Infinite Realms is a Facebook strategy game from developer Joyport Inc. The game officially launched December 6, 2010, but in the words of game producer Waye Geng, it was “unstable and somewhat unsuccessful back then.” Since that time, the team worked to “fix” it and re-released the game on May 13 of this year. Geng says he’s pleased with the metrics so far, believing that traffic will pick up in earnest very soon.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, Infinite Realms currently has 51,394 monthly active users and 3,934 daily active users.

The game places players in the role of an outpost builder and army commander, tasking them with constructing the outpost’s facilities and conquering areas on a map by defeating enemies in order to obtain resources for building. Combat is similar to older Facebook strategy titles where player send an army unit to fight an enemy and receive an instant notification of victory or defeat. Players can affect the outcome of battles by selecting Hero leader characters for individual units; these characters gain experience points through combat to be spent on improving their combat statistics. If the player doesn’t assign a Hero to an outpost’s unit, that outpost can only defend against attacks from enemy units.

Also like those other strategy games, Infinite Realms aims to appeal to the hardcore gamer, mostly through its science fiction setting and sophisticated art style. Geng explains that Joyport wanted the game to feel like “next-generation” for Facebook games, which would go toward the goal of attracting hardcore players.

“When we first designed the game, the overall experience we wanted our players to have was ‘I am exploring an endless universe,’” he tells us. “So we designed all aspects of the game — the story, art style, music, gameplay and narrative — to reach that goal.”

Infinite Realms is monetized through its premium currency of “tokens,” which players can spend on special items and gameplay boosts. Geng says the game monetizes well with hardcore players willing to spend real money on Hero equipment and higher-end weapons. Tokens can be purchased using PayPal, credit card, mobile, bank transfer or pre-paid card. They can also be earned through the game’s offer wall. At present, the game does not feature Facebook Credit integration, which Geng says is due to lack of communication with Facebook.

“We currently don’t know how [implementing Facebook Credits] will affect our revenue and monetization,” reports Geng. “We want to publish the game in the Middle East and we’ve been having a hard time finding official instructions on the policies — and it seems to be hard to reach someone at Facebook to ask questions.”

Future plans for the game include the addition of new content and added depth. Additional planetary systems will be added to the game map, and the story will continue, with stronger “boss” opponents for players to face. The Infinite Realms team is focused entirely on the game at the moment, though Joyport has a few other unannounced projects in the works. The developer also tells us its actively seeking a publisher, asking that interested parties contact them directly.

You can follow Infinite Realms’ progress with AppData, our traffic tracking application for social games and developers.

Even though Facebook likely has around 700 million users now, it actually isn’t often that we hear the social network is a major driver for user acquisition in mobile gaming — at least compared to FreeAppADay or having an inside connection to Apple.

But a veteran team from the social gaming world is trying to disprove this with its first app Mob Empire, a Foursquare-meets-Mafia Wars game. CrowdMob, which was co-founded by LOLapps’ former creative director Damon Grow, Alex Han and Matt Moore, is among a handful of startups that are trying to build location-enabled mobile games that are genuinely social.

The app, which the company has intentionally kept quiet about since its April 1 launch, pits friends and strangers against each other in a quest to gain control of venues in their city. The game has a modest number of users at the moment with just over 17,000 Facebook monthly actives on AppData, but that’s because the company hasn’t really publicized it to date. Grow said the company is focused on getting engagement of existing users up and ensuring the back-end can scale before marketing or promoting the title.

> Continue reading on Inside Mobile Apps.

Late yesterday, DNA Games posted announcements on the Pages of Casino City, Bar World and Slot City announcing each game’s impending closure set for July 8. The developer was acquired by Zynga last month to the purpose of developing new intellectual property.

Typically, we see social games on Facebook sunsetting only after a prolonged period of decline across monthly active users and monthly active users. These games usually hit their peak traffic within three to four months of launch and then spend as many as 12 months shrinking before the developer moves to sunset or change its growth strategy. According to research published in Inside Virtual Goods: The Future of Social Gaming 2011, engaged social gamers stick around for about two months before moving on. This tells us that decline slopes are impacted as much by new users not coming in as by old users lapsing.

In the case of DNA Games’ library, we see some inconsistencies with other sunset scenarios with its two newer games, Bar World and Slot City. The former launched in November 2010 and reached peak traffic only one month after launch and instead of steadily decline, it experienced a resurgence in traffic almost four months later. The latter, meanwhile, only just launched in early April, barely giving it three months in which to aim for peak numbers. Both games saw a marked decline in May just prior to the acquisition announcement.

Casino City, meanwhile, tells a slightly different story. This game is DNA Games’ oldest Facebook title, launched in April 2010, and by far its largest, accounting for over half the developer’s total MAU and DAU across all its games. Casino City differs from what we think of as a typical sunset pattern in that didn’t reach peak traffic until February of this year. While the beginning of this social game’s “slow burn” life cycle differs from other sunsetting games, however, the end of it looks similar — Casino City began a downward slope at the beginning of March that remained consistent even throughout the acquisition announcement period.

Had DNA Games continued along a sunsetting strategy we’ve seen with Playfish and PlayFirst, we could’ve expected it to migrate Casino City users to Slot City as development efforts shifted over to the new game. The acquisition by Zynga, however, puts the developer in a unique position. On the one hand, DNA could’ve maintained its thriving game while closing its declining games — similar to what ZipZapPlay appears to be doing with Baking Life and Happy Habitat after the developer was acquired by PopCap Games. On the other, DNA can close all its games at once and “start fresh” with new IP for Zynga that in no way relies on player loyalty from its previous games. In either case, Zynga’s overall MAU and DAU dwarfs DNA Games’ many times over, so traffic probably isn’t much of a concern for the developer at this time.

Whatever the motivation behind the closures, we’re interested to see what sunset patterns emerge among older games from established developers. As the Facebook games platform matures through its third year and social games finally reach natural “ends” somewhere between one year and two, it may be that developers begin to build games and content release schedules around a finite life cycle. What that life cycle might be probably depends on game genre and resources available for user acquisition.

DNA Games deferring to Zynga for comment on this story. Zynga would only say for the record that it continues to work with its existing studios on new IP. Zynga’s latest social game, Empires & Allies, launched June 1.

The Inside Network Job Board is dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities in the Facebook Platform and social gaming ecosystem.

Here are this week’s highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at Tagged, lolapps, Kixeye, King.com, A Bit Lucky and Acquinity Interactive.

• Game Producer
• Game Designer
• Creative Director – Social Games
• Product Manager – Monetization

• Flash Animator
• Game QA Tester
• Senior Game Designer
• 2D Animators/Illustrators – Entry, Mid and Senior Roles

• Director of Quality Engineering
• Technical Project Manager
• Flash Game Engineers
• Senior Game Engineer
• Product Manager

• Business Intelligence Developer
• Product Manager , Social & Mobile Games
• Game Developer

• Senior Product Manager

• Online Marketing – Senior Online Media Buyer
• Online Marketing – Web Designer / Graphic Designer
• Online Marketing – Social Media Business Development Lead & Internet Guru

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.

Pac-Man is the latest in Japanese video game developer/publisher Namco Bandai‘s range of games for Facebook, following up titles such as New Rally-X S and Dig-Dug S. The game launched to the public on June 5.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, Pac-Man currently has 196,016 monthly active users and 91,942 daily active users.

Hailing from the 1980s, Pac-Man is one of the all-time classic arcade games. Casting players in the role of the titular yellow blob with an insatiable appetite, it’s the player’s job to guide Pac-Man through a maze full of edible dots while avoiding the unwanted attention of four ghosts. Pac-Man can turn the tables on the ghosts by gobbling a Power Pill, which temporarily turns the ghosts blue and sends them running away from Pac-Man, who can eat the ghosts for large score bonuses while they are in this state. Eating all the dots within a maze moves players to the next “level” where the same maze is presented with increases to speed and difficulty. A player’s progress is represented in-game by a special object that moves around the maze, which Pac-Man can eat for bonus points. As the player’s level increases, the object changes shape, say from fruit to key, and the bonus points increase. If the player is caught by a ghost, the bonus resets.

The Facebook interpretation of the game remains largely unchanged from its arcade forefather. The social features of the game come in the form of two leaderboards: one for the player’s friends who are playing Pac-Man, and the other for worldwide high scores. Entries on the leaderboard link to players’ Facebook profiles, but other than this, there is no direct interaction between players.

The game is monetized in one way only — Facebook Credits for Continues. This differs from other arcade games on Facebook where virtual currency can be spent on power-ups or gameplay boosts. Pac-Man instead relies on the same method old arcades used to keep patrons pumping quarters into machines in order to prolong gameplay. Pac-Man for Facebook allows players to start the game for free, but should they die, the game asks for 10 Facebook Credits to continue where they left off. This means those willing to spend money on their play sessions will be able to rack up enormous scores simply by paying repeatedly for Continues.

As the game has only just opened to the public, Namco Bandai is running an opening sale, with Continue credits available for 3 Facebook Credits instead of the usual 10. Liking Pac-Man on Facebook also provides players with a free Continue credit for use whenever they like.

Pac-Man is what it is, so it’s unlikely that Namco Bandai will be adding much more to the game now it’s up and running on Facebook. The game is experiencing some technical difficulties at the moment, however, so we expect updates to take the form of behind-the-scenes bug fixes to solve network and data transfer issues. New content in the form of virtual items will likely find its way into Pac-Man S, a more socially-themed interpretation of Pac-Man from Namco Bandai which we’ll be taking a look at here on Inside Social Games soon.

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

Digital Chocolate’s Zombie Lane tops this week’s list of fastest-growing games by daily active users, as recorded by AppData, while its newest title, Army Attack, lands at number four. Farther down the rankings, we see a slew of ‘Ville-titled citybuilding simulation games duking it out for DAU growth.

It should be noted that Facebook is experiencing some reporting delays of late that may impact today’s DAU rankings. No new traffic numbers were reported for the period of June 2 through June 5 and now we’re seeing a lack of updated figures for the period between June 6 and June 7. At time of writing, these rankings are based on the last-reported figures from June 6.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Zombie Lane	1,472,254	+287,113	+24%
2.	Bejeweled Blitz	3,164,006	+280,916	+10%
3.	CityVille	18,971,019	+271,916	+1%
4.	Army Attack	460,699	+220,421	+92%
5.	FarmVille	10,563,446	+212,250	+2%
6.	PyramidVille	476,879	+169,447	+55%
7.	Texas HoldEm Poker	6,872,456	+156,109	+2%
8.	Monster Galaxy	951,320	+129,093	+16%
9.	Bubble Saga	1,070,809	+99,893	+10%
10.	FrontierVille	4,146,182	+81,323	+2%
11.	Bubble Island	1,542,367	+77,303	+5%
12.	Diamond Dash	1,442,933	+75,232	+6%
13.	Monster World	1,344,130	+73,186	+6%
14.	開心農場	1,302,357	+68,160	+6%
15.	Games	1,727,044	+59,590	+4%
16.	แฮปปี้คนเลี้ยงหม	912,534	+56,670	+7%
17.	World Series Superstars: Baseball with MLB teams!	117,523	+55,556	+90%
18.	Tetris Battle	787,199	+55,435	+8%
19.	Top Eleven – Be a Football Manager	684,047	+48,502	+8%
20.	Crime City	694,072	+48,422	+7%

Of the ‘Ville games, many of these are familiar. FarmVille is still seeing some slight growth despite an overall decline following the conclusion of a Lady Gaga campaign. Its Zynga siblings CityVille and FrontierVille also saw DAU spikes this week.

New to this list, meanwhile, is Kobojo’s PyramidVille, which also showed up on our top 20 list of fastest-growing games by monthly active users this week. The game launched in January with a very basic gameplay structure similar to FrontierVille where players straddle a farming simulation combined with citybuilding to create a thriving Egyptian town. PyramidVille recently added Italian and Spanish language versions, consistent with the expansion plans Kobojo shared with us after closing a $7.5 million round of funding, and a new feature around godlike-powers fueled by a new in-game resource earned through gameplay. We’re still waiting to hear when a mobile version of the game will be made available.

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

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

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

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

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

About the Report

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

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

What We Cover

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

See the full table of contents below:

Table of Contents

I. Methodology and Respondents

1. Introduction

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

2. Research Methodology

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

3. Survey Respondents

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

II. Overall Results

4. Favorite Game

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

5. Payments

• Consumer Perception of Facebook Credits
• Frequency of Payment Methods

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

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

7. Mobile Platform and Game Adoption by Social Game Players

III. Demographic Differences in Usage Patterns and Monetization

8. Age and Gender Differences

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

9. Regional Differences

• Game Discovery and Spending
• Favorite Game
• Payment Types
  

Appendix

• Survey Questions

More Data, More Actionable Insights

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

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

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

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

Get The Annual Membership

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

OR Buy Single Report: $995 $795 USD*

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

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

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

TinierCafe is a restaurant sim for Facebook from casual and social game developer GCREST, a subsidiary of CyberAgent, which maintains a Flash-based virtual world called TinierMe on its own site. Using cross-promotion and interconnected gameplay between TinierCafe and TinierMe, the developer has gotten TinierCafe a healthy start after its late May launch, landing it on our top 20 emerging Facebook games list as of last week and already placing it in the top 10 restaurant Facebook games by traffic.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, TinierCafe currently has 500,728 monthly active users and 44,281 daily active users.

TinierCafe comes in eighth among restaurant sim games as tracked by AppData, just behind Cupcake Corner and Cooking Mama in both MAU and DAU. The game debuted with a cross-promotion to TinierMe players on the game’s website, which attracted a large influx of initial players. Additionally, the game allows TinierMe.com players to import their character and their existing virtual currency balance to the game for a smooth platform transition between games. All of these factors contributed to the game’s initial traffic growth, however Masaru Ohnogi, CEO of GCREST America, tells us that marketing and viral growth have shifted the current player base to roughly half TinierMe cross-over players and half brand new players. The balance is still shifting even now as TinierCafe continues to grow.

In terms of gameplay, TinierCafe is similar to other restaurant games where players control a chef avatar responsible for cooking dishes to serve to customers to make said customers happy. The core gameplay loop involves selecting a dish from a cookbook, clicking on a stove object several times to prepare the dish, then waiting for the dish to be done. Once finished, the player must click on the completed item to “serve” it, which prompts a non-playable waiter character to bring servings of the completed item to any customers that walk in and sit down. A customer that successfully receives a dish pays the player a standard currency, Pecos, and adds to the overall star score of the restaurant. A customer that isn’t served anything within a certain amount of time leaves without paying and decreases the overall star score. The game keeps a running tally of how much a player’s restaurant earns while they are not in the game; although, players can close a restaurant at any time by clicking a button.

A key viral feature in TinierCafe is the friend invite system, which feeds into a gameplay mechanic that allows players to open more restaurants in other cities. Each restaurant features both a standard menu with items a person might order in real life if they lived in Japan (e.g. udon soup, hamburger steak, beef and rice bowl, etc.), while the regional menu items cater to a city’s “specialty” dish, like clam chowder in a bread bowl for San Francisco or escargot for Paris. Players “hire” friends to work as waiters within their first restaurant and can also hire friends to be the chefs in other regional restaurants. The more restaurants a player can keep running at once, the more Pecos the player earns.

Monetization presents TinierCafe with a challenge. Ohnogi explains that currently, players with a TinierMe account maintain a consistent premium currency balance across all Tinier brand games, including the Facebook version of TinierMe. At present, the game isn’t integrated with Facebook Credits integration and only allows the purchase of Tinier’s premium currency, G-Coins, with PayPal, credit card, or Rixty. Players can also acquire G-Coins via offer walls powered by SuperRewards. The G-Coins make up the primary revenue stream across all Tinier brand products as player spend the coins on premium decoration items or on mini-games like gatcha (capsule machines). Ohnogi says there’s still plenty of time to work out Facebook Credits integration without sacrificing the cross-game G-Coin balance.

As for future features in TinierCafe, Ohnogi would only say more content is planned. He says GCREST is committed to a strategy of “one character, multiple games,” as TinierMe users tend to be very attached to their individual characters.

“Because it’s so cute,” Ohnogi says, “they want to use their characters in many games.” If TinierCafe continues its growth in the coming months, we’ll start looking for more games on Facebook to which we can migrate our TinierMe characters.

Blackberry-maker Research in Motion said it acquired European mobile gaming network Scoreloop for an undisclosed amount today.

The Canadian handset maker says Scoreloop’s team will become part of Blackberry developer outreach and help build gaming toolkits to attract developers to the platform, which is sorely in need of ways to compete with the more than 420,000 apps available on iOS and the 200,000 on Android.

“As part of RIM, we’ll be in a unique position to integrate deeply into Blackberry platforms to take mobile gaming to the next level together,” wrote Marc Gumpinger, Scoreloop’s chief executive. “We’ll continue our cross-platform approach but you’ll see that our Blackberry solution will be unparalleled.”

> Continue reading on Inside Mobile Apps.

Social networks have been burdened by an overabundance of copycat social games with dozens of variations on essentially the same game type clogging Facebook’s search function. The pets genre in particular is looking pretty crowded on the platform with almost 100 apps tagged as such in our social game traffic tracking service, AppData. So we were surprised when Rivet Games, formerly known as FooMojo, announced a pet game as its first Facebook offering after closing a $5 million round of series B funding.

Far from feeling like a copycat, Rivet Games CEO Jesse Janosov says the company’s game is a unique offering based on its visual style alone. The game, called Pet Tales, uses a photorealistic style detailed enough to render individual hairs on cats and dogs when viewed close up within certain game modes like the “play with pet” one pictured below.

“It’s not really cartoony, like a lot of the other pet games aimed at [a younger audience],” Janosov says. “This game is for an older audience, for people who like pets.”

Pet Tales builds on the collectible pets theme established by FooMojo with its now off-Facebook title, FooPets, by adding a gameplay loop around decoration in addition to the pet care and other interactions. Players decorate a park for their adopted pets to inhabit and play with other pets. The game monetizes mainly around premium decoration items, much the same as other social games in the pets genre.

Where Pet Tales is unique, and where Rivet Games hopes to execute scalable growth, is in the visual assets. Janosov tells us that when he joined the studio, he noticed that the company wasn’t making use of a lot of the FooPets assets, so it made sense to build Rivet Games’ first title around those. The visual style lends itself to branding, should Rivet Games decide to take Pet Tales to mobile platforms in the future, which could be in the cards as the developer considers mobile game development. It also makes it difficult for other developers to copy Pet Tales on either Facebook or mobile platforms.

“Our 3D models are done in Maya, which gives our pets a really realistic look,” Janosov says. “This whole space has been dominated by copying — but good luck copying us.”

Pet Tales officially went live almost two weeks ago and currently has around 8,000 monthly active users as last reported by Facebook.