Slotomania developer Playtika was partially purchased by Harrah’s, a casino brand in the Caesars Entertainment Corporation, for between $80 million and $90 million. Harrah’s initially acquires 51% of the social game developer.

According to reports from Israeli media, the buy is “astonishing” because Playtika is a small social game developer without a positive cash flow while the Harrah’s brand is the first big United States casino chain to invest such a large sum of money in an Israeli online gaming start-up. Playtika was founded in late 2010 by Robert Antokol and Uri Shahak after raising a reported $1 million in funding from investors. The developer currently has 14 or 15 full time staff members in Israel with additional staff at a facility in the Ukraine.

On Facebook, Playtika has seen success with slot machine simulation Slotomania and with the recently launched Farkle Pro. According to our traffic tracking service, AppData, the developer enjoys 2.9 million monthly active users and 643,000 daily active users across all its Facebook games. Playtika reports it has 9 million total users worldwide across multiple social networks.

It would seem like the flood of new hires has finally begun to slow — at least in terms of company activity — as the number of social developers bringing on new team members has dropped from last week’s 12. That said, Kabam and Zynga host an above average number of hires themselves, according to data from LinkedIn and other sources, with the former showing one major hire.

Though he has been in the role since March, a recent update on LinkedIn has highlighted Bryan Vaniman as the company’s new director of corporate development. He was previously a partner at Active Private Equity.

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 the information about most new hires, below, comes directly from company updates from LinkedIn, and is only as current as people’s profiles.

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:

Cie Games

• Robert Tsao, Game Designer — Joining Cie Games this week, Tsao was most recently a game designer for Possibility Space.
• Dinko Tontchev, Front End Wed Developer — Also now a part of Cie Games, Tontcheve was previously a front and back end web developer for Eyemaginetech.com.

Kabam

• Mike Sellers, Executive Producer — Marking the first in a long list of new hires at Kabam, Sellers was previously a senior game designer at Electronic Arts.
• Justin Lambros, Executive Producer — Now at Kabam, Lambros was a senior producer at Electronic Arts.
• Keith Kawahata, Senior Producer — Kawahata was most recently a sales manager at Aeria Games & Entertainment.
• Jeff Adams, Art Lead — Adams was formerly a lead concept artist at Visceral Games.
• Dmitri Ellingson, Art Director — Joining Kabam, Ellingson was formerly an art director at LucasArts.
• Mike Wallis, General Manager — Also joining the team, Wallis was previously a studio executive producer at Buzz Monkey Software.
• Marco Perez, Senior Artist — Perez was a concept sketch artist at Ocular Sedition.
• Todd Legate, Player Experience Associate — Legate was most recently a closing manager at Home Goods.
• Randie Lin, Player Experience Associate — Now at Kabam, Lin was previously a sales associate at Aaron Brothers.

Loot Drop

• Rex Cartagena, Software Engineer — A part of the Loot Drop team now, Cartagena was a Flash developer and technical artist at Zynga.
• Michael Romero, Software Engineer — Also joining this week, Romero was formerly a UI engineer at Amazing Society.

Mindjolt

• Serena Cheng, Marketing Intern — A single hire for Mindjolt: Cheng was previously a professional relations intern at Project Ethos.

Nordeus

• Aleksandar Markovic, Software Development Engineer — Joining Nordeus this week, Markovic’s prior role is unknown.
• Mirjana Jovicic, Software Development Engineer — Also joining Nordeus is Jovicic, whose previous role is also unknown.

Playdom

• Benzamin Basher, iPhone Engineer — Now at Playdom, Basher was formerly a senior software engineer and iPhone team leader at Prolog Inc.

RockYou!

• Dan Aquino, Community Advocate — Joining RockYou, Aquino was previously a contracted promotions specialist for Zoom Media.
• Jacqueline Reiter, User Acquisition Analyst — Reiter was previously a marketing associate at ROXRO PHARMA, Inc.

Zynga

• Reed Shaffner, Senior Product Manager — Starting off a large list of new Zynga hires, Shaffner was most recently a senior product manager for Bing at Microsoft.
• Alwin Mathew, Site Reliability Engineer — Now at Zynga, Mathew was a student at the Cochin University of Science and Technology.
• Deanna Magnuson, HR Coordinator — Also joining the team, Magnuson was previously a server at Its Italia.
• David Wee, Developer — Wee was previously a developer at AppDirect.
• Aaron Arboleda, Engineering Manager — Arboleda was formerly a software engineer II at Electronic Arts.
• Bryan Vaniman, Director of Corporate Development — As noted prior, Bryan Vaniman joins Zynga. He was previously a partner at Active Private Equity. That said, he has been in this role since March, and this is merely an update made this past week.
• Bryan Larson, Research Recruiter — Another addition comes to Zynga. Larson was previously a university relations manager at Electronic Arts.
• Jose Ciceraro, UI Designer — Ciceraro was a UI artist for Sony Online Entertainment.
• Austin Walterman, Associate Producer — Walterman was formerly a computer programmer and project planner at CNN.
• Sreenath Somarajapuram, Software Engineer — Joining Zynga this week, Somarajapuram’s prior experience is unknown.

The Amazing Puzzle Factory is a Facebook game from British company IdeasPad, loosely based on their Puzzler World titles for the Nintendo DS, which are in turn licensed from long-running British puzzle magazine, Puzzler.

Since the game’s launch in mid-April, The Amazing Puzzle Factory has enjoyed steady growth up to present-day levels of over 54,000 monthly active users and 6,000 daily active users. Most of this growth seems to be from viral measures like friend invites or wall posts and from banner clicks from the recently launched display ad network, Appatyze.

Gameplay centers on traditional pen and paper puzzles such as crosswords, Kriss Kross, Sudoku and word searches. Players are scored based on how quickly they complete the challenges. Games are mostly controlled by using the mouse, though crossword puzzles require words to be typed in using the keyboard. There is a Daily Puzzle players can complete that awards weekly bonuses to regular players. There’s also an in-game leaderboard for players to compare scores or “IQ points,” the game’s equivalent of experience points, with friends.

The Amazing Puzzle Factory is monetized through Facebook Credits, which can be spent on three main items of in-game currency: Puzzle Tokens that unlock individual puzzles; Nuts, which are used to purchase hints during puzzles; and Bolts, which are used to unlock harder difficulty levels. Successfully completing levels rewards players with all these different currencies at different points, but the use of Facebook Credits allows players to jump straight to harder puzzles if they believe their puzzling skills are up to scratch.

The game doesn’t offer much in the way of social features beyond bragging rights for leaderboard scores. The lack of direct social interaction between players is unsurprising given the solitary nature of the puzzles, but the fact that friends are not required to progress limits the amount of viral growth The Amazing Puzzle Factory can leverage. Even so, the inclusion of the Daily Puzzle and rewards for regular players could be an effective way of maintaining a loyal base of daily users, which could make the game successful in the long run.

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to reach developer IdeasPad to find out future plans for the game, but it’s easy to see how it can expand through content. The modular nature of puzzle progression means that it will be simple to add new puzzles across the four different categories and potentially even new categories. There are no virtual items for players to collect besides the currency units, but there are a number of achievement “badges” for players to acquire, so another route for future development is to add increasingly-challenging tasks for players to complete. As it is, the highest level of badges requires the completion of over a thousand puzzles, so players should be kept occupied for some time.

You can follow The Amazing Puzzle Factory’s progress on AppData, our traffic tracking application for social games and developers.

Who Wants to be a Millionaire is an adaptation of the TV game show of the same name produced by ABC Television Network. The game launched in mid-March, but was taken down for stability issues and re-launched March 29. In April, the game added the ability to advance to Round 2 and not long after, the game broke into our weekly top gainers lists and still remains on it at time of writing.

Who Wants to be a Millionaire on Facebook is a mostly-faithful adaptation of the TV game show. Gameplay is broken into “shows” at a rate of one playable show per day. Shows are played out in two rounds. In Round 1, there are ten players and ten questions, with each question being worth a certain amount of prize money ranging from $100 to $25,000. At the beginning of the round, the prize amounts and the question categories are shown, but both are then randomized as the round starts, so the difficulty of the question is not tied to its value. Players receive two “Life lines,” which are other friends that play the game. Using a “Life line” allows players to skip questions while gaining the prize money and bonuses are given to the fastest answer.

The top three scorers in Round 1 advance to Round 2. In Round 2, players answer four questions with prize amounts increasing from $100,000, to $250,000, to $500,000 and finally to the grand prize of $1,000,000. Players can choose to “walk away” with their winnings by not answering a question. They can also skip a question by “Asking the Audience,” which posts a question on their wall, allowing a friend playing the game to earn a little prize money if they answer the question correctly. An incorrect answer drops the player’s prize money to $25,000 and ends the show.

Where the Facebook game differs from the TV show is in wrong answers. On the show, a wrong answer is an instant loss. The Facebook game instead uses players that give the wrong answer to a question as multipliers for the prize value of the question, which is then applied to all players that answered correctly. This augments the sense of competition between players in a way that sets the Facebook game apart both from its TV show origin and from other TV game show adaptations on Facebook.

The overall appeal of the game seems to be in competition. While inviting friends to the game has benefits, like increasing the chances of gaining additional playable shows and extra prize money, the real thrill comes from beating complete strangers in answering trivia questions. Because players are matched randomly and can only play one show per day, the chance of encountering the same players again and again is very low, making competition feel fresh each day. By limiting gameplay to a single show per day, Who Wants to be a Millionaire also succeeds in luring competitive players back on a daily basis for a chance to hit the million dollar mark.

As an aside, we experienced a severe gameplay upset when internet latency forced our show to freeze. As that was our one playable show for the day, there was no point to reloading the game as we’d lost all our scores within the incomplete show and had to wait for the next day to play again. The single-show limit is actually the key to the game’s monetization. Players can spend Facebook Credits only on additional shows in contrast to other TV game show Facebook games that sell power-ups or hints that directly affect gameplay. Who Wants to be a Millionaire also features a TrialPay offer wall to earn Facebook Credits.

Players can continue to track Who Wants to be a Millionaire on AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

Zynga announced another acquisition this morning in the form of Casino City developer DNA Games. The developer retains its founder and CEO, Jonathan Lee, as General Manager and will begin development on new Zynga games.

DNA Games saw success on Facebook with its oldest game, Casino City, to the tune of 2.4 million monthly active users and 356,000 daily active users at the game’s peak in February of this year. The title is still one of the top casino games by traffic on Facebook despite slowing down in recently weeks. DNA’s newer games, Bar World and Slot City, haven’t seen as much success, but the former did perform well in December 2010 and the latter only just launched in early April of this year.

Where DNA Games seems to excel, and why Zynga is interested, seems to be the developer’s approach to A/B split testing and feature iteration. When we spoke to Jonathan Lee around the time Slot City launched, he explained the process by which DNA tracks the results of its feature split tests, noting that the developer tracked player behavior across gender and age demographics as well as region and time-of-day demographics. Zynga noted in its press release announcing the acquisition that it was impressed with DNA’s technology platform that allows for rapid iteration of new features.

This is Zynga’s 14th acquisition in the last 12 months. Three weeks ago, Zynga announced a talent acquisition of United Kingdom developer Wonderland Software to beef up Zynga’s mobile development. The future of DNA’s existing Facebook games is not immediately clear.

PopCap Games launched a social game adaptation of its Plants vs. Zombies tower defense franchise on Chinese social network Renren today. The developer told us last month that “what happens in Asia stays in Asia,” so we don’t expect to see a United States release of the title for Facebook anytime soon.

Plants vs. Zombies is played in series of increasingly difficult battle encounters where zombies progress across a lawn toward a house. The player fights off the zombies by planting various flowers, shrubs, and other garden variety plants in the lawn that then attack the zombies with different powers or defend other attacking plants. The social element for the Renren game comes from player “towns” that the player decorates to reflect their combat style (see below). Players can visit each other’s towns, but beyond that we’re not sure what they may do with this feature.

The Renren game also adds a new gameplay mode to Plants vs. Zombies called Rampage, where players must fight off a two-minute zombie onslaught. Scores in Rampage mode are tracked on a leaderboard. The game will feature weekly Rampage challenges.

Plants vs. Zombies for Renren was developed by PopCap’s Shanghai studio, which opened its doors in summer of 2008. PopCap’s strategy for Asia has been one of patience and emphasis on regional development, meaning that the developer avoids direct translations of its games to the region. Instead, the regional studio builds the game for the regional audience from the ground up, ensuring that the gameplay fits the audience. This is why we haven’t seen a Plants vs. Zombies game for Facebook here, yet; according to John Vechy, PopCap co-founder and VP of corporate strategy and development, PopCap has already cancelled roughly three different Facebook versions of the game so far because they didn’t feel right for the U.S. audience.

PopCap’s next move for Facebook will likely come from its newly-acquired studio, ZipZapPlay. The developer is also reportedly considering an initial public offering before the end of the year.

Several Zynga games got lifts in monthly active users and daily active users this week, bringing games like CityVille back onto our top 20 list of fastest-growing games by DAU after previously falling off. A combination of new content and a Lady Gaga promotion could explain the spikes.

On to the rest of the top 20, we see Gardens of Time, Bubble Saga and Diamond Dash still going strong. Ninja Saga also makes a reappearance farther down the list at number 16.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	CityVille	19,199,540	+734,775	+4%
2.	Gardens of Time	2,443,982	+541,637	+28%
3.	Bubble Saga	934,640	+214,958	+30%
4.	Texas HoldEm Poker	6,971,768	+173,330	+3%
5.	Diamond Dash	1,375,845	+162,326	+13%
6.	Bubble Island	1,483,847	+134,688	+10%
7.	Café World by Zynga	2,974,095	+125,591	+4%
8.	Zombie Lane	1,254,054	+121,674	+11%
9.	FrontierVille	4,439,057	+119,010	+3%
10.	Draw My Thing	200,293	+115,646	+137%
11.	Games	1,721,378	+107,107	+7%
12.	Restaurant City	1,400,671	+104,779	+8%
13.	FarmVille	11,295,664	+88,736	+0.79%
14.	Jersey Shore	242,283	+74,480	+44%
15.	Tetris Battle	625,145	+65,214	+12%
16.	Ninja Saga	915,468	+62,832	+7%
17.	Backyard Monsters	967,431	+59,238	+7%
18.	Sorority Life	277,644	+58,620	+27%
19.	Who Wants To Be A Millionaire	256,654	+57,247	+29%
20.	Pet Society	1,516,344	+56,730	+4%

Earlier this week, Zynga announced a themed campaign in FarmVille around pop singer Lady Gaga’s upcoming album, Born This Way. FarmVille players can enter a Gaga-themed farm filled with unicorns and sheep riding motorcycles as well hear a significant number of songs in-game from the soon-to-be-released album. The campaign launched in FarmVille just yesterday, making it unlikely to be the only contributing factor to the game’s appears on today’s top 20 list. The full impact of the campaign will likely become apparent early next week when Born This Way is released.

Another contributing factor in Zynga’s surge in DAU may be new game content recently added to several of its titles. CityVille, for example, launched a zoo component to gameplay a little over two weeks ago, which coincides with an overall DAU lift of over 10%. A similar content update to the boss fight system in Mafia Wars released this month doesn’t seem to have had the same effect, however.

The last possible explanation for Zynga’s spikes in DAU may actually be one of visibility. A Vanity Fair article on Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus from the magazine’s June issue appeared on the web this week, possibly sparking interest in Zynga’s games from an audience that hadn’t previously experienced them.

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

Candy Dream is a new game from developer Toy Studio, in closed beta since May 6. Keeping with a Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory theme, players can only enter the game with “Golden Ticket” invites issued from the official website. So far, 4,643 users have accessed the beta.

Candy Dream’s premise is that the world has run out of candy and it is up to the player to produce candy and sell it to the stores in the various towns around the game world. This is achieved by building up a candy factory, harvesting “candy” crops and developing recipes to produce different types of candy bars. Later in the game, players get the opportunity to specialize in specific types of candy, and can pick an additional specialization every 10 levels.

“Everything in Candy Dream has a touch of magic,” says Christian Arca, Studio Director at Toy Studio and designer of the game. “When we were kids, Candy Land and Willy Wonka is where we think candy comes from. That sense of surrealism is something we wanted to bring to Candy Dream. From the fully customizable avatar editor to the candy crops that grow out of the ground, we want players to be constantly surprised at the sparks of magic and what they’ll discover next.”

Arca is particularly pleased with the game’s modelling of “supply and demand.” The game features a dynamic online economy which adjusts itself according to what players are selling and where. Selling too much of one candy will cause the global prices to dip, while shortages of a particular product will cause prices to rise.

The game is monetized exclusively through the use of Facebook Credits, which can be used to purchase energy-restoring items and soft currency as well as premium goods from the in-game marketplace. They can also be used to instantly create new candy bars rather than having to wait for the machines to make them. Many of the game’s items and buildings can be purchased using the game’s soft currency, but as is usually the case with games of this type, using Facebook Credits can help make progress a little quicker.

As for the future of the game, Arca says that some new decorations are in the pipeline as well as new crops and new recipes. To expand gameplay, there’s a plan in place to introduce new buildings and tools for aspiring candy moguls to manage their empire in a variety of different ways.

“We are dedicated to Candy Dream right now,” says Arca. “We’ve been monitoring user feedback very closely to adjust some features and moving forward with some of our longer-term goals for the game. We are looking to do some mobile games in the near future, however.”

No word yet on when Candy Dream will reach a general release, but keep an eye out for it on AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers. To sign up for a “Golden Ticket” allowing closed beta access, visit the game’s official website.

Cross-platform publisher Viximo has been racking up more social game partners for its distribution platform, this time pulling a couple of off-Facebook games into the mix. Viximo CEO Dale Strang explains how the company hopes to deliver benefits to smaller games with global aspirations.

Back in January, Viximo signed some bigger-name social games like Ravenwood Fair that very obviously drew benefits from cross-platform publishing on international social networks like Orkut and Quepasa because the games already had success finding users on Facebook. Today, the company’s newest social game partners — Clublife, Treasure Diving, and Cupcake Corner — are either not on Facebook at all, or haven’t been able to hang onto users. Cupcake Corner in particular seems to be suffering a steady loss across monthly and daily active users on Facebook after breaking 1.7 million MAU and 200,000 DAU four months after its August 2010 launch. With cross-platform releases in international territories, Viximo hopes to help these games find larger audiences.

None of that matters if the game is a good fit for international social networks, Strang says.

“What we look at is, ‘Do we think that it’s a game that’s attractive to a bunch of different demographics, will it translate to different languages?’” Strang tells us. “We don’t just go with whatever the DAU trends are. If a game developer feels like they’re reaching the point of diminishing returns on Facebook, that might be a good time to go with us.”

Viximo assumes responsibility for user acquisition across its web of social networks in North America, Europe, and Latin America and then takes a share of the game’s revenue after its launched. It also handles localization and currency management between networks, making recommendations to developers on how to control pricing using various network currencies like Facebook Credits.

Viximo VP of Business Development Sutton Trout adds that if a game isn’t on Facebook, that “often may be a better time” because there are fewer barriers to integration across multiple networks.

“There’s two pieces of what we view the publishing enterprise being,” Strang says. “One is the cross-promotion and discovery by using a base of users to drive new users into a game. The other part that we do is the cross-network functionality and optimization. We pull out many of the Facebook platform functions that these guys accessed and swap them out with ours and then make them work on a variety of sites. And then we optimize about that.”

Viximo has only just begun to see the returns on its investment into cross-platform publishing. Trout says several of its developers have renewed agreements with Viximo to start publishing new games across all the networks. The goal, say both Trout and Strang, is to eventually get its social game partners to the point where they’re releasing games simultaneously across multiple social networks on a global scale.

In the short term, this means working with developers on localization and in-game currency management for effective monetization in North America, Europe, and Latin America. In the long term, it means getting into other social networks in these regions and eventually rolling out to networks in Asia and Russia.

“The reason we haven’t done Asia yet has to with matching content to region,” Strang says. Viximo isn’t currently convinced that it could integrate its social game partners into the Asian market across both localization and monetization systems unique to the region.