PopCap Launches New Studio — Games developer, PopCap Games has launched a new development studio by the name of 4th & Battery. The new studio is intended to create “smaller, simpler, and sometimes edgier games,” bringing some of PopCaps “more experimental ideas to customers.” Their first game is Unpleasant Horse for iOS — but it has just been rejected by Apple.

MySpace Executive Joins Tagged — According to TechCrunch, MySpace executive, Tish Whitcraft has left the company to join social network Tagged as its new chief customer officer. In this role she will starting with the replacement of 50 India-based customer service contractors with full time employees in San Francisco.

Factor 5 Veterans From Social Company — Former employees of the closed U.S.-based studio of Factor 5 — the company that developed core games such as Star Wars: Rogue Squadron — have formed a new social company called TouchFactor, says Gamasutra. No titles have been announced.

OpenSocial State of the Union 2011 — The OpenSocial Foundation has announced its State of the Union event for May 12, 2011 between 1pm and 5pm. The free event will involve presentation from community members and will allow other users to participate in a pre-SOTU event before and a Happy Hour/Poster Session after.

Quepasa Partners with Tutudo — Latin-oriented social network Quepasa has partnered with Tutudo this week. Through the partnership, Quepasa will bring Tutudo’s ewallet payment system to social games across the network.

History Channel Gets Into Social Games — The History Channel is getting into social games this week, says EngageDigital, with the launch of Pawn Stars: The Game. The app is developed by Gamenauts.

The Fall of MySpace — Most are aware of the rapidly declining MySpace, but for those looking to catch up, Reuters has released a very in-depth report on its downfall; highlighting weaknesses in the network’s technology, management, and the rise of Facebook.

Having begun life as a photo-sharing app on MySpace in the middle of last decade, RockYou rose to become one of the largest app developers on Facebook in the early years of the platform, before being overtaken by Zynga and other social game developers.

Meanwhile, the company has widened the scope of its business, launching an advertising network and a subsidiary in Asia.

Following this range of efforts and mixed results, the company is now refocusing all parts of its business around social games.

Lisa Marino is leading the transition. A revenue development executive who joined the company in 2008, she has moved up over the years, serving as RockYou’s chief revenue officer where she managed its media business, before taking the chief operating officer role last year. Yesterday she was named the company’s new chief executive. It’s now her job to make all the pieces fit together, a challenge we explore in the interview below.

Inside Social Games: You’ve been with RockYou since 2008, and you’ve been heading up operations since last August. Walk me through the transition process that brought you to today.

Lisa Marino: I became COO in August. At that time, our games and ad businesses both reported to me. We had a lot of work to get done in terms of bringing in new talent that would allow us to build games effectively.

First, We brought in Jonathan Knight [from EA] in October, and he’s been the lynchpin of rebuilding our games. Lance [Tokuda] chose to step down in late September.

Shortly after Lance stepped down, we made a lot of tough decisions to get the business on track and focused on social games. Then, we cut cash burn by 60% at the end of last year, which put us in a situation from a cash perspective where we had 2 to 2.5 year run-rate. After that, we went after some big problems that had been low-hanging fruit. For instance, JK cancelled the games pipeline, because they weren’t going to be successful, and instead started a new games pipeline from scratch. Last, we also completed two acquisitions in Q4 — Tirnua and Playdemic — which brought us terrific gaming talent as well as a live game.

Additionally, we continued hiring more creative gaming leaders with much more traditional gaming DNA. JK and his team have been able to attract a pretty experienced group — Steve Cartwright, a 30 year gaming veteran, and John Yoo from Zynga were early key hires.

Then in Q1 we started rebuilding the executive team, which has been in place for the last 5-6 weeks. We brought on Julie Shumaker, our GM of Media, who has been in media gaming for a very long time and Katrina Osio, SVP of Marketing, another gaming and media vet.

Our tough decisions taken recently have yielded quick results. We ended up beating revenue Q4 2010 revenue projections by 40%, and at this point the gaming investments we made are near launch — including Zoo World 2 coming out in May.

ISG: That’s a whole new game, right? Not just an expansion?

LM: Definitely a new game — new art, simplified mechanics and a revamped economy. There are some screenshots and forums and fan pages. We’re super excited. The focus groups have been pretty positive so far. [The official Page is here.]

ISG: And you have a Loot Drop game coming?

LM: Yes, we have [John] Romero’s game. We’ve worked really hard to build a quality games pipeline and partnering with proven game makers was part of a strategy where we evaluate content more broadly.

Besides Zoo and Loot Drop, we are more generally a two-studio company now — the Playdemic team in the UK and our headquarters here in Redwood City.

ISG: You’ve repositioned to social gaming, but you’re keeping your ad business. Can you tell me more about how the pieces of the company fit together at this point?

LM: We’re the only company that can combine the ability to make gaming content as well with the very powerful incremental monetization that our media business brings.

Our media business is still incredibly large: 300M impressions a day on our ad network, 170M uniques a month — it’s a great engine for user acquisition. We also do brand sales, including ad integrations into games.

We’re able to increase ARPU 25% to 30% every single month because of our brand sales initiatives — when we’re buying users on Facebook, that makes a lot of difference for life time value. [Ed. You can check out RockYou traffic data on AppData, our tracking service for top apps and developers on Facebook.]

As a social gaming company, that doesn’t mean we just make games. We focus on games, how they’re built, distributed, and monetized.

ISG: Can you explain more what you’re providing to other developers now?

LM: We’re still selling installs for other developers. The inventory of ad network is almost all Facebook — it’s app inventory, games, quiz apps, video apps, poking apps.

The core of our business is not necessarily to take the app ad network and grow it to compete with Lifestreet. It’s really about leveraging the asset for distribution, as well as monetization within those apps.

We’re building out our brand team to really boost up monetization within games. Ad content for us doesn’t necessarily mean we’re just selling for games that we build at RockYou. It may mean that we sell brand ads for other developers’ games.

ISG: Are you moving more into publishing as well?

LM: The Romero deal is a very classic old-school gaming publishing deal. We own the IP when the game launches.

We’re having lots of conversations about publishing other peoples’ games — it’s something we’re starting to look at more seriously.

ISG: Can you tell me more about how your brand ad sales work?

LM: When we think about brand side, we don’t run a lot on our ad network. It’s more more ad units within a handful of partner games; our deal of the day unit is terrific and as of 15 months ago WAS industry leading for in-game innovation.

We do a lot of other types of brand ads — page takeovers, branded virtual items, or other custom branded experiences.

When you think of the value brands add in a game, one must remember that 1% to 2% of users actually pay, but everyone wants to level up.

ISG: As a social game developer, you’re competing with Zynga and everyone else. But who do you see as your competitors in the publishing and cross-promotion parts of the ecosystem — would you consider 6 Waves a competitor, for example?

LM: We think of publishing in a very different way from 6 Waves. We only want to be supporting 4 to 7 titles at a time as a company. This includes our owned and operated games. Think of us publishing a game as one of our main shots on goal for the quarter — we’d just take on 1-2 per quarter. It’d be targeted, opportunistic and because we love the game and fits in to portfolio.

For the brand ad network, it’s separate from our publishing operations. But just as we’d be incredibly targeted and focused on a game we might publish, we’d also be that way about who we sell brand ads for.

ISG: You also have RockYou Asia, and co-founder Jia Shen is heading it up — how is that organization fitting in with everything else you’re doing?

LM: RockYou Asia is majority owned subsidiary. We launched it a couple years ago. We’re excited about what Jia is working on. RockYou Asia is focused on mobile, particularly in Japan but Asia more broadly as well. Jia and his team are a main part of RY family. He and I connect regularly as to what’s going on, although they’re independent. We have supported it with funding, coordinating around image, marketing, and brand presence.

There’s a fair amount of cross-pollination, but we’re much more Facebook focused, while they’re much more mobile.

We’re looking forward to next the few months, as he gets more launches under his belt, and as he and the rest of us learn more about what works in Asia.

ISG: How are you looking at mobile within the main RockYou business?

LM: We don’t think social gaming is defined just as Facebook any longer. For anyone, mobile needs to be part of the business. I think that within 12 to 18 months, there’ll be one or two more venues — platforms that we can be on as well.

During Q2 we will flesh out our mobile strategy, but honestly, my number one goal is to continue growing and expanding our Facebook presence. We’ve done a lot in last 60 days in terms of rising through rankings. On the MAU side, before we were 14 or 18. We’re number seven in MAU and are about 4 million away from the number four spot on game launches.

ISG: Circling back to your RockYou’s nearer term social gaming plans, what are you seeing in the industry now.

LM: Production quality on Facebook games is going to keep going up in the next 12 to 18 months. There are new demographics, more hardcore gamers coming on. We’re still bullish on the platform.

In terms of current games, although costs have gone up for CPI over the last few months, we’re buying profitably on Gourmet Ranch.

We’re also moving on to Facebook Credits. For us, Credits have been neutral or a net positive on Gourmet. The demand that Facebook has talked about for awhile is starting to play itself out. At the end of the day, you have to have good games in order to positively arbitrage. Otherwise you won’t make it.

You need to have a mix of cash, cross-selling, and a good game.

Late last month, Playfish announced on its forums that due to poor performance in Pirates Ahoy, Poker Rivals and Gangster City, the developer would be taking the titles offline on Tuesday, June 7, 2011. A study of these three games’ life cycles characterizes the challenges of killing off a social game built into a larger developer ecosystem.

Note: Lifetime data was collected from our application and social game traffic tracking service, AppData. To view these numbers for yourself or any traffic information beyond the current 30-day period, sign up for AppData Pro.

Pirates Ahoy, July 2010 – June 2011

MAU Today: 267,000
DAU Today: 40,000

Pirates Ahoy is a combination treasure hunting and city building game where players take the roll of a pirate plundering the high seas for goods that can then be spent on building up a pirate cove. The game took about three months to hit its stride with users, reaching an all-time high of 6.8 million MAU and 806,000 DAU between August and September 2010. After that point, the game declined more rapidly than Poker Rivals or Gangster City, but stayed relatively sticky among its small audience with a 15% to 20% ratio of DAU over MAU after its peak months ended.

Poker Rivals, November 2009 – June 2011

MAU Today: 91,000
DAU Today: 12,000

Poker Rivals was Playfish’s answer to Zynga’s Texas HoldEm Poker, only with avatar customization as a variation to the formula. The game hit its stride very early with all-time highs of 1.5 million MAU and 130,000 DAU in December and January and then declined gradually with post-peak DAU to MAU ratio hovering around 13%. Interestingly, Poker Rivals seemed to attract a female audience why Texas HoldEm Poker’s audience remains largely male.

Gangster City, January 2010 – June 2011

MAU Today: 88,000
DAU Today: 7,000

Gangster City also seems to be Playfish’s answer to Zynga game Mafia Wars, but the quality of animation, voice over work, and polish created a completely different player experience. By the numbers, Gangster City hit its high of 2.6 million MAU and 322,000 DAU in the first three months and declined a little bit faster than Poker Rivals over the rest of its life. The post-peak DAU to MAU ratio hovers between 8% and 10%.

Why did they fail?

While the critical response to each of these games was initially positive, a reasonable person can concluded that none of these games found a large enough, or dedicated enough audience to sustain the games over time. There may be several reasons for that on the gameplay side, but that would be to difficult to quantify in a way that produces constructive analysis. Instead, we look at the factors we can see — that two of these games were incredibly similar to popular Zynga titles and that one of them came out three years after North America’s pop culture obsession with pirates had largely died off. So either Playfish found itself in direct competition for an audience, or the audience was already declining when the game launched.

What can we learn?

Given the long life each of these titles enjoyed and Playfish’s continuing success through its other games, it seems like we can draw three conclusions. First, social games don’t last forever no matter how well-designed they may be. Developers tend to build products that the hope will last indefinitely, but according to research published in Inside Virtual Goods: The Future of Social Gaming 2011, engaged users only play game for about two months before moving on. If a developer isn’t bringing new users into a game to replace them or attracting old users back either with content iterations or marketing campaigns, the decline continues and a developer reaches a point where it’s not financially reasonable to maintain a game that isn’t making money.

Second, we can draw the conclusion that consistent currency across all games in a network makes transitions from closing games to thriving games smoother. All Playfish games use Playfish Cash, so it’s easy for customers in these three dying games to take their existing balances to other Playfish games. We expect that with the launch of Facebook Credits, these game-to-game transitions will only get smoother — so smooth, in fact, that developers may find themselves adding item incentives within their own thriving games to keep customers from taking their Facebook Credits to a different developer’s game. This seems to be what Playfish is trying to do by inserting a pop-up into the closing games that invites users to join Monopoly Millionaires with a free gift item as a reward for switching over.

This is where our third conclusion comes in: developers should be aware of the similarities and difference in their games enough to suggest and appropriate “replacement” games for users grieving the loss of their favorite game. It’s probably impossible to find a perfect replacement with the same gameplay mechanics, genre, and style; but within a developer’s network, there ought to be at least one game with enough similarities to appeal to an existing user about to lose their game. Developers should go the extra mile to match these users to replacement games and perhaps let them choose which game they want to migrate to for a bonus item.

For example, right now a Pirates Ahoy user could take their Playfish Cash to My Empire because the games feature similar art styles both in-game and in the cross-promotion bar for Playfish games. This player may adjust well to the game because both feature city-building mechanics. However, the Monopoly Millionaires prompt is trying to direct them to a completely different gameplay experience than what they’re used to with the promise of a free item. It’s jarring and it compromises the user’s ability to choose their “replacement” game from among the rest of Playfish’s titles.

You can find out more about Playfish’s existing titles on AppData.

This week’s list of emerging Facebook games — which we define as those that grew the most to end the week at less than 1 million monthly active users — is a mishmash of different types of titles. On the list we have sim games such as Flutter, Happy Kingdom, and Treasure Land, puzzle games like Miner Speed and Temple of Mahjong, and casino games like WPT Texas Hold ‘Em Poker and CROWDPARK.

According to AppData,our metrics service for analyzing the growth in the top Facebook games, the largest percentage growth game from Flutter and Boss Vegas, which grew by 600% and 400% respectively. We will be watching these games closely over the next few weeks to see if they continue to grow or if they are peaking this week.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Video Galerisi	527,231	+421,321	+398%
2.	Flutter	281,870	+241,725	+602%
3.	แฮปปี้เบบี้	303,735	+236,416	+351%
4.	TrainCity	479,386	+234,371	+96%
5.	The Qpiz – L’amore è un gioco	403,488	+183,118	+83%
6.	Happy Kingdom	735,803	+155,526	+27%
7.	Boss Vegas	191,383	+153,070	+400%
8.	Treasure Land	548,025	+152,435	+39%
9.	Dragon Age Legends	744,395	+123,189	+20%
10.	Texas HoldEm Poker – Deluxe:	706,126	+99,717	+16%
11.	Miner Speed	603,649	+84,112	+16%
12.	CROWDPARK – Betting Game	230,788	+81,767	+55%
13.	WPT Texas Hold ‘Em Poker	620,720	+76,195	+14%
14.	King.com	589,314	+66,252	+13%
15.	Horse Academy	459,257	+65,207	+17%
16.	Buddy Rush	392,541	+64,226	+20%
17.	Temple of Mahjong	230,856	+62,235	+37%
18.	龍之契約	157,943	+59,904	+61%
19.	Social Empires	856,882	+56,674	+7%
20.	Punch Punch Revolution	186,796	+51,200	+38%

Boss Vegas is a game that launched in February. We reviewed this casino game shortly after it launched, deciding that it was a nicely polished game with some interesting mechanics that lacked in innovative social features and difficulty. Until the end of March, Boss Vegas was hovering at a very steady 15,000 MAU before taking off in the last week. Judging by the falling retention percentages, it would appear this was the sudden introduction of a cross promotion or marketing spend. Boss Vegas was developed by Happy Elements, who also have the titles My Fishbowl and Happy Kingdom.

Punch Punch Revolution is an interesting game by Alii, Inc that launched last May to little fanfare. It’s touted as a motion control game, using your webcam to detect your hands and your movement. Of course, it is a fighting game allowing you to battle enemies to level up and unlock new areas. It feels like a Flash title found on a games portal and very little like a Facebook app. In addition, the webcam feature doesn’t actually seem to function — on several computers it failed to detect a webcam. Punch Punch Revolution also does not contain many viral features, but may be gaining traffic through the Applifier network that it is a part of. There isn’t much to be impressed about at this point, but Punch Punch Revolution does inspire some interesting thoughts about the future technology and integration of Facebook games.

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

At a speed-themed panel during the Marketing Intelligence 6 Conference in San Francisco today, RockYou SVP and GM Julie Shumaker had 20 slides and six minutes to describe what she sees as the future of games. Wisely, she limited her time to talking about social games.

“The irony is that the future of social gaming will actually be social,” Shumaker said. “The evolution of social games is about game content and the mechanics that make interesting social game experiences. Content will move from clicks to storylines. We may require people to think.”

Being that Shumaker only had 20 seconds per slide to explain her assertions, not all of the ideas were fully expressed; but a notable few make a lot of sense to us. For example, she said that as social games evolve toward actual social experience, people will develop friend networks around games made up of people who aren’t actually their friends in real life. Shumaker also said that these experiences would shift from asynchronous “click and then wait for your friend” experiences to synchronous, multiplayer games.

Another interesting idea is the impact real life will have on social games in the form of augmented reality and brand engagement. Shumaker — and all of the other panelists — seemed to agree that the future of games would be a 24/7 networked experience consistent from device to device and through this constant connection, we might see real life inserting itself into the game either as a gameplay experience or as a marketing exercise. For example, Shumaker hypothesized a scenario where a player would walk into a Starbucks, complete a level in a game on his phone, and win a free latte from the store for his in-game accomplishment.

The challenge, Shumaker said, is bringing the existing hardcore gamer into the social games space. “We’ve got to blow shit up,” she said. Then, echoing a statement made in an early MI6 panel by EA Sports’ Peter Moore, she said that brands would add value to the player experience in a way that would engage them consistently.

Shumaker closed her six-minute speech with the statement that RockYou would play a part in all of this. “We will continue to innovate our ad products,” she said. But at the same time, the company would continue to innovate in gameplay so that “games will finally move from clicks to experiences.”

In the latest indicator of Zynga’s maturation as a technology company, it is hiring veteran information tech executive Debra Chrapaty to be its new chief information officer.

Chrapaty has an extensive background at big tech companies, including a three-year stint as president of E*Trade in the late 90s, seven years as a corporate vice president at Microsoft, and mostly recently a year and a half as the senior vice president of collaborative software at Cisco.

While Zynga has been hiring veteran technologists since its early days, and has been especially successful in building out its own infrastructure to supports its many large games, the CIO position is to our knowledge new. And we don’t have much more information about what Chrapaty is doing (although we’re asking Zynga to share more, and we’ll update if we hear back). A press release sent to us by the company says that she’ll report to chief technology officer Cadir Lee, and it includes her official statement about the job:

Through its focus on leading technology, Zynga is redefining how we look at play. My job will be to make it easier for our employees to design and build for play. I am looking forward to tackling Zynga’s unique technology challenges and helping develop infrastructure systems to ensure that we have the most scalable, secure, and reliable systems in place.

Zynga has been busy showing off its ability to attract top talent this week. On Monday, it announced that DreamWorks chief executive Jeffrey Katzenberg is joining the company’s board of directors.

[Image via All Things D.]

Video game retailer GameStop announced a partnership with social commerce service Adgregate Markets to provide a digital storefront for GameStop on Facebook on the company’s Page.

For the last three years, GameStop has been aggressively pursuing the digital commerce space by offering in-store downloads of game content as part of special promotions, buying browser game network Kongregate, and by selling downloadable content packs previously only available through console networks Xbox Live and PlayStation Network. The company also introduced a customer loyalty program that drives customers toward browser games on Kongregate.

Despite these moves toward digital retail through social networks, however, the company hasn’t taken a plunge into the social games space; although we observe the GameStop Facebook page features a Free Games tab that directs to Kongregate and to several large Facebook games like CityVille and Mafia Wars. The lack of any real bridge to social games could create conflict where its DLC sales are concerned. For example, the Facebook store makes no mention of social games affiliated with some of the console titles it offers, notably Dragon Age Legends and its unlockable content ties to Dragon Age 2. Because GameStop frequently offers exclusive DLC packs to customers that pre-order specific games, it may be that these offers compete with DLC made available through affiliated social games.

You can check out the GameStop Facebook storefront for yourself here.

In times past, social hiring, as a whole has often fluctuated on a predictable wave of crests and troughs. Now is certainly the latter. Unlike the higher activity of last week, updates from company profiles on LinkedIn have shown a dramatic drop in activity. Only five developers have shown any sort of new hiring or internal promotions. Moreover, aside from Zynga, the hires were only of single individuals.

In regards to Zynga, the company also has one bigger higher and promotion of note. The company has brought on Beth Adair as their new vice president of taxes. Prior to this, she was the CFO of CooperVision at The Cooper Companies. In addition to this, and as we noted earlier this week, Jeffrey Katzenberg has also joined the company’s board of directors. Beyond Zynga, RockYou has made one executive move of its own, havingpromoted Lisa Marino to its new CEO.

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:

Kabam

• William Coyner, 2D Artist — A single internal change for Kabamthis week as Coyner is promoted from 2D art intern.

PopCap Games

• Colin Bricken, Lead Flash Engineer — A new member at PopCap Games, Bricken was previously director – Online Games Studio at RealNetworks.

RockYou!

• Lisa Marino, CEO — In a major internal change at RockYou!, Lisa Marino is promoted from her role as chief operating officer.

SocialVibe

• Hayley Cochrane, Account Director EMEA — Joining SocialVibe, Cochrane was previously a sales executive at Publicitas.

Zynga

• Siqi Chen, General Manager — In an internal change at Zynga, Chen was recently promoted from director of product.
• Jeffrey Katzenberg, Board of Directors — Jeffrey Katzenberg is best known as the CEO and co-founder of DreamWorks.
• Saurabh Odhyna, Software Engineer — Now a part of Zynga, Odhyna was a software developer at Yahoo!.
• Vickie Chiang, Technical Artist — Joining Zynga, Chiang was previously a production designer at Tiny Prints.
• Beth Adair, VP Taxes — As noted prior, Beth Adair joins Zynga this week. She was most recently the CFO of CooperVision at The Cooper Companies.
• Wydad Mafhoum, Localization QA Lead — Mafhoum was previously an AdWords representative and translator at Google.
• Ozerk Alpay, System Administrator — Alpay was most recently a Linux system administrator at Sony – Information Systems Europe.
• Gabriel Magaña Gonzalez, Senior Software Engineer — Now at Zynga, Gonzalez was previously the director of software development at Continental Currency Services, Inc.
• Ryan Dormanesh, Quality Analyst — Before Zynga, Dormanesh was a designer at Rockstar Games.

Mystery Manor is a hidden object game from Russian developer Game Insight and publisher 6waves that launched in mid-March. Between its two largest games, Resort World and Big Business, Game Insight enjoys over 4.2 million monthly active daily users, according to our traffic tracking service, AppData. Mystery Manor joins the lineup with 484,000 MAU and 132,00 DAU after less than a month on Facebook.

The game is interesting to us for its choice of genre. Hidden object games are rare on Facebook and we’re hard-pressed to point to a successful example. This type of game traditionally monetizes through one-time download sales and doesn’t lend itself to social networking features because of its static, solitary gameplay. Mystery Manor has some advantages to overcoming these challenges through access to 6waves’ wide audience reach and through its established success with Resort World and Big Business. Hidden object games also tend to appeal to an older female audience common to Facebook.

Mystery Manor presents users with a floor plan of a mansion and pop-up text informing them that they’re trapped in a mansion owned by a mysterious person nobody’s ever seen. Players must search each room of the mansion for clues and for a way out. Searching a room involves identifying and clicking on objects that match a list displayed on the right side of the screen when viewing a room. Variations on the puzzle include scrambling the words of the objects, displaying only the silhouettes of the objects, and narrowing the player’s field of vision to only one small, movable cone. Completing a room search in a certain amount of time nets the player collectible items, money, energy, and experience points. Some rooms are restricted to higher-level players and all rooms cost a certain amount of energy to search.

As mentioned above, monetization presents a challenge for Mystery Manor. Publisher 6waves is exploring options for effectively monetizing the genre through item sales and gameplay options. Currently, the game offers players power-ups and bonuses that replenish energy, extend the time on puzzles, or reveal the locations of objects on the search list the user can’t seem to find. Players can buy these with the game’s premium currency, Diamonds, available through Facebook Credits, offer walls, pre-paid cards in certain regions like Taiwan and Hong Kong, and other regional payment systems (e.g. Ultimate Game Card). Additionally, players can pay Diamonds to unlock rooms before completing level requirements or to buy objects to complete quests without searching rooms.

As for the social feature challenges, the game has a recruiting feature where friends who also play the game appear in each other’s mansion as once-per-day power-ups that improve drop rates in searched rooms. Players can also visit their friends’ mansions once-per-day and click on rooms to earn coins and other items. Mystery Manor also displays people on your friends list who aren’t also playing the game as icons floating around outside the mansion floor plan that can be “Invited in,” which leads to a game invitation screen.

In the coming months, developer Game Insight plans to add new rooms and a second floor of the mansion to the game. Meanwhile, 6waves is hard at work on localizing the game in Chinese, French, Spanish, Italian, German and Turkish as part of the publisher’s global audience strategy. There may also be additional localization on the English version, as some of the word choices are not naturalized to North America (e.g. “a clew of threads” versus “a ball of yarn”).

We’re keen to see how Mystery Manor does given its uniqueness. You can follow its progress on AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.