Late last week, Facebook updated its Platform Policies with language that forbids cross-promotion from within Canvas apps for games on any “competing social network.” We can confirm today that this does not apply to social game developers cross-promoting their own iOS and Android apps or off-platform versions of their games.

A Facebook spokesperson tells ISG that there’s no issue with developers promoting mobile apps from within Canvas applications.

“[We] don’t believe it’s appropriate to use our site to promote a competitive service whether through ads, platform or any other channel we make available to third-parties on Facebook.com,” the spokesperson says. “We’ve had this policy in place for our advertising platform for some time, and the recent update extended this to Canvas applications on Facebook.”

The language of the initial update is a bit hazy: “Apps on Facebook may not integrate, link to, promote, distribute, or redirect to any app on any other competing social platform.” Broadly interpreted, many developers would have reason to believe cross-promoting an iOS version of their game would be in violation of the policy. This could’ve been pretty damaging to many social game developers looking to expand into the mobile space. For example, Cupcake Corner developer OMGPOP tells TechCrunch it got a healthy percentage of its first 1 million downloads for its iOS game, Puppy World, using cross-promotions like the one below:

Understandably concerned, the developer spoke with Facebook and found that it wasn’t in violation. OMGPOP VP Eric von Coelln tells us that the developer is not in violation because it’s cross-promoting its own portfolio of games — which includes the newly-launched iOS exclusive, Puppy World. Von Coelln notes that the title uses Facebook Connect, which may explain why Facebook doesn’t think of mobile as a competing platform as Cupcake Corner player checking out Puppy World would still be “on” Facebook as opposed to “leaving” Facebook for another network.

The timing of the update — made the day after Google+ launched its Games platform — suggests that the policy was instead aimed at preventing developers from directing Facebook traffic to Google+. The distinction between G+ and mobile is an important one, as much of Facebook’s social games ecosystem relies on cross-promotion both for cross-platform games (e.g. PopCap’s Bejeweled Blitz) and for each others’ games, as with the social games cross-promotion service Applifier.

> Read a review of Puppy World on our sister site, Inside Mobile Apps.

Deal or No Deal from iWin is a Facebook version of the well-known TV game show. The title was launched July 6 and has seen steady growth in monthly active users while daily active users have remained stable after the first 20 days or so. This is iWin’s third TV game show-based social game after Family Feud and 1 vs 100.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, Deal or No Deal currently has 964,450 monthly active users and 130,657 daily active users.

In Deal or No Deal, players compete against a mysterious “Banker” character in an effort to walk away with as much money as possible. The game presents players with 26 briefcases, each one containing an amount of money between $1 and $1 million. Players choose one case as theirs at the outset and open a set number of cases per round after that. As cases are opened, the sums of money they contained are taken out of play.

The Banker presents players with a deal at the end of each round, which they can either take and keep, or reject and keep playing, hoping that the case they chose at the outset contains more money or that they get a better deal offer after the next round. At the end of the game, players must open their case and they are shown how much it contains versus the highest deal from the Banker. If the sum their case contains is more, they’re considered a winner. Either way, they keep what is in their case. Along the way, players can win bonus experience points, extra players, more money and items for their collections by picking the right cases. Power-ups are also integrated, such as allowing players to remove the lowest-value cases from play

The game offers both single-player and tournament play against two other Facebook users. This mode alters the gameplay slightly, allowing players to accept up to three deals by the Banker during the course of the game. The player that ends up with the most cash is dubbed the winner and receives a hefty bonus. Players can also participate in other social features such as inviting friends to join their “Deal Crew” and share in bonuses as more are added, or choose to share winnings with friends. It’s also possible to invite friends to compete in a quick-play round in order to win more play tokens.

Deal or No Deal is monetized through the use of Facebook Credits to purchase more Episodes, which are tokens spent each time the player wishes to participate in a game. These tokens can also be one during the course of play and are given to players at the rate of one every 12 hours.

iWin has been steady adjusting the game and adding new content. For example, the developer recently raised the per-game prize cap to $1 million and introduced an item collecting aspect of the game, whereby players can earn extra episode tokens and other prizes by finding and collecting special item icons while playing.

You can follow Deal or No Deal’s progress using AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

While not all of the games currently available in Google+ are attempting to monetize, Kabam’s Edgeworld monetization flow serves as a model for the same basic flow for payments in games on the Google+ Platform.

As we’ve previously reported, Google+ utilizes Google Checkout for its in-app purchases, meaning game developers (currently) only pay 5% on each transaction to the platform. It also means social games customers on Google+ can only make purchases using credit cards, debit cards, or gift cards branded by American Express, Discover, MasterCard, Visa, or Visa Electron.

By contrast, Facebook (and many other online games services) have either partnered with and aggregated many other payment methods around the world or simply partnered with local payment aggregators, but Google has not confirmed plans to integrate additional payment methods yet. For now, there is no PayPal, no mobile payment options, no prepaid cards, etc.

Edgeworld monetizes through the sale of a premium currency, Platinum, which can be spent on gameplay boosts and defenses. The game starts all players off with 10 Platinum and does not currently provide any means of earning Platinum either through gameplay or by completing promotional activities (e.g. offer walls, video ads, etc.). To buy Platinum, players must select the Get Platinum tab from the upper menu of the game screen, or click Add next to the Platinum icon in-game.

Selecting the Buy options opens a pop-up window, prompting the user to sign into Google Checkout:

Clicking Start Now either sends the user to a Complete Purchase screen, or to the following screen if the user hasn’t already associated a credit card in their Google Checkout account:

The Complete Your Purchase screen appears automatically when the user is already signed into a Google Checkout account with a linked credit card:

And then a Thank You screen appear after completing each purchase:

That’s it. The currency purchased immediately appears in the user’s in-game wallet (orange circle added for emphasis):

We’ll be tracking the payment flow and payment method options Google rolls out as part of its wider Google+ Games launch over the coming weeks.

Ubisoft and EA lead this week’s list of fastest-growing Facebook games by monthly active users with The Smurfs & Co. and The Sims Social. Zoo World 2, The Pokerist Club and GnomeTown round out the top five.

Jersey Shore drops off our rankings this week, as its recent growth spike appears to have tapped out at just over 1.4 million. We watched the game climb on our weekly rankings around the August 4 premier date of its parent TV show’s newest season. In terms of daily active users, the game is back down to its pre-premier levels.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	The Smurfs & Co	3,353,247	+2,079,505	+163%
2.	The Sims Social	2,595,438	+1,571,704	+154%
3.	Zoo World	8,648,311	+995,641	+13%
4.	The Pokerist club — Texas Poker	2,332,796	+805,628	+53%
5.	GnomeTown	1,004,071	+593,775	+145%
6.	我的王國(My Kingdom)	1,211,835	+494,741	+69%
7.	MapleStory Adventures	1,261,046	+481,580	+62%
8.	Megacity	1,466,433	+383,983	+35%
9.	Premier League Fantasy Football	767,042	+366,043	+91%
10.	Texas HoldEm Poker	34,822,351	+355,255	+1%
11.	Collapse! Blast	1,190,569	+287,732	+32%
12.	Gourmet Ranch	3,641,857	+279,087	+8%
13.	ESPN Sports Bar & Grill	710,572	+276,482	+64%
14.	FarmVille 中文版	1,304,274	+250,089	+24%
15.	Social Empires	3,640,639	+238,432	+7%
16.	SlotSpot – Best Free Slot Machines	486,422	+231,829	+91%
17.	Slotomania – Slot Machines	4,631,006	+228,722	+5%
18.	Mahjong Saga	3,123,465	+227,770	+8%
19.	Monster Galaxy	10,505,089	+171,332	+2%
20.	Edgeworld	490,150	+158,867	+48%

At No.7 this week is MapleStory Adventures, Korean MMO developer Nexon’s first Facebook offering. The 2D side-scrolling adventure game replicates many of the paid items that monetize well in the original MapleStory free-to-play MMO. Nexon is carefully monitoring player behavior, however, to see if the same items sell as well to social gamers. Read our review for more details on the game.

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, August 8th, 2011

• Emerging Paid iOS Apps: Zeptolab’s New Cut The Rope Title, Lockify
• Gamevil’s Smartphone Revenues Climb 259% to $5.6M In Second Quarter
• A Review of Quarterly Earnings for iOS, Android Gaming Companies

Tuesday, August 9th, 2011

• Emerging Top-Grossing iOS Apps: Limbic, Storm8, ZeptoLab, Garmin & More
• OpenFeint’s Partnership With The9 Brings 60 Games From The West to China
• Facebook Messenger: A New Standalone Group Messaging Mobile App Built Off Beluga

Wednesday, August 10th, 2011

• Top Emerging Android Apps: LevelUp, Marvel, Skype, Dragonplay, Com2uS
• New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: Kabam, Metamoki, Lolapps, Playfish and More
• Tencent’s Mobile Revenues Rise 2% Quarter-Over-Quarter to $123.7M
• Russia’s Game Insight Aims For Another Top-Grossing Android Hit With My Country

Thursday, August 1th, 2011

• Emerging Top Free Apps on iOS: Facebook Messenger, Glee, and Jamie Oliver Appear
• Zynga’s New $1 Billion Credit Line Could Double its Acquisition Warchest, Or Give It Time Amid Market Volatility
• New Hires in Mobile: Backflip Studios, Beeline Interactive, Big Fish GAmes, & More
• How Beluga Metamorphosed Into Facebook Messenger

Friday, August 12th, 2011

• Mobile App Roundup: New Launches, iOS 5, Rovio Funding & More
• W3i Launches Games Program to Set-Up Servers, Analytics & Storefronts for Developers

Inside Social Games

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

Sunday, August 7th, 2011

• Social Developers Hopeful About Google+ Platform Potential

Monday, August 8th, 2011

• Ubisoft, RockYou Games Lead This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Games by MAU
• When to Sunset and When to Stay With Social Games on Facebook
• Divinitiz: The Offerings Rush Demands a Sacrifice of Time on Facebook

Tuesday, August 9th, 2011

• EA Playfish Signs With Nanigans Ad Platform, Moves Toward Sims Social Launch
• 1 vs 100 Puts Facebook Players on the Spot For Virtual Cash

Wednesday, August 10th, 2011

• The Smurfs & Co Top This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Games by DAU
• New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: Lolapps, Playfish, Kabam, EA and More
• Facebook’s Gamer Status API Lets Developers Track High Monetizing Users

Thursday, August 1th, 2011

• Fashion Designer For Facebook Models Franchise Expansion
• New Hires in Social Gaming: Digital Chocolate, Gaia Interactive, iWin, & More
• Zynga May Borrow Up To $1 Billion in New Revolving Credit Agreement, Revised IPO Filing Says
• Google+ Announces Games, Launches With Zynga, Playdom, PopCap Games, Wooga, Rovio, Kabam, More
• Kabam Officially Announces Edgeworld for Facebook Following Google+ Launch
• Facebook Updates APIs, Canvas, Home Page to Improve Discovery, Retention, and the Games Experience

Friday, August 12th, 2011

• Premier League Fantasy Football and ESPN Sports Bar & Grill Top This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Games
• Zynga Launches Pioneer Trail Expansion for FrontierVille Today, Migrates Base Game to New App ID
• Facebook Adds Game Stories to the News Feed, Privacy Settings to Limit Them
• Creara Gets a Big Response From Its S.O.S. on Facebook
• Social Gaming Roundup: Zynga, FIFA Superstars, OpenFeint, & More

Inside Facebook

Tracking Facebook and the Facebook platform for developers and marketers.

Monday, August 8th, 2011

• Mobile, Calendar, Photos, Quizzes, Pages, Dating, Music and More on This Week’s Top 20 Facebook Apps by MAU
• Facebook’s News Feed Links Status Updates to Pages Even If Users Don’t
• Featured Facebook Campaigns: Sears Latino, Aeropostale, DirecTV and Food Network
• Platform Update: OAuth 2.0 Spec Migration Required by November 5th, PHP SDK, Video
• Facebook’s Relevance-Filtered Chat Buddy List, or, Why Users Don’t Know Who’s Online

Tuesday, August 9th, 2011

• New Facebook Platform Industry Hires: Involver, BranchOut, Wildfire and More
• Facebook Mobile to Thwart Hackers and Cyberbullies with Password Reset and Social Reporting
• Facebook Messenger: a New Standalone Group Messaging Mobile App Built Off Beluga
• Rihanna, “Harry Potter,” Zynga, YouTube, TV and Cristiano Ronaldo on This Week’s Top 20 Growing Facebook Pages
• Improving Your Facebook Page with Customized Tab Applications: 10 Examples

Wednesday, August 10th, 2011

• Mobile, Horoscopes, Pages, Phrases, Calendar, BandPage and More on This Week’s Top 20 Facebook Apps by DAU
• With Voice Calling, Facebook’s Skype Partnership Wil Offer Alternatives to Traditional Carrier Plans
• New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: Context Optional, EA, Lolapps, Amazon and More
• Facebook Developer Groups Make App Role Assignment More Efficient, Could Increase Groups Usage

Thursday, August 1th, 2011

• Facebook Careers Postings: Recruiting, IT, Dublin, Operations and More
• Facebook Hires and Departures: Interns, Engineering, Account Management and More
• Facebook Adds “More Online Friends” to Chat, Returning the Complete Buddy List
• Facebook to Migrate the Ads API to the Graph API, Releases Ads Power Editor Source Code
• Facebook’s New Zip Code Ad Targeting Could Boost Local Advertising Revenue
• Facebook Updates APIs, Canvas, Home Page to Improve the Games Experience

Friday, August 12th, 2011

• Calendars, Pages, Quizzes, Happiness, Photos, and Korea on This Week’s Top 20 Growing Facebook Apps by MAU
• Facebook Users Can Now Opt Into Letting Friends Export Their Email Addresses via Download Your Information
• How Beluga Metamorphosed Into Facebook Messenger
• Facebook Adds Game Stories to the News Feed, Privacy Settings to Limit Them
• Facebook Prohibits Promotion of Apps on Competing Social Platforms, Unapproved Soft Offers
• Facebook Roundup: UK Gov, Police, Netlog, Ceglia, Narcissism, Google+ and More

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 Playfish, Amazon.com, lolapps, Billing Revolution, Electronic Arts, Context Optional, King.com, Kabam and Metamoki.

• Product Manager, Playfish
• Senior Artist – Playfish
• PRODUCT MANAGER
• Online Product Manager (Playfish)

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

• Flash Engineer – Game Play
• Server / Systems Engineer
• Email Campaign Product Manager
• Game Lead Engineering Manager
• Data Analyst

• Account Manager

• Business Analytics (Contractor)
• Sr. Product Marketing Manager
• Senior Manager, PR – EA Mobile
• PR Manager

• Social Marketing Software Customer Support Specialist
• Social Marketing Software Quality Assurance
• Account Manager — Social Marketing
• Software Trainer–Social Marketing Suite

• Business Development Director – Central Europe – King.com
• Senior Business Development Director – US – King.com
• Business Analyst

• Mobile Art Director
• Senior 2D Artist
• 3D/ 2D Game Artist
• UI/UX Artist

• Senior Backend Software Engineer
• Backend Software Engineer

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.

FIFA Superstars Nominated at Best Free-to-Play Game — Electronic Arts and Playfish have received a nomination for the GameMaster Golden Joystick Awards this week for FIFA Superstars. The awards ceremony will take place October 21st.

Zynga to Gain EA Executive — Another executive from Electronic Arts is defecting over to Zynga, reports Develop. According to a “U.S. source” Jeff Karp, one of EA’s social games executives, is slated to join Zynga after 11 years at EA.

Jeremy Verba Leaves Zynga — According to VentureBeat, Zynga general manager Jeremy Verba has left the company after 19 months to become CEO of dating site, eHarmony.

OpenFeint Releases New Social Features — Aside from its activity in China, OpenFeint has begun its roll out of new social features for Android. This includes player status updates and a new message wall.

Mobage Releases for iPhone in Japan — DeNA has released its mobile social games network, Mobage, in Japan’s App Store this week, reports Penn-Olson. Though the platform has been available in mobile browsers, it did not have a dedicated app.

Zynga vs. Vostu Lawsuit Clashes Abroad –  Last week, Zynga filed its copyright infringement lawsuit against Brazilian startup Vostu, again, in a Brazilian court. This led to a preliminary injunction against Vostu. Now, TechCrunch reports that U.S. District Judge Edward Davila has issued an order that restrains Zynga from enforcing the Brazilian courts decision to shut its games down.

[Launch] Greenopolis Stays Environmentally Friendly in New Mobile App — The environmentally friendly Greenopolis has launched a new mobile app for iOS and Android dubbed RecyclePix. The social title allows users to take pictures of themselves and friends recycling and share them on social feeds. Doing so earns “Greenopolis Points” which can then be redeemed for real world rewards and discounts.

[Launch] Yazino Socializes Bingo as a Team Sport — Yazino announced the launch of its newest social game, Extreme Bingo for both Yazino.com and Facebook. Combining traditionally Bingo rules with the use of strategically placed power-ups (on the Bingo “Battleboard”), players are able to compete in synchronous, team-based play.

S.O.S. is an adventure game from Russian developer Crazy Bit. It officially launched on July 27 after an open testing period that began in March of this year. The game has seen fairly rapid growth, landing on our top 20s rankings by the beginning of August.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, S.O.S. currently has 396,559 monthly active users and 13,632 daily active users.

Similar in premise to a title we previously covered, The Island: Castaway, S.O.S. has players controlling a plane crash survivor stranded on a deserted island. The goal is simple: survive. In order to do so, players must clear land, build shelter, plant crops and so on. Nearly every action the player initiates requires energy, which recharges over time or can be refilled via food (or purchased). Players can customize their survivor avatar with a variety of facial, hair and clothing options.

Various objectives are presented to add some structure to the experience, and completing these rewards the player with experience points, resources and “greenbacks” — the game’s soft currency. Players can also get bonus rewards for finding special items that are used to complete collections. In a somewhat fresh twist to the farming simulation on Facebook, a weather mechanic (shown with an on-screen forecast for each day) affects the yield of crops harvested on a particular day.

Social features include inviting friends to become neighbors, with standard visit bonuses and construction item gifting. Players can also share their accomplishments through viral channels including friends’ Walls.

The developer could not be reached for comment on its future plans for the title, but does seem to be keeping pace with reports of bugs on the game’s Wall and addressing them while adding new features and content on a regular basis.

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

CORRECTION: A previous draft of this story incorrectly listed Creara as the developer. According to representatives from Crazy Bit, the Russia-based Creara served as publisher on S.O.S., but that relationship has ended now that Creara is no longer active.

Facebook yesterday announced several changes to how games work on the Platform, including that stories about game may be published to the news feeds of a user’s friends, including non-gamers, when the play a game for more than 15 minutes or complete an in-game objective. Depending on their prevalence in the news feed, game usage and achievement stories could help developers gain new users for free, but could also clutter the news feeds of people who don’t care about games.

To help users avoid annoying their friends, Facebook will add a new privacy setting that allows them to define on an app-by-app basis who an app can share with. The setting will default to “friends” but users can select to prevent the publishing of game discovery, usage, and achievement stories to news feed and the new Games Ticker.

A Year of Limited Virality

Prior to last September, Facebook apps and games could publish stories to the news feed about users taking in-app actions. While relevant to other gamers and key source of new users for developers, non-gamers often found these stories irrelevant and considered them spam amongst their social content. With this spam threatening to overrun the news feed and drive users away from Facebook, the site closed this viral channel.

Only the occasional story about a friend starting to play a game would appear in the news feed to those that had not already installed that game, significantly cleaning up the feed but also severely limiting organic growth for apps and games. Facebook also tested a randomly occurring Discover New Games sidebar module, but this wasn’t frequently seen and its placement in the sidebar made it much less noticeable than the old game stories that appeared in the news feed.

Without the free growth channel of prominent placement in the news feed, developers were forced to spend more on ads to gain traction for their apps. Combined with Facebook’s 30% tax on Facebook Credits that in July it made the mandatory payment method for virtual goods within games, the Facebook Platform had become much expensive to develop on then a year ago. This led developers to look for alternatives, making Facebook more potentially vulnerable to competing platforms.

> Read more on Inside Facebook.

A little over a year after launching FrontierVille on Facebook, Zynga is ready to release the first major expansion for the title as a standalone gameplay experience called Pioneer Trail (originally titled Oregon Trail). The new content goes live on Facebook today.

In Pioneer Trail, FrontierVille players can form a party of three companion characters each with a unique role — doctor, hunter, carpenter. These roles can be filled either with non-playable characters from the player’s homestead, or by the player’s friends. At a later point, Zynga also plans to add a community functionality where players can meet and recruit other FrontierVille players to their Pioneer Trail game. Once each role is filled, the player’s party sets out on the Trail, which is made up of three unique locations through which the player must progress on the way to a final destination called Fort Courage.

Progression is quest-based. Each location will present the player with a series of quests that must be completed in order for the player’s wagon to move down the trail from one end of an area to another. A single story quest about a kidnapped boy underlies the entire journey, while each location also features its own narrative-driven quest. In the High Plains area, for example, the McBaggins family from previous FrontierVille quests turns up in dire need of the player’s help. Additionally, each location will have optional side quests and what FrontierVille General Manager John Osvald calls a “gigantorous social mission,” where the player needs to recruit a certain number of friends to pass.

While on the Trail, the player must spend rations on individual actions performed by their character or one of their party members. Certain actions can only be performed by certain characters — like the doctor searching the brush for medicine. This is where friends’ gameplay will become important, as friends can visit your Trail and perform actions like finding medicine or repairing the wagon without drawing from the player’s store of rations. Additionally, the player receives bonus rations for each time their friends visit the Trail to help out. Playing without friends — or with very lazy ones — forces the player to spend their own rations to activate characters and complete quests. Pioneer Trail offers players the chance to “fire” party members at any point during the game to replace them with other friends or NPCs.

Missions in Pioneer Trail feature branching possibilities and outcomes. Certain plot points prompt the player to choose one of two responses. Though a “wrong” decision during these instances will not halt progression, it will impact the player’s overall score for the Trail. As the player completes quests and eventually the entire Trail itself, they earn Trail Points to spend on special items that can be taken back to the homestead. These items range from decorations found on the Trail to single-click harvesters or chicken feeders. A secondary Pioneer Trail currency is Prize Tickets, which players can purchase with Facebook Credits and then turn around and spend on Trail rewards. Once players complete the Trail, they can replay it for more Trail Points.

The Pioneer Trail expansion is an interesting experiment in extending the life of FrontierVille, a topic we recently explored with Facebook’s Sean Ryan. Aside from just introducing a new gameplay experience, the expansion itself runs on a unique app ID on Facebook. When players first log into the FrontierVille after Pioneer Trail is live, they will be prompted to visit the trail, which leads to a new app install screen. Once installed, all of the player’s FrontierVille progress — their homestead, completed quests, inventory, friends, etc. — is migrated to the new app ID. At any point on the Pioneer Trail, if the player selects “Return to Homestead,” they do go back to their homestead as they left it, but not back to the old app ID. Zynga is still determining what to do with the original FrontierVille app ID once the majority of players have migrated. Osvald says Zynga will likely not have to create new app IDs for subsequent FrontierVille expansions.

Pioneer Trail launches on Facebook today.