Play FarmVille in Real Life, with MyFarm — Inspired by the success of FarmVille, a 2,500-acre Wimpole Estate farm in Cambridgeshire, UK will grant control to digital farmers over the web, says the Guardian. Dubbed the “MyFarm experiment,” up to 10,000 web users will be able make many of the decisions on what to grow, what livestock to buy, or even whether to “split fields to resurrect lost hedgerows.” Participation requires a £30 annual subscription.

Social Games for Improving Schools — According to VentureBeat, school network KIPP and test-prep startup Grockit are trying to apply social gaming mechanics to studies. Backed by Zynga’s Mark Pincus, Grockit is seeking to utilize elements such as badges, leaderboards, and rewards to create social game interaction for things such as SAT and ACT test prep.

Foursquare Creates Subscribe To It — The popular social location-based game of Foursquare has created a new service called “Subscribe To It” that costs a monthly fee of $1. Here’s the catch: This “premium” service doesn’t actually provide anything other than placing the subscriber’s name onto an arbitrary leaderboard.

i-Jet Media Expands its Social Games in Asia — Gamasutra reports that social games publisher i-Jet Media has expanded further into Asian markets having published its Wild West Trains and Airport titles on Vietnamese network Go.vn and its Farm of Happiness game on South Korean network Cyworld.

Renren Prices Initial Public Offerings — Chinese social network Renren has made its initial public offering of shares available. According to TechCrunch, they are priced at $14 a share, with a total offering size of $743.4 million. The shares have begun trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “RENN.”

New Social Game Company: Bossa Studios — A new London-based social gaming startup by the name of Bossa Studios launched last week at The Next Web Conference Startup Rally. The company is hoping to have its first title release within the next few months, starting with Facebook and following with Orkut, iOS, and Android. The company’s focus is to make games similar to those that current gamers grew up with. A full interview with the company can be found on The Next Web.

LOGIN Conference to Hold Facebook Game Developer Boot Camp — The annual LOGIN Conference in Bellevue, Washington has announced a day-long track called the ”Facebook Game Developer Boot Camp,” starting May 18th. The track will include topics such as tools for virality, metrics, and monetization.

Zynga Co-Founder Blooked from Selling His $12 Million — After leaving Zynga last year, co-founder Andrew Trader has recently attempted to sell his $12 million share to Alpha Investment. Zynga, however, has blocked the sale stating that “former employees” can only sell stock 180 days after Zynga’s IPO, says Mercury News. Alpha Investment has since filed a lawsuit against Zynga in a Delaware court.

Zynga’s FrontierVille has started asking users permission to cache in-game assets directly to hard drives, apparently a feature in testing that may be rolled out to a wider audience at some later date. It’s just the latest example of a social game developer trying to provide a better game-play experience by going beyond the basics of what browsers offer.

While we haven’t seen other developers cache data like Zynga at this point, we are seeing an uptick in social games that require plugins for services like Microsoft Silverlight or are built with the Unity 3D game engine, which prompts users to install a plugin in order to play the game on Facebook. Unity appeared on Facebook with Paradise Paintball (now called UberStrike) in 2009, and other 3D games have followed suit. Earlier this week, we reviewed Unity-run 3D first person shooter N.O.V.A. Elite, which has minimum system requirements of a 1.8 GHz dual-core processor, 2GB of RAM, a 256MB graphics card and 1GB of free hard drive space; an uncommon concept for a Facebook game.

Raising the tech bar for social games has some clear benefits for developers looking to improve user experience. In the case of FrontierVille’s data storage, the install resulted in shorter load times for the game, down from about 20 seconds to 7 seconds. All the items on our homestead appeared immediately instead of “drawing in” as the game continued to load the art assets. Beyond user experience, developers can also widen their hiring pools by building games in Unity. This is of particular interest for developers looking to hire engineers out of the console video game industry as most of these engineers would probably have an easier time adjusting to Unity than Flash because Unity is written in C++, the language in which most console video games are coded.

A challenge with these tactics, however, is possibly cutting out the Facebook gamer audience that most accesses their games on computers that don’t belong to them, or with computers that can’t meet the minimum system requirements specific games. Assuming a typical FrontierVille gamer accesses their homestead from a work or school computer on which they lack administrator access, that player may not be able to allow the game to install data on the hard drive. Moreover, installing a plugin takes time, and a user with a limited amount of play time per day (say, on an hour long lunch break), might navigate away from a game that prompts them to install a plugin before playing toward a game that’s less demanding of their time.

Of course, a N.O.V.A. player using a computer that meets the minimum system requirements to play the game probably already has FPS games available to them on that machine. A Facebook user that’s been playing social games for years without ever being prompted to install a plugin probably doesn’t see the need for it when they’ve been enjoying plenty of games without it. If social games are getting more complex only for the sake of attempting to mimic the types of game available on consoles, they might fail to connect to the existing Facebook audience even if they are able to attract some new audience of “hardcore” gamers.

Following reports in February that Zynga was raising a new round of funding of up to $500 million at a $10 billion valuation, a new filing has emerged showing what appears to be a sale of $490 million in Series C Preferred shares, that had been slated to take place in early March.

The filing, discovered by financial analysis firm VC Experts, could indicate a post-money valuation of $9.1 billion, so within the range of the reports — that’s assuming the full amount of new funding is in, and that all of the authorized shares have been issued.

All Things D, which reported that Zynga was raising up to $500 million in February, named institutional investors including Morgan Stanley, T. Rowe Price, Fidelity Investments, as well as venture firm Kleiner Perkins as participants. The New York Times reported in April that T. Rowe Price is now holding $71.8 million worth of Zynga stock.

One caveat: Zynga’s legal paperwork has taken a tortuous path over the last several years, and it’s not entirely clear what this document is showing. As of today, the company’s stock table includes: Series A Common, Series A Preferred, Series A-1 Preferred, Series B Common, Series B Preferred, Series B-1 Preferred, Series B-2 Preferred, Series C Preferred, and Series Z (which is oddly priced at a penny per share), according to filings.

Zynga’s filings have also come at odd times, oftentimes not corresponding to the dates and amounts of publicly announced fundings. To add to the complexity, there’s been other buying and selling of Zynga stock that has not been officially confirmed. Early investor Union Square Ventures has sold at least a large portion of its stake in the company, according to an industry source, while Google has also reportedly bought a large amount of Zynga stock (which the companies have never confirmed).

We’ve asked Zynga for comment and we’ll update with any further information.

Zynga April 2011

Auto Hustle tops our list of top 20 emerging Facebook games this week just two weeks after its official launch on Facebook and only one week after debuting on our weekly rankings. Farther down the list, Uno Boost keeps its number two spot for the second week running while the Chinese language version of Boss Vegas classes out of our rankings, having broken the 1 million monthly active user mark.

We got closer looks at both N.O.V.A. Elite and UFC Undisputed Fight Nation in the past weeks, giving us an idea of how traditional video game genres and franchises are fairing as they try to make the jump to social games. We can also see traditional gaming influences in Auto Hustle and Uno Boost, as the former is a Grand Theft Auto homage and the latter got a lot of positive critical reception from console gamers when it came to Xbox Live in 2006.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Auto Hustle	466,423	+303,317	+186%
2.	UNO Boost™	984,731	+180,864	+22%
3.	N.O.V.A. Near Orbit Vanguard Alliance: ELITE	295,450	+154,089	+109%
4.	UFC Undisputed Fight Nation Game	726,841	+148,170	+26%
5.	Battle Pirates	269,259	+146,795	+120%
6.	Puzzle Saga	761,727	+146,213	+24%
7.	Sinuca by Gazeus	230,443	+144,074	+167%
8.	Bizim Çiftlik	901,015	+138,744	+18%
9.	Pawn Stars: The Game	878,055	+133,021	+18%
10.	Farkle Pro	296,922	+112,515	+61%
11.	Buraco by Gazeus	396,045	+104,686	+36%
12.	Enrique Iglesias, Play with it!	111,087	+100,812	+981%
13.	Truco Paulista by Gazeus	215,463	+97,707	+83%
14.	英雄遠征-小小戰爭/開心農場活動	358,518	+90,151	+34%
15.	Pop Boom	425,604	+85,987	+25%
16.	Feevo	219,024	+82,301	+60%
17.	แฮปปี้เกาะ	560,492	+80,206	+17%
18.	มหัศจรรย์การเดินทาง	663,016	+79,307	+14%
19.	WestWars	367,128	+78,326	+27%
20.	Poker Star	388,782	+78,131	+25%

In the case of N.O.V.A., developer Gameloft went with a high end Unity-programmed first person shooter in the tradition of PC games Doom and Unreal Tournament. The game has some steep system requirements that make us wonder what sort of user the developer hopes to acquire, as players with computers that could run N.O.V.A. probably already have access to more sophisticated FPS games than what any Facebook variation has to offer.

Meanwhile, UFC Undisputed Fight Nation seems to be a successful attempt by video game publisher THQ to port its existing branded sports title to the social game experience with a Mafia Wars-style approach to organizing gameplay loops around training and fighting in the Ultimate Fighting Championship circuit. The game doubly benefits from the existing fan base for the THQ console games within the franchise and from the UFC fan base on Facebook.

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.

Farkle Pro is one of several versions of the traditional dice game that can be played on Facebook from Slotomania developer Playtika. It’s one of few social games that draws a clear line between paying players and free-to-play players with “VIP” gameplay options.

So far, the game has seen strong growth since its early April launch, breaking into last week’s list top 20 emerging Facebook games at number 8 with 296,000 monthly active users and just under 30,000 daily active users as of today. Overall, Playtika enjoys 2.4 million MAU and 582,000 DAU across Farkle Pro, Slotomania, and a Chinese language version of Slotomania.

Farkle Pro is a dice-based game of chance and mild gambling. Players roll six dice and then score them as they choose. Different combinations of dice — mostly groups of three of a kind, a straight run of 1-6 or a set of three different pairs — score various point values. Individual ones and fives also score points.

Once the player has chosen to score one or more dice, they can then re-roll the remaining dice in an attempt to improve their score for that round. There’s an element of risk, however; if no scoring combinations come up, that’s a “Farkle” and the player then forfeits both their score for the round as well as their turn if they’re playing a game against someone else.

Farkle Pro on Facebook can be played either solo or against other players for virtual stakes of the game’s currency — chips. Competition against other players requires the player to make use of the “VIP Club.” Every four hours, all players may access the VIP Club for free to  play against a live opponent. For a promotional rate of 50 Facebook Credits, players can officially join the VIP Club and play as many live opponents as they want without the four hour waiting period. Players can also upgrade to VIP Club Gold or Platinum services, allowing them to play with higher stakes of chips. All players can also purchase additional chips using Facebook Credits to help them get back in the game if they’ve had a run of bad luck.

Farkle Pro is a simultaneous-play game, so its social features include real-time chat with opponents during a game. Opponents are drawn from the entire Facebook community — players see their adversary’s profile picture and first name. The game also has a leaderboard feature, ranked by either the number of chips a player has, their total score for all their games, or their “player rating,” which is calculated by their wins versus losses total. Entries in this leaderboard can be clicked on to visit the players’ Facebook profiles.

We weren’t able to reach Farkle Pro developer Playtika for comment on future features for the game, and the team is tight-lipped about its plans on its official Facebook page. The team is keen to engage the community, however, offering rewards of chips for use in the game for answering prompt questions, discussing the game and sharing it with friends. Possible future expansion plans could include some sort of item on which to spend chips rather than just wagers; other gambling games sometimes allow players to customize the play space and dice, for example. Customization also allows gaming games an opportunity for some cross-promotion with other products, which Playtika could leverage with Slotomania.

You can follow Farkle Pro’s progress on AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

Facebook has just announced an expansion of its partnership with social game offer provider TrialPay on its DealSpot product that gives users Facebook Credits in exchange for watching branded videos. We covered in detail Facebook and TrialPay’s initial partnered around DealSpot earlier this year, but now Facebook will be presenting the option to earn Credits for video views around the site in its sidebar modules. Video providers Sharethrough, EpicSocial, SocialVibe, and SupersonicAds will be the first companies to have their videos shown in Facebook’s sidebars as well as games via DealSpot.

Facebook says the goal of the expanded partnership is to help game developers monetize a higher percentage of their users by educating users about how to earn and spend Credits and getting more of them to carry a balance of the virtual currency.

> Continue reading on Inside Facebook.

Medieval city building game Trade Nations has enjoyed success on iOS, clocking over 200 million game sessions in four months and now it looks to bring the experience to Facebook with a newly launched port. It is currently ranked as the 17th highest grossing app for iPhones in the U.S. and 14th highest grossing for iPads.

Trade Nations on Facebook was developed by Bight Games. It was originally published on iOS by another studio, Seattle’s Z2Live, which hired Canada’s Bight Games as a contractor to design artwork and gameplay for the title. Both subsequently had a small dispute where they each claimed ownership of the intellectual property behind the game.

They came to an agreement, with Z2Live telling our sister site Inside Mobile Apps that it owns the rights to distribute Trade Nations in perpetuity on iOS while Bight is free to do what they want with the Facebook title.

Trade Nations on Facebook appears to be a faithful port of the iOS game where users build structures in a medieval town and recruit villagers to till the fields, chop the wood, and so on. On iOS, the game is comparable to Ubisoft’s Castle & Co. and Capcom’s Smurfs’ Village; we expect that on Facebook, it will be compared to other medieval life sims like Knight’s Story and to any number of farming and city building sims.

On the monetization side, Trade Nations sells a premium currency called Magic Beans that can be used to accelerate building or purchase special decoration items. On Facebook, Credits is the sole means of acquiring Magic Beans. A standard currency, Coins, is earned by completing in-game tasks.

We’ll have a more in-depth review of Trade Nations for Facebook in the coming weeks as the game grows. You can follow its progress on AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

TradeNations becomes yet another in a series of mobile apps that have crossed over to the Facebook platform, following Glu Mobile’s Gun Bros and Pocket God. Rovio Mobile is planning to bring a version of Angry Birds to Facebook in the near future, which the company has been working on for a year. But the poster child for true cross-platform success is still PopCap’s Bejeweled Blitz.

Eleven major developers brought on new team members this week, according to data from LinkedIn and other sources, — an uptick from what we observed last week. Booyah and Ohai in particular announced major hires this week: Jason Willig joins the former team as the new chief operation officer; for the latter, Amy Widdowson joins as their new director of marketing.

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:

Booyah

• Jason Willig, Chief Operating Officer– As noted already, Jason Willig joins social and mobile developer Booyah this week.  Before this, he was COO of Electronic Art’s Hasbro business division.

CrowdStar

• Garret Carstensen, Software Developer — Now at CrowdStar, Carstensen was previously a pre-calculus teacher at Lake Central School Corporation.

Cie Games

• Chad Schroeder, Front End Developer — A new hire shows from Cie Games this week. Schroeder was previously a front end developer at The Designory.

Digital Chocolate

• Monico Chavez, 2D Artist — Joining Digital Chocolate, Chavez was previously a visual development artist for Unicorn Studios.

GSN

• Michael Ovadya, Advertising Operations — A new face joins GSN this week. Ovadya was most recently a media accountant at Dailey & Associates.

Kabam

• Aaron McElroy, Player Experience Global Systems Manager — Now a part of Kabam, McElroy was previously a senior manager at Apple.
• Humphrey Yang, Player Experience — Also joining Kabam, Yang was formerly a student at Loyola Marymount University.

Ohai

• Amy Widdowson, Director of Marketing — As noted prior, Amy Widdowson joins Ohai this week. Prior to this, she was a marketing manager at NileGuide.
• Tony Li, Senior Product Manager — Joining Ohai as well is Li, a former product manager at Plastic Jungle.
• Adam Haslip, Flash Developer — Haslip was most recently a game developer for Sony Online Entertainment.
• Jessica Delfanti, Production Assistant — Delfanti was previously a copywriter at Hooked Media Group.

Playdom

• Andrée-Anne Boisvert, Associate Producer — Joining Playdom this week, Boisvert was previously a user experience specialist at Ubisoft.

Playfish

• Calum McMinn, Game Developer — Now at Playfish, McMinn was previously a game developer at Tag Games.

RockYou!

• Kristina Tomalesky, External Product Manager — Joining RockYou this week, Tomalsesky was previously a producer at Cryptic Studios.
• Michael Hassett, Flash Designer — Hassett was most previously the animation director for Demoscene.

Zynga

• Brad McKee, Principal Engineer — Now a part of Zynga, McKee was formerly a senior software engineer at Electronic Arts.
• Susan Paperini, Manager of Integration Operations — Also joining Zynga, Paperini was the head of IT, North America at Babcock & Brown.

Playdom’s NBA Dynasty basketball simulation game is one of two officially licensed NBA Facebook games alongside Lionside’s NBA Legend, which launched in February. Despite the common ground, Playdom doesn’t see the games are rivals because of the different approaches to gameplay.

According to metrics on AppData, NBA Dynasty is showing steady growth after its April 16 soft launch. The game hasn’t received much marketing, but already has a steadily-rising MAU figure of 48,000 and DAU relatively stable around the 7,000-8,000 mark.

NBA Dynasty’s gameplay revolves around two main aspects: collecting players to form a team, then coaching this team to win as many games as possible. Players are collected by purchasing “packs,” similar to how customizable card games work. Each pack contains a random selection of players who can be recruited into the team, and the players involved cover the NBA’s history back to 1946. As a result, this means there are a number of duplicates reflecting players at different stages of their career.

Packs of players along with consumable items, boosts and other gameplay enhancements can be purchased using either in-game currency, earned by winning games, or with the game’s premium currency of Crowns, which are acquired via Facebook Credits. More powerful items and players require the use of Crowns to purchase, while the first few articles in each category can be acquired by simply using the in-game currency, or through exchanging gifts with friends.

Coaching of the team takes place via an abstract representation of the basketball game. The first part of the game is skipped through, then it’s up to the player to monitor the stamina and performance of their team, substituting players with those on the bench when necessary. Following the game, NBA highlight movies are played, which has been a popular feature, according to Markus Krichel, senior producer of the game.

“We have thousands of movies,” says Krichel. “So much, in fact, that we can customize the movie selection to include players that are part of your current team.”

The game has a number of social features befitting a competitive sports title. Facebook friends who are also playing the game can send gifts and boosts to each other, while opponents for the player’s team to compete against are picked from all over Facebook, not just the player’s friends. This offers the opportunity for the player to find and befriend other NBA Dynasty fans on Facebook.

In contrast Lionside’s NBA Legend focuses more on building up the capabilities of an individual player avatar rather than purchasing, constructing and coaching a team themselves. Legends also uses a completely different set of social hooks between friends. In fact, Krichel doesn’t believe the two games are really “rivals” at all.

“There are many sports games available on Facebook these days,” Krichel says. “But I would not necessarily call them rivals in the traditional sense. They all have their strong points, but NBA Dynasty’s mix of very deep simulation, historical accuracy, tactics and video highlights is unique among them.”

Looking forward, Playdom’s plan for the future of NBA Dynasty is to incorporate league and tournament play. League play will be where the more serious competition will take place, while tournament play will allow friends to set up their own custom competitions. Further gameplay enhancements to lend an air of authenticity to the experience, such as a trophy room and the ability to negotiate TV deals, are also in the works, as is an Achievement system.

You can follow NBA Dynasty’s progress on AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

During today’s Q4 earnings call, EA reported more growth in its digital segment: net digital revenue for the quarter rose to $211 million, 46% above the same period a year earlier, and net income went to $151 million from $30 million. The very broad “digital” segment includes social games developed by Playfish or separately,  as well as other “digital service” casual and browser games that are treated as extensions of packaged console goods, the same as downloadable content. In other words, these numbers don’t give a clear picture about how Playfish in particular is doing.

EA said that it currently has 15 of these “digital service” titles in beta testing, though the company did not say whether or not all of these titles were planned for Facebook. Some digital service games that EA seems especially proud of — like FIFA Online — are only available on EA.com or the franchise’s website. In total, the FIFA franchise brought in more than $100 million in revenues across the packaged products and online services like FIFA Online as well as Facebook’s FIFA Superstars.

We’re combing Facebook for any possible EA digital service game betas that align with the publisher’s existing franchises. So far, we were able to find what looks like a Need for Speed Facebook game in closed beta.

It’ll be interesting to see if and how EA differentiates revenues generated from Playfish social games developed as original intellectual property for Facebook and from Facebook incarnations of its console products like Dragon Age Legends. Right now, it’s unclear whether Dragon Age Legends is counted in the “PC (MMO, Download, PDLC)” subcategory under digital revenues or under the “PC (Free to Play, Casual, Social)” where we expect to see Playfish game revenues:

Across all its live games, EA enjoys 34 million monthly active users and 5.4 million daily active users. Follow the company on AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.