Russia has a long history with PC strategy games that includes the King’s Bounty series, a forerunner to the long-lived Heroes of Might & Magic PC strategy saga. Russian developer Nival hopes to bring the King’s Bounty franchise to Facebook both in Russia and in the United States by finding hardcore gamers on the site.

The ideal of the untapped “hardcore” gamer on Facebook is not new, with developer Kabam specifically targeting this demographic of dedicated male gamers as far back as 2008. With King’s Bounty and additional social game strategies for other intellectual properties, however, Nival is in a unique position to tap an emerging market for social games in a region Facebook hasn’t be able to penetrate well. The key, Nival North America General Manger David D Christensen tells us, is making chess appeal to checkers players with King’s Bounty: Legions for Facebook (pictured below).

“The [typical]  way you monetize on Facebook is by having a lot of users,” Christensen says. “I think a lot of these 150 million gamers that other companies have attracted on Facebook are checkers players. King’s Bounty is more like chess. You can’t do something else while you’re playing chess and [still] be good at chess.”

The King’s Bounty series puts players in the role of a leader with a class restriction such as mage, paladin, etc. and allows them to recruit squadrons of troops to order into battle as the player explores the world. The series has never before featured a competitive multiplayer component, and this is where Nival knows it can innovate with King’s Bounty on Facebook in a way that’s consistent with the platform features. The idea is that players can participate in traditional turn-based combat in live matches with other players’ armies in sessions that last up to 15 minutes.

“[A game isn’t] innovative just because it’s on a new platform,” Christensen says. “If you’re going to bring a game [franchise] to a platform, you have to use the features of that platform otherwise it’s not a new game. King’s Bounty is a fairly deep and fun game when you play on PC and we’re going to build that into the game, but the core of it is going to be [player versus player combat]. Because what we think King’s Bounty players really want is the chance to kick each others’ asses, which they’ve never been able to do before.”

King’s Bounty will be Nival’s first experiment with a purely social game that exists only on a social network, however, Facebook fits into the developer’s long-term strategy of developing “social strategy games” that build on multiple levels of skill and genre preferences of players into team-based multiplayer games. Christensen illustrates the concept of the game type with Nival’s other game in development, Prime World, for which Nival reportedly raised $5 million in funding.

Prime World is for the most part a browser-based multiplayer game where teams of five players battle in an arena. Christensen says that game will straddle multiple platforms such as Android and iOS by building components with the Unity 3D engine, which features a plugin for a possible Facebook component. The game will also use Facebook Connect to identify players’ friends as potential team members, and to determine which gender the player takes within the game, which will contribute to the skill set the player has available.

“The question is how do we make the social games more social,” Christensen explains. He says that people in real life experience much of their social interaction in how they relate to the opposite sex, which is what Nival wants to tap into with Prime World’s game system. “So this is still being tweaked, but [the concept is] there are advantages in-game from having mixed gender teams. So like male characters in the party can only heal female characters. Your gender defaults to what you have on Facebook profile.”

Nival may also break out components of the game onto Facebook. For example, Prime World’s arena combat is supplemented by a castle-building meta-game and by an in-combat puzzle mini-game, both of which generate consumables that give players of the browser game advantages in combat. By straddling the different platforms and the different game types, Nival hopes to create a game experience that’s truly social in the way players create these dependent relationships to harvest and use resources.

The danger with attempting to incorporate so many different genres and platforms into a single game experience is becoming “nothing to no one,” as Christensen says he once experienced when working on a game that tried to be both a massively multiplayer game and a first-person shooter. But with Prime World and also with King’s Bounty: Legions, he says that Nival is mindful of creating a strong core game around which all other components — including social network elements like gifting and invites — fall into place to create a cohesive experience.

Again, the key is finding both the hardcore players and potential new players from the existing casual Facebook gamer audience.

“Finding King’s Bounty players [is easy],” Christensen says. “There are a bunch of King’s Bounty pages [for the various PC games]. We can find those gamers. Figuring out what it was [they] liked and bringing that Facebook — we’ve got a blueprint, so that’s not hard. The challenge is making that appealing to more than just hardcore gamers. It’s taking chess and making it appeal to checkers players.”

Nival hopes to have King’s Bounty: Legions live in beta on Facebook this summer. Prime World is slated to enter beta before the end of the year. North American players will have the chance to experience both games at the Electronics Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles early next month.

[Editor's Note: Nival is the result of a merger between Nival Interactive and Nival Network, which runs Russian social games network Zzima.com. It is not to be confused with Nival Online, which Nival CEO and founder Sergey Orlovskiy previously sold to Mail.ru.]

Turkish and Middle Eastern developer Peak Games announced a $5 million round of series A investment today, led by Earlybird Venture Capital. This brings the developer’s total funding up to $7.5 million toward expanding its social games library in Turkey, the Middle East and North Africa (abbreviated as MENA), and other regions.

According to our social game traffic tracking service, AppData, Peak Games currently enjoys a combined 8.4 million monthly active users and 1.6 million daily active users across both its in-house developed games and its published titles. Its top performing in-house titles are variations on the Turkish tile game, Okey, which is a form of rummy. Its top performing published title is a farming sim called Komşu Çiftlik, developed by TheBroth.

What makes Peak Games truly unique is its success in emerging regions that Western developers often dismiss as regions as places that don’t monetize well. Peak Games CEO Sidar Sahin explains that this is a misconception of these regions that comes from developers that don’t understand the audiences of the region. For its part, Sahin says that Peak Games has seen much higher average revenues per user in Turkey and MENA than it has in Russia, China, or Eastern Europe. He explains that Peak Games succeeds in monetizing in these regions because the developer knows what the audience wants, whereas other developer stumble over fundamental cultural difference.

For example, Sahin and Peak Games co-founder/CSO Rina Onur explain to ISG that in Turkey and the MENA region, day-to-day socialization between potential social game players doesn’t occur in the same places or with the same frequency as it does with Western social game players who can go out to bars or tennis courts to meet people. This means that actual socialization in-game is something the Turkish and MENA audiences crave, usually in the form of private chat rooms and in games that require multiple players to participate online at roughly the same time — like board games and card games.

Peak Games succeeds at monetizing with this audience by providing a “VIP” subscription access to its games, which allows users to form private chat rooms to interact with other players. While subscription models haven’t performed well in Western-developed social games, it does seem to be a winning strategy in the MENA region. We’ve recently seen a strategy “VIP” paid level of access in Israel-based Playtika’s Farkle Pro. It seems this model lends itself well to lifetime user value and overall conversion of players. Peak Games estimates the lifetime value of a board game player at one year.

The trick for Peak Games will be keeping its brand distinct, even as competing developers encroach on its game types. For example, Turkish developer Mynet has a similar lineup of titles that feature the Okey game type. Peak Games will also have to look at expanding to other regions, which the developer has begun to do in Latin America with a new studio recently opened in São Paulo, Brazil.

For now, Sahin says the focus of the funding will be on hiring new staff for in-house development, some investment in new regional offices and new talent for those offices, on mobile platform expansions, and also on marketing and user acquisition. Up until now, Peak Games has relied primarily on viral growth — and it seems to have paid off, with several of its games recently appearing on our top 20 lists of games by growth.

Playdom’s Deep Realms makes a surprise appearance at number seven this week on our list of fastest-growing games by daily active users, following a two-day spike in both DAU and monthly active users. It’s not quite clear what caused the spike, but the game’s got a ways to go to catch up with its sibling, Gardens of Time.

On to the rest of the top 20, we see Zuma Blitz and Monster Galaxy also making surprise returns with DAU lifts. Even farther down, we find poker, pool, and Turkish rummy-type tile game, Okey. Seems like Zynga’s temporary rise across all its titles from last week has died off.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Gardens of Time	2,416,471	+178,301	+8%
2.	Monster Galaxy	925,867	+175,044	+23%
3.	Zuma Blitz	848,231	+104,526	+14%
4.	แฮปปี้คนเลี้ยงหม	838,277	+48,885	+6%
5.	Bubble Saga	917,416	+47,950	+6%
6.	Tetris Battle	649,812	+44,292	+7%
7.	Deep Realms	86,219	+41,558	+93%
8.	AddictingGames	82,434	+29,010	+54%
9.	Ravenwood Fair	974,182	+28,780	+3%
10.	DoubleDown Casino	383,227	+27,120	+8%
11.	Auto Hustle	201,027	+25,380	+14%
12.	Hero City	68,816	+23,678	+52%
13.	เผ่าสนุก	243,656	+23,513	+11%
14.	PokerShark	26,887	+22,309	+487%
15.	Pool Live Tour	218,538	+22,227	+11%
16.	Clash of Kingdoms	27,121	+20,886	+335%
17.	Temple of Mahjong	54,710	+20,467	+60%
18.	Okey Plus	159,805	+19,299	+14%
19.	Totem-集獨有的角色扮演、勇猛的戰斗、巧妙的偽裝等元素于一體的多人高智商卡牌游戲！	19,893	+19,144	+2,556%
20.	Monster World	1,238,196	+18,854	+2%

Deep Realms has had a hard road since its late March launch was overshadowed by the early April release of Gardens of Time. Though both games came from the same company, it seems as though Deep Realms didn’t enjoy as post-launch support from Playdom. So ignored was the title that Playdom owner Disney Interactive didn’t even mention it during its Q2 earnings call earlier this month, although it made much of Gardens of Time’s success. This sudden spike in both DAU and MAU could be a signal that more attention is coming Deep Realms’ way.

You can read a comprehensive breakdown of the two games’ launches from former ISG contributor and former Playdom employee, Tami Baribeau, on her blog.

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the top emerging apps on Friday.

Zynga could be filing for its long-rumored initial public offering as early as this week or next week, AllThingsD reports. The article cites unnamed sources “close to the situation” as saying the company’s filing will reveal more “robust” valuation numbers than previously reported for the company’s speculated annual revenues.

A Zynga IPO this month would come as no surprise given both the company’s history of rapid growth and successful game launches on the Facebook platform (and long-standing speculation about an IPO). A recent filing shows that the FarmVille developer appears to be selling $490 million in Series C Preferred shares that had been slated to take place in early March, which would corroborate earlier reports that Zynga was raising $500 million in funding with a $10 billion valuation. AllThingsD reports that the valuation may be much higher when Zynga files with the Securities and Exchange Commission, citing the $9 billion valuation LinkedIn got at market despite having half that in valuation pre-IPO.

According to our social game traffic tracking service, AppData, Zynga currently enjoys 247 million monthly active users and 49 million users across all its Facebook apps and games. Its largest game, CityVille, accounts for over 30% of that traffic. An ISG tipster tells us that Zynga is about to launch a beta of its newest game on Facebook and that the title of the game may or may not be called Crime Nation.

Hero is a role-playing game for Facebook from Chinese developer Hero Legend. The game previously appeared on our top 20 list of emerging Facebook games in December, about six months after its launch. After holding steady throughout the beginning of 2011, its monthly active users are again on the rise. Daily active users are another story, however. Today’s figure comes just after a recovery from a large drop, which oddly coincided with a spike in MAU.

According to our traffic tracking service, AppData, Hero currently has 948,000 monthly active users and 77,000 daily active users.

Hero’s gameplay has several elements. Players can build up a castle, take part in Mafia Wars-style quests and pass through a “Time Gate” to enter into combat with a variety of fantasy-themed foes. The game opens with a simple tutorial to teach players how to play, but a shaky translation from the original Chinese means that the game demands a certain level of familiarity with the genres involved — or at least a willingness to explore and experiment. The mechanics involved will be familiar to those who have been playing social games for some time, but the combination of genres offers something a little different to the norm.

The game’s main social elements come from recruiting other players for bonuses and gift-exchanging purposes. More experienced players are able to join guilds to take on tough challenges for useful bonuses. Players can also declare war on neighboring players’ kingdoms in an attempt to gain even more bonus items.

Hero is monetized through the sale of its premium currency, diamonds. These can be purchased via PayPal, credit card, cellphone, Ukash, Amazon Payments, Social Gold, Click and Buy or PaySafe. There’s also an offer wall provided by Tapjoy that enables players to earn diamonds by completing offers, taking surveys or trying other Facebook games. There’s also a paid monthly membership option which gives players free equipment every day plus a stipend of 4 diamonds per day. Members also get discounts in the in-game store. Currently, the game does not feature any sort of Facebook Credits integration.

We were unable to contact Hero Legend for comment on the game’s growth pattern, but it appears that game updates are somewhat sporadic, which could account for the sudden MAU uptick. Past updates seem to have revolved around revamps of the user interface, and new equipment for players to purchase in the in-game store. There was also a seasonal event around Christmas of last year where players could purchase a special Santa Claus item to heal their heroes. It’s fair to assume that the game will continue to support its community with content updates, particularly if the MAU figure continues on its upward path. If Hero Legend plans to stick around on Facebook, Facebook Credits might also be a forthcoming update as the mandatory deadline for social game integration goes into effect at the end of next month.

You can follow Hero’s progress using AppData, our traffic tracking application for social games and developers.

A Mystical Land is a 3-D massively-multiplayer online role-playing game playable on Facebook as well as through the game’s website. It’s one of the first Facebook games to utilize the Portalarium Player, a web browser plug-in developed by video game entrepreneur and developer Richard Garriott at his new company of the same name. A Mystical Land is developed by Mad Otter Games and published worldwide by Neonga AG.

According to our traffic tracking service, AppData, A Mystical Land currently has 25,000 monthly active users and 1,000 daily active users.

The game is a full-fledged MMO that features combat, crafting professions and quests, feats, achievements, badges and collections. The gameplay is targeted toward a casual player, as if often the case with browser-based MMOs due to the limitations of the platform. A Mystical Land, however, is one of very few full 3D games on Facebook and it has more in common with classic MMOs than it does with the modern casual browser-based MMOs.

Players start the game by creating and customizing a character. The classes are traditional fantasy MMO fare: warrior, wizard, hunter and priest. The interface is very simple and players have a choice of using the keyboard, mouse or a combination there of to navigate the world. In this world, players can fight monsters to earn experience points. A Mystical Land also offers alternative gameplay activities like harvesting, fishing, mining, raising farm animals and something called insect lore, where your character crouches over what looks like a giant ant hill with a magnifying glass. Player are not required to participate in combat if they prefer the crafting and lore activities.

The feel of the game is reminiscent of an earlier time in MMOs, mainly due to the simple but pretty graphics, non-player character dialogue and combat. Like those older MMOs, players spend most of the game in a single area where monsters respawn so that players can kill them over and over again for XP. If a particular creature is required for a bounty or completion of a quest, players wait their turn to kill it, which is a contrast to modern MMOs that create instances for each player so there isn’t competition for the monster.

Other classic-style MMOs on Facebook have struggled in the past to connect with players on a massive scale. Most of these have been isometric top-down games similar to Garriott’s 1997 MMO, Ultima Online, where 2D avatars move about in a 3D landscape for what we think of as a “2.5D” experience. Sacred Seasons 2 and City of Eternals are examples of this kind of Facebook MMO. MilMo, on the other hand, is a cross between traditional social game and traditional MMO with full 3D artwork; however, it also suffers from limited appeal as its targeted at children.

A Mystical Land also uses Facebook Connect viral features from its browser version, allowing players to find their Facebook friends in the game, although a Facebook account is not required to play the browser version of the game. Recall that any player using Facebook Connect off the platform to access the game is counted toward that game’s MAU and DAU figures. The game is monetized by purchase of its premium currency, crowns, which is used to buy consumable items like potions and spells and for avatar customization items. Currently, crowns can only be purchased through Neonga, but the developer tells us it is working on implementing Facebook Credits.

Interested readers can follow the progress of this game in our traffic tracking service, AppData.

Yesterday, we got our first look at a 3D social game engine that streams through Flash without the use of a plugin or download from developer Rocket Ninja in the game Wrestler: Unstoppable. The developer’s proprietary engine, Shr3d, marks another effort by developers to push the web technology that makes more sophisticated games possible.

When 3D first came to console video games, it changed both the way that players interacted with the games and the way the video games industry judged progress. An arms race emerged where the three largest console developers — Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft — spent the majority of their development budgets on creating bigger, better 3D experiences. This created an environment where game designers focused on crafting games that showcased the technology, effectively changing the types of games players had access to.

So far, the social games industry has been immune to the 3D arms race, instead focusing on an art quality arms race where developers looked for ways to create vivid, distinctive visuals that ran smoothly on Flash. We’ve seen developers explore ways to create these experiences through hiring highly specialized artists, experimenting with data storage options for art assets on client computers, and also with plugins that provide games with additional functionality like Microsoft Silverlight. Now, with Rocket Ninja’s new engine, we begin to see where the 3D arms race could make its way into social games as Shr3d creates a 3D experience without the use of plugins.

ISG interviews Rocket Ninja CEO Oded Pelled, CTO Randy Fish, and Executive Producer Neil Haldar on the implementation of Shr3d and what 3D means for the social games industry.

Inside Social Games: Wrestler: Unstoppable was originally a 2D fighting game experience. How did you introduce the existing player base to 3D without overwhelming them?

Oded Pelled: When we launched [Shr3d] on Cinco de Mayo, the game was in 3D for all users. The game by default [now] appears in 3D for all users. [The upcoming] sound features will only be for 3D, and in the next month, there’s not going to be a 2D option. There’s going to be 3D animation with sounds, or there’s going to be basically [a mode] with animations turned off.

ISG: Did you experience any early performance issues by introducing 3D into the game?

Pelled: The unique thing about Shr3d is that it works with Flash version 10 and it works with low performing machines, so we’re very pleased to [report] that we don’t get complaints about performance issues. So far.

Randy Fish: The animations are pretty small. I think most of the size of the download is actually in some of the models, in the texturing. And in the background in the arenas. I’m not sure what the total size is of an actual character, but we have a pre-loader, so by the time the match starts, you’ve got all the assets you need. The characters themselves are very small. Right now we’re relying very heavily on the browser’s caching mechanisms and that’s been working very well. Our Flash engineer worked on Shr3d almost almost completely with a four-year-old laptop that’s basically a netbook just to make sure that we’re addressing [possible performance issues].

ISG: Now that you can render everything from animations to actual items in 3D, will you add more premium decoration features as a revenue stream?

Pelled: We haven’t yet. We have 10 new [arena] venues coming in the next few months. Some of them are very, very cool. There are more venues in different locations and obviously a person will have to buy them.

ISG: A lot of social game developers are beginning to think of 3D as an arms race. What is your attitude toward the rise of 3D in social games?

Pelled: We believe that Shr3d is giving us a competitive advantage because we’re not counting on people downloading any plugin or software, like Unity, which no doubt offers significantly higher capabilities. But how many people download the client, the plugin? You’re talking about less than 1% of Facebook users. So in that race, we’re not talking about the future, [we're talking about the present]. We’re out there with the game and it’s in 3D and it looks very impressive. And it works on low-performing machines.

So there are going to be more [developers] coming in. We believe that a lot of them will require plugins and software. That’s going to be a challenge, especially when you’re talking about a social platform with a relatively short attention span. People need to get a game — maybe from a viral share — and instantly start to play. Not [be asked] to start a download or go to this, install this.

Neil Haldar: To add onto that, I would say that a lot of developers get caught up in 3D for 3D’s sake. I think I can envison an arms race where developers are trying to build lots of stuff in 3D. More than they need to. I think the philosophy that we took with the acceleration of Wrestler has been very specific. We haven’t built the whole thing in Flash; we’ve used a lot of HTML so that it renders really clear on a low-end machine. And we remain most compatible with older machines. I think that’s the probably the right way to allow us to scale with our own technology. It doesn’t require a download.

Fish: I think from the ground up we focused on lower polygon models. In doing so, we allow the download sizes to be much smaller. So basically it’s not going to look console quality, but the time to get started is much quicker. It looks pretty good. But the emphasis was on getting people [into the game]. You don’t download a 250 megs of assets in order to get started. Or a gig. Or World of Warcraft.

ISG: Is Shr3d something Rocket Ninja would consider licensing to other social game developers for their own games?

Pelled: Right now, that’s not part of our strategy. [Shr3d] is definitely a big competitive advantage. Part of our strategy [is to be] an accelerator. The more games we come to an agreement with a developer on, [the more we'd use the engine]. Mostly likely, we would buy [the game], or reach some kind of business terms [with the developer] so that  they can benefit from [our] proprietary technology. It’s case-by-case scenario. In this specific case of Wrestler, we bought the game and we actually even had the developers join the company, so it’s a full acquisition.

[Editor's Note: What Pelled means here is that Rocket Ninja is not interested in handing over the engine to other developers to experiment with, much the way that Epic Games does with its Unreal game engine in the console and PC video game space. Rather, he's talking about a case-by-case agreement process where Rocket Ninja would acquire or partially acquire a single game at a time to give it the acceleration treatment with the Shr3d engine the way it did for Wrestler. So far, Rocket Ninja has not announced plans to acquire any other new games.]

ISG: Just before Rocket Ninja bought Wrestler, the company announced a $3.5 million round of investment. How much of this funding went into development on Shr3d versus what Rocket Ninja spent on marketing the game?

Pelled: So far, we’ve barely even started marketing. We bought the game in December. We really started work on it in January. The last four months have been devoted to the acceleration part, which is broken into making the game 3D, introducing new mechanics, introducing new virality components [...] And two three weeks from now, we’re going to open the floodgates and start to expand [marketing]. So far, not even 20% [of the funding] went to marketing.

In the latest sign that Facebook is trying to win over social game developers, the company has just launched a Page called Facebook + Games. There are no posts up yet, but the Page description says that it’s going to be focused on industry issues.

Today we’re launching Facebook + Games, a page created for the games partner and business community. Expect to hear the latest on the Facebook Platform games ecosystem and social gaming innovation, directly from the Facebook Games Partnerships Team.

Facebook has had a long road to travel with social game developers, particularly following reductions in viral channels last year, and its drawn-out efforts to make its Credits virtual currency the mandatory method of in-app payment across the platform.

It has made overtures to the development community on various fronts, including a program to make the platform more hospitable, called “Operation Developer Love,” which launched last fall — the goal was to increase everything from bugs to improving documentation and sharing plans more often ahead of time.

We’ll keep an eye on the Facebook + Games page for further developments. In the meantime, catch up on our Road to Credits series.

Social game developer Rocket Ninja debuted its proprietary 3D Facebook game engine, Shr3d, this month in pro wrestling combat game Wrestler: Unstoppable. The company reports that just 10 days live, the game is already seeing a spike in retention rates.

Wrestler: Unstoppable was originally a 2D one-on-one fighting game where players customized an avatar and sent them into turn-based combat with other players’ avatars either in offline or live mode. Players start out with a list of move types like holds and throws and unlock different moves within the type as they win fights and gain experience points. During combat, the player can use as many moves as they like during their turn, but player statistic such as stamina and fatigue combined with statistics for each specific move determine the success or failure of a move. If the player fails a move, their turn ends and the other player is free to attack. The game originally didn’t have viral features and monetization was limited mostly to costume items for avatars.

Rocket Ninja bought the game from developer SteamStreet last year around the time the former secured $3.5 million in funding to invest in new technology. The result is Shr3d, a streaming 3D engine that runs entirely through Flash with no need for plugins or art asset installs. Rocket Ninja introduced the engine into Wrestler: Unstoppable on May 5 to coincide with the Cinco de Mayo holiday, but kept in the old 2D wrestling game as an option to keep its existing user base happy. The engine recasts all avatars and items in 3D and adds animations to the combat that vary by move and by character body type.

This may prove to be a crucial decision for Rocket Ninja’s overall retention. Prior to any changes the developer made to the existing game, Wrestler: Unstoppable already enjoyed a very small but loyal fanbase that was deeply involved with the game’s core mechanics. Fan pages and spreadsheets documented the game’s move sets and many statistics that determine the success or failure of a move and some players arranged in-game marriages and weekly podcasts. Rocket Ninja maintained the integrity of the game mechanics when introducing the new engine, although it did redesign the appearance and location of move statistics during combat. The developer also responded to user feedback from players that wanted to keep the 2D combat mode because it was faster and allowed for players to conduct multiple asynchronous games at once whereas the 3D mode can only run one game at a time.

On the whole, however, Rocket Ninja says the 3D engine has increased player retention. From what we can see in our traffic tracking service, AppData, Wrestler: Unstoppable saw an initial drop in monthly active users right when Shr3d launched while daily active users climbed. The MAU figure now reflects a growth trend consistent with new or returning players visiting the game for a look at the new system. Rocket Ninja did not provide more detailed metrics for player retention, but said that all features in the game are experiencing a marked lift in the past 10 days alone.

Most interestingly, the Shr3d update introduces a viral sharing mechanism that feeds into a core gameplay system. When viewing wrestler profiles either of their own characters or of other players’, a Wrestler: Unstoppable player can Like that individual wrestler. This creates a News Feed story that looks like a trading card, featuring an animation of that wrestler than anybody can manipulate by rotating the character model. The Liked wrestlers form the basis for the Stables and Companies gameplay functions.

Stables are player groups of friends’ wrestlers. Companies are larger groups where players essentially form guilds that match stables against one another, creating rivalries and back stories that fuel player competition. Some of this system existed while the game was still under SteamStreet, but Rocket Ninja introduced formalized game systems that made it easier for Companies to host tournaments and some additional features to incentivize player-formed Companies.

For example, a player-formed Company (called a Private Company) can offer players with a lot of fans of their wrestler a Contract for joining, which automatically pays out the game’s standard currency to that character on a timed basis. Players can only join or form Companies by paying soft currency to unlock one or two initial Company options, and then paying real money to acquire the game’s premium currency to spend on more Company slots or on the option to form a new Company. Both Stables and Companies can direct players to wrestlers to drive up Likes or fans on that wrestler, thus increasing the value of the Company or Stable that acquires that wrestler. Players have also used the Companies function to form meta-games, like The Wrestler Apprentice — a game that mimics the TV show The Apprentice by awarding the winning player with ownership of the Company that hosted the game.

Assuming the growth pattern remains consistent, Rocket Ninja has other features it plans to introduce to Wrestler: Unstoppable. For example, the game is getting an update next week that will introduce sound to the 3D animation sequences, like crowds cheering and booing and wrestler grunts and shouts. Rocket Ninja was not prepared to discuss plans for cross-platform development or additional game plans at this time, but it is possible that the developer might acquire other games in which to introduce Shr3d. Any in-game features the developer is likely to audition within its “test environment” game, Ocean Kingdom.

Stay tuned for an interview with Rocket Ninja.

Correction: A previous version of this story misconstrued the connection between Liking a wrestler and “becoming a fan” of a wrestler in connection to the Companies function. These are actually two separate activities.

Social game developer CrowdStar nets a $23 million investment this week in a series A round led by Intel and Time Warner with participation from Chinese game publisher The9 and from NVInvestments.

Peter Relan, CEO of CrowdStar, tells us that the funding will go primarily toward expanding CrowdStar’s reach beyond Facebook onto other platforms and into other regions through hiring and development. The participation from The9, he says, confirms that there’s a large potential audience in China that the developer could tap if it had the resources to develop its games for non-Facebook platforms and localize them for China, Japan, Korea and other Asian countries.

Key to success in Asia is the mobile platform, on which CrowdStar has only recently begun to release its games, which is where the support from Intel comes in. Intel has also invested in OpenFeint, a mobile-focused sister project to CrowdStar formed out of the YouWeb incubator.

“Our focus on mobile is most important right now,” Relan says. “We believe social gaming is going beyond Facebook and mobile [eventually]. In a year, we’ll look at investing in [expanding onto] smart TVs.”

Relan says that CrowdStar aims to reach a potential audience of 2 billion alone on smartphones and “highly capable” feature phones. In Asia, Relans says there maybe 1 billion gamers that “want It Girl.” In order to get its games in front of those audiences as quickly as possible, CrowdStar hopes to double its staff this year to around 200 employees by investing about 80% of this series A funding into game development talent to adapt existing games and create new one. The rest will go toward globalization and localization of existing CrowdStar games.

This round of funding represents the first time CrowdStar has ever raised funding from investors for its projects. Previously, the developer was funded primarily from its own profits, but Relan says that the social games market is in a unique place that CrowdStar needs to take advantage of.

“Every major industry has three independent leaders,” Relan explains. “Over several years, three, maybe four wind up dominating the space. Playdom cashed out early. It’s really just Zynga and maybe one other left. And CrowdStar [has the chance] to remain one of the few independent social game developers with long term [potential].”

Beyond Asia and platform expansion, CrowdStar will get support from investors Time Warner in the form of branded intellectual property. CrowdStar hasn’t announced any new games as of yet, but Relan recently told us we could expect to see a new title this quarter.

CrowdStar has seen some gradual losses in monthly and daily active users across all its games in the last three months, according to our traffic tracking service, AppData. down about 10 million in MAU to today’s levels of 29.1 million and down 2 million in DAU to today’s 2.4 million figure. Its largest game, It Girl, accounts for 8 million of its total MAU and almost 800,000 of its DAU.