Zynga announced the next “With Friends” mobile title today in the form of Hanging With Friends, a social mobile version of the word game Hangman for iPhone and iPod Touch. The app is live in Canadian App Store as of today and will launch globally “in the coming days.”

This is the first game out of the Zynga With Friends studio, which was was formed in December 2010 when Zynga acquired mobile developer Newtoy and its Scrabble-esque iOS game, Words With Friends. At that time, we thought Zyna might focus its mobile efforts more on paid apps as opposed to free-to-play apps, which seems plausible considering that Words With Friends grosses better than Zynga’s free-to-play FarmVille app. Zynga, however, recently acquired talent from mobile developer Wonderland Studios, which made a name for itself with free-to-play iOS game, GodFinger.

We expect Zynga to continue making a push into mobile gaming, given its slower growth on Facebook. We’ve heard that it paid considerably more for Newtoy than some of the other acquisitions it has done in the past year, and that it is hiring fast for a big new mobile team.

Hanging With Friends will monetize both through a paid version currently available for 99 cents as a launch promotion (later it will be $2.99) and an ad-supported free version that uses the same interstitial ads found in the free version of Words With Friends. An upcoming feature planned for the game will introduce microtransactions where players can spend real money to buy in-game currency that can be spent on “lifeline” power-ups. Currently, players earn in-game currency when they generate words, but they cannot spend them on lifelines as yet.

Though modeled on the classic word game Hangman, Hanging With Friends incorporates elements from Scrabble to form a unique puzzle-like gameplay experience. Players choose an animated cartoon-y avatar with various facial expressions that change as game-play progresses. A match begins with the player’s avatar suspended over a hazard, such as lava, hanging from a cluster of five balloons. When a player starts a round, they are given the choice of a random assortment of letter tiles to place along a row of spaces. Like Words With Friends, some of those spaces contain score bonuses like “Double Word,” which the player can collect only by placing a letter on that tile in sequence with a word.

Once a word is played by the first player, the second player gets a chance to guess at the word by choosing individual letters from the entire alphabet. For the duration of the second player’s turn, they have eight chances (here called “strikes”) to guess at which letters are contained in the first player’s word. If they guess a wrong letter, one of the strikes activates. If the player cannot guess the entire word in that turn, they lose one of their five balloons. Whether or not they guess the correct word in their turn, the round ends on that word and a new round begins with player two choosing a word for player one to guess at. Losing all balloons results in a player’s avatar falling to its virtual death while the other player wins.

The life lines are used during the letter guessing phase of the round. The “suspect” item suggests four letter to the player, only one of which is contained in the word. The “extinguish” item removes four letters from the choices that are not contained in the word. The “revive” item restores one activated strike if the player wants an additional guess. These items are currently available as one-time uses per turn in Hanging With Friends, but as mentioned, they will be available for purchase through virtual currency at a later date.

Like Words With Friends, Hanging With Friends allows the player to run up to 20 games at once. Players can enter random matches with strangers or import friends using Facebook Connect or via their existing With Friends account. Hanging With Friends also has an in-game chat function and push notifications.

Zynga did not announce plans for an Android version, but told us to “stay tuned.” Words With Friends came to Android in April of this year.

During its Q4 earnings report earlier this spring, EA said its experience with Dragon Age Legends on Facebook was enough to motivate the developer/publisher to bring many of its other established franchises to the platform. Today, EA announces that the popular life simulation series, The Sims, is the next of its intellectual property to get the Facebook treatment.

Launched on PCs over a decade ago, The Sims is a series of single-player games that allows users to manipulate virtual people in virtual houses — and later, towns — to do just about anything. The game is know as a “sandbox” where the player isn’t required to complete any sort of gameplay objective in order to achieve a winning condition. This open-ended gameplay sounds perfect for a social game or massively multiplayer online game; however, The Sims experienced failure in the MMO space with the now-defunct The Sims Online.

Jeff Karp (pictured in Sim form) tells ISG that The Sims Social is going to be different. As Executive Vice President of the EA Play Label at EA, he oversees internal developer The Sims Studio, which took over from original Sims developer Maxis when The Sims Online shut down in 2008.

“We learned a lot [from The Sims Online],” Karp says. He explains that the PC gaming audience is much larger than what it was when The Sims Online launched in 2002, and now almost everybody has at least heard of Facebook. Therefore, he says, The Sims Social should enjoy a completely different experience from The Sims Online. “It’s like comparing apples to oranges.”

In The Sims Social, players will create and customize their own Sim person. Instead of populating that Sim’s environment with other Sims controlled by artificial intelligence, Karp says that The Sims Social will be entirely populated by a player’s friends in the form of their Sims. The idea is to play The Sims with your friends in a synchronous mulitplayer experience, which is a new concept for the series. Karps says fans have been asking for multiplayer for a long time, which is part of what motivated development.

As for the more complex social interactions between Sims that make the series famous (up to and including “Woo Hoo” – the game’s term for sexual intercourse), Karps says we can expect to see some of it in The Sims Social. For example, we could take our Sim to another Sim’s house and play a prank on them — such as peeing in their yard. This creates a negative relationship balance between our Sim and our friend’s Sim, which could escalate to a “rivalry” relationship.

Karp says that all relationships in The Sims Social will be consensual between players past a certain point. This means that while we may not need our friends’ permission to pee in their lawn, we do need their permission to pursue a romantic relationship with them if we choose to use a flirt interaction on them. A rejection of a flirt will close the romance socialization pathway between players, while an acceptance could lead the relationship all the way to the point of Woo Hooing. Pregnancy, while a significant part of gameplay in The Sims series, is not a planned feature for The Sims Social at this time.

As for monetization, Karp says we can expect to see familiar free-to-play conventions built around monetizing premium decoration or customization options. He also hinted that there would be quest completion items, but could not specify what form quests might take in the game, as its still in the very early stages of development. We know that while gameplay is non-linear, there will be a levelling system for each player’s Sim. Players may also be able to “start over” with a Sim as part of gameplay, or for a fee, which is similar to the character re-specialization feature in Dragon Age Legends.

Some of the questions EA is still struggling to answer for The Sims Social include how they will build a synchronous gameplay experience that still supports asynchronous activity. For example, Karp wasn’t sure what would happen if we flirted with his character while he was not online — would we have to wait for him to log back in to accept our advances, or would the AI guess his character’s reaction for him? Would his character even appear in our game if he weren’t online at the time? While accepting my friend request allows our Sim to enter his Sim’s house, is there any way he could temporarily lock us out if, say, he were sick of us peeing on his lawn?

Another significant challenge for The Sims Social is breeding the unpredictability that makes The Sims series so popular. In The Sims and The Sims 2, for example, players can make Sims look through telescopes, which creates a random chance of alien abduction (and later, alien pregnancy). Karp says that EA means to bring that element of spontaneous fun to The Sims Social, but it’s not immediately clear how that will play out and whether or not there will be AI-controlled Sims in the game, which could add to the overall unpredictability.

“The think we’re most excited about is bringing something new and unique to Facebook,” Karp says. “With this game, we like to say it’s alive… and unpredictable.”

The Sims Social is being designed in collaboration between EA’s internal Sims Studio and EA Playfish. It’s due out “soon,” with Karp telling us to Like the game’s Facebook page in advance of more news.

JollyWood is an animal-themed citybuilding Facebook game from Tecmo Koei Singapore Pte, Ltd, an affiliate of Japanese holding company and video game publisher/developer Tecmo Koei. The game officially launched to the public on June 1, 2011, though it had been active and available since late May.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, JollyWood currently has 18,464 monthly active users and 3,627 daily active users.

JollyWood is a light-hearted, cartoony game based around building habitats for wild animals. The game’s objective is to build platforms, ladders and facilities onto a tree and attract forest creatures to come and make use of them, not unlike the core gameplay mechanic of Ravenwood Fair. The more animals that visit, the more virtual currency, resources and experience the player earns to then spend on more building and customizing options. Different decorations or structure components generate varying amounts of currency and resources per use by visiting characters. How happy a visiting character feels in a player’s tree contributes to an overall “Zest” score for the tree and to whether or not the visiting character will come back again.

The game’s social features stem from the ability to visit friends’ trees and “assist” them with operating their facilities as staff characters. Assisting players earn experience and other resources that can be taken back to their own game. Gifts can also be exchanged with other players, and progress can be shared on a player’s Wall.

The game is monetized through the sale of premium items that cost Facebook Credits. Certain quest objectives can also be bypassed through the use of Facebook Credits if players wish to skip them and get right into a more “freeform” style of play. Premium items include energy boosts, unique facilities and decorative items, though none of these are required to play the game. Quicker progress may be made earlier by making use of them, but otherwise the vast majority of items are available using only the game’s standard currency, leaves.

Tecmo Koei representatives didn’t get back to us by the time of writing so we weren’t not sure exactly what future feature the developer has planned. Other building games rely on steady content releases of new items and buildings, particularly for higher-level players who need something to do in order to keep them playing. Premium items are also quite thin on the ground right now, so it’s likely the team will add some more of these in the future to provide additional sources of income. It’ll be interesting to see what sort of seasonal promotions JollyWood may or may not offer to North American and European players, as the game features some distinctive Japanese cultural influences.

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

Digital Chocolate’s Army Attack tops our top 20 fastest-growing games in terms of monthly active users as tracked by AppData after just over a week’s worth of life on Facebook. A reporting delay from Facebook prevents us from determining just how its growth stacks up against Zynga’s rival game, Empires & Allies, but we think it’s shaping up to be a pretty tight race with Empires & Allies claiming over half a million MAU as of today. Interestingly, Kabam’s army-themed strategy game, Global Warfare, almost placed at number 20 this week at just 2,000 MAU shy of ousting Zombie Lane.

Farther down the list are some familiar favorites, including Playdom’s Gardens of Time and Gaia Online’s Monster Galaxy. Newcomers include wooga’s Happy Hospital and BitRhymes’ Salon Street.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Army Attack	1,696,934	+1,188,134	+234%
2.	Monster Galaxy	13,476,981	+1,172,211	+10%
3.	Gardens of Time	13,201,030	+868,151	+7%
4.	Games	8,074,461	+496,810	+7%
5.	Bubble Saga	6,524,362	+487,204	+8%
6.	Planet Domo	387,161	+274,991	+245%
7.	Diamond Dash	9,169,114	+274,708	+3%
8.	PyramidVille	1,811,364	+265,353	+17%
9.	Galaxía Online II, Mejor Juego de Ciencia Ficción	1,875,286	+248,465	+15%
10.	Zuma Blitz	5,217,794	+225,615	+5%
11.	Slotomania – Slot Machines	2,706,128	+211,483	+8%
12.	Happy Hospital	3,301,474	+203,545	+7%
13.	Hero City	928,042	+202,166	+28%
14.	Addicting Games	888,239	+176,925	+25%
15.	Dragons of Atlantis	4,040,826	+173,289	+4%
16.	Deep Realms	798,633	+165,581	+26%
17.	TinierCafe	500,728	+162,322	+48%
18.	Backyard Monsters	4,597,666	+156,900	+4%
19.	Salon Street	1,403,984	+149,172	+12%
20.	Zombie Lane	8,131,564	+145,674	+2%

Happy Hospital is a building/decoration game about caring for sick, but cute, animals. In order to earn the in-game currency needed for building and decoration items, players have to cure animals that have strange or funny ailments. There’s also an element of upkeep that goes into Happy Hospital in the form of machines that require daily use of batteries, which the player must earn.

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, May 30th, 2011

• Monday Mobile Roundup: Mergers, Samsung Galaxy S II & More
• Z2Live’s MetalStorm: Online Racks Up At Least 2.3 Million Players in Two Weeks
• Emerging Paid iOS Apps: Memorial Day Sales & Grilling Rise Over the Weekend

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

• Emerging Top-Grossing iOS Apps: The Heist, Talking Tom Cat 2, & Weber’s On the Grill Rise
• Robbery Pays Off For tap tap tap’s The Heist on iPhone
• Outfit7′s Talking Tom Cat 2 Saw More Than 1 Million Downloads in a Single Day
• Chillingo Goes Platforming with New App Red Ball 3 on iOS
• Announcing Inside Virtual Goods: Spending and Usage Patterns of the Social Gaming Audience 2011
• Lodsys Begins Suing Mobile Developers, Disputes Apple’s Claims About Licensing

Wednesday, June 1st, 2011

• iSwifter Brings Flash-Based Social Games, Massive Multiplayers to iPad Under Subscription Model
• Rovio Acquires Finnish Animation Studio Kombo For Cash and Stock
• New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: Digital Chocolate, EA, Atari and More
• Emerging Top Free Apps on iOS: Fragger, Talking Tom Cat, Skee-Ball & More

Thursday, June 2nd, 2011

• Loss of Incentivized Installs Crimps Profit Margins for Developers, Tapjoy Argues
• Thursday Mobile Roundup: Gameloft, TapLynx Acquisition, Malware, & More
• Nitako Lets Players Save Toshi, Again, on iOS
• NewHires in Mobile: Big Fish Games, Gameloft, InMobi & More
• Another Game Developer Crosses The 100 Million Download Mark: Backflip Studios

Friday, June 3rd, 2011

• Friday Mobile Roundup: Sega, Android Returns, iCloud & More

Inside Social Games

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

Monday, May 30th, 2011

• As Zynga Looks to IPO, Its Traffic on Facebook Stays High
• Digital Chocolate’s Army Attack Marches up This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Games by MAU
• Army Attack Blends Real Time Strategy, Treasure Hunting Genres to Create Deep Singleplayer Experience

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

• Wooga Nets $24 Million Investment, Starts Hiring Spree
• Zynga Launches Strategy Citybuilder Empires & Allies for Facebook
• Announcing Inside Virtual Goods: Spending and Usage Patterns of the Social Gaming Audience 2011

Wednesday, June 1st, 2011

• Hero City Layers the Super Hero Genre on City-Building Gameplay, Developer Aiming to Build Distinctive Brand
• Army Attack Leads This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Games by DAU
• Social Game Publisher Portalarium Scores $2.4 Million Second Round of Funding
• RockYou Acquires Australian Social Strategy Game Developer 3 Blokes
• New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: Ubisoft, Daglow Entertainment, Tagged and More
• Top 25 Facebook Games For June 2011

Thursday, June 2nd, 2011

• New Hires in Social Gaming: CrowdStar, Digital Chocolate, GSN, & More
• D9: Disney’s Iger Says More Original IP Titles Coming From Playdom
• A Better World Social Game Encourages Real World Good Deeds, Punishes Lazy Players
• Jolt Online Brings Famed Championship Manager Series to Facebook with Balance Between Realism and Accessibility

Friday, June 3rd, 2011

• Planet Domo Appears in Our Orbit on This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Games
• Video: Disney CEO Iger Talks Playdom at D9 (And Zynga Went MIA Ahead of Reported IPO)
• Atari Brings Dungeons & Dragons to Facebook this Summer in Heroes of Neverwinter
• Social Gaming Roundup: SAVA Transmedia, Brands, World Records, & More

Inside Facebook

Tracking Facebook and the Facebook platform for developers and marketers.

Sunday, May 29th, 2011

• As Zynga Looks to IPO, Its Traffic on Facebook Stays High

Monday, May 30th, 2011

• Photos, BandPage, Videos, Pages, Chase Community Giving and More on This Week’s Top 20 Facebook Apps by MAU
• Featured Facebook Campaigns: Subway, Samsung Televisions, Stoli Vodka, NBC & Bravo and More

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

• New Facebook Platform Industry Hires: Deal United, Shoutlet, Votigo and More
• Shakira, Beyoncé Linkin Park, YouTube, The Simpsons and Coca-Cola on This Week’s Top 20 Growing Facebook Pages
• Announcing Inside Virtual Goods: Spending and Usage Patterns of the Social Gaming Audience 2011

Wednesday, June 1st, 2011

• Friends, Horoscopes, Music, Videos and Foursquare on This Week’s Top 20 Growing Facebook Apps by DAU
• How Your Business Should Reply to Comments on Facebook Pages
• New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: Atari, EA, Peak Games, Digital Chocolate and More
• Advocacy Group, Facebook and Other Companies Launch Privacy Info Site for App Developers
• Top 25 Facebook Games For June 2011
• The Facebook Marketing Bible June 2011 Edition Is Now Available

Thursday, June 2nd, 2011

• Facebook Careers Postings: Chinese, Mobile, Engineering, Construction and More
• Facebook Hires and Departures: Antonio Garcia-Martinez, Interns, Recruiting, Games, Singapore and More
• Facebook Details Ceglia Fraud, Pushes for Expedited Discovery in Ownership Case
• Facebook for Blackberry v2.0 Beta 3 Adds Wi-Fi and Deletion Options for Professionals
• Facebook Recommends HTTPS Secure Browsing Via Home Page Prompts

Friday, June 3rd, 2011

• Profile Analyzers, Friends, Videos, Quizzes and Tabs on This Week’s Top 20 Emerging Facebook Apps
• Facebook’s New Ads Power Editor Replaces the Bulk Uploader with a Streamlined GUI
• Facebook Roundup: Palihapitiya Starts Fund, Safety, OnLive, PunchTab and More

EA General Manager Launches New Social Games Company — The former general manager of EA Montreal, Alain Tascan, has launched a new social games company called SAVA Transmedia. Though no titles have been announced, the studio states that it seeks to “redefine the future of social games” and wants to connect players “on every screen.”

Alfa Romeo Sponsors I AM PLAYR In-Game — Social football (soccer) game I AM PLAYR, from We R Interactive, has partnered with Italian car manufacturer Alfa Romeo. Through the deal, the Alfa Romeo brand will be integrated into the game’s fictional football club, dubbed “River Park FC.”

Capital One Teams Up With Zynga — In another promotional deal within Zynga’s FarmVille, users can now find the Capital One brand within the game via a Visigoth statue that grants double mastery points on crops for one week. It is earned by Liking Capital One’s Facebook fanpage. In addition, there is also branded avatar clothing and an offer to earn fast cash by watching a Capital One TV spot.

OnLive to Integrate With Facebook — OnLive is announcing a new gaming integration for Facebook, as VentureBeat details. Through the service, players will be able to play a game and post what the company is calling a “brag clip” highlighting their favorite in-game moments. Additionally, users can instantly join game being played and watch.

TrialPay Awarded Patents for “Alternative Payment Systems” – TrialPay has announced that it has been recently granted its fourth patent from the U.S. Patent Office. A list of their current patents can be found here.

EA Sets World Record with Monopoly Millionaires — Electronic Arts and Hasbro announced the breaking of a Guinness World Record this week within its social title, Monopoly Millionaires. The record was set for the most simultaneously online players worldwide. 197 countries participated during “Global Monopoly Day” with over 1.6 million game sessions played that day. 32,976 were recorded to have been on at one time. An infographic of other stats from the day can be found here.

Cooking Mama Friends’ Cafe Receives Arkadium Stadium Features — Social game Cooking Mama Friends’ Cafe, from Majesco Entertainment,  has received directly integrated features available through Arkadium Stadium (which allows users to play Flash-based games directly from a Facebook wall). Soft-launched last week and is noted to have been played over 5,500 times via users’ walls.

Pixonic Raises $5 Million — In funding news, Russian social games publisher Pixonic announced the raising of $5 million this week. Ventech, Kite Ventures, and TA Ventures participated in the round, and the funding is noted to be used towards publishing new social games via its PixAPI platform.

Console video game developer/publisher Atari has a few forays into Facebook games with its arcade-type titles like Asteroids, but until now, it hasn’t brought in any of its more complex franchises. Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes of Neverwinter, developed in collaboration with Liquid Entertainment and brand oversight from Wizards of the Coast, will be Atari’s first big plunge into the space with a complete array of monetization and social features.

Core Gameplay

Heroes of Neverwinter is a turn-based multiplayer role-playing game where players customize a character and then recruit other characters to form an adventuring party. This party ventures into dungeons to kill monsters and collect items from chests, which can then be used to upgrade the character’s combat statistics or to buy new items and equipment for their character. Like EA2D’s Dragon Age Legends, Heroes of Neverwinter also encourages players to recruit friends’ characters to their party, which creates unique social interactions as players “shop” among their friends for those with the ideal character class and level to make up the best possible party.

At this point, the game is in an early alpha testing state ahead of a planned summer release. Atari Social Games Producer Carlos Schulte walked us through some of the available content as we played, explaining certain features that are not currently live in the game yet. The singleplayer experience at launch will include 50 dungeons (here called “Adventures”) with three different difficulty levels per dungeon at Normal, Hard and Heroic. As players complete dungeons, they earn achievements in the form of decoration items that appear in the player’s in-game house. As players gain experience points that eventually advance their level, they also gain access to more items, more weapons and special gameplay mechanics only available above level 10.

The dungeons themselves are laid out with various rooms divided by a grid of squares along the floor. Each dungeon costs a certain amount of energy to enter and energy regenerates over time; as the player levels up, they are given more energy to spend. In keeping with Dungeons & Dragons tradition, players may move a certain distance along the squares based on their character’s statistics. Each character can only perform so many actions in a turn, again determined by their statistics. For example, a rogue character can move across the room and launch a ranged attack, while a wizard character might spend their entire turn on a special attack or healing item use.

A unique feature of the dungeons is an artificial intelligence mode that the player can toggle on and off for both party members and for their own characters. When toggled to party members, the computer controls the other members of a player’s party when it’s their turn. When set to “all,” the computer controls the player’s character as well for a sort of simulation experience. Schulte cautions that the AI will never be “as smart as the player,” as Atari and Liquid don’t want players to rely entirely on simulation to get through dungeons.

When a player completes a dungeon or arrives at a chest or a body that can be looted, the game presents the player with a random chance game where they must choose a face-down card to determine what they collect. Players can remove the element of chance by revealing all the cards with a luck potion, which costs in-game currency. The game also presents players with giftable items at the end of dungeons they can send to friends. Each random chance for loot contains one item of excellent quality, several decent items and several different sums of gold.

Social Features and User-Generated Content

The most interesting of the high level features is the Dungeon Workshop, a mode where players can build their own dungeons using similar tools as the developer. Players can create up to six dungeons of their own and publish them to the game for all players to enjoy and rate. In order to play a player-created dungeon, however, players must pay the creator a fee in the form of the game’s standard currency. This intends to create a unique economy of user-created content similar to what console and PC games have achieved through level-building modes and modding communities.

Another social element available to all players as early as level 1 is a spectator mode where players can watch their friends play through dungeons using the spectator player’s character. This mode was not functional during the demo, but Schulte explains as an example that he could recruit our character to his party and, if we happened to be online at the same time, we could enter spectator mode as he took his party into a dungeon. While in this mode, we have limited means of participation in the form of a chat window and special scroll items that we can use on Schulte’s party to support him in battle.

It’s what Schulte calls a “baby step” toward a synchronous multiplayer experience, which would be true to the Dungeons & Dragons experience. At present, the developer does not plan to extend spectator mode to non-friend players as the spirit of Dungeons & Dragons has always been about playing in groups of friends that know each other intimately. Atari and Liquid are considering adding guild support and other multiplayer features post launch.

Monetization

Heroes of Neverwinter monetizes much the same as other Facebook RPGs through the sale of premium items, gameplay boosts and shortcuts to advance beyond what the player has already unlocked. The game features a standard currency, gold, and a premium currency in the form of Astral Diamonds, which can be bought with Facebook Credits. Astral Diamonds are also the means to buy “packs” of content for the Dungeon Workshop, such a “vampire pack” that unlocks all the undead monsters for the player to create an undead type of dungeon.

Launch Plans and Cross-Compatibility

Atari and Liquid haven’t set a hard launch date for Heroes of Neverwinter as yet, but they are aiming for a summer release. Advertising support will mostly come from Wizards of the Coast in the form of tie-in promotions with its other Dungeons & Dragons products; and Heroes of Neverwinter will have some cross-compatibility with other Dungeons & Dragons video games like the upcoming online game, Neverwinter, in the form of unlockable items and promotional codes. Schulte adds that while it’s difficult to plan for total cross-compatibility with other video games on different development cycles, Atari and Liquid were careful to keep the story in Heroes of Neverwinter consistent with what players will see in the upcoming Neverwinter.

According to our traffic tracking service, AppData, Atari currently enjoys 6,000 monthly active users and 299 daily active users across its three games. This is Liquid Entertainment’s first Facebook game that we know of.

We’ve covered the gist of Disney chief executive Bob Iger’s on-stage interview yesterday at D9, but here’s the video of it for those who want to dig in more. As the owner of Playdom, Iger is arguably the highest-ranking executive in social gaming.

At least aside from Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, who was also supposed to speak at the conference but withdrew last week, shortly after organizer Kara Swisher broke the story about the company planning an IPO soon. The withdrawal, along with various recent reports, makes a near-term Zynga IPO look more probable than ever.

Anyway, here’s the transcript of Iger’s main comments about Playdom and gaming, in which he reaffirms Disney’s interest in the business. Note that some other parts of the interview, including his mentions of the focus on new Playdom intellectual property, as well as Disney’s marketing efforts on Facebook, didn’t make it from the raw conference footage into this more polished video.

We still view gaming as a growth business for us. We’ve made some mistakes, which we’ve admitted: some on the creative front, some on the strategic front. We were putting too many eggs in the console games basket, for instance, and we’ve seen tremendous diversity in terms of game-play from casual games online to obviously social games.

What Zynga has done is extraordinary. We took a five-month break to retool because we felt our game wasn’t good enough — sort of a pun — our games were not good enough creatively, and we had some issues with the technological infrastructure at Playdom that we wanted to improve — and we’ve done that.

And we’ve since released a game called Gardens of Time, which is a top 10 game on facebook. One which, unfortunately, I’ve gotten addicted to. I think we’re on the right path, I’m a big believer in the space. I think it’s a great place for Disney to be and I’m optimistic about us being there.

All Things D limits the size of video embeds, so you can find a larger version of the video here.

Domo, a highly recognizable mascot from Japanese TV, makes his way to Facebook this week with the launch of Planet Domo from San Francisco-based developer TheBroth. Meanwhile Hero City and Army Attack vie for the top spot on this week’s list of emerging Facebook games.

It might be time to say goodbye to Army Attack this week as its growth trajectory puts it above the 1 million monthly active user mark, which would class it out of the emerging Facebook games category. We could perhaps expect to see it replaced by Zynga’s newly released Empires & Allies, assuming the game doesn’t hit 1 million MAU in its first seven days. You can read our early looks at both games here and here.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

Name MAU Gain Gain,% 1. Army Attack 839,642 +806,338 +2,421% 2. Hero City 827,321 +249,599 +43% 3. Planet Domo 241,664 +231,814 +2,353% 4. Deep Realms 724,631 +215,393 +42% 5. AddictingGames 785,721 +174,190 +28% 6. Battle Cards 286,536 +167,947 +142% 7. TinierCafe 406,663 +159,530 +65% 8. Temple of Mahjong 564,211 +126,720 +29% 9. Dragon Age Legends 626,198 +112,259 +22% 10. Global Warfare 535,948 +110,763 +26% 11. HotShot 315,485 +109,190 +53% 12. Enrique Iglesias, Play with it! 512,618 +103,790 +25% 13. 天書奇談2.0 179,675 +101,547 +130% 14. City Wars 380,740 +93,437 +33% 15. แฮปปี้เบบี้ 502,994 +88,760 +21% 16. Shadow Fight 285,974 +86,286 +43% 17. แฮปปี้ฟาร์ม ๓ 579,868 +84,031 +17% 18. Battle Pirates 717,062 +78,193 +12% 19. Bingo Adventure 245,092 +72,549 +42% 20. Go Fishing 310,514 +72,060 +30%

Planet Domo appears to be a treasure hunting adventure game where players click on locations to find pieces of postcards that “unravel the mystery” of a mythical cheesecake. The game features a highly animated art style and numerous types of standard currency to spend in-game. Facebook Credits make up the game’s premium in-game currency.

Farther down the list, we see Dragon Age Legends gaining some ground, perhaps as the result of new quests recently added to the game. We also see several new games gaining growth in their early days, so sit tight for early looks on Battle Cards, TinierCafe, and Hotshot next week.

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Come back next week for our top weekly gainers by monthly active users on Monday, our daily active users on Wednesday, and the top emerging apps on Friday.