If 2010 is remembered as the year that games on social networks became a billion dollar business, 2011 is quickly becoming the year that the industry is starting to mature. Facebook is mandating Credits effective July 1st, creating massive changes in the monetization ecosystem, last year’s hit games are fighting for their lives, and new developers and games are climbing the leaderboards. At the same time, larger players are consolidating smaller studios and teams, and large media companies and traditional game developers continue to plot their social gaming strategies.

Get the Annual Membership Get Annual Membership (Includes Report + 3 Additional Quarterly Issues): $2,495 $1,995 USD* OR Buy Single Report: $995 $795 USD* * Pre-order discount ends June 13, 2011. All pre-ordered reports will be delivered on June 14, 2011.

That’s why we’re excited to announce today a new original study in our Inside Virtual Goods series by co-authors Justin Smith and Charles Hudson that is exclusively focused on spending and usage patterns in the social gaming market, entitled Inside Virtual Goods: Spending and Usage Patterns of the Social Gaming Audience 2011. The second annual installment of this report, it will be released on Tuesday, June 14, but is available for discount pre-order now.

Most of the studies on player spending and usage patterns in social games over the last year have actually been conducted by industry vendors. Inside Virtual Goods: Spending and Usage Patterns of the Social Gaming Audience 2011 is our exclusive independent look at the virtual goods spending and behavior patterns of social game players on Facebook — data you won’t find anywhere else.

About the Report

Inside Virtual Goods: Spending and Usage Patterns of the Social Gaming Audience 2011 gives you an inside view of the market at this critical juncture in the intersection of social networking and online games.

We have surveyed nearly 2,000 players of social games on Facebook from around the world and across the demographic spectrum. Inside Virtual Goods: Spending and Usage Patterns of the Social Gaming Audience 2011 is the most in-depth independent survey of player behavior and spending patterns in the social gaming market.

What We Cover

1. Spending Habits and Payment Methods in Top Games – It’s easy to compare games based on audience numbers, but which games monetize better? What payment methods do players use most often in top games? How is the shift to Credits affecting player behavior? We investigate how spending patterns compare across top social games.
2. Frequency of Play and Methods of Game Discovery - As Facebook has cut down on developer access to viral channels, designing an engaging and viral game is becoming both increasingly important and challenging. We investigate which games people play most frequently, and which methods of social game discovery are most effective for top games.
3. Demographic Differences by Region, Age, and Gender – While the social gaming market is increasingly global, the audience is also becoming increasingly diverse by age and gender. How do different segments of the audience differ in terms of spending and usage patterns inside social games? We take an in depth look.
4. Brand Recall for Social Games – How important are brands, and how well can users identify developers of top games? We investigate brand recall amongst social game players.

See the full table of contents below:

Table of Contents

I. Methodology and Respondents

1. Introduction

• About Inside Virtual Goods
• About the Authors
• Survey Objectives

2. Research Methodology

• Target Population
• Respondent Acquisition Method
• Survey Structure
• Potential for Bias

3. Survey Respondents

• Description of Total Respondent Population
• Total Number of Respondents
• Overall Breakdown

II. Overall Results

4. Favorite Game

• Distribution of Favorite Game
• Frequency of Play
• Favorite Game Discovery
• With Whom Do You Play?
• Spending on Favorite Game

5. Payments

• Consumer Perception of Facebook Credits
• Frequency of Payment Methods

6. Play Patterns, Spending, and Brand Recall for Top Games

• Frequency of Play in Top Games
• Spending in Top Games
• Aided Brand Recall for Top Games

7. Mobile Platform and Game Adoption by Social Game Players

III. Demographic Differences in Usage Patterns and Monetization

8. Age and Gender Differences

• Who are the Social Gaming “Whales”?
• Spend Across Games
• Trends in Favorite Games by Age and Gender
• Analyzing the Top Two Games
• How Do Midcore Games Compare?

9. Regional Differences

• Game Discovery and Spending
• Favorite Game
• Payment Types
  

Appendix

• Survey Questions

More Data, More Actionable Insights

In 2009 and 2010, social games began to show what kind of value can be created on top of social networks. 2011 will be an even more important year as the industry continues to mature.

Social gaming, powered by virtual goods, is this year’s industry to watch. If you’re involved, or are considering jumping in, Inside Virtual Goods will be one of your most important tools.

One year of original data and exclusive in-depth reports delivered on a quarterly basis is $2,495 and contains:

• A detailed overview of the current state of the industry
• Specific estimates on market size by segment
• Diagnosis of key opportunities and issues by segment

Get The Annual Membership

Get Annual Membership (Includes Report + 3 Additional Quarterly Issues): $2,495 $1,995 USD*

OR Buy Single Report: $995 $795 USD*

* Pre-order discount ends June 13, 2011. All pre-ordered reports will be delivered on June 14, 2011.

Although the report will not be released until next Tuesday, June 14, we are offering a special pre-order discount for those who purchase now. A one year subscription is $1,995 until June 14, at which point the price will go to US $2,495. The one year subscription includes three quarterly updates on key developments in the space, including future editions of our annual reports, Inside Virtual Goods: The US Virtual Goods Market 2010-2011 and Inside Virtual Goods: The Future of Social Gaming 2011.

Or, you can download just this report. The pre-order price is $795 until June 14, at which point the price will go to US $995.

Zynga’s first game out of its Los Angeles studio, Empires & Allies, is also the developer’s first-ever strategy game. With Digital Chocolate’s Army Attack also live and Kabam’s Global Warfare launched earlier this month, we expect to see the strategy genre expand throughout the summer. More importantly, as Zynga prepares for an initial public offering, all eyes will be on how Empires & Allies performs.

In Empires & Allies, players take the role of a commander needing to rebuild their island town after an attack by an evil general. The game draws on CityVille’s citybuilding mechanic where buildings produce resources for the player to harvest. In addition to rents collected from residential buildings and crops collected from farms, players also harvest resources like oil or ore. These resources for the basis for the game’s building economy, which also includes units to send into battle.

The combat portion of the game is inspired by real time strategy games like the Command & Conquer series and Battle for Middle Earth, on both of which Zynga Executive Producer Amer Ajami previously worked. The combat in Empires & Allies is asynchronous as opposed to real-time, but Ajami points out that this style of gameplay better suits Zynga’s existing audience. Players select a world map view of other islands in their region and click on an occupied area to enter combat. The game is structured around a series of bad guy characters each occupying a cluster of islands along a chain leading toward the final boss character. As the player advances through the islands, conquering territory, they can unlock the enemy vehicles of defeated mini-bosses. They cannot, however, build structures on any islands besides the starting island cluster, which provides five islands total. Friends can be called into singleplayer as “power-ups” that aid in combat.

The actual combat instance is a turn-based event where the player initiating the combat can view what units the opposing force has positioned in the area. Units are classified by terrain (air, land, sea) and then by type (bomber, grenadier, etc.). In a guided preview with ISG, Ajami demoed a battle where the opposing force had three grenadier units stationed on land. He responded by choosing to attack by sea with two different types of gunship. He explained that units follow a rock-paper-scissors combat flow where land has the advantage over air, air has an advantage over sea, and sea has an advantage over land.

In addition to this layer, each individual unit type has three “specialty” units against which its attacks are the most effective. The game communicates this both with icons next to each unit that show the specialties, and with help text like “Good Target” or “Poor Target” that appears when the player hovers the cursor over an enemy unit after choosing to attack. The player first selects their attacking unit, then an enemy unit, and then clicks a final time to launch the attack. The enemy unit, controlled by artificial intelligence, counter-attacks almost immediately so that the player doesn’t have to sit around waiting for the AI to make a move.

What sets Empires & Allies apart from Army Attack and Global Warfare for the time being is the ability to attack friends in a “Fight With Friends” mode. While Army Attack hasn’t introduced the feature yet and Global Warfare’s combat system is geared more toward attacking strangers while forming alliances with friends, Empires & Allies sends users to their friends’ island cities either to help out by harvesting resources and joining building crews or to attack their friends’ cities in an attempt to “conquer” land.

Ajami explained during the demo that when a friend visits another friend and decides to help out, Empires & Allies behaves much like FrontierVille or CityVille — rewarding the visiting player with a portion of the harvested resources plus red hearts (here called “honor points”). Deciding to attack, however, yields the player black hearts (“infamy points”) and the chance to play out combat phases against whatever units their friends have stationed on their island. From the perspective of the player being attacked, their friend appears on their island much like the critters in FrontierVille appear — a portrait hovering over a section of “annexed” land highlighted in red. The attacked player can click the attacking player’s portrait to enter combat in an attempt to fight them off, can call other friends to join them in fighting off the attack, or can choose to not fight the attacking player at all. Clicking on the annexed land, however, costs the player extra energy. The attacking player automatically disappears from their friends’ islands after seven days, if they are not successfully defeated in combat.

It seems like Zynga is toeing the line between competitive and cooperative multiplayer experiences with Fight With Friends. On the one hand, they encourage players to attack one another for bonuses; but on the other, they limit the amount of grief players can inflict on one another through invasions. In addition to the seven-day invasion limit, for example, friends cannot join forces to attack another friend; they can only join forces with friends to throw back an attack. This may be a reflection of Zynga’s existing audience, which has been trained to be helpful to neighbors by the social features in other Zynga games. It may also be an attempt by Zynga LA to reduce the perception of difficulty that sometimes comes with competitive multiplayer strategy games.

Empires & Allies players can opt out of being attacked by friends by building a World Embassy structure on their islands. The Embassy protects the player from friend attacks for 24 hours, plus an additional 24 hours for each friend they can convince to join the Embassy through invites. Beyond that, the player can extend the 24 hour period only by visiting the game each day and clicking on the Embassy.

The only other social features launching with Empires & Allies are the crew structures like those found in CityVille and unique resource harvesting from in-game friends. The crew structures are slightly different from CityVille where instead of inviting friends to come be crew members, players look for crews in their friends’ towns to join. Joining a crew gives the visiting player a virtual currency bonus for visiting the structure each day to tend it and friends compete with each other to “out-tend” the structure for a larger bonus. With resource harvesting, players’ friends are randomly seeded with rare resources like gold or silver, which the player can only get by trading other resources with those players.

Monetization is similar to other Zynga games where the game uses a premium currency, Empire Points, for premium items and accelerated building. Empires & Allies will launch with full RewardVille support as well, for players that have accrued Zcoins to spend on in-game Zynga items.

In the long run, Zynga LA is looking at expanding the singleplayer campaign with more maps, more enemies and more unit types. The Fight With Friends mode, meanwhile, could perhaps see some leaderboard or tournament support if Zynga LA thinks the fans would like it. For the time being, the game does not support an auto-complete function for the combat phases and Ajami tells us that while live combat between players is possible, it’s likely not something Zynga players would ask them for.

Empires & Allies launches on Facebook tomorrow in 12 different languages worldwide, including three languages new to Zynga’s experience — Norwegian, Korean and Malay. The internationalization will likely have a huge impact on the game’s early growth, much like we saw with CityVille, which launched globally with five languages. This should be of particular interest to people looking to buy Zynga stock whenever the developer goes for its IPO.

Growing social game developer wooga announced a $24 million series B round of funding today led by Highland Capital Partners. Founder and CEO Jens Begemann says the money will go toward hiring two new employees per week until the company reaches a total headcount of 150 staff members.

According to our traffic tracking service, AppData, wooga ranks third among top social game developers both by monthly active users at 29.8 million and daily active users at 4.7 million. Three of its games rank in our top 20 social games by MAU with Diamond Dash sitting at number 10 just behind CrowdStar’s It Girl.

The developer got off to a quick start on Facebook in July of 2009 with Brain Buddies. At the time, it decided not to pursue any kind of in-game monetization or ad support. A year later, wooga did introduce monetization after going all-in on Facebook Credits. At that time, Begemann told us that the decision was based on a long-term growth strategy similar to Facebook’s where wooga raised venture capital to invest in growth rather than relying on monetizing as quickly as possible. In a follow-up interview, he elaborated on growth strategies through cross-game promotion after Facebook limited the viral channels available to social games.

The strategy seems to have paid off if we study the growth of one its most recent hits, Diamond Dash, which has seen a rapid rise to the top over the course of eight weeks between March and May of 2011. Even now after adding monetization features post-launch, the game still regularly makes the top five in our weekly top 20 list of fastest-growing games.

This second round of funding from Highland Capital Partners also includes  participation from Tenaya Capital and existing investors existing investors Balderton Capital and HV Holtzbrinck Ventures. Highland’s General Partner Fergal Mullen joins wooga’s Board of Directors as part of the round. Wooga’s series A round of funding closed in November of 2009 at $7.5 million.

Army Attack is the latest game from Millionaire City developer Digital Chocolate. The just-launched game focuses on single-player gameplay while incorporating social features to encourage collaboration, interaction and cooperation between players.

According to our traffic tracking service, AppData, Army Attack currently has 33,304 monthly active users and 28,370 daily active users.

Gameplay in Army Attack blends real time strategy combat with a bit of the treasure-hunting social game genre. The player’s military units take it in turns to explore the grid-based map, “conquering” unexplored squares as they go, acquiring items, experience, standard currency and energy randomly along the way. Obstacles can be destroyed by the player’s units, with thematically-appropriate items being released from the various structures. For example, the player can earn enemy intelligence to spend on expanding the play area by destroying “propaganda towers.” Discovered enemy units can be engaged in combat, with defeated vanishing from the map.

Strategy comes from unit placement as attacking units receive a bonus when allied units occupy squares adjacent to both the attacking unit and the target. It costs at least one energy to move a unit to a square and depending on what squares the player has “conquered,” it can be a challenge to maneuver units into a bonus-friendly firing position without spending the entire energy gauge. Moreover, tnemy units get similar firing bonuses, so players must consider attack formations before sending off single units into unknown regions of the map where clusters of enemies might wait.

Army Attack also features a base-building mechanic which is introduced via a series of missions. Producing buildings requires both energy and several resources, the latter of which can either be collected from destroyed structures and enemies or traded with friends. Players can set up a “wishlist” of items that they need and publish this to their wall so their Facebook friends who are also playing the game can help out. Resources can also be used to acquire “fire missions,” which are very strong attacks which the player can inflict on the enemy if they’re encountering a particularly tough challenge.

Lastly, there’s a supply chain from the structure the player builds to the towns the players liberate. Generating supplies from specific locations nets the player additional standard currency. The larger the town or city, the better the payout for supplies provided, though the larger towns and cities take longer to payout.

Despite the violent subject matter, the presentation of Army Attack is similar to a children’s cartoon, with defeated units exploding in puffs of smoke and dropped items rather than any show of gore. The presentation is somewhat reminiscent of the Nintendo Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS Advance Wars real time strategy series, so players who enjoy gaming on dedicated platforms will feel right at home.

The game is monetized exclusively with Facebook Credits as the premium currency players use to purchase in-game items and boosts. Players can also use Facebook Credits to buy the standard form of currency, Cash. Certain mission objectives and building resources can also be bought with Facebook Credits, though this is not always possible, and buildings can either be instantly completed as well. Certain particularly strong or useful buildings and units can only be produced through spending Facebook Credits. Buying new maps for the player to conquer can be done with a combination of Cash and the Intel resource that can be gifted by friends.

At present, the game offers three opponents to defeat throughout the course of the single-player campaign. Social features appear to be limited to visiting friends’ maps and gifting; which is interesting, as it seems this type of combat would lend itself to competitive multiplayer. As the game only just launched May 20, we expect to see additional features introduced into Army Attack as the game scales.

In the meantime, you can follow Army Attack’s progress using AppData, our traffic tracking application for social games and developers.

Digital Chocolate’s newest game, Army Attack, debuts in the top five of this week’s fastest-growing games by monthly active users as tracked by AppData. CityVille is still seeing some growth, though the big Zynga spike seems to have mostly receded.

Beyond that, we’re seeing some strong performance from card games on this week’s list, particularly from the Okey type of game that resembles rummy. Recently, we spoke with Turkish developer Peak Games on the success the genre enjoys in both Turkey and the Middle East/North African region where cultural difference have a huge impact on the monetization rate of social games.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Gardens of Time	12,332,879	+1,734,785	+16%
2.	Bubble Saga	6,037,158	+638,279	+12%
3.	Diamond Dash	8,894,406	+510,197	+6%
4.	Army Attack	508,800	+507,699	+46,113%
5.	Auto Hustle	1,722,513	+389,325	+29%
6.	Zombie Lane	7,985,890	+372,847	+5%
7.	Zuma Blitz	4,992,179	+359,507	+8%
8.	Okey Plus	1,374,124	+328,174	+31%
9.	Games	7,577,651	+324,776	+4%
10.	Backyard Monsters	4,440,766	+305,083	+7%
11.	Tetris Battle	2,908,868	+294,792	+11%
12.	Hero City	725,876	+280,884	+63%
13.	CityVille	90,019,261	+272,776	+0.30%
14.	Deep Realms	633,052	+246,146	+64%
15.	Galaxía Online II, Mejor Juego de Ciencia Ficción	1,626,821	+226,091	+16%
16.	Super Texas Holdem Poker	998,583	+205,936	+26%
17.	Monster Galaxy	12,304,770	+203,860	+2%
18.	Battle Cards	217,424	+201,884	+1,299%
19.	King.com	2,034,256	+200,624	+11%
20.	AddictingGames	711,314	+196,724	+38%

Army Attack, meanwhile, relies on the strategy genre of gameplay combined with some treasure hunting elements. Players control units in a top-down view of a field field, having the “conquer” each square of land as they move toward enemy units for turn-based combat engagements. Stay tuned for a more thorough review from ISG later today.

Correction: A previous version of this story stated the view was isometric.

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the top weekly gainers by daily active users on Wednesday, and the top emerging apps on Friday.

Most developers on Facebook have many ups and downs, with an emphasis on the downs over the last 12 months or so as Facebook has cut back on viral channels. Zynga stands out not just for dwarfing the rest of the market, but because it has managed to keep traffic so high for so long.

A look back at the past few years of data provides a quick explanation of Zynga’s story, that will get the attention of investors trying to decide how to value it when it reportedly files to go public later this year.

The Data Timeline

At the end of 2008, Zynga was in a pretty good position. It had figured out how to monetize through virtual goods in its first hit, Texas Hold’Em Poker. It was in the process of launching Mafia Wars and a long line of other text-based role-playing games on Facebook, MySpace and other social networks. It was on its way to dominating that category through copying the competition, then using a careful combination of aggressive viral tactics, gradual but consistently improving game quality, back-end scaling expertise to handle the incoming traffic at the right times, and everything else that would eventually become the so-called “Zynga Playbook.”

It had 23.9 million monthly active users.

(Note that you can access the full data history for Zynga and its games, in our AppData Pro tracking service.)

Almost all of its growth since then came in 2009. It moved into the simulation category with the launch of FarmVille in June of that year, with the tailwind of Facebook’s spammily-designed Twitter style of news feed pushing the game far and wide across the social network. It also had capitalized on Facebook’s increasingly sophisticated advertising tool to cheaply and effectively reach users before most other developers (or other advertisers) were. Well-timed investments into all parts of the company, including fast hiring of experienced leaders in gaming, and in business and technical fields in other parts of Silicon Valley — a story that the company hasn’t talked about much yet.

Zynga had already managed to double MAU traffic when FarmVille launched in late June of that year, to around 44 million. From there to the end of 2009, it grew to by more than five times that size, to 239 million. On top of FarmVille, it rushed out other increasingly polished simulations including Café World, PetVille and FishVille. All three games took on and matched or beat established competing titles.

We began tracking daily active users around the time of FarmVille’s launch — the company in total had 6.16 million at that point. It ended the year at 63.7 million, an increase of more than ten times. Daily active user numbers over time more clearly signify revenue generation, because people who come back every day have more time and generally more desire to buy goods in a game. Zynga had been doing well before, but by this point it was well into the hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, according to all reports and these numbers. Its “sticky factor,” the DAU over MAU and a good benchmark for the health of a game, has stayed solidly above 20% for most of the time that we’ve been following the company.

But that fall, Facebook reverted its home page to the algorithmically-driven structure it had previously had, in what proved to be the first of many reductions in viral channels over 2010. Users who don’t play social games, and don’t want to know that their gaming friends are doing on Facebook, may have breathed easier. But Zynga went into defensive mode, cutting back on the number of launches and trying to improve the games that had already grown.

Its 2010 launches, which started off with the failed Poker Blitz and going into the successful but not mind-blowing-traffic-wise simulations Treasure Isle and FrontierVille, helped make up for some traffic losses. But it continued to hang on to millions of users.

Before the launch of CityVille at the beginning of December, its MAU total had fallen to below 200 million and its DAU count was down to 43.4 million. The city-building simulation brought everything back up. Today, its monthly active user count — generally a better measure of marketing efforts, total possible reach, but not revenue — to 244 million. Its DAU is meaningfully staying in better shape, at nearly 52 million, and flat.

Looming over the rest of Zynga’s plans has been Facebook’s Credits virtual currency, which will possibly get more users paying but has also come with a 30% fee instead of the single-digit cuts Zynga has had to pay out to PayPal and other companies. After a bitter fight with Facebook over the last couple years, it said last year that it would do what Facebook required, and make Credits the single way to pay for virtual currency or goods in its Facebook games.

Zynga’s Stock: Obviously Valuable

Today, Zynga seems to be especially focused on mobile. Although virtual goods revenue hasn’t been making as much on any mobile platform compared to what Zynga has done on Facebook, it is an obvious growth opportunity. And although Zynga’s past efforts in Apple’s App Store and elsewhere have been on the experimental side to date, the company has been busy building a dedicated mobile team. It will be in charge of the mobile versions of big games (like CityVille), rather than the main social studio handling as they have in the past.

So for those investors thinking about buying Facebook, it’s not clear how big of a growth opportunity Facebook will be for Zynga in the future. But the company has shown that it can hang on to users and successfully launch new games in hard times or easy ones. And do so with a serious profit. Revenue grew last year, with the help of its ongoing attention to the guts of payments operations, to $850 million, almost half of which was profit, according to The Wall Street Journal — although AllThingsD says that “the filing will reveal much more robust numbers.” Given Zynga’s strong 2009 growth, we’re also interested to see how much cash the company has stored up.

In sum, Zynga may have maxed out its original market opportunity on Facebook (or maybe not), but now it’s big and just as aggressive. It can hold what it has and expand in any direction it wants, whether that means launching a new site for all of its games, or launching all of its games on other platforms.

Here are all the latest headlines from around Inside Network this past week.

Inside Mobile Apps

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

Monday, May 23rd, 2011

• Monday Mobile Roundup: Foursquare-INQ, EFF’s Call to Apple & More
• Emerging Paid iOS Apps: New Content Breaths New Life Into Older Apps
• Apple Responds to Lodsys Threats, Says Developers Are Protected
• Casey’s Contraptions Rises Up iPad App Charts

Tuesday, May 24th, 2011

• Emerging Top-Grossing iOS Apps: Top Paid Apps Fill the Top Grossing List
• Microsoft Releases New Developers Tools for Windows Phone
• Nexon KartRider Rush Breaks Through 2 Million Downloads in 10 Weeks

Wednesday, May 25th, 2011

• TinyCo Launches $5 Million Fund To Finance Games From Third-Party Developers
• Simogo Brings a Bit of Charm to iOS With Bumpy Road
• Emerging Top Free Apps on iOS: High Noon, iQuarterback & More
• New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: TinyCo, PopCap Games, Roblox and More
• PopCap’s Second 4th & Battery Title, Candy Train, is Both Colorful and Challenging

Thursday, May 26th, 2011

• New Hires in Mobile: EA Mobile, Gameloft, Glu Mobile & More
• Building a Better Hospital With Game Insight’s Social-Mobile Title, My Clinic on iPad
• With Google Wallet, How Much Potential Will There Be For Third-Party Developers
• Room For Both The Familiar And The Unexpected in Glu’s Summer Lineup

Friday, May 27th, 2011

• Glue Boosts Second-Quarter Earnings Guidance, Stops Accounting for Incentivized Install Revenue
• Paypal-Google Lawsuit Reveals More About How Android Market Deal Went Awry
• Amazon Wants to Hire Game Designer to Create Mobile Social Games
• Friday Mobile Roundup: Margaritas, Lodsys Redux, iPhone 4 & More

Inside Social Games

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

Sunday, May 22nd, 2011

• The Road to Credits: Mid-Market Developers Experience Technical Difficulties, Experiment With New Promotions

Monday, May 23rd, 2011

• GagaVille Pushes FarmVille Toward the Top of This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Games by MAU
• CrowdStar Secures $23 Million Series A Funding From Intel, Time Warner, The9
• Rocket Ninja Seeing Retention Rise After Launching 3D Mode in Wrestler: Unstoppable
• “Facebook + Games” Equals a New Effort by Facebook to Communicate With Game Industry

Tuesday, May 24th, 2011

• Rocket Ninja’ Shr3d Engine Provides Boost in Social Gaming 3D Arms Race
• Richard Garriott’s 3D Portalarium Plugin Appears in A Mystical Land
• Hero’s Blend of City-Building and Adventure Sees Steady MAU Growth but Variable DAU
• Report: Zynga Filing for IPO This Week of Next Week

Wednesday, May 25th, 2011

• Deep Realms Doing Something on This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Games by DAU
• Peak Games Finds Growth In Middle East, North Africa, Turkey, Secures $5 Million in Funding
• Nival North America to Bring Russian Strategy PC Series King’s Bounty to Facebook
• New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: 6waves, AdParlor, Kixeye and More
• Fortune Creek Poker Gives Card Sharks a Place to Visit Instead of a Game to Play

Thursday, May 26th, 2011

• New Hires in Social Gaming: Cie Games, CrowdStar, Digital Chocolate, & More
• Facebook Announces PayPal Payouts to Developers for Credit Revenue
• It’s Official: Kabam Announces $85M Fourth Round of Funding
• Tagged Looks to In-House Social Game Development for New Growth
• Trials of Elsword Experiments With Demoing A Full MMOG on Facebook

Friday, May 27th, 2011

• King.com’s Bingo Adventure Appears on This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Games
• LOLapps Side-Steps Sequels With Franchise Expansion in Ravenshire Castle
• Glu Boosts Second-Quarter Earnings Guidance, Stops Accounting for Incentivized Install Revenue
• Amazon Wants to Hire Game Designer to Create Facebook and Mobile Social Games
• Social Gaming Roundup: THQ, Supercell, Sim City, & More

Inside Facebook

Tracking Facebook and the Facebook platform for developers and marketers.

Monday, May 23rd, 2011

• Pages, Music, Badoo, Videos and More on This Week’s Top 20 Facebook Apps by MAU
• Featured Facebook Campaigns: Lancôme, Nivea, Cost Plus World Market, Allstate, Budweiser and Axe
• USA Network’s Chatter Aggregates Conversations About TV Shows From Facebook and More
• Platform Update: PHP SDK 3.0.0 Arrives, Client-Side Re-Authentication, & More

Tuesday, May 24th, 2011

• Bruno Mars, Subway, Turkey, Disney, Vin Diesel and Converse on This Week’s Top 20 Growing Facebook Pages
• New Facebook Platform Industry Hires: Efficient Frontier, Involver, Vitrue, Wildfire and More
• Facebook No Longer Blocking Comments for (Most) Pharmaceutical Pages
• Facebook Adds “Subscribe Via RSS” Option to Pages
• New Facebook Feature Has Users Post Recommended Pages to Wall, News Feed

Wednesday, May 25th, 2011

• Chase Giving, Luck, Astrology, Mobile, BandPage and More on This Week’s Top 20 Facebook Apps by DAU
• Report: A More Official Spotify-Facebook Partnership Is Coming Soon
• New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: Context Optional, AdParlor, PopCap Games and More
• ShopIgniter CEO Matt Compton on Raising $8M and the Growth of Ecommerce on Facebook
• Facebook Ecommerce: What Features Are Important in a Page Storefront Application

Thursday, May 26th, 2011

• Facebook Hires and Departures: Engineering, Account Management, Creative and More
• Facebook Careers Postings: Singapore, Recruiting, Engineering and More
• Facebook Announces PayPal Payouts to Developers for Credits Revenue
• BandRx: A Free Page Management App for Musicians That Matches Facebook’s Design

Friday, May 27th, 2011

• Friends, Photos, Videos, Weddings and More on This Week’s Top 2- Emergin Facebook Apps by MAU
• A New Facebook Lobbying Team Emerges to Match Increasing Political Scrutiny
• Facebook Platform Update: New Token Requirements, Photo and Video Graph APIs
• Facebook Roundup: Privacy, Europe, Mobile, Minors, Travel, Trading, Legal, Capital and Profanity

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 Context Optional, AdParlor, 6waves, Tagged, TinyCo, PopCap Games, Roblox, Openfeint, PopCap Games and Kixeye.

• Ruby on Rails Developer – Social Marketing Suite (San Francisco, CA)

• Online Operations Project Manager (Seattle, WA)
• Software Developer – Game Services (Seattle, WA)
• Franchise Marketing Manager (Seattle, WA

• Flash Game Engineers (San Francisco, CA)
• Director of Quality Engineering (San Francisco, CA)
• Technical Project Manager (San Francisco, CA)

• Account Manager / Sales - 5 positions (Toronto, Canada)

• Product Manager – Monetization (San Francisco, CA)
• Creative Director – Social Games(San Francisco, CA)
• Game Designer (San Francisco, CA)
• Game Producer (San Francisco, CA)

• Producer/Product Manager, Game Publishing (San Francisco, CA)

• Product Manager (San Francisco, CA)
• Data Analyst (San Francisco, CA)

• Senior Scalability Engineer, Web Services Team (San Mateo, CA)

• Mobile Game Designer (San Mateo, CA)
• Product Manager (San Mateo, CA)

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.

THQ Brings Margaritaville to Facebook and iOS — Core games developer THQ has announced a new Facebook and iOS inspired by Jimmy Buffett this week. Margaritaville Online is slated to release this fall and will allow users to create their own tropical paradise and explore an open world of parties and mini-games.

EA to Make Sim City, Simpsons Facebook Game — In a brief post from MCV, it would seem that Electronic Arts is looking to bring another piece of major intellectual property to Facebook. The Simpsons franchise is stated to make its social gaming debut in September. Additionally, the coming of a Facebook rendition of SimCity has also been noted.

Raptr Launches Personalized News Feed — Gaming social networking platform Raptr has launched a new personalized news feed feature for its users that is not unlike a Facebook news feed. The addition will not only display news that comes from other users, but will also show news relevant to players based on what games they are currently playing.

Supercell Raises $12 Million — Finnish games developer Supercell has raised $12 million in a round led by Accel Partners this week. The funding is stated to be used for real-time social games with a much larger scope than traditional social titles, yet less complex than an MMOG.

Gree Invests in Hand — Japanese company, Gree is looking to grow stronger in the social gaming category. As such, according to Adriasang, Gree has announced that it will be investing in Japanese social game developer Hand via a stock purchase.

Men Outspend Women on Mobile Virtual Goods — According to a survey from MocoSpace, men outspend women 9 to 1 when it comes to buying virtual goods in mobile social games. Of the 1,500 users that participated, men not only played slightly longer (21 minutes versus 19 minutes for women), but 69 percent also bought virtual goods. 31 percent of women did the same.

[image via VentureBeat]

Media Should Mimic Social Games — At the eG8 forum in Paris earlier this week, Mark Zuckerberg made his views known regarding Facebook and media such as music and movies. While he states that Facebook has no intention of offering these services itself, he does believe that both industries could benefit from going social in the same way that social games have, drawing parallels to companies such as Zynga and Playfish. According to him, “These industries can be rebuilt from the ground up with social. The opportunities when you make these companies social are a lot bigger than they are (in their current form).”

We’ve known for a while that Google wants a social network of its own and possibly games to go with that, but this week, it looks Amazon is ready to try the same — apparently through Facebook.

An Amazon job posting listed earlier this month calls for a “Game Designer to envision, design and create great new social games for Facebook and smartphones.” This is so far the first we’ve heard of the online retailer looking to get directly into the social games space. Amazon recently entered the mobile space with an Android Appstore that conspicuously lacked in-app payments in developer distribution agreements. This shows progress toward the retailer’s understanding how games can monetize through the sale virtual goods as opposed to one-time, up-front purchases.

Amazon has what Google lacks in terms of managing payments and e-commerce, which could be a financial boon to developers looking to make money off Android. However, Android doesn’t have core competency yet in understanding how games can monetize through the sale virtual goods as opposed to one-time, up-front purchases. Its app store conspicuously lacked restrictions around in-app payments, which stands in contrast to Google’s official Android Market, which strongly encourages developers to use Checkout.

In contrast, Google looks like it would rather beat Facebook with its own social network platform for social games, rather than join it. Based on the acquisition of social game/app developer Slide and mobile social game developer SocialDeck last year, along with some internal staff shuffling, it is prepping what could be a cross-platform social network for web and Android on which it could include its own games.

Social app developer Slide, which Google acquired last year, has more or less operated as an independent unit within the company. It has built one test app to date called Disco that hasn’t been promoted heavily. The games it acquired from Slide, such as Superpoke Pets!, still run on Facebook — though Slide’s presence on the platform shrunk dramatically in the last year, down from pre-acquisition levels of 14.7 million monthly active users and 1 million daily active users to 674,000 MAU and 59,000 DAU as of today.