like EVE Online, players don’t have to be actively playing the game for their skills to develop. There is no combat in the game, no set goals or quest lines, and players are free to explore the world and set their own priorities rather than following a linear path. Butterfield is keen to emphasize the fact that unlike many other social games, Glitch is “a synchronous, shared, persistent world as opposed to a single-player game where you can just peek at your friends’ progress.” And unlike many other MMORPGs, there are no “shards” or “servers” in Glitch — the game world is one contiguous entity with a single ecosystem and just one economy. This will help promote a coherent community, rather than fragmenting it by server.
Aside from the planned iOS and Android mini-game apps mentioned above, the game will be monetized through in-game premium currency, although this hasn’t yet been implemented. (Update: Premium currency was added to the beta as of late yesterday.) Butterfield tells us that the team has been keen to stay away from selling gameplay assists wherever possible, and try to keep to a policy of only offering premium cosmetic customizations. There will also be a subscription plan available, which will unlock a number of skin colors, facial features and clothing for “free” as part of the package. Butterfield also says players will have the ability to purchase ads for their in-game services, corporations, religions and cults.
Social features in the game are diverse. There’s a solid chat and IM system in place already. An upcoming feature will allow larger groups to have their own “group hall,” much like a guild hall in a traditional MMORPG. There are also a number of collaborative projects to complete throughout the game world. These encourage mass cooperation in the name of unlocking new areas of the world, so everyone has a reason to contribute, but those who contribute the most will have appropriately larger rewards.
Tiny Speck doesn’t have a final release for Glitch scheduled as yet, and the team intends to continue active development for “many years.” At present, the game world is only available for specifically scheduled tests, but the beta period will feature more regular, lengthy test opportunities. At present, there are 39,000 people in the queue to join, but soon the game will switch to a system where players will be able to invite their friends rather than all invites having to come from Tiny Speck itself.
Glitch will open to the public later this year, “when it’s ready.”
Casual games developer PlayFirst has a successful background on PC and iOS downloads, but so far the company has only introduced three of its franchises on Facebook. Of those, only Diner Dash seems to be thriving — thanks to a $9.2 million round of funding, a loyal fan base, and tight integration with Facebook Credits.
Diner Dash launched on Facebook early this year and saw strong growth throughout the month of February. Since that time, the developer has been steadily adding new features to the title, including additional playable restaurants and purchasing options via premium decorations and gameplay boosts. It also recently added Frictionless Credits as a payment option for boosts and is planning to integrate Buy With Friends in the next couple of weeks.
In the meantime, PlayFirst is sunsetting its second Facebook title, Chocolatier: Sweet Society, before the end of the month. In a farewell message posted on its blog, the company explained that the title was no longer performing at a level that justified the expense of maintaining it. Sweet Society players are being offered a special discount on the PC version of the game for a limited time. PlayFirst’s oldest Facebook foray, Wedding Dash Bash, went offline in September 2010, roughly six months after its launch.
We spoke with Eric Hartness, vice president and general manager of social games at PlayFirst, about some of the lessons the team is learning to make Diner Dash a sustainable Facebook game. Though it would’ve been easy to port the original PC retail game to Facebook, PlayFirst approached the platform instead with a new game in the series, complete with its own storyline and character cast.
“That was one of the key challenges, adapting the gameplay from a disc to a live game on Facebook,” Hartness says. “Our core audience is older women, so it works out really well with all the older women on Facebook. [The Facebook audience] is a bit different. We’ve got about 20 percent male, when historically we’ve been 90 percent female. We’re seeing a younger demographic as well and international players. So Facebook has really allowed us to broaden our audience.”
Diner Dash currently has 2.3 million monthly active users and 196,000 daily active users on AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers. It already surpasses Chocolatier’s peak traffic of 902,000 MAU and 119,000 DAU, which the game reached in October 2010, five months after its initial launch. Wedding Dash Bash boasts far less than that at all-time highs of 164,000 MAU and 15,000 DAU. Hartness points out that Diner Dash achieved these results not through ad buys or extensive cross promotion within its iOS title, but through sheer brand recognition with existing fans.
“Recently we’ve been testing with some ad spend, but predominantly most of our installs have occurred without it,” he says. “This is something that I’m very proud of. It showcases how much the fans love Diner Dash. We have over 58,000 reviews and we’re holding steady at 5 stars, a claim most of our competitors can’t make.”
In the long run, PlayFirst hopes to sustain Diner Dash’s growth through additional monetization features and steady content support. As detailed in our early look, the game is structured around the traditional restaurant time management gameplay and a park decoration meta-game where players can spend the currency they earn from working shifts at the restaurant. PlayFirst has adjusted the traditional gameplay so that players can only play two restaurants for free and must spend Facebook Credits to unlock premium restaurants. Recently, the developer downgraded a premium restaurant to an unlockable restaurant that players can earn by increasing their star rank.
Hartness says the company is thinking of different ways to do these downgrades. “We might use [materials gifted by friends] or an ‘invite friends to unlock’ [mechanic], or some different combinations to work that out,” he tells us.
For now, the social features in the game are limited to gifting energy or items used for decorating restaurants, visiting friends’ parks to help out with daily missions, and some light leaderboard integration. Hartness says that the leaderboards will be “beefing up” in the near future with weekly tournaments, score-tracking, and the ability to challenge friends.
On the horizon is the possibility of integration with the larger Diner Dash brand. PlayFirst has a large enough fan base to where cross-promotion could be especially helpful to the Facebook version. Hartness is no stranger to the ideal of cross-platform cross-promotion, having spent nearly nine years at EA before entering the social games space.
“We have talked about it but we haven’t gotten to that stage yet,” Hartness says . “Chris Williams who heads up the iPhone team and I have talked about it, about how can we link Diner Dash on iPhone and Diner Dash on Facebook. It’s very cool conceptually, but very difficult technically. How can we carve out the time?”
Chocolatier: Sweet Society closes officially on April 28. You can follow Diner Dash’s progress on AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.
Listings on the Inside Network Job Board are distributed to readers of Inside Social Games, Inside Facebook and Inside Mobile Apps 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.
Facebook is testing a new version of the Discover New Games sidebar module introduced last month. Along with showing friends who play a certain game, this version asks users if they want to hear about games more or less often.
How much game content to serve to non-gamers and how to determine who is a gamer have been two long standing questions for Facebook. Now the site looks to be asking users directly, rather than deduce the answer from their behavior.
At a press event in September 2010, CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained the issue presented by the rift between gamers and non-gamers. “One of the biggest drivers of negative experiences has been games. There’s all these people who want to play games, and all these people who don’t want to play, who view it as spam. Two hundred million people or more are playing games on the site. When you poll users, one of the top 5 things they like is games, and one of the top 5 things they don’t like is games.”
Up until then stories generated by the in-game actions of friends had clogged the news feeds of people who didn’t play games. Facebook then altered the feed such that users would only see App Discovery stories about friends installing games, and stories from friends about in-game actions of games they’ve already installed. This significantly reduced the virality of many games to the dismay of developers.
Some developers complained that there was no way to acquire new users without paying for advertisements, so Facebook introduced the Discover New Games module. However, those who’ve never or only occasionally installed a game might find the module useless.
This tested interface asks “How often would you like to see ‘Discover New Games’?” with buttons to respond “More Often” or “Less Often”. This allows users to inform Facebook of their preference so it can show them different modules such as “Friends’ Photo Albums” or “Unread Messages“.
Role-playing games lost some ground in our list of top 20 emerging games on Facebook, but Hollywood industry RPG FameTown was able to grab the top spot. Going farther down the list, we’re pleasantly surprised to see THQ’s UFC Undisputed: Fight Nation clawing its way up to number three only a week after its official launch. Give our ongoing interest in brand integration with social games, UFC Undisputed is definitely one to watch in the coming weeks. Other than that, we see a healthy smattering of gambling-themed games covering everything from slots to poker. Much as we’d like to draw a correlation to the FBI crackdown on the three largest online poker websites last Friday to the apparent growth in this genre, most established poker and gambling social games saw no discernible impact in the seven days following the shutdowns.
FameTown
King.com
UFC Undisputed Fight Nation Game
Game-Athanaton-De
Flutter
Miner Speed
World Series Superstars: Baseball with MLB teams!
Monster Hero
Deep Realms
Boss Vegas
CROWDPARK – Betting Game
Slot City
Poker Star
Footbo City
Fortune Stones
Temple of Mahjong
Bizim Çiftlik
Puzzle Saga
Home Fest
Sanalika
The company 
Playdom Co-Founder Rick Thompson 
All of the above is the asynchronous aspect of IdleWorship; but the real sell for the title is the synchronous gameplay among other “God” characters. Players can visit a friend’s island and interact with their Mudlings, either benevolently or malevolently with the previously mentioned God actions. These visits can turn competitive as players can “steal” Belief from each other by converting Mudlings of wavering faith. Alternatively, players can set up shrines of their friends within their own Mudling populations to award their friends free Belief.
Monetization, as it turns out, is one place where IdleWorship is similar to other social games on Facebook. The game uses Facebook Credits as its premium currency, which players can spend on Belief, on premium items, and on reducing the amount of cool down time on God powers. Idle Games hopes that players will invest Credits mostly in customizing their Moai, the idols that represent the player’s God status on their islands. This seems like a reasonable assertion as some of the Moai are very desirable; one of the ones we saw was an arcade cabinet idol that actually displayed an animation of a Donkey Kong-style game cast entirely with Mudling characters. IdleWorship plans to use both Frictionless Credits and Buy With Friends as part of its monetization system. The developer is also considering releasing the title on mobile and other social networks outside the United States.
Glitch is a web-based “social” massively multiplayer online game developed by Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield at his studio, Tiny Speck. The developer 
Casual games developer 
In the long run, PlayFirst hopes to sustain Diner Dash’s growth through additional monetization features and steady content support. As 
