MetroGames’ Grand Theft Auto homage, Auto Hustle, debuted last October and only just now seems to be hitting its stride on Facebook as the developer announces the game’s official “launch” today. According to our social game traffic tracking service, AppData, Auto Hustle already enjoys 93,000 monthly active users and 13,000 daily active users.

The game puts players in the role of a gangster in a grimy city setting. Gameplay is structured around missions played in a top-down third person view where players control their characters with keyboard inputs similar to traditional PC games and with mouse clicks to fire weapons or use melee attacks. In our early look at the title last year, the story element of the game wasn’t readily apparent, but one of the many updates to the game appears to be story cut scenes that player unlock both by accepting and completing missions. Artwork in menus also looks like it got a makeover with some extremely visceral weapon effect animations (see below).

We spoke with MetroGames Lead Designer Joe Gatling about Auto Hustle’s prospects on Facebook given its hardcore game angle and evolutions within the Facebook games platform. In particular, we asked Gatling to explain how Auto Hustle would find its hardcore gamer audience when, traditionally, the Facebook audience doesn’t appear to host them.

“We are going to have to build a player base from scratch,” Gatling told us. “The concept of crime games on Facebook is pretty big, so we already know there is a market for the theme. The question is whether or not there is a market for both the theme and the gameplay. So attracting those players is going to be an interesting challenge.”

As it stands, MetroGames is hoping to leverage what few viral growth options Facebook has left developers with after clamping down on wall posts and friend invites. Cross-promotion wouldn’t work well for Auto Hustle given that it’s completely unlike other games in MetroGames’ portfolio. So, Gatling says, the developer is thinking of going off Facebook to search for viral growth among the audience it hopes to attract. “We’re still trying to work out how we can do that in an effective way,” he said.

It may be that Facebook Credits restores some virality to Auto Hustle in the form of features like Buy With Friends. Because Auto Hustle uses Credits as its premium currency, MetroGames has the option of using the discount system for some of its in-game items. Additionally, some of the game’s existing monetization methods would work well with Frictionless Credits, which would allow players to make purchases under $3 without having to leave the game. For example, the game allows you to bribe a police officer with two Credits when being arrested mid-mission to avoid jail, which would result in a failed mission.

“Anything that we can do to make the transactions more simple is definitely [our goal],” Gatling said. “Right now, the Facebook Credit process is a little bit jarring since it involves using Facebook’s own windows, which don’t fit with the visual style of the game. So anything we can do to simplify the process is going to help monetization. We’re definitely looking into Frictionless Credits and Buy With Friends.”

For now, it looks as though Auto Hustle hopes to cash in on its uniqueness as a means to get attention. Gatling says he was actually expecting some backlash on the level of violence in the game, but so far hasn’t heard anything that would generate the kind of controversy that could ultimately drive users toward the game. His only real concern, he said, is that people who compare Auto Hustle only to Grand Theft Auto and not to other Facebook games might come away disappointed because of the disparity between console games and Facebook games.

“We definitely think that the audience that we’re targeting may not have played that many Facebook games before since there aren’t that many Facebook games that offer the level of interaction that Auto Hustle does,” Gatling said.

MetroGames currently has 4.3 million monthly active users and 636,000 daily active users across all 16 of its Facebook games according to AppData. Fashion World is easily its largest title to date at 1.9 MAU and 311,000 DAU.

This week’s list of fastest growing games on Facebook based on daily active users features Playdom front and center in the number one position. The new hidden object game Gardens of Time has been showing a fascinating amount of growth. Launched on April 7th, Gardens of Time has gained almost 600,000 DAU in under two short weeks. This highly polished and fun game is on its way to surpass Playdom’s most popular game Wild Ones in daily activity within a day or two.

According to AppData, our metrics platform for tracking new Facebook games like this, the game is currently seeing 50% of its monthly active users logging in each day to play. Of course, this number is likely to go down quite far, as is usual for newly launched applications — but still, it’s an early indicator that Playdom has a game with good potential. For sake of comparison, Playdom’s other new game, Deep Realms, sank to under 17% DAU/MAU after two weeks.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

1.	Gardens of Time	596,468	+571,855	+2,323%
2.	Salon Street	371,572	+282,311	+316%
3.	Zombie Lane	516,889	+216,311	+72%
4.	Diamond Dash	866,976	+131,368	+18%
5.	Gourmet Ranch	433,909	+121,962	+39%
6.	Car Town	1,141,116	+115,892	+11%
7.	TrainCity	203,323	+93,313	+85%
8.	Monster Galaxy	802,546	+85,180	+12%
9.	แฮปปี้เบบี้	109,364	+74,874	+217%
10.	Happy Hospital	329,068	+71,935	+28%
11.	Mynet Çanak Okey	529,076	+68,396	+15%
12.	Pet Society	1,617,797	+65,277	+4%
13.	Happy Aquarium	909,343	+61,167	+7%
14.	Bubble Island	1,203,625	+44,689	+4%
15.	Slotomania – Slot Machines	430,976	+44,229	+11%
16.	開心寶貝	314,264	+43,260	+16%
17.	(fluff)Friends	56,001	+43,206	+338%
18.	Komşu Çiftlik	829,504	+41,280	+5%
19.	FameTown	65,593	+36,983	+129%
20.	Top Eleven – Be a Football Manager	505,173	+35,444	+8%

Zombie Lane, the newest Digital Chocolate title, has still been going strong and climbing up the charts. Having launched in late March, this zombie-slaughtering sim game has been on a direct path to popularity ever since. Though there is nothing overly original about Zombie Lane aside from a fresh theme, there is something that just feels right while playing it. Everything is in its place — well planned out quests, fun objectives, an enticing game loop, and cheerful and polished graphics and gameplay. It’s no surprise that Zombie Lane has over 516,000 DAU and 2.2 million MAU in less than a month. It’s a well done game and is now Digital Chocolate’s second most popular game after Millionaire City. Zombie Lane shows that developers don’t have to take too many risks; there is still a place for a well-designed game that sticks to the tried and true but delivers a high quality experience.

Stay tuned for our look at the top emerging Facebook games on Friday, and the top weekly gainers by monthly active users on Monday.

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

Serf Wars is a take on the empire building, real-time strategy game genre with a fairytale look and feel. When the game launched early last month, developer Meteor Games told VentureBeat that Serf Wars was an attempt to refocus development on Facebook games that straddle multiple audiences, with battle elements to appeal to the male population and a beautiful art style to appeal to the female population of Facebook gamers. Since its March 7, 2011 launch, the game has climbed to a high of 11,870 monthly active users and 2,000 daily active users on AppData, our data tracking service.

As of press time, Serf Wars can be described as a game of empire building through mini-games. Players build and create a fantasy kingdom, train an army to attack others and play mini-games to fund this building and training. The look and feel of Serf Wars is reminiscent of fantasy fairytale lands, from the whimsical art style to the “magic beans” premium  currency. The game mechanics are simple, with only gold and food as the two main resource requirements. Food is grown by building farms and is required to feed the population and the armies. Gold is gained through daily taxes collected from the population and through mini-games, which players can then spend on building and training. Other items required for particular buildings and army training activities are also earned through playing mini-games.

Like other Facebook RTS games such as Backyard Monsters and Kingdoms of Camelot, Serf Wars monetizes mainly through the sale of resources for building and reducing the time to build or upgrade structures. The game also monetizes by restricting the number of mini-games a player can use to earn gold by requiring tokens per play, which can only be gifted by friends or bought with magic beans. Certain mini-games are also unlocked through magic beans only.

Random events also occur while players are logged in the game, such as cats in trees which have to be rescued and fires that need to be put out. These events add a little flavor to the game and earn the player small sums of gold and/or experience. The battle element in Serf Wars is currently limited to attacking your friends by pitting your armies against theirs. World maps and the ability to ally with your friends to attack others are forthcoming, as is more content for the game.

On April 18, Meteor Games announced that Serf Wars’ game design would move away from its current gameplay format to more quest-based and traditional RTS game play. We will be keeping a close eye on that transition and its impact on the game’s MAU and DAU. Interested readers can also follow the growth of this game via Appdata, our data tracking service.

TechCrunch reports that Zynga hired the talent behind Czech Republic developer JamLegend, which just announced today that it would be shutting down to “move on to new ventures.”

JamLegend is part Guitar Hero music game and part online music community where players could upload MP3s to the service, which would note-track the songs for a playable experience via keyboard or guitar controller peripheral. Some premium options were available to users for in-game currency; JamLegend’s farewell blog posts says refunds are on the way for users that purchased currency with direct payment methods (PayPal, mobile, or credit card). The startup was founded three years ago by Ryan Wilson, Arjun Lall, and Andrew Lee and claims a user base of 2 million. Its Facebook application broke 85,000 monthly active users in February, according to our social game traffic tracking service, AppData.

Zynga hasn’t responded to request for comment on the report at time of press, but we know this isn’t the company’s first talent acquisition of a music game developer. Last August, Zynga bought Music Pets developer Conduit and turned them into Zynga Boston, which also added Floodgate Entertainment talent to its ranks last month. So far, Zynga hasn’t made any moves toward the music game space and we’re not sure the company ever will given the sharp decline of the music gaming genre over the last year.

Former MySpace chief executive Chris DeWolfe is stepping up his game strategy with the acquisition of social mobile game developer/publisher Social Gaming Network (SGN) and free online game network Hallpass Media this week. The move comes a little over a year after DeWolfe and a team of other MySpace leaders bought San Francisco casual-social gaming company MindJolt.

In the last 12 months, MindJolt has been expanding its reach beyond its Facebook games platform into web publishing and ad platforms as a means to monetize. Meanwhile, its presence on Facebook has been going through some fluctuations. A year ago it had nearly 17 million monthly active users and 1.90 million daily active users across all of its properties, according to AppData, our tracking service for top apps and developers on Facebook — a drop-off from previous months. Then traffic grew over last summer before starting on a long and increasingly gradual decline. Today, it has 10.5 million MAU and 1.43 million DAU.

Despite the shrinkage, MindJolt said last November that it was making $20 million in annual revenue. Other Facebook game developers have found ways to increase revenues even as MAU and DAU decline over time and it appaers that MindJolt is one of them.

DeWolfe’s long-running plan for MindJolt has been to ramp up monetization through brand partnerships and virtual goods, expand the company’s global presence both online and via smartphones, and work more closely with game developers to create games. SGN and Hallpass Media will help on both the second and third points by adding a library of iOS, Android, and online games as well as an online network of over 4 million gamers. According to the press release announcing the acquisitions, SGN has “a host” of new games set to release on iOS and Android in 2011.

For SGN, in any case, it’s a quiet ending to a prolonged saga. The company was one of the first to get into social gaming, having been spun off from FreeWebs in April of 2008 as it began to get traction on Facebook’s platform. As early rivals, specifically Zynga, doubled down on Facebook gaming, SGN decided to switch focus to mobile by the end of its first year. It went on to launch a number of successful titles for iOS devices, although it has faced intense competition from a wide range of other developers large and small.

The New York Times first wrote about the acquisitions, yesterday, with a look at MySpace’s decline in contrast to MindJolt’s rise. DeWolfe’s former social networking platform has lost users, lost game developers, and reportedly is losing revenue so badly that anonymous sources told the paper MySpace is expected to fetch no more than $100 million when owner News Corp auctions it off this year. News Corp is the one that ousted DeWolfe when it bought MySpace in 2009, and now, says the NY Times, DeWolfe may be one of the bidders looking to buy the dying the network.

EA Playfish is switching off Playfish Cash, its long-time cross-game currency, in favor of individual game currencies purchasable with Facebook Credits, the company tells Inside Social Games. The transition goes into effect starting today.

In an exclusive interview with us, Playfish VP of publishing and product management C.J. Prober described the motivation behind the move as one part quality consideration and one part agreement. With Facebook requiring all games to implement Credits after July 1, Playfish saw an opportunity to improve user experience across all its games while meeting Facebook’s requirement that it use the virtual currency. Because Playfish partnered with Facebook last year to begin the transition, the change has been the works for some time.

“It’s actually something we’re excited to get behind because we think that having individual game currencies in connection with Facebook Credits is a better user experience,” Prober said. “So going through that hurdle over the next couple of months will get us to that endpoint.”

As of this week, the developer will stop selling Playfish Cash to customers. Between now and June 30, Playfish customers with an existing Playfish Cash balance can exchange their currency for individual game currencies in any increment within any Playfish game at a one-to-one rate. As an incentive to transition, Playfish is offering customers a bonus item for the game in which the customer completes the Playfish Cash conversion. Note that Playfish is not using Facebook Credits as a premium currency within their game, which means that Frictionless Credits and Buy With Friends discounts won’t be coming to Playfish games in the short term.

“We’ve always taken the high road and really been focused on the consumers from everything from virality to payment methods,” Prober said. “Credits provides a much more seamless purchasing experience across the whole platform.”

Moreover, Prober continued, the chance to individualize game economies will make for a better user experience in the long run. Because Playfish used a single cross-game currency for its games (except in its two most recent titles, Monopoly Millionaires and World Series Superstars), the developer couldn’t offer discounts or alter prices within one game without impacting the economies of all its games at once.

“It’s one of those things that gives our game teams more independence around how they think about building up their economies, planning out their features, how they think about pricing,” he said. “As i’ts structured today, if there’s something that happens in a particular game that is a big swing away from our general economic approach across our games, that can have an impact and it creates kind of a heavy burden around coordination and working together on those economies. So [individual economies for each game] is going to allow us to act more freely on consumer demand and give our development teams more flexibility in terms of what they can offer users in the game.”

Playfish currently enjoys approximately 27 million monthly active users and 4.4 million daily active users across all its games on Facebook. The developer recently announced plans to sunset three of its older games and hired a new general manager to oversee development on new games. Follow Playfish’s progress on AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

As part of its move toward an initial public offering possibly before the end of 2011, PopCap Games is making some of its revenue information public, including the tidbit that Facebook revenues generated a significant portion of its $100 million 2010 revenue.

PopCap Games chief executive David Roberts declined to give specific numbers during a joint interview with Inside Social Games and Inside Mobile Apps, but his press presentation broke down the company’s 2010 revenues to 38% PC download, 34% mobile and 14% online. Roberts said “most” of that 14% came from Facebook, which could mean the the company made around $10 million on Facebook last year. According to our traffic tracking service, AppData, the company has about 16.7 million monthly active users and 4.2 million daily active users as of today. This makes it the #7 game developer in terms of MAU and the #3 in DAU with just two games — Bejeweled Blitz and Zuma Blitz – available on Facebook.

What makes all of this especially interesting is that PopCap games seem to monetize well on Facebook despite its games’ arcade genre categorization. Arcade games generally have smaller average revenue per user margins because the gameplay is so casual and the play sessions are so short. But according to Roberts, when PopCap monetized Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook through the sale of Coins last summer, the game reached $1 million in revenues by August. A slide included with the press kit says that total “social revenue growth” is up to $2.5 million per month.

It’s hard to say exactly what makes PopCap games immune to the monetization woes of other arcade games, but Roberts believes it has to do with how monetization is built into the game. PopCap is known for being “slow” among game developers, taking a long time to develop a game and later iterate features that impact gameplay and Roberts says this makes for a more quality product that people are happy to pay for. An additional factor may be brand recognition; each of PopCap’s franchises (Bejeweled, Zuma, Peggle, etc.) are available on multiple platforms like Xbox Live Arcade or Nintendo DS, which increases the likelihood that players will both see and engage with the games wherever they can find them.

For the moment, Bejeweled and Zuma are the only two PopCap franchises available on Facebook, although the company has been experimenting with its other brands. John Vechy, PopCap co-founder and VP of corporate strategy and development, told us that the company cancelled about three different Facebook versions of Plants vs. Zombies; although a Chinese version exists on SNS RenRen. We were told not to take this as a hint that Plants vs. Zombies would be the next PopCap Facebook game — a bullet point on the PopCap Asia press presentation asserts, “What happens in Asia stays in Asia.”

PopCap Games’ next project from the company’s recently announced 4th & Battery studio, Unpleasant Horse, is due on iOS very soon.

Last Friday at the Inventing the Future of Games symposium hosted by the University of California at Santa Cruz’s Center for Games and Playable Media, students showcased Prom Week, a social simulation game built for Facebook. The game presents some interesting challenges for games that go for deep social integration with Facebook’s social network features.

Prom Week is an experiment in artificial intelligence-based design that builds on the complex network of social interactions between humans confined to the same social group. The game plays out over a series of chapters, each starring a different character, in the school week leading up to prom. Within each chapter, players take the role of a specific character within the high school that has a goal to meet in order to enjoy prom (e.g. “Become Prom King”). Guiding the player through a series of dialog trees, the player can interact with other characters in the school and shape the social landscape. The nerdy character, for example, might break up with his nerdy girlfriend and date the popular girl in order to satisfy the goal of “Dating Popular Girl,” or he might try to make his existing girlfriend popular through social interactions like befriending a bully or making enemies of a science geek.

It sounds like satire and certainly has the potential to be depending on the tone of the written dialog. The unique thing about Prom Week, however, is the game’s ability to remember the complex layers of social interaction between characters throughout the game. For example, while trying to make the nerdy girlfriend popular, the player might try to make her interact with a skater boy character to make friends. The skater boy, however, will remember any bad thing the nerdy girlfriend might’ve said about him to another character by virtue of gossip and then shut her interaction down with a reminder that she’d said bad things about him. Other lifestyle simulation games offer this mechanic, but only in a limited scope. For example, in The Sims 3, the game might register an intense dislike between two characters as a result of the player’s manipulation, but the game itself has no “memory” of why the two characters don’t get along. This distinction is what makes Prom Week more of a “social physics puzzle” than a high school dating simulation.

What makes Prom Week’s integration with Facebook interesting is the complication of an actual social network. Josh McCoy, one of the student developers on the title, explained that his team wasn’t sure how best to implement social features into Prom Week without creating an uncomfortable user experience. For example, the game could use players’ friends lists to find people the player actually went to high school with in real life and then generate actual in-game characters based on those connections; but how much fun would that really be for a user? True, the information about with whom a Facbeook user went to high school is mostly public depending on user settings, but in-game interactions with virtual representations of these people is something McCoy and his team view as private.

For now, the Prom Week team hopes to add in-game achievements and replay functionality to the game during its beta phase. The goal is to get the game live on Facebook by the end of August or in early September in time for the start of the 2011/2012 school year. As the game is an academic research project, it will not use any monetization features. Find out more about the game on UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Games and Playable Media site.

This week’s leaderboard of the fastest growing games on Facebook based on monthly active users is dominated by Wooga’s Diamond Dash. Though the game hasn’t added any new content since it exploded in popularity last month, there is something special about matching colorful gems while increasingly ominous music plays that really makes players enjoy these games. Diamond Dash borrows quite heavily from the puzzle game titan Bejeweled Blitz, with voiceovers and sound effects that are nearly indistinguishable between the two. The result, whatever the causes, is that it’s been growing at a rapid pace (over twice as fast as any other game this week).

Another game that is making its way up the chart is Zombie Lane, the latest Digital Chocolate game. This charming and high quality social game makes zombies something for fun and entertainment rather than something to be afraid of. Zombie Lane just launched last month and already has almost 2 million MAU according to AppData, our metrics platform for monitoring the traffic in the top growing Facebook games.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Diamond Dash	4,148,745	+1,388,853	+50%
2.	Zombie Lane	1,953,632	+608,991	+45%
3.	Monster Galaxy	9,827,039	+574,330	+6%
4.	Gourmet Ranch	3,160,841	+533,645	+20%
5.	Ravenwood Fair	11,908,305	+416,912	+4%
6.	TrainCity	881,639	+274,787	+45%
7.	Car Town	8,445,387	+261,844	+3%
8.	Monopoly Millionaires	6,312,523	+247,474	+4%
9.	Dragons of Atlantis	3,310,745	+208,910	+7%
10.	Crime City	6,788,356	+208,384	+3%
11.	Slotomania – Slot Machines	1,780,430	+153,052	+9%
12.	Flutter	507,976	+146,845	+41%
13.	Bubble Island	6,735,692	+145,772	+2%
14.	Jersey Shore	1,398,660	+127,335	+10%
15.	King.com	722,831	+127,172	+21%
16.	Deep Realms	476,033	+126,799	+36%
17.	CSI: Crime City	2,127,474	+119,835	+6%
18.	Tetris Battle	2,254,343	+113,303	+5%
19.	Monster Hero	240,352	+110,713	+85%
20.	Treasure Land by Kudos Media	702,490	+105,594	+18%

Gourmet Ranch is a farming and cooking simulation game that was developed and released by Playdemic last summer (who were acquired by RockYou in January). While still a rather simple game, Gourmet Ranch brings in more elements of both growing crops and using them in production to make food. For some time, farming games were popping up left and right and players seemed to be feeling some “farming fatigue”. As a whole, there is nothing wrong with Gourmet Ranch, but it does feel as if the genre is quite stale. Players seem to be agreeing, as its monthly retention hovers around 10-13%. RockYou have stated that their prime focus is on making social games rather than lightweight applications, so we’re hoping that their future efforts will feel fresh and innovative.

Bubble Island is another Wooga game that we’ve been hearing a lot more about lately. This new twist on a classic bubble popping arcade game launched in January of 2010. When we reviewed it, we felt that it was quite the entertaining rendition of a familiar favorite. When it first released, Bubble Island consisted of a series of game levels laid out in a progression-based adventure format with increasingly difficult puzzle games standing in the way of getting to the next level. Since then, a “blitz” style mode has been added that simply allows players to play for 60 seconds and compete for a place amongst their friends on a leaderboard. Both Bubble Island and Diamond Dash have the same bright and cheerful art style and high level of polish, which leads to a great experience for players who enjoy both.

Stay tuned for our look at the top weekly gainers by daily active users on Wednesday, and the top emerging apps on Friday. The data in this post comes via AppData, our data service tracking growth and trends across the Facebook platform.