This Week’s Headlines From Across Inside Network

• Apr 17th, 2011
Social Games

Here are all the latest headlines from around Inside Network.

IMA LogoInside Mobile Apps

Tracking the convergence of mobile apps, social platforms, and virtual goods.

Monday, April 11th, 2011

Tuesday, April 12th, 2011

Wednesday, April 13th, 2011

Thursday, April 14th, 2011

Friday, April 15th, 2011

ISG LogoInside Social Games

Covering all the latest developments at the intersection of games and social platforms.

Monday, April 11th, 2011

Tuesday, April 12th, 2011

Wednesday, April 13th, 2011

Thursday, April 14th, 2011

Friday, April 15th, 2011

IF LogoInside Facebook

Tracking Facebook and the Facebook platform for developers and marketers.

Sunday, April 10th, 2011

Monday, April 11th, 2011

Tuesday, April 12th, 2011

Wednesday, April 13th, 2011

Thursday, April 14th, 2011

Friday, April 15th, 2011

New Jobs This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: Spooky Cool Labs, Acquinity Interactive, TinyCo & More

• Apr 16th, 2011
Social Games

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 Spooky Cool Labs, Acquinity Interactive , TinyCo, Buffalo Studios, Arkadium, NaturalMotion and Daglow Entertainment.

Daglow Entertainment

Listings on the Inside Network Job Board are distributed to readers of Inside Mobile Apps, Inside Social Games and Inside Facebook 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.

Social Gaming Roundup: Turner Broadcast, Foursquare Day, Branding, & More

• Apr 15th, 2011
Advertising, Business, casual, facebook, international, iphone, Marketing, Mobile, Playdom, Social Games

TeePee GamesTurner Broadcasting Europe Partners with TeePee Games — Games discovery platform for social, mobile, and online titles, TeePee Games, has announced a new partnership with Turner Broadcasting Europe. Through the partnership, TeePeewill both receive funding for the platform’s development as well as gain access to Turner’s digital games content.

Wooga is 4th Largest Social Games Developer After 20 Months — According to our AppData service, German outfit wooga has become the fourth largest social games developer on Facebook 20 months after its debut. The company, who recently released its newest title, Diamond Dash, currently hosts just almost 21 million monthly active users and just over 3.6 million daily active users.

Foursquare Day“Foursquare Day” Proclaimed in New York — Mayor Mike Bloomberg has announced that April 16, — 4/16, the fourth sixteenth of the year - to be “Foursquare Day” in New York City. Events include a myriad of check-in events from around the world.

GREE & mig33 Announce Partnership — Japanese mobile social gaming platform GREE and mobile community mig33 have teamed up this week. With the partnership, GREE has opened its GREE Platform for smartphone, which mig33 will make use of, allowing games to be easily deployed on the platforms of either company.

Google Checkout Purchases to Get More Seamless — Google Checkout is slated to become more seamless according to an interview between Vikas Gupta and Google Checkout Blog. He states that in the near future, they will be bringing Jambool’s — which was acquired by Google seven months ago — Social Gold technology to web applications purchases on Google.

We City iPhoneWe City Adds Century 21 Brand Promotions — Social-mobile city-builder, We City, from developer ngmoco, is adding in a promotion from real estate agent company, Century 21 (with the help of appssavvy). Until April 26th, users can purchase branded Century 21 buildings for their virtual cities.

Free-to-Play Style Games Could Come to Xbox Live — Proven successful in the social space, IGN has reported a rumor from a “trusted source,” that Microsoft will begin making free-to-play games available through their Xbox Live service. Users will then be able to purchase additional content for these games at their own convenience.

Sacred Seasons 2 MMORPG – a Re-telling of the Tale

• Apr 15th, 2011
Social Games

Sacred Seasons 2 is a massively multiplayer role playing game with a multi-class system that, despite the name, is not a sequel but a re-telling of the original story. Created by Emerald City Games and previously self-published on Facebook, Sacred Seasons 2 more than quadrupled its monthly average users from about 27,000 to 193,500 when they partnered with Facebook game publisher 6waves. Sacred Seasons was what Derek Day, CEO of Emerald City Games called their “first kick at the can” as they had never made a flash game or MMO before. Sacred Seasons 2 was to be an improved replacement of the original Sacred Seasons which enjoyed a peak of over 16,000 MAU according to AppData, our data tracking service. A small but loyal fan base (1,500 MAU and about 4% DAU/MAU) persuaded Emerald City Games to continue supporting it, although in a limited manner, through small content updates.

In Sacred Seasons 2, players choose between the usual close combat, ranged combat and magic wielding classes of a fantasy MMO with an added twist; the flavors that the seasons of spring, summer, autumn and winter bring, each with a custom look. This gives the game an engaging multi-class system where players can switch between classes and seasons, leveling each separately. This system is not uncommon in console games such as Square Enix’s Final Fantasy Tactics and most recently in Trion World’s MMO, Rift.

Sacred Seasons 2 is a full-featured MMORPG, with storyline driven quests, synchronous multiplayer gameplay, and formation of guilds, global as well as local chat, and a large community that congregate on the official forums. Global chat is available on the Facebook page itself while local chat is done in-game via a chat bar. Sacred Seasons2 also provides leader boards for top individual experience gainers as well as guilds and friends have the ability to send each other gifts of cosmetic items at this time. Like other free-to-play MMOs, it monetizes through the purchase of in-game gold which can be used to buy consumables such as XP potions, weapons and cosmetic items. At an exchange of 1,000 gold for 100 Facebook credits, or about a penny to a gold, items range from 4 gold potions to the popular 150 gold hairstyles, to 1,500 gold level 150 weapons.

All Sacred Seasons 2 players are served on the same server, which is to say, despite the different portals from which the game can be accessed, players all play in the same world. The game can be played through the Sacred Seasons website, Facebook and Kongregate. This seems to be the current state of technology and the MMO MilMo is also served through Facebook and developer Junebud’s own website. Player accounts are bound to portals due to contractual services provided by the different portals.

Emerald City Games was proud to report MAU in the millions on Kongregate and future plans to introduce crafting, pets and the improvement of guild functions in the game. With a strong partnership with 6waves, we can expect Sacred Seasons 2 to grow on Facebook as it gets publicized through the network. This growth can be tracked by interested readers on our data tracking service, Appdata.

The Maturing Market For Brand Integration With Social Games: Part One

• Apr 15th, 2011
Social Games

Brand engagement through social games covers a wide range of efforts from labeled in-game items to entire games built around a recognizable name. As we see more brands entering the space by signing partnerships with major social game developers and publishers, we break down the different types of brand and levels of engagement to see where successful brand engagement is more likely.

WHY BRAND?

Social games represent a number of potential opportunities for marketing brands by offering a deeper level of engagement than any print, television, or radio ad medium. By integrating a brand with an existing social game, advertisers can have exposure to a ready-made audience that potentially represents a new set of consumers. By creating a game specifically for an existing brand, an advertiser can provide support and viral growth to existing brand customers.

Brand integration can also bring game developers and their customers and added value. Through brand integration, a developer can receive significant funding from the advertiser, which in turn fuels development of new content for end users. The typical model for brand integration in a social games comes from a cost-per-engagement or impression interaction within the game. This makes the cost of brand integration in social games comparable to traditional media buys.

To give you an idea of how successful a brand campaign can be through a social game, consider our findings on a promotion for Disney’s recent film, Tron: Legacy within nightlife resource management social game, Nightclub City. This two-week event is credited with 120 million minutes of brand engagement between the number of times the film’s page was Liked, the number of times the trailer was viewed and the number of times the film’s Daft Punk theme song played in-game on a jukebox item. According to our analysis of the campaign in The Facebook Marketing Bible, over 3.1 million Tron virtual goods were consumed in-game during the campaign.

The catch is, developers must divert production resources from their games to make the brand integration happen. As developers hire more artists and become more agile in their development of specific objects, some of this opportunity cost dissolves; additionally, the payment from the advertiser can offset the worst of it. However, as more brands enter social games through integration, we are beginning to see new layers of integration develop that may change the nature of the opportunity cost and perhaps the payment dynamic between advertiser and game developer.

LAYERS OF INTEGRATION

To begin, we break out degrees of integration into three tiers: light, medium, and deep. Light brand engagement in a social game takes the form of branded items for sale or in-game decorations featuring company logos. Medium brand engagement is a little more involved on the game mechanic level, usually involving a themed quest or storyline or a special character with whom players can interact that clearly bears an association to a brand. Deep brand engagement is the easiest to identify because in most cases the brand is the entire game.

Light brand integration is the most common form of engagement across both Facebook and mobile social games. In just the last week, we’ve heard of partnerships between Toyota and EA to bring a branded Prius item to Monopoly Millionaires and between ngmoco and Century 21 to feature branded buildings in We City.

These small-scale promotions are relatively easy to pull off because, at their most basic, they only require one or two pieces of artwork. We observe, however, that crafting branded artwork represents an opportunity cost to the developer whose artists probably have a list of permanent in-game items they could be working on as opposed to a branded item that only appears in the game for a limited time. We also observe that light integration may not be the best way to encourage brand engagement; light integration presents no click-through opportunities or real world rewards to kick-start player interaction.

Medium brand integration is less common, although notably developing over the last six months as brands have worked with games to build a more detailed player experience that fosters a higher level of engagement. Most recently, we saw the Rango film promotion in FrontierVille in the form of a branded quest with special item rewards. Medium integration represents more of an opportunity cost to developers because of its higher demands on the game design team to build a quest or write dialogue for a new character; however, it also seems to be a more structured campaign because this type of engagement usually only lasts for a short amount of time leading up to a real world even, like a film’s theatrical or DVD release.

Deep brand integration is familiar to Facebook and mobile social games, but so far not consistently successful. The most successful ones we can name are properties where the brand is somehow a game in itself, like game show games based on Wheel of Fortune or Family Feud. However, we also see sports brands like the National Football League and FIFA performing well in social games, even without a playable sport component. Additionally, we also see some social games like Jersey Shore or CrowdStar’s Old Navy game, It Girl, finding success even though the brands don’t exactly lend themselves to game mechanics. This is easily the most demanding form of integration on the game developer, but it also represents the biggest risk to the brand promoter because there’s no way to guarantee that people will actually come and play a new game no matter how familiar the brand might be to them.

BRAND TYPES: A Case Study

Sorting brand integration into these three levels presents us with an interesting idea: not all brands are equal in social games. True, both Megamind and Tron are films — but are they both equally served by light integration into social games? Or does one property lend itself better to medium integration given the social game’s audience?

These questions will become increasingly important as more brands seek out integration through social games. For the moment, we see a large volume of brands coming from consumer products like the food and fashion industries as well as a significant portion of entertainment media brands like TV shows or board games and even other video games.

If there are some brands that lend themselves better to deep integration and some that can only use social games at the light level, then it’s useful to segment brand types to better understand which ones fit within which layers of integration. We’ll be addressing this part of the discussion through case study analysis within each of the three layers of integration in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

RPGs Battle It Out On This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Games

• Apr 14th, 2011
Social Games

This week’s list of emerging games — those still under 1 million monthly active users — is filled with new titles that we haven’t explored yet. Leading the pack this week is TrainCity, a game we’ve talked about quite a bit on Inside Social Games. We reviewed this LIFO Interactive city builder in January, and noted that it looked great and was well-designed but might not end up being a successful game due to the city theme being a crowded space. According to AppData, (our metrics platform for tracking the top Facebook games) TrainCity has grown by 66% this week up to just under 800,000 MAU. It’s possible that TrainCity will end up doing well despite its genre being one of stiff competition.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

Name MAU Gain Gain,%
1. TrainCity 796,878 +317,492 +66%
2. Flutter 463,363 +181,493 +64%
3. Deep Realms 445,943 +169,432 +61%
4. Social Empires 997,380 +140,498 +16%
5. Treasure Land 666,385 +118,360 +22%
6. แฮปปี้เบบี้ 416,324 +112,589 +37%
7. Boss Vegas 299,732 +108,349 +57%
8. King.com 690,359 +101,045 +17%
9. Monster Hero 199,952 +93,387 +88%
10. CROWDPARK – Betting Game 311,408 +80,620 +35%
11. Miner Speed 667,958 +64,309 +11%
12. 雄霸三國 155,271 +61,839 +66%
13. Home Fest 128,008 +59,681 +87%
14. Dragon Age Legends 800,634 +56,239 +8%
15. Sanalika 347,294 +46,161 +15%
16. Smeet 385,506 +44,221 +13%
17. Punch Punch Revolution 226,789 +39,993 +21%
18. Mucit Köy 179,283 +39,858 +29%
19. Sacred Seasons 2 MMORPG 193,548 +37,714 +24%
20. Treasure Madness – Maya Gems 758,964 +32,165 +4%

It has been quite some time since we’ve been able to talk about a Playdom game on our weekly leaderboards, but this week Deep Realms is giving us the opportunity. We took a close look at this classic RPG-meets-Facebook last month when it first launched. We felt that it was a very interesting foray into the world of RPG style games that are so popular on other platforms, but that an addition of more story elements would take the game to a new level. Deep Realms’ early metrics look interesting — though it is on a steady incline in terms of MAU, its daily active users are fluctuating more than what is usual for new games. It has also already fallen down to under 14% DAU as a percentage of MAU, which is a good early indication that its retention is lacking. This could be because Playdom are using a lot of internal cross-promotion efforts and the demographic of most of their other games is not congruent with the more core gameplay of Deep Realms. It will be interesting to watch this game as it attempts to bring fresh innovation to Facebook.

Monster Hero is a pet-battling RPG that works as a nice comparison to Deep Realms. In this equally-as-stylized core game for a more mixed gender audience, the battles are determined by an Angry Birds-style minigame as opposed to the turn-based combat in Deep Realms. Monster Hero launched in February, just a month before Playdom’s RPG and is growing at around 50% of the pace (but retaining players slightly better). Of course, new developer Phoenix Age is lacking in the existing userbase to utilize for early traffic, and it’s also lacking Playdom’s budget. Yet Monster Hero is an equally appealing game, with a cute art style, some interesting minigame mechanics, and a similar content-heavy map requirement.

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

Playdom Pushes Its Own Games Portal

• Apr 14th, 2011
Social Games

A mid-morning tweet from Playdom directed us to a new Playdom.com games portal where two of its games are playable without the use of Facebook, MySpace, or other platforms. As with Zynga’s FarmVille.com, Playdom appears to be experimenting with running games in an environment that it controls — without the requirements that come with the Facebook platform, such as using Credits as the exclusive paid currency in games.

Wild OnesAt the moment, only Wild Ones and City of Wonder are available on Playdom.com as completely independent playable experiences. The developer’s other titles, ESPNU College Town, Social City, Bola, Market Street, Sorority Life, Mobsters, World Series of Poker, Gardens of Time and Deep Realms, are linked to their existing platforms through a Playdom.com landing page (the long-standing format for the site).

Note that Playdom games aren’t pure cross-platform play experiences where you can keep a consistent game running between Facebook and MySpace. In other words, a Facebook Wild Ones player looking to migrate to a Playdom.com hosted game would have to start the game over completely and register for a Playdom.com account. This will likely impact players using the mobile version of games that allow for light cross platform play between iOS/Android and Facebook/MySpace in a similar fashion.

Regarding Credits, you won’t see the currency on the new site (although Facebook has only recently begun testing Credits for games off of Facebook). Payment options in Wild Ones and City of Wonder include Tapjoy’s offer wall, credit card, PayPal, Ultimate Game Card, Amazon Payments, Coinstar, prepaid cards, or pay-by-mobile with Zong and Paymo.

It could be that Playdom plans to add its entire games catalog to Playdom.com in the coming months. If so, it and Zynga have similar ideas about breaking away from Facebook to form their own social games networks. Zynga has most prominently been pursuing this idea with a reported $500 million round of funding closing ahead of plans to launch Zynga Live sometime this year. In the last few weeks, the FarmVille developer already introduced an in-game virtual currency system outside of Facebook in the form of RewardVille and earlier this week it added a Fan Army site, which could be used as an infrastructure for Zynga Live user profiles.

With Facebook Credits becoming mandatory for all social games by July, many social game developers are being forced to end existing relationships with payment service providers. As evidenced by the laundry list of ways you can pay for things in Wild Ones and City of Wonder, Playdom can maintain its current pay systems through its own site. Another added benefit of running its own show is that Playdom can make payment options available to parents of younger players in a way that Facebook cannot. This could be a crucial connection for Playdom to make, being that parent company Disney’s audience tends to skew toward a younger demographic with limited access to money.

As of press time, the company hasn’t responded to request for comment on the long-term plan for Playdom.com.

Playfish Taps Ex-Planet Moon Studios CEO for Studio General Manager

• Apr 14th, 2011
Electronic Arts, Social Games

Playfish announced this morning that Aaron Loeb, former CEO of game developer Planet Moon Studios, joined the social game developer as General Manger. In his new role, Loeb will oversee production on both branded intellectual property and original games.

The move tells us how serious Playfish is about expanding its games library across a range of products, especially branded IP. During his 10 year career at Planet Moon, Loeb oversaw production on many branded IP titles, such as a sequel to Nintendo DS game Drawn to Life for Wii and most recently tie-in games for Disney film Tangled on both DS and Wii. It’s worth mentioning that Loeb also has a background in writing both for games and about games, having been the founding editor-in-chief of games blog UGO Network.

As Playfish moves toward expansion, the developer is sunsetting three of its older titles and ramping up development on Monopoly Millionaires. To date, the game has 6.2 million monthly active users and 788,000 daily active users according to our traffic tracking service, AppData.

New Hires in Social Gaming: Booyah, CrowdStar, Gaia, & More

• Apr 14th, 2011
Business, Hires

Last week’s hiring activity may have dropped dramatically, but that trend has turned around completely as a high number of social developers have hired on new team members; according to data from LinkedIn.

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:

Booyah

  • Kale Menges, UI Artist — A single hire appears at Booyah this week. Menges was previously a concept artist at Gearbox Software.

CrowdStar

  • Patrick Dugan, “Journeyman” Game Designer — Now a part of CrowdStar, Dugan was previously a game designer at Vostu.

Gaia Interactive

  • Jen Bennet, Contract Artist — A new artist appears at Gaia Interactive. Bennett was a freelance illustrator at HoriPro Music Academy.

GSN

  • Keith Johnson, Account Executive — Joining GSN this week, Johnson was previously an associate account executive at Turner Broadcasting.

Kabam

  • Jarrod Schwarz, Senior Director of Marketing — Now at Kabam, Schwarz was most recently the senior manager of Internet marketing at eBay.
  • Courtney Kettman, Player Experience — Kettmann was previously an account manager at World Centric.
  • Ken Hu, Senior BI Data Engineer — Hu was previously a “technical Yahoo” at Yahoo!.

LOLapps

  • Peter Henry, Software Engineer — This week’s first hire for LOLapps, Henry was previously a lead gameplay programmer at Infinite Interactive.
  • Mike Bear, Concept Artist — Also now joining LOLapps, Bear was a concept artist at Rockstar Games.

Playdom

  • Steve Day, Quality Assurance Analyst — Joining Playdom, Day was previously a customer service supervisor at Hit! Run! Score!.
  • Naveen Selvanathan, 2D Artist — Also joining Playdom, Selvanathan was a facial animator at DQ Entertainment.
  • Ronald Wan, Software Engineer — Wan was previously a software engineer at Involver.
  • Derek Becker, Art Director — Becker was most recently an art director and lead artist at Bottle Rocket Entertainment.

Playfish

  • Simon Hunger, Artist — There is a single noted hire for Playfish this week. Hunger was previously a lead environmental artist at Curve Studios.

RockYou!

  • Ed Stepanovsky, Director of Sales — As noted prior, Ed Stepanovsky joins RockYou. Prior to this, he was a national sales executive at AdGent 007 Inc.

Wooga

  • Chiara Grotti, Social Media Marketing – Country Manager Italy — One hire appears for wooga this week. Grotti was previously an online marketing trainee for Italy at Digital Performance GmbH.

Zynga

  • Jay Srinivasan, M&A Integration Operations — Joining Zynga this week, Srinivasan was most recently an associate principal at McKinsey & Company.
  • Hilten Kapadia, Senior Payroll Accountant — Also joining Zynga, Kapadia was an “accountant II” at Gilead Sciences.
  • Vaibhav Sharma, Java Developer — Sharma was previously a Java consultant at NetApp.
  • Kris Deguast, Principal Software Engineer — Deguast was previously a software consultant at Farelogistics.
  • Deepali Dixit, QA Analyst — Now a part of Zynga, Dixit was a QA engineer for Wells Fargo.
  • Alden Seabolt, Product Manager — In an internal change at Zynga, Seabolt changes roles from Associate Producer for Texas Hold’Em Poker.
  • Christy Bontrager, Associate Artist — Bontrager was previously a background painting and visual development intern at House of Chai.
  • Tony Wu, Game Design Intern — Another new team member at Zynga: Wu was a 3D animator and digital designer at RealPage, Inc.
  • David Westrom, Dev Manager — In another internal change at Zynga, Westrom changes roles from senior software engineer.
  • Jens Stark, Game Lead — Stark was previously a German customer and billing support representative at GOA Games Service Ltd.
  • Wendy Riggs, Litigation Paralegal — Riggs was previously a student at George Fox University.

New Jobs This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: Daglow Entertainment, Buffalo Studios, Arkadium & More

• Apr 13th, 2011
Social Games

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 Daglow Entertainment, Buffalo Studios, Arkadium, NaturalMotion, Spooky Cool Labs, Acquinity Interactiv and TinyCo.

Daglow Entertainment

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.

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