The team behind Dragon Age Legends at developer BioWare is recruiting for a new social game. Given that the next big console game due out for the developer is Mass Effect 3, we wonder if that could be the franchise in question.

You’ll get no context from the job posting itself; the text name-drops just about every franchise BioWare has ever produced with no significance placed on one more so than another. BioWare could be adapting its classic, Baldur’s Gate, for all we know. It seems more likely, however, that EA is pushing for a combination of standalone games within franchises and for “digital service” social games that support the release of a new console title. This is where Mass Effect for Facebook from BioWare would make sense, especially given EA’s current run of success with social games based on its more successful video game franchises.

What separates a standalone game from a “digital service” game, so far as we can tell, is the presence of a console game for the social game to support. Like Ubisoft’s Project Legacy and upcoming Ghost Recon Commander and inFamous Anarchy earlier this summer, digital service Facebook games are timed to launch alongside the console game and feature cross-compatibility in the form of item unlocks or special gameplay bonuses. Standalone games, meanwhile, carry the brand of a franchise onto Facebook, but exist as self-contained experiences with little to no cross-compatibility with any existing games within that franchise. A recent example of this would be Nival and KranX Productions’ King’s Bounty: Legions.

In the last six months, EA has been pushing a mix of the two types of social game onto Facebook while also revamping older titles like Scrabble with new cross-platform features. By spreading social game development duties around its internal studios from Playfish to EA2d (the studio behind Dragon Age Legends), EA has been able to keep a steady flow of releases for the quarter, the most recent of which being The Sims Social. Next up will likely be Risk: Factions, another collaboration between Playfish and internal studio EA Hasbro.

So far, EA seems to feel like it has had success with adapting its original intellectual property for Facebook, even when games aren’t getting massive amounts of traffic. According to our AppData traffic tracking service, Dragon Age Legends never did break the 1 million monthly active user mark that most social games aspire to, while The Sims Social shattered it even before the game was actually live. Even so, EA singled out Dragon Age Legends during an earnings call earlier this summer as a successful “digital service,” and told investors they planned to bring more core franchises to Facebook — though the company made no distinction between standalone games like The Sims Social and tie-in games like Dragon Age Legends (which depend on the launch of a new console game in the franchise). In other words, EA doesn’t seem like it would hold back from pushing for its EA Partner studios (like BioWare) for more social games after getting favorable results from Dragon Age and The Sims.

As far as Mass Effect goes, we’ll have to wait and see what shakes out on Facebook as the console game’s March 6, 2012 release date approaches. We observe that that’s almost a year to the day to Dragon Age 2′s release; Dragon Age Legends was first announced in February 2011. It’s also worth noting that the official fan Page (maintained through the Mass Effect 2 Page) has 739,036 Likes as of today — a healthy pool of potential players for a Mass Effect social game.

Gladelings from Imba is an adventure game set in a magical forest environment that combines elements of role-playing with traditional Facebook game activities like farming and decoration.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, Gladelings currently has 19,509 monthly active users and 606 daily active users.

Players of Gladelings are in charge of a group of its titular characters, which are bear-like creatures that live in a forest glen. The game begins with players in control of one Gladeling, but this number can grow. The objective is to utilize the Gladelings in four different mini-games (including spelunking and a slingshot-based challenge) in order to collect gold and valuable gems. Training them on various apparatuses akin to gym equipment can enhance the abilities of the Gladelings. For example, working out their antennae can enable them to see farther in dark caves, while exercising their feet make them move faster, thus providing more time to potentially collect riches.

Various trees can be planted in the player’s glen, the fruit of which can be harvested at timed intervals and combined to make juices used in training the Gladelings. The game’s shop also offers deco items for customizing the glen. The glen houses a few different important locations, including spots where players can view the juice and riches they’ve amassed and even convert the latter into gold, which is used to enter the mini-games. Performing actions in the game also rewards the player with experience points, and new areas of the game world’s map are unlocked as players grow in experience.

Social features include sharing accomplishments to other Facebook users’ Walls, gifting, and visiting the glens of friends that are playing the game in order to collect special fruit once a day. Gladelings is monetized via the use of Facebook Credits to purchase gold — a direct way to buy items from the game’s shop — and various gems, fruit and other elements of the game’s recipes.

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

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 Tagged, FunCom Oslo AS, Amazon, TinyCo, Liquid Entertainment, 5th Planet Games, King.com, Nanigans and Identified.

• Art Director – Social Games
• Game Designer
• Creative Director – Social Games

• TEAM LEAD – SOCIAL GAMES BUSINESS ENGINE
• SENIOR DATABASE AND BACKEND PROGRAMMER/ARCHITECT – SOCIAL NETWORK GAMES

• Senior UI SDE: Social Games
• Senior SDE: Social Games

• Monetization Analyst
• User Acquisition Specialist
• Data Analyst
• Product Manager

• UI Artist
• Social Games Programmer

• Mobile Game Developer (iOS)

• Advertising Operations Director – King.com
• Partner Manager – King.com -Nordic
• HR Manager

• AdOps Manager

• Super Software Engineer
• Super Human 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.

Stick Run by Manuel Otto is an independently developed endless-running game for Facebook. The title first caught our eye earlier this month and wound up on our list of fastest-growing Facebook games by daily active users today.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, Stick Run currently has 1,716,127 monthly active users and 316,930 daily active users.

Stick Run challenges players to travel as far as possible through a randomly generated side-scrolling level filled with obstacles. The player’s stick figure character runs on its own, but players can speed up and slow down using the left and right arrow keys. Pressing the up arrow key makes the figure jump, while pressing down causes it to slide under obstacles.

Obstacles range from single crates to stacks of them, panes of glass and rotating saw blades. Running headlong into walls of crates or any saw blade ends the game, at which point players can restart and try again. Achievements can be unlocked for meeting certain performance criteria. The game also has a multiplayer component wherein players can run through a level alongside up to three other players in real time. The winner is the player that runs the farthest. Hitting obstacles eliminates players and they must wait until the next round to compete again.

In addition to the multiplayer mode, Stick Run offers social interaction in the form of a chat room, leaderboards (both score and number of boxes jumped), friend to friend challenges and bragging about achievements on viral channels.

Stick Run is monetized through the sale of soft currency and special items, and apparently through display ads (see screenshot below). Some of the items for sale are cosmetic enhancements while others, such as various types of running shoes, can actually make players’ characters run faster, jump higher and so on. There’s a roughly even mix of items that can be purchased using coins versus those that can only be had by spending Facebook Credits.

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

Not much movement on this week’s list of fastest-growing games by daily active users as The Sims Social continues to dominate. Diamond Dash and 水果忍者 (Fruit Ninja) from MiniMax round out the top three.

Casino and slot games are still getting a lot of love from these rankings as Slotomania and DoubleDown Casino expand and newcomer JackpotJoy Slots ramps up in players. The latter has now officially classed out of our emerging Facebook games category, having broken the 1 million monthly active user mark late last week.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	The Sims Social	7,531,096	+4,081,773	+118%
2.	Diamond Dash	1,991,759	+190,132	+11%
3.	水果忍者	185,747	+180,419	+3,386%
4.	Tetris Battle	1,386,299	+155,010	+13%
5.	MapleStory Adventures	473,809	+134,457	+40%
6.	Mahjong Saga	559,093	+130,757	+31%
7.	Traveler IQ Challenge	114,564	+112,280	+4,916%
8.	Bubble Island	1,933,839	+104,820	+6%
9.	Slotomania – Slot Machines	1,349,117	+90,061	+7%
10.	Games	1,835,966	+83,615	+5%
11.	Bubble Saga	1,269,142	+79,481	+7%
12.	Stick Run	307,728	+78,055	+34%
13.	Monster World	1,661,034	+77,870	+5%
14.	Resort World	210,617	+75,269	+56%
15.	Magic Land	293,477	+72,142	+33%
16.	Big Business	180,703	+67,770	+60%
17.	DoubleDown Casino	828,052	+67,019	+9%
18.	Ravenwood Fair	759,845	+65,535	+9%
19.	BINGO Blitz	520,861	+61,886	+13%
20.	JackpotJoy Slots	241,100	+60,987	+34%

If you haven’t already, give Tetris Battle a try. The officially licensed social game from Tetris Online, Inc. has held steady with growth for the past three months and word-of-mouth buzz about the game among core video game fans may sustain the title for quite a while longer. Read our review for more details.

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

Though Zynga hasn’t gone public just yet, the social game developer is keeping busy between releasing an expansion to FrontierVille and now a whole new game called Adventure World.

The game, based on details gleaned from its fan page and trailer, is about exploration with puzzle-solving elements. On paper, it actually sounds a bit like Loot Drop’s upcoming Cloudforest Expedition, to be published by RockYou.

As to the IPO, troubled stock markets have some unnamed sources telling the New York Post that Zynga could stall well into November before pursuing the course in earnest. While not confirmed by Zynga or IPO leader Morgan Stanley, or other reporting, the idea of a delay isn’t hard to imagine between hurricanes, earthquakes, and United States credit being downgraded. Where’s the sense in selling stock if nobody’s in a buying mood?

Zynga first moved toward IPO with an S-1 filling early this summer that has since been amended to include or exclude details on valuation, traffic target agreements with Facebook, and the exact power Zynga CEO Mark Pincus will retain once the developer goes public. The company is currently hoping to raise $1 billion in the offering.

Further details on Adventure World will become available later this week when a preview embargo lifts. You can find out more about Zynga’s approach to launching its FrontierVille expansion, Pioneer Trail, here and here.

Social game developer and publisher RockYou announced a partnership with Peak Games today to bring Zoo World 2 to Turkey, the Middle East and North Africa.

RockYou launched its sequel to 2009’s Zoo World on Facebook earlier this summer. The game runs on the same app ID as the original, making it somewhat difficult to nail down the exact number of new incoming players. Our AppData traffic tracking service, however, shows an over 400% increase in monthly active users and over 100% increase in daily active users for the ID between the game’s launch-date and its present-day levels.

During that time period, RockYou CEO Lisa Marino told us that the company was experimenting with a new ad platform that we could expect to see added to Zoo World 2 before the end of August. In the last seven days, the sequel’s growth has slowed down somewhat, knocking it off our weekly rankings of fastest-growing games by MAU and DAU. With Zoo World 2 coming to a new audience in localized versions for Turkey and the Middle East and North Africa (a.k.a. the MENA region), we expect to have a better picture of who plays the game, given that the localized versions will run on their own app IDs.

Peak Games established itself as a leading developer and publisher for the region with in-house games like Okey and publishing partners like TheBroth. The company secured a $5 million first round of funding back in May. Part of Peak Games’ success has been in focusing on games that provide a level of socialization in-game that players cannot get in their day-to-day life due to social norms. This is what drives the engagement in card games like Okey and other board game titles developed or published by Peak Games. Even so, TheBroth’s Peak Games-published farming sim, Komşu Çiftlik, enjoys roughly the same amount of traffic as Okey. It’ll be interesting to see if Zoo World 2 has a similar experience. The press release announcing the partnership says that the localized versions of Zoo World 2 will contain “culturally specific enhancements.”

Read our review of Zoo World 2 here.

Baby & Me from publisher 6waves Lolapps is a simulation game in which players care for a baby and its mother. Developed by Grab, the title launched in late July and turned up on our list of fastest-growing games by monthly active users just this week.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, Baby & Me currently has 935,719 monthly active users and 142,005 daily active users.

In Baby & Me, players assume the role of a mother who must care for her baby. The gameplay is divided into two components: baby care and mother care, the latter requiring players to interact with the mother and keep her happiness as high as possible. When interacting with the baby, players engage in mini-games themed around diaper changing, bathing and feeding, all three of which require specific items to perform (e.g. crafting homemade soap and then moving a sponge across the baby’s face with the mouse to simulate scrubbing). Progressively better items become available through crafting or purchase that increase the amount of time that can pass between the baby needing changing, cleaning and feeding. There are additional mini-games for play activities with the baby.

The mother, meanwhile, can be given gifts (jewelry, food, etc.) to boost her mood and can visit a cafe, bar, movie theater, the beach and other locations (some requiring a certain experience level and number of friends playing the game) in order to dine out, host events, see films and participate in mom-centric mini-games (e.g. a simple hidden object game at the beach). The better the player does at it, the more rewards they receive to put toward both Mom and Baby’s happiness.

Most actions performed in-game reward the player with Mom Happiness, Baby Happiness, experience points, coins and cash. Actions require energy, which recharges over time or can be refilled via items. An interesting way to gain rewards during the Mom-care portion of the game involves watching real-life videos in-game, including workout and beauty segments, from ModernMom. Players can also purchase a variety of deco items for the mother’s home in order to spruce it up, and can clean the house every once in a while in order to gain more coins and XP.

Players can make use of social features including sharing accomplishments to their Wall, inviting friends to the game and visiting friends to help them clean their homes. There is also a “spot the differences” mini-game that can be played upon visiting a friend’s home.

February 8 – 9, 2012 | San Francisco Notify Me When Registration Opens

Inside Social Apps is coming back to San Francisco! We are proud to announce our third conference on the future of monetization on social and mobile platforms, and we hope to see you there.

Inside Social Apps 2012 will explore new opportunities, as well as emerging risks, in the development, distribution and monetization of social and mobile applications. Inside Social Apps 2012 will span February 8 – 9, and will bring together the world’s leading developers and investors for critical discussion and analysis.

Social applications first made their splash in 2007, and have now evolved into a global media ecosystem. Today’s social and mobile apps comprise a profitable multi-billion dollar industry, characterized by vibrant investment activity and newly emerging opportunities on mobile platforms.

Inside Social Apps is Inside Network’s content-focused conference series that investigates the latest trends and challenges for social and mobile applications and the companies that bring them to market.

Past Inside Social Apps events have seen sold out well before conference day, so we strongly encourage you to register early.

Sign up here to be notified when registration opens.

Speakers

Our 2012 speaker list will be announced in the weeks to come.

Past Inside Social Apps agendas have seen a roster of leading entrepreneurs, including:

	Bret Taylor CTO, Facebook		Eric Chu Group Manager, Android Platform, Google
	Mark Pincus CEO, Zynga		Kristian Segerstrale Co-founder and CEO, Playfish (now part of EA)
	Kevin Chou Co-founder and CEO, Kabam		Peter Relan Executive Chairman, CrowdStar
	Rick Thompson Co-Founder, Playdom (now part of Disney), and Investor		Jason Oberfest VP Social Apps, ngmoco:) (now part of DeNA)
	Rex Ng Co-Founder and CEO, 6waves		Deborah Liu Commerce Product Marketing, Facebook
	Sean Ryan EVP and GM Games, News Corp		Bill Gossman CEO, hi5
	Anil Dharni Co-founder, Funzio; Founder, Storm8		Paul Bettner GM, Zynga with Friends
	Jens Begemann Co-founder and CEO, Wooga		Dennis Ryan EVP Worldwide Publishing, PopCap Games
	Eric Goldberg Managing Director, Crossover Technologies		Carey Kolaja Senior Director, Digital Goods Operations, PayPal
	Raph Koster VP Creative Design, Playdom (now part of Disney)		Atul Bagga VP Equity Research, Games, ThinkEquity
	Manu Rekhi GM Games and Platform, MySpace		Martin Essl Strategic Software Partner Management, Sony Ericsson
	Vish Makhijani SVP Business Operations, Zynga		Asokan Thiyagarajan Dir. Platforms & Tech. Strategy, Samsung

A full agenda will be announced shortly. Keep an eye on InsideSocialApps.com for more information.

Registration

We will be announcing limited tickets at special early pricing, and we strongly encourage you to register early and so your company doesn’t miss the event!

Join our registration notification list here.

From all of us at Inside Network, we look forward to seeing you on February 8 and 9 in San Francisco.

The Sims Social and The Smurfs & Co. are still in the lead on this week’s list of fastest-growing games by monthly active users. Zynga’s Texas HoldEm Poker winds up just behind them thanks to a daily active user spike begun August 25.

Zoo World 2, meanwhile, drops off the rankings this week as RockYou’s sequel slows down in growth. As of today, its MAU peaked at 9.4 million while DAU reached an all-time of 943,523 before stabilizing between 650,000 and 740,000 at its present-day levels. Note that Zoo World 2 appears as “Zoo World” on account of the sequel running via the original game’s app ID.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	The Sims Social	20,892,330	+13,567,491	+185%
2.	The Smurfs & Co	7,807,171	+2,627,746	+51%
3.	Texas HoldEm Poker	36,556,079	+1,244,910	+4%
4.	Magic Land	1,626,086	+1,054,644	+185%
5.	GnomeTown	2,701,570	+854,755	+46%
6.	Ninja Saga	6,106,192	+765,357	+14%
7.	MapleStory Adventures	2,401,057	+742,247	+45%
8.	Slotomania – Slot Machines	5,759,423	+723,144	+14%
9.	Baby & Me	935,719	+630,141	+206%
10.	Diamond Dash	10,360,245	+614,441	+6%
11.	The Pokerist club — Texas Poker	3,937,421	+586,329	+17%
12.	胡萊三國	1,124,991	+486,953	+76%
13.	FarmVille	34,055,691	+471,541	+1%
14.	Gardens of Time	17,046,963	+428,901	+3%
15.	Backyard Monsters	4,490,927	+381,864	+9%
16.	SlotSpot – The Premier Slots Destination	1,104,991	+377,941	+52%
17.	BINGO Blitz	1,769,912	+372,383	+27%
18.	Monster Fusion	732,530	+361,179	+97%
19.	DoubleDown Casino	3,058,247	+359,956	+13%
20.	Total Domination: Nuclear Strategy	1,260,905	+358,187	+40%

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.