A recent set of updates to Zynga’s S-1 document sheds new light about the company’s business position, as it prepares for an initial public offering. For starters, Google has indeed invested, although the terms were not disclosed.

More interesting is the special relationship that Facebook and Zynga have formalized over revenue and traffic, in two developer addendums. (You can find the full set of docs here, although sadly some of the most interesting bits have been removed).

At first glance, the terms read as if Zynga had a special deal with Facebook, where it gets a portion of the ad revenue from Facebook ad units that run alongside its games in canvas apps. However, the terms specified that it is not canvas app ad revenue — instead, it’s referring to Zynga web sites like FarmVille.com, or even Facebook ads that might run within games.

We asked Facebook about the matter and got this response: “We don’t have agreements with any developers, including Zynga, to share revenue from ads next to their Facebook canvas apps. We did agree with Zynga to work together in the future on providing ads on their properties beyond Facebook, but we have no current timeline for when we might start working on that.”

Facebook also appears to have guaranteed Zynga certain growth targets in exchange for continuing to invest in games on the platform, whether web or mobile. Facebook has, since the launch of the platform, rewarded and punished individual developers through increasing or decreasing the number of invites, notifications and other communications allowed per user, or by providing some games with special access to features or in-house advertising.

However, Facebook has not to our knowledge previously guaranteed traffic levels in writing. Other developers are no doubt wondering if they can get the same sorts of guarantees, and why they haven’t gotten them in the past. Unless they have their own undisclosed agreements, of course.

As part of the addendum terms, Facebook appears to have gotten Zynga to agree to make Facebook the exclusive “Social Platform” that it uses, for the unspecified time-frame of the agreement. This helps explain Zynga’s closure of its games on Tagged, MySpace and other social networks, although we’re not sure how that might conflict with anything Google might want to launch with Zynga’s participation. Facebook also appears to have required Zynga to include itself as an option for mobile apps, for the agreement’s duration. However, Zynga can also use mobile platforms as well.

Another interesting point here is that Facebook has given Zynga permission to create some sort of “Zynga Platform,” although we don’t know what that is. It also has given the developer access to new features, including a proposed “Game Friends Protocol” API, apparently offering a new way for social gamers to find and play together.

Finally, with Credits, the virtual currency exclusivity kicked in for most of Zynga’s major games over the third quarter of 2010. As we examined when the filing first came out this month, the company has continued to grow revenues after the Credits implementations kicked in; some growth rate decreases are visible, but other factors, like communication channel reductions, appear to have affected it as well.

Animal Party is a pet simulation combined with treasure hunting and gardening from indie developer Tribal Crossing. The game was recently signed to a publishing agreement with 6waves, which has since accelerated the game’s growth through user acquisition, landing Animal Party on our weekly top 20s lists.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, Animal Party currently has 766,922 monthly active users and 102,469 daily active users.

The game tasks players with collecting animals on various planets using bait. In this mode, gameplay is mostly hands-off, with the player clicking once to deploy a piece of bait and perhaps clicking again on the screen to chase off bait-stealing vermin. Different types of bait (e.g. meatballs, cheese) attract different types of animal, each of which makes up part a collection set that can be collected for a virtual currency and experience bonus. Once the player has lured the maximum number of animals that their spaceship can hold, they return to their garden base and receive virtual currency bonuses for animal weight, type and rarity.

The garden part of the game contains many familiar social game elements from both the pet and farming sim genres. Players clear land to plant crops, which they can harvest for bait and also interact with animals in the garden through a menu interface. Animals can perform tricks, can be petted or instructed to interact with other animals with menu options like “Flirt” or “Boo!” To keep the pets’ happiness rating high, they must also build food dispensers and toys in their garden.

Social features in the game include the usual Wall-sharing and friend invites, along with the pet-specific mechanic where players are prompted to send animals to friends to get them playing. Players can also visit neighbors’ gardens to care for their animals and crops or fend off attacking vermin.

Animal Party is monetized through the sale of premium decoration items, ship upgrades for capturing higher-quality animals, and energy refills. There’s a pretty firm limit to the amount of time you can spend playing the game for “free.” Between collecting animals, clearing land, planting crops, and caring for animals, lower-level players frequently run out of energy well shy of completing construction projects or collecting all animals available on a planet. New planets and items for the garden can only be unlocked at higher levels or in exchange for Facebook Credits, which puts pressure on new users to spend early on.

Tribal Crossing will likely adjust the gameplay over time in response to user feedback. Before signing with 6waves, the developer relied entirely on feedback from users acquired in a limited marketing campaign to adjust the Animal Party into the game it is today.

“What you see now in Animal Party is a fundamentally different game from our first public version (our first version didn’t even have a garden),” Tribal Crossing CEO Tommy Wu tells ISG in an email. “We were set on running marketing campaigns on our own and had just finished finished building a system to measure lifetime value of users by different entry points so that we could have dynamic CPI bids by traffic source.”

Wu says that the biggest challenge small indie studios like his face aren’t development costs, but rather, user acquisition costs. “With the game frameworks we have built over the past year, we could build a new game as complex as Animal Party for ~$200,000,” he says, “but if you look at Zynga’s last quarter, you’ll see they spent twice that amount per day in marketing costs.”

Signing with 6waves eases the burden a bit, but Tribal Crossing still has to keep their game fresh to please the users that 6waves acquires. To that end, Wu says that the developer is in the process of considering new features to add to the game. There is a challenge, however, as Tribal Crossing doesn’t want to make Animal Party too complex just for the sake of a cool game mechanic.

“We have had ambitious plans to do a breeding system for a while but we aren’t sure if it’s something we want to incorporate as a feature in this game or as a standalone title,” he says. “One thing we have not exposed to the user is how the animals interact with each other. There’s actually a sophisticated AI system and we’re able to give animals different personalities.  We’re really excited to see where we can take that (any ideas are welcome)!”

You can follow Animal Party’s progress using AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

Kabam’s Global Warfare winds up in the top spot on this week’s list of fastest-growing Facebook games by monthly active users while King.com’s newly-released Mahjong Saga debuts number two. Neither Empires & Allies nor Army Attack turn up this week as both strategy games appear to be shrinking in MAU.

RockYou Playdemic’s Gourmet Ranch turns up on the top 20 this week as the game appears to be entering a spike in MAU and daily active users. RockYou’s next big game, Cloudforest Expedition, is expected to release sometime this summer.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Global Warfare	4,480,204	+828,235	+23%
2.	Mahjong Saga	1,131,550	+682,887	+152%
3.	Gardens of Time	15,397,165	+673,226	+5%
4.	Kingdoms of Camelot	2,357,151	+486,020	+26%
5.	It Girl	7,769,920	+343,556	+5%
6.	Social Empires	2,846,400	+333,894	+13%
7.	المزرعة السعيدة	717,137	+316,686	+79%
8.	inFAMOUS Anarchy	2,475,577	+309,273	+14%
9.	Animal Party	766,922	+299,951	+64%
10.	Pool Master	2,141,056	+282,538	+15%
11.	Shadow Fight	1,437,476	+275,954	+24%
12.	Cooking Mama	1,508,128	+237,919	+19%
13.	Revienta el teclado	1,684,683	+218,159	+15%
14.	Bubble Saga	7,075,239	+208,609	+3%
15.	Perro Saltarín	1,789,805	+208,570	+13%
16.	แฮปปี้เบบี้	917,705	+207,323	+29%
17.	Bubble Island	9,442,029	+204,289	+2%
18.	Monster World	8,557,375	+180,808	+2%
19.	Perfect Getaway	797,593	+174,667	+28%
20.	Gourmet Ranch	1,947,511	+172,908	+10%

King.com’s Mahjong Saga is what it sounds like. Players “journey” through a map, encountering various mahjong puzzles that they can complete for a star ranking. Like its sibling game, Bubble Saga, this game has an indirect competition system that keeps track of where your friends are on the map and how well they scored relative to your own level score.

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.

Ravenwood Fair developer Lolapps and Ravenwood Fair publisher 6waves announced a merger today that gives the combined company over 39.2 million monthly active and 4.4 million daily users, according to our traffic tracking service, AppData.

The company will now be called 6waves Lolapps with Lolapps CEO Arjun Sethi (pictured below) reporting to 6waves CEO Rex Ng (pictured above). Both Sethi and Ng now sit on a six-member executive team comprised of half 6waves members, half Lolapps members. For the most part, development and publishing operations will function independently at each studio, while a deeper integration is planned for international release strategy and licensing agreements for Lolapps’ recently-acquired Fliso game engine.

“We still want to keep things pretty independent,” Ng tells ISG. “Lolapps has a pretty full [release schedule] for the year, so we don’t want to [disrupt] that. We’re still deciding whether or not to physically join offices.”

“We’re still working out what’s going to happen with Fliso [licensing],” Sethi adds. He says that by joining forces, 6waves Lolapps now has a clear advantage over competitors in the rapidly expanding social games publishing space.

The Fliso engine is a Flash graphics engine that allows developers to create 3D environments on an isometric field, which is the standard view for most Facebook games. In the engine acquisition, Lolapps also picked up the engine’s creator, Sean Cooper, and has begun to develop a newer version of Fliso to license to developers in the future.

Aside from the technical edge 6waves Lolapps gains from the Fliso engine, the merger also expands overall international reach. As one entity, the company now holds offices in the United States, Japan, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom with localization support for 15 languages. Coincidentally, Ravenwood Fair is currently only localized in nine languages; though Sethi says Facebook is working with Lolapps on Portuguese, Russian, Arabic and Korean language versions.

The terms of the merger were not disclosed, but Sethi and Ng confirmed that 6waves Lolapps is now in the process of raising funding. 6waves’ last round brought in $17.5 million in January 2010, while Lolapps’ last known funding was a $4.5 million Series A round raised back in September 2008.

As for releases, 6waves recently published several new titles that have been appearing on our weekly top 20s lists, such as Camelot: The Game. Lolapps, meanwhile, is set to deliver Ravenshire Castle and possibly a second title dubbed Ravensky before the end of 2011.

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, July 11th, 2011

• Monday Mobile Roundup: Mobile Job Growth, Smartphone Tech, Tablet Declines & More
• Emerging Paid iOS Apps: New iPhone Apps Slow While HD Versions Rise
• Andreessen Horowitz-Backed TinyCo’s Co-Founder Spivey Leaves
• Outblaze’s Six-Month Foray Into Mobile Games Pays Off With 21M Downloads for Pretty Pet Salon & Other Apps
• Katango Could Solve Facebook Friend List Creation Problems, But For Now It’s Just Group Messaging

Tuesday, July 12th, 2011

• Russia’s Kama Games Acquires IP Behind Mall Party, City Friends and Epic Gladiator
• Team Behind Postagram Launches PopBooth, a Photobooth-Like Experience on iOS
• Emerging Top-Grossing iOS Apps: Past Top Paid & Top Free Apps Rise
• New “Facebook for Every Phone” App Brings Photo Uploading and More to 2500 Different Feature Phones
• Tapjoy Hires New CFO as It Hints at IPO Prospects
• EA Buys PopCap Games in Deal Worth Up to $1.3 Billion
• Mopub on Its $6.5 Million Round From Accel Partners

Wednesday, July 13th, 2011

• Android Market Makes Its New Grossing, Trending Charts Available on Devices
• New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: Glu Mobile, Pontiflex, TinyCo, Kabam and More
• Pocket Gems Passes 40M Downloads After Pair of Hits Tap Zoo, Tap Pet Hotel
• Emerging Top Free Apps on iOS: Songify, Happy Theme Park Rise Up
• In a Boon For Enterprise Apps, Apple Introduces Bulk App Purchases For Businesses

Thursday, July 14th, 2011

• New Hires in Mobile: EA Mobile, Gameloft, Z2Live & More
• Evil Dead for iOS Looks Good, but Struggles to Match Franchise’s History
• iPad2, Verizon iPhone Help Apple Eat Into Android’s Share Among Developers Building New Apps
• Google CEO Larry Page Says There ARe 550,000 Android Device Activations A Day
• Android Apps Surpassed 6 Billion Cumulative Downloads Second Quarter
• Android and iOS’s Total App Downloads Per Month May Be Near Parity

Friday, July 15th, 2011

• Bravo Launches Xtreme Wheels on iOS
• Applifier Announces Mobile Cross-Promotion Platform for iOS, Android
• CrowdStar, Incubator YouWeb Get on The Mobile Fund Bandwagon With $10 Million StarFund

Inside Social Games

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

Monday, July 11th, 2011

• Empires & Allies Battles Global Warfare on This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Games by MAU
• My Country Lets Players Build Nations, Game Builds Impressive User Base
• Perfect Getaway Sets Sail on Facebook With Service Industry Sim
• Pet Tales Makes Caring for PUppies and Kittens a Walk in the Park on Facebook
• Social Point’s Flying Dog Gets by on Bare Bones Gameplay

Tuesday, July 12th, 2011

• Trip Hawkins Talks Feudal System, Forging a “Republic of Gaming” Through Browsers
• EA Buys PopCap Games in Deal Worth Up to $1.3 Billion
• Martial Arts Masters Challenges Players to Take on the World and Risk Experience Points

Wednesday, July 13th, 2011

• Animal Party Gaining Ground on This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Games by DAU
• Investors on Where the Smart Money Will Go in Social Games
• New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: Kabam, A Bit Lucky, Pontiflex and More
• Inside Network Cocktail Party — Join Us Next Week in Seattle
• Camelot: The Game Mixes Swords and Strategy, Strong Despite Show’s Renewal Prospects

Thursday, July 14th, 2011

• New Hires in Social Gaming: Arkadium, CrowdStar, GameHouse, & More
• Bejeweled Clone Biotronic sees a Resurgence of Players as Developer Moves onto Mobile

Friday, July 15th, 2011

• Arabic Farming Sim and Pet Games Top This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Games
• Dreamland Conjures a Unique Board Game Adventure
• Applifier Announces Mobile Cross-Promotion Platform for iOS, Android
• Social Gaming Roundup: Acquisitions, Game Updates, Zynga Japan, & More

Inside Facebook

Tracking Facebook and the Facebook platform for developers and marketers.

Monday, July 11th, 2011

• 60 Photos, Page Tabs, Videos, Mobile, Zoosk and More on This Week’s Top 20 Facebook Apps by MAU
• Featured Facebook Campaigns: New Jersey Lottery, Tretorn, Toys “R” US & Craftsman Tools
• Facebook Launching Corporate-Local Parent-Child Places Structure for Businesses With Multiple Locations
• Hulu Relaunches Facebook Integration. Can a Free Month of Hulu Plus Offset Privacy Issues?
• Katango Could Solve Facebook Friend List Creation Problems, but for Now It’s Just Group Messaging

Tuesday, July 12th, 2011

• New Facebook Platform Industry Hires: Buddy Media, Efficient Frontier, Wildfire and More
• Report: Percentage of Companies Recruiting on Facebook Stagnates, Growing Just 0.7% This Year
• New “Facebook for Every Phone” App Brings Photo Uploading and More to 2500 Different Feature Phones
• Facebook Testing Location-Based Check-In Deals API for Businesses With Many Locations
• Facebook Scraps Little-Used App Directory, Simplifies App Submission to Search Index

Wednesday, July 13th, 2011

• Yahoo, Photos, Mobile, Quizzes, Yelp and More on This Week’s Top 20 Facebook Apps by DAU
• New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: Context Optional, W3i, Kabam, Glu Mobile and More
• Facebook Asking Users to Reengage With Groups, Possibly to Box Out Google+
• Inside Network Cocktail Party — Join Us Next Week in Seattle
• Facebook’s Study of Journalist Page Engagement Reveals Page Post Best Practices

Thursday, July 14th, 2011

• Facebook Careers Postings: Sales, Dublin, Data Center and More
• Facebook Hires and Departures: Stocky, Feinberg, Engineering, Africa, Asia and More
• Spotify Launches in the US With Facebook Connect but No Deeper Integration Yet
• How to Sync Your Facebook Page Updates With Twitter — and Why You Shouldn’t

Friday, July 15th, 2011

• MySpace, Facebook Live, Change.org, Hulu and More on This Week’s Top 20 Emerging Facebook Apps by MAU
• Report: Facebook Working With News Publications to Offer App-Based “Facebook Editions”
• Facebook Roundup: China, Paul Adams, Video Calling, Badgeville, Don Dodge, and More

Headed to Seattle for Casual Connect, Flash Gaming Summit, or IGDA Summit next week? Join Inside Network and our community of social and mobile developers at The W Hotel for post-event cocktails and some great networking.

AJ Glasser, lead writer for Inside Social Games, will moderate a daytime panel conversation on top companies’ transition from casual to social. Later, join Inside Network and our friends and party sponsors at Rightscale, Amazon Web Services, and Couchbase for an evening of networking and drinks in downtown Seattle.

All are welcome, and drinks are on us with your RSVP.

Happy hour starts at 5:30 p.m. at the Living Room and Bar, W Seattle. We’ll be right by Benaroya Hall, so stop by after Casual Connect’s panels and talks and say hello!

Inside Network Cocktails in Seattle
Wednesday July 20, 2011
5:30 pm – 8:00 pm
Living Room and Bar, W Seattle
1112 Fourth Avenue
Seattle, WA
Please RSVP here

If you will be at the conference, don’t miss AJ Glasser moderating “Casual Games Rule Cross-Platform,” July 20 at 10:30 am.

See you there!

Thanks to Our Sponsors:

Rightscale provides cloud computing management for social application and game developers.

Couchbase products, which are built on Apache CouchDB, Membase, and Memcached open source software, represent a comprehensive family of database solutions for building scalable web and mobile applications.

Amazon Web Services Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides businesses with a secure, reliable, easy-to scale, low-cost computing platform “in the cloud.”

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 A Bit Lucky, Kabam, Glu Mobile, Pontiflex, TinyCo, Context Optional, W3i and Acquinity Interactive.

• Senior Product Manager
• Technical Game Designer

• UI/UX Artist
• Senior UX Specialist
• Senior 2D Artist
• UX Director
• Mobile Art Director

• Design Director

• Mobile Development Associate

• Product Manager
• Data Analyst

• Director of Marketing, U.S.
• Web Designer– Social Marketing
• Associate Product Manager
• Marketing Manager
• Application Genius/Ruby on Rails Developer

• Business Development Manager

• Web Designer / Graphic Designer – Online Marketing
• Online Media- Senior Affiliate Manager
• Online Ad Trafficking Operations Associate/Coordinator
• Senior Online/Web Product Manager

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 Japan Shuts Down FarmVille & Treasure Isle — According to a post from Dr. Serkan Toto, and via Game Watch, Zynga Japan is sunsetting down both FarmVille (Farmvillage) and Treasure Isle (Treasure Island) on Japan’s social network, Mixi. Each title was earning around 114,000 and 21,000 users each.

EA Uses Debt to Pay for PopCap — EA states that it will use $550 million in convertible debt to finance part of its recent PopCap purchase. As noted by VentureBeat, this is likely to allow for greater financial flexibility when it comes to making further acquisitions.

Ubisoft Buys Owlient — Core games developer Ubisoft has purchased web games developer Owlient. The acquisition is part of Ubisoft’s strategy to expand its games onto the web, social networks, and mobile spaces.

SponsorPay Launches BrandEngage to Drive Engagement & Monetization — Social advertising platform SponsorPay released a new product called BrandEngage this week. The service allows social game and app developers to enhance user engagement and monetization in their titles by integrating cost-per-engagement campaigns on Facebook and other social networks.

Kontagent Expands Analytics Platform — Earlier this week, Kontagent expanded its social analytics platform beyond games and apps on the Facebook platform with kSuite. Now, game developers for both the web and mobile platforms will be able utilize demographic data based on location, age groups, gender, engagement, and so on in real time.

Round of Funding Raised for deal united — The payments company behind PAY.BY.SHOPPING, deal united, has announced the ending of a Series B financing round led by Tengelmann E-Commerce Beteiligungs GmbH. Also participating were Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, KFW Bankengruppe, High-Tech Gründerfonds, and Venture Incubator. Though the exact amount raised was not noted, the proceeds are stated to be used for expanding global brand awareness.

EMI Signs Deal With Social Games Publisher MXP4 — Major record label EMI has signed a deal with social games publisher MXP4 says the Guardian. Through the deal, EMI will provide music from various artists to sell within MXP4′s Bopler Games app on Facebook. Sixty seconds of songs will be free, but Facebook Credits will be required to purchase full access.

Sometrics Releases Virtual Currency Infographic — Sometrics has released an infographic regarding its virtual currency services. According to the data, the majority of virtual currency purchases they’ve seen since has derived from the MMOG at 43 percent, followed by casual and social games at 35 percent. Additionally, credit cards make up the primary payment method at 53 percent with the most active spending day being Friday.

[Launch] Kabam Releases New Dragons of Atlantis Content — Social developer Kabam has announced the release of new content for its Facebook title, Dragon’s of Atlantis. High level players will now be able to further upgrade their Fortress with new looks and abilities as well as be able to gain access to a new combat class, the Fire Dragon.

Cow Clicker Runs Amusing Campaign — Facebook application Cow Clicker is running an amusing promotion to “Save The Pigs” by clicking cows in their game. Poking fun at Angry Birds, the app provides an amusingly written “open letter” detailing the entire predicament.

CrowdStar, the ninth largest developer on the Facebook platform by monthly actives, is launching a $10 million fund along with incubator YouWeb to scout for promising mobile game developers.

The fund comes at a time when the company is trying to diversify off Facebook and build out a mobile gaming business. CrowdStar recently launched a title focused at female, casual gamers called Top Girl that it has managed to keep in the top 10 grossing U.S. titles on iOS since its launch on June 16.

It also comes at a time when many mobile gaming companies like TinyCo, Glu Mobile and Gamevil have launched funds or contests to find promising IP from third-party developers. It’s partially a way to mitigate the risks of creating new games and also a way to grow a network of titles for distribution and cross-promotion.

> Continue reading on our sister site, Inside Mobile Apps.

Game discovery and cross-promotion platform Applifier announced a mobile product today that will help users find games and help developers track user interaction with ads. The app is expected to launch on both iOS and Android in Q3 2011.

Applifier on Facebook has grown steadily in the last year, reaching over 150 million monthly active users with its cross-promotion bar and its newer games portal app. As of today, the company claims 100 million game installs on the platform as a result of cross-promotion. Developers can integrate with the cross-promotion platform for free while Applifier itself remains ad-supported. Applifier also recently launched a cross-promotion bar for web games outside of the Facebook platform.

On mobile, Applifier hopes to achieve a similar ecosystem of reach and engagement. The App Store and Android Marketplace are even more fragmented than Facebook when it comes to games, and discovery has proved a challenge for many developers that can’t sign up with major publishers to support them.

> Continue reading on Inside Mobile Apps.