Crowdstar, Zynga and Playdom — three of the big social gaming companies which grew up on the Facebook platform — have all had launches on iOS in recent weeks that reflect evolving strategies in terms of thinking about the mobile space. Either through internal reorganization or acquisitions, all three companies are building out devoted mobile studios, instead of creating “companion” apps that exist primarily to promote their Facebook titles.

We talked to Playdom, which up until the launch of City of Wonder offered two apps in the iOS store. Although City of Wonder has fallen down the general free app charts since its launch nearly a month ago, it’s still in the top 100 for the platform’s highest-grossing apps.

“In the past, we viewed mobile as being an interesting adjunct, largely because the opportunity was there, but it was small relative to Facebook,” said Omar Siddiqui, who is vice president of game production overseeing City of Wonder and Gardens of Time at Playdom. “We would add a helper app or something that supported the web experience.”

Those “helper” apps for titles like Social City and Sorority Life would have some core features of the games on Facebook, but they were mostly targeted at hardcore fans, he explained.

> Continue reading on Inside Mobile Apps.

Platinum Life: Country by Heatwave interactive for CMT (Country Music Television) joins the ranks of Facebook Games developed to promote a genre of music or a band. Among others, we’ve previously looked at the hip-hop genre game by Platinum Life: Web Edition by the same developer, as well as New Boyz:The World created by Funtactix previously and expect more to join to join the party.

According to our data tracking service AppData, Platinum Life:Country currently has 14,515 monthly active users and 1,052 daily active users.

The game is still finding its feet. The launch was pushed back by 10 days, going live on June 13th; after that, a new loading screen with “under construction” graphics confused users who thought that the game was down, accounting for the slow start tracked by AppData and the recent dip in users.

Here’s what the game offers users, as is, especially country music fans.

Platinum Life: Country streams music by artists featured on CMT, including the artists themselves as cartoon avatars. A new player selects one of these artists such as Dolly Parton, Trace Adkins, Colt Ford and Big & Rich as a mentor(s) and they will hear their voices and avatars as they play through the game.

The game itself combines the social aspect of building communities and visiting your friends’ communities to do chores for rewards and a “performance” mini-game which is a game of four card draw based on luck. Each action requires energy, called “moxi” in the game and gains fame (experience) for levels. Building isn’t simply buying and setting objects down on the map, some yield only coins and fame, some actually yield coins, moxi, fame as well as ribbons which are used to upgrade building objects. The game monetizes by selling Platinum points using Facebook credits which is used to buy premium buildings for your community as well as moxi and customization for your avatar.

What the game does right is the large avatar that a player gets to create at the start of the game, with over 400 items of customization and four different stances. This gives a stronger sense of identification for the player and the player gets to see the avatar on stage at each performance. Even facial features and hair can be changed without cost so a player could decide to be a happy brunette one day and a sad red-head the next. Additional customization items are purchased with in-game coin as well as Platinum points. The game also features a camera that allows the player to post pictures of his or her avatar, and an option to view your friends’ avatars.

Country music streams continuously in the background, so a player may even use the game as a country music station. In the future, CMT expects that the game will be a platform for the artists to announce new music and another avenue for getting their music out to country music fans. Players who build a movie theatre will be able to watch CMT content including music videos and TV content. This is an announced feature which will be live in a coming upate. As new features and mini-games are added into Platinum Life:Country, we have no doubt that it will have its devoted followers.

Interested readers can follow the progress of Platinum Life:Country with AppData, our traffic tracking application for social games and developers.

Military-themed strategy games had some significant high points on Facebook well before 2011, but in the last couple of weeks, the genre’s really heated up as Digital Chocolate and Zynga both released new entries to the market. With the two games live and in heavy use by players, we compare the two to see how each are doing given their thematic similarities and gameplay differences.

Digital Chocolate’s Army Attack was first to market toward the very end of May. The game gained traction quickly, debuting at number four on our top 20 list of fastest-growing Facebook games by monthly active users for the last week of the month and landing at the top of the daily active users ranking only two days later. It’s the 19th game in Digital Chocolate’s developer portfolio and already it’s number three in term’s of the company’s overall Facebook traffic just behind Millionaire City. In Army Attack, players control individual military units on a map laid out along a grid. Clicking an unoccupied square on the grid sends a selected unit to “conquer” the square while clicking an occupied square sends unit into turn-based combat against whatever happens to be there.

Zynga’s Empires & Allies arrived about a week later following an announcement made just a day before the game launched. It’s Zynga’s first new Facebook game following December’s CityVille release, but as it came after the launch of RewardVille, Empires & Allies was already compatible with the fan incentive network. This along with cross-promotion through Zynga’s other games gave Empires & Allies a leg up on the growth charts for its first 10 days of life, though a reporting issue on Facebook prevented the game from hitting our rankings charts until almost two weeks after launch. In the game, players must rebuild a city attacked by a savage military force. Specific military structures produce individual units that the player can then lead into turn-based combat against artificial intelligence-controlled opponents or against neighbors for player-versus-player action.

It comes as no surprise that Empires & Allies now leads Army Attack in terms of traffic, despite the latter game’s head start. Zynga simply has the larger network to leverage cross-promotion, and the game uses a city-building mechanic identical to the one in CityVille, which creates instant familiarity for CityVille players. Digital Chocolate’s cross-promotion is not insignificant, however; we’ve seen its 18th game, Zombie Lane, get a bit of a lift as Army Attack grows in popularity and it’s not hard to imagine that traffic flows both ways despite the games’ dissimilar gameplay.

As for a gameplay comparison, we avoid making any subjective judgements on behalf of players. We will, however, point out a few of the core differences between the two military-themed strategy titles:

• Empires & Allies relies heavily on a city-building mechanic while Army Attack pulls more from the treasure-hunting genre where users are encouraged to click on as many squares as possible. Note that players are still asked to build structures in Army Attack to produce units; however, they do not have to provide civilian housing or comfort the way they do in Empires & Allies.
• At time of press, Army Attack does not have a PvP mode, although Digital Chocolate President Marc Metis says that is in the game’s future at some point. Empires & Allies launched with a PvP mode, however, it started off as a feature to be unlocked around level 6.
• Combat in Army Attack can occur at any time whenever the AI spawns enemy units on unoccupied squares on the map. Empires & Allies’ combat must be sought out and activated either by clicking on an attacking character’s (or player’s) icon or by visiting their occupied territory.
• Environment does not play significant a role in Army Attack wheres Empires & Allies makes a firm distinction between land, air, and sea units for a sort of rock-paper-scissors dynamic to balancing combat.
• Army Attack places significance on unit location as units that are adjacent to one another will both attack in the same turn at no additional energy charge. Empires & Allies units can only attack one at a time and gain no clear advantage based on positioning.
• In Army Attack, players must purchase new maps to unlock areas. In Empires & Allies, players must earn enough in-game currency and “Liberty Bonds” (which can also be gifted by neighbors) to buy a land expansion for their city.

As far as monetization goes, the games both use similar models where players are paying to speed up construction on structures, replenish energy, or gain access to special gameplay boosts. Zynga has a slight advantage as Empires & Allies does encourage players to build decorative structures in their cities, creating an additional revenue stream.

As was the case with hidden object games in direct competition for the Facebook audience, we observe that players are not in a position where playing one strategy game would prevent them from playing the other. If anything, the presence of more strategy games in the genre might be having an overall positive impact across all strategy games. We observe, for example, that Kabam’s Global Warfare has shown accelerated growth since Army Attack and Empires & Allies arrived.

We plan to keep an eye on the strategy genre throughout the summer as Playdom readies its own entry into the military-themed strategy genre. In the meantime, Digital Chocolate is actively challenging Zynga with an “Army Attack Challenge,” asking Facebook players to try both games and rate according to which they feel is the better game. You can follow each game’s progress on AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

Developer Gamzee recently scored $1 million in seed funding to develop HTML5-based games for mobile devices and social networks. Apple, Facebook and other companies are all pushing to improve the markup language, in order to enable applications to run across computers and other devices more easily. However, the standard itself is still being developed, as is Facebook’s role in helping to promote social-mobile apps.

With HTML5 still coming into its own as a programming language for social and mobile games, few developers have released games that actually do run seamlessly across networks.

We’ve seen larger social game developers take steps toward realizing this goal, with Zynga acquiring an HTML5 engine just last fall and EA building an entire game and mobile component with it in 2011. The question is what Facebook decides to launch in addition to what it already provides for mobile devices, such as single sign-on for iOS. For now, app stores on native applications for iOS and Android have been the main way that people discover games and other third-party titles.

Josh Levitan, VP of Games at Gamzee, walks us through the challenges of developing an game in HTML5 that works on all platforms. Levitan joined Activision and Acclain co-founder Howard Marks at Gamzee after launching a social games division at Nexon (which is just now getting its first social game out in the form of Maple Story Adventures) and previously working at Playdom on a game called Kogamu, which was apparently shelved by Playdom following a beta test period. Gamzee’s first game is designed for mobile, but will work on Facebook as well.

Inside Social Games: Why HTML5?

Josh Levitan: Two reasons, the first is Facebook announced back in February that they were redoing their platform in HTML5 for mobile. Basically we saw that as a great opportunity because when Facebook released their web platform, they had all these great things where you could put games out as apps that would run inside Facebook — with all the Facebook frame, with promotion, with discovery… and they’ve added all sorts of things like Credits to enable people to purchase items in game more easily. They’re [apparantly] going to be doing the same thing on mobile.

The second reason [for our company] is that, having operated a bunch of games at Acclaim that are download games for PC and then making Facebook games that were Flash games at Playdom, we wanted the opportunity to make [multiplatform] games because as a gamer, I want to be able to play my game on whatever device I happen to be on. You can’t really do that right now. There are some games that allow you to have the same sort of integration across servers, but it’s usually a different client, you have to download an app for your iPhone… and that just gets really messy. With HTML5, you can make the same game on all platforms.

ISG: What are some of the challenges to being truly multiplatform? We’ve heard some developers say it’s just too much of a hassle to deal with phones’ variable WiFi connections…

Levitan: So phone speed is certainly one challenge. That seems to be going away with the fact that a lot of phones — pretty much all smartphones now — have WiFi connections and 4G is becoming more prevalent in a lot of cases.

The other big challenge is just differences among different devices and having to support a lot of different devices like the screen resolution on an iPhone 3GS is different than the screen resolution on an iPhone 4. And the way that those guys handle javascript and certain elements of HTML5 are different on those platforms as well.

ISG: Do you find yourself focusing on specific mobile devices just to cut down on all the demands?

Levitan: Our goal is to have it work seamlessly on all platforms, but we’re going to be focusing on iOS devices and Android, because those are the two biggest chunks of the market. Then we’re going to expand out to other things like Windows Phone 7 and Palm.

ISG: You said the game would also work on Facebook. What about on other social networks?

Levitan: Right now, we’re just looking at Facebook, but the way we’re architecting our code, we’re sort of platform agnostic. So if in the future we want to integrate our game with a social network in China or Japan, we’re able to do that. Or if Google gets their social network working and that turns out to be great, we can integrate fairly easily with that platform as well. Our focus is definitely on Facebook right now because it’s obviously the 800 pound gorilla pretty much over the entire world. There’s just so many users and so many people that play games and so many people that have proven they like to spend money on good games.

ISG: Do you find that being platform agnostic puts limits on your game design? Social games and mobile gamers have very different play habits, for what we’ve seen.

Levitan: There are certain differences. The first game that we’re doing is going to be consistent across the platforms, so we picked something that lends itself well to short bursts or longer play. We don’t want to give away what we’re working on yet. We’ll just say it’s a traditional Facebook gaming genre that’s done very well.

But for example, city-building games have proven to work pretty well on Facebook and then there are similar games on mobile — [like] Tap Zoo or Smurf Village or Zombie Farm or something like that — where you could call them the same type of game even though they’re on mobile.

ISG: And now we’ve got CityVille coming to mobile, too.

Levitan: Exactly. But that’s a good example where it’s not the same game. I can’t play my city on my phone. It’s a separate app that has some light [Facebook] integration and we think that gamers want to be able to play their game anywhere. Even on their TV if it has a web connection.

ISG: What are some of the limitations you find with developing a game in HTML5 for mobile? We’ve heard that first-person shooters are definitely out for now…

Levitan: I certainly wouldn’t try and do that right now. There are definitely some limitations for doing things on mobile. Just because of the fact that there are different implementations of hardware acceleration and the way that graphics get processed on mobile than for desktop.

When you’re looking at HTML, if you’re using canvas for example, canvas performance on desktop is almost identical to the performance you can get out of Flash on a desktop. But if you’re running canvas on an iPhone 3GS, it’s pretty bad at the moment. So the kinds of games that we’re focusing on are not 3D. They’re 2.5D isometric games. Similar to ‘Ville games or Ravenwood Fair, because that’s something that javascript and HTML are able to handle fairly well even on a mobile phone.

ISG: How much longer do you think it will take before HTML5 could handle something along the lines of a 3D first-person shooter?

Levitan: We’ve played around a little bit with iOS 5 — they have the dev version out — and that runs canvas pretty well. So you might be able to do [shooters]. We haven’t played around with doing 3D graphics or trying to do something that simulates 3D. WebGL is also coming for phones in the next probably year or two and once that’s in place, it should be able to handle 3D just fine.

[HTML5] is not a mature standard yet and there’s still some holes in it. For example, audio. There isn’t a great way to do the same kind of audio that you would in a regular application and so, for example, a lot of times when people are making web apps in HTML5, you’ll have a fallback audio player that loads a separate Flash player just to play audio files. Which is obviously kind of a kludge-y solution and it wouldn’t work at all for mobile. And canvas is slow, and there are a few other things that aren’t locked down yet.

But overall, people have been able to make some pretty good apps with it. People have been able to make some games — you can find a bunch of demos of all sorts of different kinds of games, like arcade games, 2D shooters, platformers and things like that. Facebook actually got Doom 2 running on HTML5 and fairly well. They’re pretty heavily invested in it — on their developer site, they will put up little benchmarking tests that they’re doing just to show the difference in like sprite performance or texturing amongst different mobile platforms. For whatever reason, they decided to do a java port of Doom 2 in HTML5 and canvas and it was pretty neat.

ISG: If you integrate Facebook Credits for the product, that implies Credits will work on mobile. But, how will that work on mobile? Do we have to pay Apple for a download from the App Store and then pay Facebook for in-game purchases?

Levitan: There’s still a bit of mystery as to what the [Facebook] mobile platform will support. We expect that it will support Credits, because otherwise they’d be giving up some money. If for some reason it doesn’t, we still plan on using Credits because we can just integrate with the regular Credits API and treat it as a regular Facebook app because our game is basically a web app that just happens to run on any platform.

We may at some point have an app that you can download through the App Store, or we may not. Our game is like a regular Facebook app where through the mobile platform, you’ll just authorize the app and because it’s a web app, you won’t actually have to get it through the Apple App Store or the Chrome app store or something like that. We may put out an app for you to do that for additional discovery, but basically that’s just a shortcut that will run the web app.

ISG: What about getting your game onto Android? Does that platform have any differences that will impact your game?

Levitan: It seems like you make, for native [Android] apps, about half the money that you make on the iOS ones even those there’s way more [Android] phones. I think Apple just had a much better experience overall for downloading apps. Purchasing is one click. Apps just tend to work. Whereas Google’s been a little bit slower, they had that weird thing where you could buy apps and return them for a long period of time… I think all of that just made it a little bit clunky.

Bingo Adventure is a new game from well-established social game developer King.com. It launched to the public on May 12, appearing on our list of the top 20 emerging Facebook games about two weeks later, though it has since lost some of its growth momentum.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, Bingo Adventure currently has 310,041 monthly active users and 15,430 daily active users.

Bingo Adventure is a simulation of various forms of the classic game of chance, Bingo, with a strong real-time social interaction component. Players can visit one of several different worldwide locations, each offering a variation on the basic Bingo game, and play against randomly matched opponents in real time. Locations are split into rooms, and each room has its own chatroom, allowing players to talk, interact and buy each other gifts during play.

Play proceeds by players “buying in” to one or more bingo tickets by spending the game’s soft currency. Purchasing a bingo ticket provides the player with experience points with higher levels unlocking new venues with higher stakes as well as the opportunity to play more than one bingo ticket at the same time in lower-level rooms. Gifts, which take the form of virtual food and drink, also provide small experience point bonuses, though these are negligible compared to the amount gained for purchasing a ticket.

After a short wait to allow all players to buy in if they desire, play begins. Numbers are called and are automatically marked off on the player’s tickets if they come up. The first player to reach Bingo receives the prize pot, made up of other players’ virtual currency. There is also a jackpot on offer for players who achieve Bingo within a certain amount of numbers being drawn. If multiple players reach Bingo at the same time, the pot is split between them.

Unlike the games on King.com’s main website, there are no cash prizes on offer in Bingo Adventure — it is purely a social experience, with players competing for virtual currency. Players receive a daily bonus of coins to play with and can also purchase more with Facebook Credits. This is the only means through which the game is monetized; all other purchases, whether they are bingo tickets or gifts, are completed using the game’s soft currency.

We didn’t hear back from King.com’s representatives prior to publishing this, so it’s difficult to comment on the exact plans for the game’s future, as there are no hints on the game’s Facebook page, either. As the selection of locations on offer is currently relatively limited, one of the first things to be added will likely be additional places for players to continue their Bingo Adventure. A wider variety of virtual items would also likely be a popular choice with players, with perhaps some premium items on offer with more significant experience point boosts for those players who wish to progress through the levels into the high-stakes games quicker.

We know that King.com is focusing on a cross-platform growth strategy for social and mobile and that the developer had a strong 2010 by virtue of offering a wide selection of games for Facebook, both with standalone titles like Bubble Saga and via its portal app. King.com currently has 7 games on Facebook, with Bingo Adventure being one of the newest. We’re not exactly clear on why the game has slowed down in growth of late, though the real-time gameplay and genre may have something to do with it. Even so, it’s still early days for Bingo Adventures and the real-time, synchronous nature of the game could attract a dedicated group of players that make it a virtual social event.

You can follow Bingo Adventure’s progress with AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

Get used to this picture: Zynga’s Empires & Allies and Digital Chocolate’s Army Attack battling it out in the top two spots of fastest-growing games by monthly active users. The only possible surprise we expect to see in the next three months or so as the army-themed strategy genre balloons is Kabam’s army game, Global Warfare, creeping up behind them at a steady pace. It’s up more than 11 spots from last week’s rankings for a solid position at number seven.

On the non-army front, Zoo World (a.k.a. Zoo World 2) is off to a good start following last week’s launch and Namco Bandai’s arcade classic Pac-Man eats its way toward the top of another top 20 list, having gobbled up Friday’s list of emerging Facebook games. Pokémon clone Monster Galaxy, meanwhile, maintains its monstrous growth pattern; it might be time to start giving awards to social games with longest-running top 20 stints.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Empires & Allies	32,974,509	+23,319,006	+242%
2.	Army Attack	4,182,229	+1,594,634	+62%
3.	Monster Galaxy	16,166,748	+1,476,780	+10%
4.	Tea4Friends	1,689,943	+547,118	+48%
5.	PAC-MAN	1,115,966	+523,194	+88%
6.	Zoo World	2,178,219	+489,178	+29%
7.	Global Warfare	1,203,432	+434,988	+57%
8.	PyramidVille	2,619,431	+375,139	+17%
9.	Tetris Battle	3,589,634	+353,779	+11%
10.	Millionaire City	7,529,783	+343,350	+5%
11.	Nomi Cose Città	1,554,242	+330,414	+27%
12.	inFAMOUS Anarchy	362,637	+306,811	+550%
13.	Ravenwood Fair	6,405,645	+301,882	+5%
14.	Akvaryum	295,316	+295,195	+243,963%
15.	Glory of Rome	1,242,964	+276,130	+29%
16.	Happy Hospital	3,705,144	+271,278	+8%
17.	Slotomania – Slot Machines	3,092,262	+261,430	+9%
18.	Monster World	7,572,187	+242,018	+3%
19.	Planet Domo	763,477	+241,371	+46%
20.	Addicting Games	1,179,326	+236,393	+25%

Newcomers to the rankings this week are Nomi Cose Città, which appears to be an Italian word game, and restaurant simulation Tea4Friends, which we’ll have a review of later this week. Turkish language aquarium sim, Akvaryum, also makes its first appearance here after turning up in last week’s emerging games list.

At number 12 we see inFamous Anarchy, a game developed by Mob Science in collaboration with Sony Computer Entertainment as a tie-in to the recently-released PlayStation 3 game, inFamous 2. An outage in the PS3′s built-in PlayStation Network caused some developmental problems for Anarchy as the social game and the console game are designed to have some light integration facilitated by PSN, but it looks game is still growing healthily despite the delays. The game combines several social game genres such as farming and exploration with player-versus-player combat, which furthers the good-versus-evil theme central to the inFamous franchise. Check out our full review of the game for more details.

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.

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, June 13th, 2011

• Monday Mobile Roundup: Controllers, YouTube Marketing, GEE & More
• Emerging Paid iOS Apps: Hanging With Friends, Doodle Jump & Smoothies Show Growth This Week
• New app dream:scape Comes Off Interesting, But Falls Short of Expectations

Tuesday, June 14th, 2011

• Facebook Social Game Dev MetroGames Partners With Chillingo for iOS Games
• Tuesday Mobile Round-Up: Nokia-Apple Patent Dispute, Square Hires
• Emerging Top-Grossing iOS Apps: Updates Support TeamLava, Bolt, PopCap
• Rovio’s Angry Birds Taps NFC to Let Players Unlock Virtual Goods in The Real World
• Inside Virtual Goods: Spending and Usage Patterns of the Social Gaming Audience 2011, Is Here

Wednesday, June 15th, 2011

• Facebook Appears to Be Finally moving Away From Its All-in-One Mobile App Strategy
• Android Apps Nearly Even With iOS In Mobile Advertising Revenue Share, Millennial Says
• New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: Atari, Wild Needle, Voxer, Peak Games and More
• Wednesday Mobile Roundup: More Lodsys Advice, Mobile Ad Retargeting
• With Three Titles in iOS’ Top Grossing 15, Is Zynga Starting to Get Mobile Right
• Emerging Top Free Apps on iOS: Hanging With Friends, Rip Off, Pandor’s IPO Bump

Thursday, June 16th, 2011

• Facebook’s Unreleased Mobile Photos App: How We Think It Works
• Tapjoy Launches $5 Million Fund to Port Games to Android
• New Hires in Mobile: Gameloft, Glu Mobile, Millennial Media & More
• CrowdStar Tries Again on iOS With Top Girl. And This Time, There’s No Facebook Connection

Friday, June 17th, 2011

• Rip Off, From Vietnam’s Colorbox, Brings Challenge, Color & Chaos to iPhone
• Friday Mobile Roundup: WildChords, Pulse, AppRedeem & More
• Facebook’s HTML5 Mobile Platform Strategy Has Risks, But It Has No Other Choice

Inside Social Games

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

Monday, June 13th, 2011

• Empires & Allies Conquers This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Games by MAU
• Empires & Allies Launches Strong Thanks to CityVille’s Influence
• inFamous Anarchy Looks for Life on Facebook Beyond Console Game’s Launch

Tuesday, June 14th, 2011

• Facebook Social Game Dev MetroGames Partners With Chillingo for iOS Games
• PyramidVille on Facebook Sees Strong Growth After Round of Funding
• The Maturing Market For Brand Integration With Social Games: Medium Integration
• Inside Virtual Goods: Spending and Usage Patterns of the Social Gaming Audience 2011, Is Here

Wednesday, June 15th, 2011

• Strategy and Card Games Top This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Games by DAU
• New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: Peak Games, Xtranormal, Atari, Wild Needle, Voxer and More
• Zynga Launches CityVille on iOS With Hometown, Android Version Expected
• Tetris Battle Reimagines Puzzle Classic with Quick-Fire Multiplayer Action
• With Three Titles in iOS’ Top Grossing 15, Is Zynga Starting to Get Mobile Right?
• Facebook Adds Alternative Payment Options for Facebook Credits in 13 Countries
• Inside Virtual Goods: Facebook Credits Gaining in Popularity, But Still New to Many Users

Thursday, June 16th, 2011

• New Hires in Social Gaming: Digital Chocolate, GSN, Happy Elements, & More
• Battle Cards: A Customizable Card Game for the Facebook Generation
• Facebook Expands Credits Offers to Europe Via SupersonicAds and Deal United
• BringIt’s Skill-Based Gaming Could Be the Best Place for Facebook Credits
• HotShot Takes Notes From PopCap to Bring Pachinko-Flavored Fun to Facebook

Friday, June 17th, 2011

• The Real Pac-Man Eat Up This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Games
• Zoo World 2 Aims to Maintain RockYou’s Leadership of Facebook While Innovating in Zoo Genre
• Social Gaming Roundup: Zynga Lawsuits, MapleStory, War Games, & More

Inside Facebook

Tracking Facebook and the Facebook platform for developers and marketers.

Sunday, June 12, 2011

• Facebook Sees Big Traffic Drops in US and Canada as It Nears 700 Million Users Worldwide

Monday, June 13th, 2011

• BandPage, VEVO, Pages, Friends, Zoosk and More on This Week’s Top 20 Facebook Apps by MAU
• New Facebook Places Features Could Give Local Business Pages a Viral Boost, Help Complete Listings
• Available Data Shows Facebook User Numbers Growing Quickly, or Slowly, or Falling
• Featured Facebook Campaigns: T.G.I. Friday’s, State Farm, Spring, NASCAR, and Honda
• Platform Update: Insights Shows App Load Times, Iframe Dialog Permission Changes

Tuesday, June 14th, 2011

• New Facebook Platform Industry Hires: Buddy Media, Context Optional, Involver, Wildfire and Work4 Labs
• Facebook’s Relaunched Comment View for Photo Albums Helps Page Moderators
• Martin Lawrence, Katy Perry, YouTube, Coca-Cola and More on This Week’s Top 20 Growing Facebook Pages
• Facebook Partners With RockMelt to Outsource Development of Social Web Browser
• Facebook Allows More Descriptive Page Tab App Names by Extending Character Limit to 100
• Inside Virtual Goods: Spending and Usage Patterns of the Social Gaming Audience 2011, Is Here

Wednesday, June 15th, 2011

• Facebook Hires Veteran Political Staffer Joe Lockhart as New VP of Global Communications
• Badoo, Friend Quizzes, Profile Statistics, Norton, Yahoo and More on This Week’s Top 20 Facebook Apps by DAU
• Facebook Appears to Be Finally Moving Away From Its All-in-One Mobile App Strategy
• New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: Context Optional, Daglow Entertainment, Wild Needle, Voxer and More
• More Measurement Firms Show Stronger May US Facebook Growth, Following Slower Start to 2011
• Facebook Alerting Users to Facial Recognition Privacy Setting With Home Page Ads
• Facebook’s Unreleased Mobile Photos App: How We Think It Works
• How Businesses Can Use Facebook’s “Recommend This Place” to Gain Exposure and Likes

Thursday, June 16th, 2011

• Facebook Expands Credits Offers to Europe Via SupersonicAds and Deal United
• Facebook Careers Postings: Credits, Austin, Recruiting, Monetization and More
• Facebook Hires and Departures: Lockhart, Odio, and Interns, Sales, Ad Ops and More
• Facebook Launches Send Dialog So Apps and Sites Can Prompt Users to Microshare

Friday, June 17th, 2011

• Friend Quizzes, Videos, BranchOut, Photos, Bumper Stickers and More on This Week’s Top 20 Emerging Facebook Apps by MAU
• Last Day to Register — Inside Facebook’s Josh Constine at the Social Media Marketing Bootcamp Next Week
• Facebook Readying Official iPad App: What It Means for Third-Party Facebook Clients
• Facebook Roundup: IPO, Political Ads, Well Being, Apple, Copious, and Iceland’s Constitution

The Inside Network Job Board is dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities across social and mobile application platforms.

Here are this week’s highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at Peak Games, Xtranormal Inc., Atari, Wild Needle, Voxer, Daglow Entertainment and Context Optional.

• Social Game Designer

• User Acquisition Manager- Germany
• User Acquisition Manager -Spain
• Game Designer

• Mobile Producer/Game Designer
• Casual/Social Online Producer/Game Designer

• Mobile Game Developer at Well-Funded Studio
• Mobile Game Developer
• Player Solutions Specialist
• Software Developer at Mobile Game Studio

• Product Manager, Android

• Ruby on Rails Developer– Social Marketing Suite
• Social Marketing Software Customer Support Specialist
• Social Marketing Community Genius
• Software Developer
• Marketing Manager
• Director of Marketing, U.S.

• Community Manager
• Lead Facebook Architect
• Lead AS3 Developer
• AS3 Developer

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.

Zynga Sues Vostu Over Copyright Infringement — Zynga has filed a lawsuit against Brazilian startup Vostu in California federal court over copyright infringement, reports TechCrunch. Vostu allegedly copied everything from exact game mechanics to “mistakes” (such as government buildings in CityVille not needing a road connection) in many of the social developer’s top games.

In response to the allegations, Vostu states that “Zynga has been accused of copying so many games that they’ve sadly lost the ability to recognize games like ours that are chock full of original content and have been independently created.”

[image via TechCrunch]

TeePee Games Launches Facebook Application — Social/mobile/online Flash games discovery platform TeePee Games has announced the launch of its new Facebook application. Through the app, users will be able to access the “Geronimo” discovery engine in order to find recommended games for their interests. Additionally, users will be able to see what games their friends are, or have been, playing. TeePee Games received $500,000 in angel funding late last year for the launch of its discovery platform.

Nexon Brings MapleStory to Facebook — Nexon, the maker of popular free-to-play online game, MapleStory has announced that its Facebook counterpart, MapleStory Adventures is hitting closed beta. In this incarnation of the game, players will be able to play a simplified version of MapleStory, hosting the same customization style players are used to as they complete tasks and quests throughout Maple World as either a Magician or Warrior. Read our preview of the game here.

Army Attack Goes to War With Empires & Allies — Digital Chocolate has issued “The Army Attack Challenge” to social gamers. The developer has challenged users to play both Army Attack and Zynga’s Empires & Allies and decide for themselves which is the better game. The challenge was issued due to the fact that user ratings for the Digital Chocolate title have been rated higher than that of Zynga’s which, earlier this week was 5 out of 5 stars versus 4.6 out of 5 stars respectively. Nevertheless, Empires & Allies still holds millions more daily and monthly active users.

Everloop Raises $3.1 Million — Kids social network Everloop has raised $3.1 million in funding this week. Investors include Band of Angels, Envoi Ventures, Richard Chino, Wayne Goodrich, Deena Burnet-Bailey, and additional investors. The children’s network offers everything from music and videos to social games.

Zoo World 2, sequel to RockYou’s 2-year-old Zoo World, launched on Facebook this week after completing a 200-person closed beta test. RockYou CEO Lisa Marino teased the game back in April; at that time, the developer was aiming for a May 2011 release.

At this time, due to both Zoo World and its sequel being listed on Facebook as simply “Zoo World,” the statistics for the title according to our traffic tracking service AppData reflect the performance of both games. At the time of writing, Zoo World is listed as having 1,929,293 monthly active users and 353,789 daily active users.

Zoo World 2 is a game about designing and building a fully customizable zoo. Players purchase animals and facilities for their zoo and are expected to feed, care for and breed their animals while keeping the public interested in spending money with fun structures. The decision to make a complete sequel to the original Zoo World was born from a desire to innovate while learning from the lessons the past game had taught the team at RockYou.

“As successful as Zoo World had been, a lot had changed on Facebook since July of 2009,” explains Jonathan Knight, senior vice-president of games at RockYou. “One thing was really missing from ZW1, and that was the ability to really customize your zoo. People love building and decorating, and so we responded to the fans and delivered on what they were asking for.”

The customization aspect isn’t just for visual appeal — adding decorations to the zoo according to the various animals’ tastes makes them happier, which causes them to provide the player with better bonuses such as Hearts, which can be spent on breeding. Animals all have their own ID card, too, allowing the player to name them, see their date of birth and their “likes,” allowing the player to build up a personalized bond with their charges.

The game also includes a “save the species” theme which Knight believes sets it apart from similar animal games on Facebook. Players can build up animals’ “endangerment meters” by breeding them and releasing excess creatures into the wild.

Facebook Credits are fully integrated into the game on the monetization front. These can be spent on a variety of goods in the in-game store, including Energy refills; fantastic “Ultra Rare” animals such as unicorns and winged horse Pegasus; special decorative and soft currency-making items; fully-detailed habitats for the animals; and various other vanity items such as animated water features.

“We’re excited to combine all the learnings from ZW1′s monetization as well as the more contemporary monetization techniques from today’s successful Facebook games,” continues Knight. “ZW1 is very content-focused. We definitely plan to deliver this same ongoing content support for ZW2.”

Knight didn’t share any specifics about Zoo World 2′s immediate future, but noted that a big team is working on the game at RockYou. The company as a whole is continuing to support Zoo World 1 alongside its sequel as well as launching a second new game from its publishing division “very soon.” This game, known as Cloudforest Expedition, is the brainchild of video game industry veterans John Romero and Brenda Braithwaite’s Loot Drop studio.

“This has been an incredibly exciting 6 months for RockYou,” concludes Knight, “and the next 6 are going to show what we’ve been up to. Some people had counted us out of the running last year, and we are back in full force, and plan to be a true leader in the space. It all starts with great games, and that’s our laser focus!”

You can follow Zoo World and its sequel’s progress with AppData, our traffic tracking application for social games and developers.