Premier League Fantasy Football rockets up to the top spot on this week’s list of emerging Facebook games with ESPN Sports Bar & Grill not far behind. Both titles offer sports fans meaningful ways to interact with their sport and team of choice, such as with a Game Predictor that ESPN just launched.

iWin’s two newest TV game show titles, 1 vs 100 and Deal or No Deal, turn up back to back on this week’s list just behind Kabam’s just-launched Edgeworld. Way down at No.15, Ubisoft’s Castle & Co. turns up, perhaps riding a wave of cross-promotion from the recently released Smurfs & Co. (which broke 1 million MAU a week ago, classing it out of this list).

ETA: Due to a miscategorization, Playdom’s GnomeTown was left off this list in error. It should appear at No.2 with a gain of 425,982 MAU for a total of 773,079 MAU at 123% growth in the last week.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Premier League Fantasy Football	644,938	+444,280	+221%
2.	ESPN Sports Bar & Grill	630,243	+276,396	+78%
3.	SlotSpot – Best Free Slot Machines	422,089	+196,031	+87%
4.	Edgeworld	438,721	+174,686	+66%
5.	1 vs 100	770,537	+133,861	+21%
6.	Deal or No Deal	934,155	+133,782	+17%
7.	Okey Plus	892,700	+122,151	+16%
8.	Total Domination: Nuclear Strategy	710,653	+108,578	+18%
9.	Galaksi Online II Türkçe: En İyi Bilim Kurgu Oyunu	475,865	+106,638	+29%
10.	We Are Music	469,246	+104,799	+29%
11.	S.O.S	396,559	+104,633	+36%
12.	RocketBird	439,143	+102,399	+30%
13.	Divinitiz	246,105	+101,276	+70%
14.	Spot The Difference	242,775	+95,282	+65%
15.	Castle & Co	238,077	+91,514	+62%
16.	Buraco by Gazeus	346,807	+77,937	+29%
17.	Fantasy Football 2011	340,077	+76,347	+29%
18.	Millionaire Boss	692,109	+75,897	+12%
19.	Little Cave Hero	488,088	+71,359	+17%
20.	驚爆骰子樂 – 藝人都在玩的遊戲！【吹牛骰(大話骰)、骰寶、梭哈骰】	196,849	+69,558	+55%

At No.10 is We Are Music, a “guess this tune in four notes” trivia game animated with cartoon avatars that wreck virtual instruments when the player guesses wrong. Gameplay modes are divided by music categories, like Hall of Fame for a range of songs or My Generation for songs from specific decades going as far back as the 1950s.

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.

Facebook posted updates to its developer blog today detailing changes to the Canvas Page, Graph APIs and bookmarking, and games stores in the news feed. The changes are designed to improve game discovery, retention, and user experience. features that better surface games stories.

Canvas Page Changes

As you can see from the screenshot, game discovery is now available through Bookmarks that appear at the top of the right-hand corner of Facebook while users are playing games. The Bookmarks with red numbers indicate apps without outstanding requests, prompting the user to click on the Bookmark for quicker re-engagement with games requests.

Below that is the real-time activity ticker dedicated to stories about a user’s friends engaging with games. The stories include traditional game stories, as well as automatically-generated games stories created when a player’s friends start using a game, or consistently use the same app.

You’ll notice the example displays a “high score” story; this comes from updated Graph APIs that allow developers to generate games stories whenever a user completes an in-game achievement, passes a friend’s score, or reaches a new rank on the leaderboards. These stories could help increase virality and discovery without interrupting the game experience with prompts to share.

The final component to the module above is the Fluid Canvas. This allows developers to expand the size of their apps based on a user’s screen resolution. When enabled, the app can be left-aligned to take up the full height and width of user’s browser. This should give users an optimized experience regardless of whether they’re playing on a large desktop setup or a small laptop.

Home Page Changes

As promised, Facebook is also improving its automated systems behind surfacing games stories and making it easier to locate games in a centralized location. The homepage bookmarks panel has been updated so that the number and order of bookmarks in the groups and apps section changes based on a user’s habits, presumably so users who actively play more games will see more bookmarks. Users can also manually add bookmarks to a “Favorites” section, which appears at the top of all bookmarks if they want to keep a game handy despite engagement with other games.

Facebook is also changing how game stories appear in the news feed. This could improve discovery for all Facebook users after nearly a year of non-gamers only seeing the occasional story about a friend installing a new game. “We’ve begun rolling out a new ranking system that better surfaces app stories to the people who will most likely to engage with it, including those who don’t already use the app.

Games that publish stories that receive high volumes of Likes and comments will be more likely to have their stories appear in the news feed, while those whose stories are often hidden from the feed or marked as spam will be less likely to appear. Depending on how the system is tuned, it could reduce the reliance of developers on paid marketing channels.

Edgeworld is a real time strategy game for Facebook and Google+ from veteran developer Kabam. This is the company’s first foray into the real-time genre, all its previous strategy games having been asynchronous in combat. The game first arrived on Facebook in mid-May in a semi-closed beta state that lasted several months while Kabam evidently readied a simultaneous Google+ launch.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, Edgeworld currently has 420,825 monthly active users and 86,634 daily active users.

Edgeworld is a strategy game of base-building, unit management and player vs player combat. The game has a lot of gameplay elements in common with Kixeye’s popular Facebook strategy title Backyard Monsters, which has led to accusations of cloning. We leave it to the dedicated players to have the final say in the cloning matter, but we do believe it’s worth pointing out that while the early-level experiences are very similar, there is potential for Edgeworld to differentiate itself from Backyard Monsters in post-launch content that further explores traditional RTS gameplay elements.

During a game of Edgeworld, a player is expected to collect resources from their production buildings, build structures to fund and defend their base, train units to be ready to assault other bases — both player and computer-controlled — and then send said units into battle to assert their dominance over the game world. The game is controlled by a simple mouse-driven interface which is introduced through a straightforward tutorial and followed by seven days of protection from attack by other players to allow newcomers the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the game thoroughly.

The game features real-time chat and in-game mail facilities, much the same as other Kabam titles. Rather than a traditional “neighbor” system, Edgeworld players populate a persistent game map and are able to see when potential opponents are online. Players who attack offline opponents are likely to cause more damage than those who are online and able to react to an assault.

To keep higher-level players from constantly attacking lower-level, Kabam has introduced a balancing mechanism that reduces the amount of spoils an attacker can collect based on levels — which means there are diminishing returns for a level 10 player attacking a level 2 player. Beyond that, there is no match-making to restrict who can attack whom and a player’s best chance at safety after a 7-day tutorial period expires is to either buy defenses or join an alliance.

Edgeworld is monetized through its premium currency of Platinum, of which the player is provided with 10 units to begin with, and which can then be purchased using Facebook Credits. Platinum can be spent on extra resources for use in building construction, speed-ups, boosts, tickets to enter the prize draw to win additional items and hours of protection from attack from other players.

As for the game’s future, Kabam is planning on a standard set of updates to the game that introduce new armor, enemy types, and higher level caps for players and structures. An interesting feature due out a month or so after launch will place players’ bases on a grid map with adjacent bases and plots of land. Players can use the map to expand their territory by conquering unclaimed spaces adjacent to their bases as “outposts,” or by stumbling on other players’ bases and attacking or allying with them. Ultimately, features like the maps system and emergent gameplay from the PvP mode will set Edgeworld apart from Backyard Monsters over time.

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

Additional reporting by AJ Glasser.

Google+ officially launches its Games service today with a series of established Facebook and mobile developers including Zynga, Playdom, PopCap Games, Kabam, Wooga, Rovio and more.

The above screenshot shows the list of launch titles for Google+ Games. While we’re not surprised by most of the games we see on this list — established titles with healthy audiences, all — we do note that CrowdStar and 6waves Lolapps don’t appear to be Google+ launch partners.

In a blog post announcing the launch, Google’s Vic Gundotra, senior VP of engineering, explains that the Games stream will show up as a button at the top of the Streams list. Clicking it displays game updates, invites, and recent gameplay activity from those within your circle. This stream is also where a player’s in-game activity is shared, eliminating the spam problem Facebook experienced last year where games posts clogged the feeds of non-gaming users. The post says the Games button is live today, but we haven’t seen it appear in our Google+ account as yet. When it does, here’s what it will look like:

Google+ Games will also launch with in-app payments, Vikas Gupta, Product Leader for Payments at Google, tweets. (Gupta came to the company via the Jambool acquisition.)

The announcement ends months of speculation about how and when Google would integrate social games into its social network experience. Previous discoveries suggested APIs similar to what Facebook offers social game developers, and there were rumors that a small pool of developers had been sought out by Google to launch games. The inclusion of Zynga Poker on the list of Google+ games is significant, as it helps us narrow down the list of Zynga games the developer is required to maintain exclusively on Facebook.

Games launching on Google+ is a symbolic moment in the evolution of social platforms in the United States. Over the last couple of years, there has been no viable alternative to Facebook for social game developers looking to get their games in front of a large audience. MySpace has fallen off the radar completely, and smaller networks like Bebo, Tagged, and Hi5 don’t have the traffic most developers are looking for. Though the Google+ Platform is currently only available to those developers Google invited to participate in the launch, its existence and possible growth will potentially grant developers an actual choice of platform and perhaps even some negotiating room with Facebook.

Zynga set up a revolving credit agreement in July, allowing it to borrow up to $1 billion in revolving loans, according to an amended IPO filing released today. This could help the company make big ticket acquisitions, especially as it looks to break into mobile gaming. It could also help the company buy time if it wants to wait for better market conditions for its IPO.

The company paid upfront fees of $2.5 million and is required to pay commitment fees of up to $625,000 a quarter based on the portion of the credit facility it draws down. Morgan Stanley, which is also the lead bookrunner on the company’s forthcoming IPO, is managing the agreement. The interest rate on the loans are tied to daily interbank rates and can also change depending on how much debt Zynga has relative to its EBITDA.

The company didn’t say what the credit facility was for. However, with the $996 million in cash and cash equivalents the company carried on its balance sheet at the end of March, the $1 billion facility could go toward helping Zynga make some very large acquisitions. We had heard that Storm8 and Zynga had had some initial talks before the mobile-social gaming company started looking more seriously at funding options, and AllThingsD said that the company may have looked at Rovio as a potential target.

Such deals would represent a major shift for the company, which has to date focused on smaller talent-sized acquisitions that would be below or around the $10 million range. The most the company has publicly disclosed it paid for a company was the $53.3 million in cash and stock it spent on Words With Friends-maker Newtoy.

The revised IPO filing also shows that Zynga paid $7.5 million for an acquisition in July. It’s not clear if this is the company the filing is referring to, but Zynga acquired Toronto’s Five Mobile that month.

Though not as busy as last week, the social games industry saw decent activity as nine developers brought on new team members, according to data from LinkedIn and other sources.

As always, if your company is hiring new people or making a notable promotion, please let us know. Email editor (at) insidesocialgames (dot) com, and we’ll get it into this or next week’s post. Also, please note that the information about most new hires, below, comes directly from company updates from LinkedIn, and is only as current as each person’s profile.

Looking for new opportunities? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.

Here’s this week’s full list:

Digital Chocolate

• Pranab Das, Game Artist — Now at Digital Chocolate, Das was previously a senior graphics artist for games at Jump Games.

Gaia Interactive

• Amie Pantle, Sprite Artist — Gaia Interactive shows activity this week, bringing on Pantle. Pantle was previously a freelance illustrator for Invitation Solutions and is also currently a graphic designer and 2D clean-up artist for Retna Media and Reverge Labs.

iWin

• Fadila Kochkar, Senior UI Designer — iWin fills us in on the hiring of Kochkar, a former freelance artists.
• Jessica Rapue, Customer Supoort Representative — Also joining iWin is Rapue, a former part of member services at Zipcar.
• Jerry Mahoney, Freelance Writer — Mahoney was previously a student at the University of Southern California.

Kabam

• Allen Williams, Senior Concept Artist — Kabam makes a single hire this week with Williams who was previously a concept artist for Guillermo Del Toro.

KlickNation

• Andrew Breese, Assistant Producer-Marketing — Starting off a long list of new hires for KlickNation is Breese. He was formerly a behavior therapist and respite care provider.
• Dan Zerzan, Software Engineer — Also joining KlickNation is Zerzan. Zerzan was most recently a development software engineer for Vertical Communications.
• Jamie Greeson, Director of HR –  Jamie Greeson joins KlickNation as its new director of human resources. She was previously the interim HR manager at Rezolve Group.
• Ryan Thomas, Community Manager — Thomas was formerly a senior quality engineer for Digital Video Group.
• Jason Wigle, Assistant Game Designer — In an internal shift, Wigle moves from his prior role as a community manager.
• Ranelle Moore, 2D Art Apprentice — Moore graduated to this position from an internship at KlickNation.
• Meagan Sevier, Manager – Revenue & Content — Sevier was previously a marketing assistant for BlackDog Education.
• James Walker, Assistant Content Specialist — Previously, Walker was a former processor at MedeAnalytics.
• David Andrew Ottman, Assistant Content Specialist — Ottman also graduates to his role from a QA internship at KlickNation.

Playdom

• Matthew John, Software Engineer — Playdom makes a single hire this week, bringing on John. He was most recently an intern for the advanced technology group at NetApp.

Playfish

• Alice Yang, Client-Side Developer Intern — Joining Playfish this week, Yang was previously a student at the University of Pennsylvania.
• Staffan Måhlen, Developer — Also joining Playfish, Måhlen was formerly a developer and team leader at Jadestone Group.

Socialvibe

• Alanna Strauss, Account Manager/Account Strategy — Strauss was previously an assistant account executive at Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising.

Zynga

• Howard Wooten, QA Engineer Intern — Wooten was previously a student at Year Up.
• Mayumi Yoshida, Mobile QA Lead — Yoshida comes to Zynga following a stint as lead mobile QA engineer for Hitachi Solutions.
• Jonathan April, Game Designer Intern — April was previously a QA tester for n-Space.
• Bryan Waters, Senior Software Engineer — Waters was most recently a lead software engineer for GoTV Networks.
• Sabah Azam, Customer Service Lead — Azam was a student at the University of California.
• Daniel Feldstein, Senior Employment Counsel — Feldstein comes to Zynga after serving as senior corporate counsel at Synopsys.
• Verity Davis, QA Analyst — Davis was previously a QA analyst at Namco Bandai Games America.
• Bob Scarduzio, Associate Producer — Scarduzio was a financial services representative at First Investors Corporation.
• Luke Lanford, Product Manager — Lanford was previously a senior associate at Innosight.
• Mark Turmell, Senior Creative Director — Turmell was formerly a senior creative director at Electronic Arts.
• Cynthia Saw, Public Relations Coordinator — Saw was most recently an account executive at The OutCast Agency.

Developer 50 Cubes follows up its successful Mall World title on Facebook with Fashion Designer, a couture clothing-creating game aimed at a young female audience. Rather than being a direct sequel, this spin-off app features cross-compatibility with the original game.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, Fashion Designer currently has 3,309,482 monthly active users and 421,165 daily active users.

Rather than a full-fledged game, Fashion Designer builds on the game mechanic of a Mall World mini-game where players create outfits, here focusing on high-end clothing. Players are asked to complete outfits that meet certain criteria — designing a dress without straps, for instance — and rewards them with experience points and other perks for doing so. Fashions are built from a set of basic pieces organized by tops and bottoms. The player can add to their selection by purchasing more parts from the game’s shop.

Once the garment is pieced together, players can change its color, patterns, fabric type and other appearance options in order to customize it. The array of different textiles and stencils can also be added to via the game’s shop. Players can further customize their fashions by altering the size, rotation and placement of various stencils on them.

After designing a piece of clothing, players place it on a fitting form and wait for it to be completed. This process can be rushed using in-game cash, and the player’s studio can be expanded to accommodate more than one form. Once the fashion is finished, players can then place it on a model, style her hair and accessories, add it to their portfolio, and put it up for display in the game’s built-in gallery, or in the player’s Mall World game.

When a player’s fashion is up on display, other Fashion Designer players can vote on it and even purchase it for their own games. On the same token, players can vote on the fashions on display and purchase them. Players can also brag about various accomplishments via viral channels.

Fashion Designer is monetized through the sale of dress components, most of which can be purchased using the game’s soft currency earned by completing tasks. Some can only be bought with Facebook Credits, however. We feel the game offers a fair mix of items available for soft currency and Facebook Credits; however the game’s Wall does contain posts from players upset that more newer items being added by 50 Cubes are premium and only available for Facebook Credits.

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

Around the time of the deadline for mandatory migration to Facebook Credits, Facebook quietly added a new “Gamer Status” API that allows developers to identify which of their users monetize the best. Facebook automatically offers these users a 20% discount on Credits purchases, but developers who’ve been whitelisted can use the Gamer Status API to track those users internally or, potentially, offer them targeted experiences.

Prior to the mandatory migration of all Facebook Games to Facebook Credits as their sole payment method, several incentives were offered to encourage developers to switch early and use Credits as their premium in-game currency. These incentives can be accessed by developers whitelisted though Facebook’s Credits Special Incentives program.

Those with access can call $ret = $facebook->api_client->users_getStandardInfo($user_id, array('gamer_status')); to determine a user’s Gamer Status. Those tagged with a Gamer Status > 1 are users that monetize above average, including lucrative whales. The API respects user privacy by not sharing any details about their actual purchase history, just the fact that the make many purchases.

However, Facebook forbids developers from using the Gamer Status API to increase prices above their normal level for high monetizing users. Facebook also explicitly says, “You may not use gamer_status for any purpose other than internal and administrative purposes related to the operation of your game. For example, you may not use this information for marketing purposes.”

Developers could potentially target these high monetizing users with optimized offers or discounts on virtual goods. Because these users also receive discounts on buying Facebook Credits, they’re more likely to have a balance to spend. Developers can test to see whether offering discounts to these users leads to enough sales to offset the reduced prices. If so, Gamer Status can be used to increase revenues.

Gamer Status could also be used to drive retention. If paired with reengagement messages such as emails, developers may be able to lure previous users to start playing their game again with a signficant discount. Once these gamers have begun investing time in a game again, developers can return prices for them to normal. However, it’s currently unclear whether Facebook would allow these types of tactics given their policy statements above.

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

• 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

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

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

• Senior Backend Software Engineer
• Backend Software Engineer

• 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

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

• Account 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.

Ubisoft’s The Smurfs & Co. top this week’s list of fastest-growing games by daily active users with Bubble Island and Empires & Allies rounding out the top three.

Farther down the list is Premier League Fantasy Football, a soccer management game from Citizen Sports via Yahoo! With the start of England’s Premier League season just five days away, we’re not surprised to see this game gaining ground in DAU and in monthly active users. It could explain some of the surge EA Playfish’s FIFA Superstars is seeing, but FIFA may also be enjoying pre-release hype for EA Sports’ annual installment of the FIFA series on consoles due out in September.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	The Smurfs & Co	901,193	+656,705	+269%
2.	Bubble Island	1,958,952	+228,008	+13%
3.	Empires & Allies	7,672,338	+214,506	+3%
4.	FarmVille	8,689,298	+148,406	+2%
5.	Monster Galaxy	708,803	+137,180	+24%
6.	The Pokerist club — Texas Poker	245,564	+130,693	+114%
7.	Diamond Dash	1,801,407	+94,855	+6%
8.	Texas HoldEm Poker	7,168,850	+82,403	+1%
9.	Gardens of Time	4,039,850	+70,043	+2%
10.	Mahjong Saga	429,515	+68,413	+19%
11.	แฮปปี้คนเลี้ยงหม	1,046,095	+65,154	+7%
12.	Edgeworld	87,934	+65,063	+284%
13.	Slotomania – Slot Machines	1,120,482	+64,245	+6%
14.	Tetris Battle	1,154,692	+64,036	+6%
15.	Games	1,796,936	+54,281	+3%
16.	PyramidVille	454,066	+51,829	+13%
17.	Premier League Fantasy Football	92,050	+47,949	+109%
18.	Mynet Çanak Okey	636,764	+38,112	+6%
19.	BINGO Blitz	411,824	+37,130	+10%
20.	EA SPORTS FIFA Superstars: Real football & soccer!	506,246	+36,779	+8%

At No.12 this week is Kabam’s Edgeworld, a space-themed real time strategy game. Though the game hasn’t “officially” launched, the beta has received a series of updates and contests in the last week that suggests Kabam is close to release. A couple of weeks ago, developer Kixeye claimed that Edgeworld was a clone of Kixeye’s title, Backyard Monsters. Kabam responded that it draws inspiration from everywhere for its games and that it was flattered at the attention. Stick around for a closer look at Edgeworld when the game is in a more “final” state.

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