Based on the well-know television game show of the same name, 1 vs 100 from iWin debuted on Facebook July 13 of this year. The developer has made a name for itself with Facebook games based on TV game shows like Family Feud.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, 1 vs 100 currently has 719,328 monthly active users and 96,542 daily active users.

In 1 vs 100, players are pitted against 100 members of the “Mob” (“mass of bodies”) comprised of their Facebook friends (along with some placeholders, if they don’t have enough) in a trivia challenge. The player and Mob are asked a question and, should the player answer it correctly within 10 seconds, they win a certain dollar amount for every member of the Mob that answered incorrectly. This amount is determined before the question is asked and increases with each subsequent question. The questions themselves span a variety of topics and current events, from politics to entertainment. They start out extremely easy and can get quite difficult. If the player manages to defeat the Mob by reducing its head count of zero, they win. If the player misses an answer, the game ends in defeat.

Along the way, players can spend points on utilizing one of three special options to avoid sticky situations. These include: eliminating one of the wrong answers by using “Ask the Mob,” seeing how many Mob members picked a certain answer with “Poll the Mob” and choosing to go with the Mob’s most-selected answer with “Trust the Mob.” At certain intervals, players are given the choice to walk away with their current winnings or continue playing against the remaining members of the Mob. Experience points accrue while playing and unlock new player levels, which in turn rewards the player with bonus episodes — one is required to play a game — and cash.

Social features of 1 vs 100 include inviting friends to join groups of players (personal Mobs), which will reward the player with bonuses, and challenging friends to “Right My Wrong” bonus rounds should the player loose. If both the player and their friend answer the question correctly in this optional activity, they split the player’s lost winnings. The game also includes a leaderboard where the player can see their standing during the week and for all time.

1 vs 100 is monetized through the use of Facebook Credits to purchase additional plays (episodes) should the player run out and Facebook Credits can also be spent on acquiring more of the three types of hints previously mentioned.

iWin has been quite active on the game’s Wall, posting frequent questions in the style of the game’s using the Poll function. The developers also seem quick to respond to players’ reports of issues on the game’s Discussion Boards. In the near future, iWin intends to roll out an unspecified number of gameplay additions, including power-ups that will “introduce more strategy and competition.”

You can follow 1 vs 100’s progress using AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

EA Playfish announced today an ad network partnership with Nanigans just ahead of launching The Sims Social, a Facebook installment of EA’s 10-year-old Sims franchise. Nanigans also announced a $3 million first round of funding led by Avalon Ventures.

The Nanigans partnership grants EA Playfish first dibs on new features in the former’s ad engine platform. The social game developer has already put the ad engine to use in Madden NFL Superstars, Monopoly Millionaires, and Restaurant City. Nanigans’ ad engine uses the Facebook’s Ads API to conduct real-time bidding that optimizes developer ad spend for acquisition of users that make purchases or have sustained engagement.

Yesterday, we explored how targeted ad spend can help social game developers reduce overall cost-per-installs, which leads to a better-performing social game. Nanigans is one of several services that help developers purchase Facebook application installs, like AdParlor, Alchemy, Spruce Media, or Brighter Option. By securing funding from Avalon, Nanigans ads Rich Levandov, one of the first investors in Zynga, to its board.

The Sims Social, a collaboration between EA Playfish and EA internal developer The Sims Studio, officially launches “soon” on Facebook, although players can click Go To App as of today. Even before a closed beta launched in late July, the game’s page routinely made our weekly rankings lists of fastest-growing social games by monthly active and daily active users. According to our AppData traffic tracking service, the game currently has 1 million MAU and over 68,000 DAU. Read our exclusive hands-on experience with The Sims Social for more details.

UPDATE: Nanigans updated the original press release to remove mention of The Sims Studio as part of its EA Playfish partnership.

UPDATE 2: A Playfish spokesperson tells ISG that the partnership with Nanigans is not now, nor will it ever be exclusive. The erroneous information contained in the corrected press release has been removed from this story.

Divinitiz: The Offerings Rush is a fast-paced puzzle game and the first title from French developer Mandala Games. It originally entered testing back in February of 2011 and officially launched on July 29.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, Divinitiz: The Offerings Rush currently has 191,968 monthly active users and 19,379 daily active users.

The central gameplay mechanic of Divinitiz revolves around making offering to various mythological gods. It’s a time-based matching game, during which tiny characters called Sherpaz carry a variety of offering icons up a winding mountain road to the gods. Each of the three gods are accompanied by the icon of the offering they desire. The player must pick out the corresponding offering (weapons, plants, food, treasure and other items) from the icons coming up the hill. The game is scored based on how many item matches can be made during the 60-second time limit.

Players can increase their score in a couple of ways. The first is by entering “Fury Mode,” which is accomplished by satisfying the demands of the gods as quickly as possible — players can match three items in fast succession, causing the screen to turn dark and the god icons to change, indicating that the mode is active. During Fury Mode, players attempt to match as many of the item each god is demanding without missing a beat. If they’re successful, the point multiplier for each god increases; if they slow down or miss an item, the game returns to its normal state.

The other method for boosting the player’s score is though magic crystals. As players match items, a gauge at the bottom of the screen fills. Once it’s completely full, magic crystals appear in the stream of offerings being moved up the mountain. Clicking on one temporarily fulfills all three gods’ demands. At the end of each game, players are rewarded with experience points that increase their player level, which in turn serves as a gradually increasing score multiplier.

In order to play the game, players must use up one of five hearts they’re given at its outset. Should they deplete this stockpile, they can ask their friends to play the game and gift them one. Otherwise, they refill over time. Getting friends to play the game also serves to extend the maximum number of hearts a player can have. Other social elements include bragging about high scores and gaining new levels on the player’s Wall, plus a scoreboard that appears at the end of every game, displaying the player’s best score compared to their friends’. There is also a weekly tournament that players can compete in.

Divinitiz is monetized through the purchase of hearts. Should the player run out of them and wish to continue before they eventually recharge — or don’t want to ask friends for them — they can buy more using Facebook Credits. They are offered in units of 15, 30, 60 and 125.

You can follow Divinitiz: The Offerings Rush’s progress using AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

The Facebook games ecosystem has evolved to the point where most social game developers put effort into planning the end of a game’s life cycle instead of just its beginning. Facebook’s Sean Ryan shares some insight with ISG on what developers are doing when a game reaches the end of the line.

“We’re hitting a phase right now where games are two, three, and four years old,” Ryan tells ISG. “So we’re seeing different philosophies on what you do. A full sequel that is a different game? An expansion pack like we’ve seen with Zynga and Pioneer Trail, or Army Attack with the Desert Area? Or just let it go and watch it decline?”

When to Let Go

Even with games consistently releasing new content and monthly updates, we’ve seen several long-running games reach the point of sunset in the last four months after 2+ years on the Facebook platform. This point comes when the game drops below a financial performance point or when the developer hits an opportunity cost of resources spent maintaining the game that could instead be spent on developing a new game. The financial performance point varies by developer, but the most common “evaluation equation” we’ve heard from developers is LTV > CPI. That is, when a game’s lifetime value of users is greater than the cost per install of a user, the game is healthy. If its performance drops to a point where LTV < CPI, the game is dying.

This was the case for several games developed by ZipZapPlay prior to its PopCap acquisition. Curt Bererton, former CEO of ZipZapPlay and now General Manager under PopCap, walked an audience through the equation during a session at Casual Connect in Seattle last month. In his talk, titled “Finding the Minimum Viable Game and When to Kill Your Baby,” he explained how the developer checked the LTV > CPI equation on the first day of launch, the seventh day post-launch, and then a final time a month after the game’s launch. In general, he says, if LTV > CPI after 30 days, you’re doing it right.

The point at which the equation seems to change dramatically for most developers is after the three- and four-month mark, where we see social games lose a lot of their early traffic. At this point, says Ryan, the game’s LTV is usually very high because only the dedicated paying users remain in the game while non-paying users have left. Depending on how a developer manages the CPI, the game will either thrive on its loyal users, or gradually decline over a period that ranges from six months to a year.

Case Study: ZipZapPlay’s Happy Habitat

The graph above shows the entire traffic life cycle of Happy Habitat as recorded by our traffic tracking service, AppData. At its peak in March 2010, the game had an all-time high of 501,918 monthly active users and 79,921 daily active users. At the point of the PopCap acquisition in April 2011, Happy Habitat got a slight lift in MAU and DAU as the new owner announced plans to sunset the title. The game officially ended June 30, 2011 at the age of 2.5 years.

When to Hang On

A game might have a LTV < CPI situation on its hands when retention drops below 10% and average revenue per daily active user is already low (say, less than 1 cent). That doesn’t always result in sunsetting, however, as we’ve seen developers turn a game around by simply changing the gameplay or adding new content.

When a game introduces a new expansion, two things happen: MAU and DAU spike as new users come into the game, and retention (DAU as a percentage of MAU) falls. This creates a second curve in the game’s overall life cycle similar to its first three months on the market. Like those first six months, the non-paying users will drop out and the dedicated paying users will stay — and hopefully there will be more of those dedicated users than prior to the expansion.

Case Study: RockYou Playdemic’s Gourmet Ranch

At the beginning of 2011, publisher RockYou acquired Gourmet Ranch developer Playdemic. Not too long afterward, the developer released an expansion pack that added a new game mechanic — fishing — the core gameplay experience. As we can see from an AppData chart covering the last eight months, MAU and DAU rose while retention mostly fell during the April and May months when the expansion launched. Throughout June, MAU and DAU fell while retention rose and after three months — in July — the game’s overall retention came out almost 5% higher than the pre-expansion figure. *Note that we see retention falling in the last 30 days on account of RockYou pushing its new ad platform in Gourmet Ranch; this is creating a new influx of MAU and DAU.

What Developers Can Do: Keep it Awesome, Reduce CPI

Social games on Facebook are only just now finding ways to prolong the gameplay experience through expansions and sequels. Early examples of sequels like Playdom’s Mobsters 2 didn’t perform very well, as users seemed reluctant to migrate from an old app to a new one. As RockYou’s Zoo World 2 proves week after week in our rankings, however, developers can get around this complication by running the sequel in the same app ID as the original. Other games, like 6 Waves Lolapps’ Ravenwood Fair, are hoping to find success through franchise extension in new games rather than with direct sequels. Zynga, meanwhile, continues to explore expansions like the upcoming Pioneer Trail add-on for the 14-month-old FrontierVille.

Aside from introducing new content, developers can also change the evaluation equation by reducing overall CPI. This comes from targeting user acquisition toward only the users they want to have in their game. It may seem like an obvious conclusion that you should only spend money on the users most likely to spend money on you; but we still see some games going after a large, general audiences in their first two months on the market. While this “race to critical mass” approach seems to be working for some games like Disney Playdom’s Gardens of Time, most mid-market and small developers struggle to reach this point unless they go through a publisher with a preexisting critical mass.

What Facebook Can Do: Make it Easier to Acquire Users

Facebook scaled back viral channels available to social games last year in an attempt to clamp down on a spam problem. Some of this virality is beginning to return on the platform, now that Facebook feels it has spam under control. Beyond that, though, the platform is working to improve social discovery for games and introduce a better new-user experience. All of this will help developers connect with the kind of users that can support high LTV.

“We focus on greater ability to find the right types of users for a lower cost for your game,” Ryan says. “It’s not just a sunsetting issue — sunsetting in creative fields is life. You move on. [Facebook] focuses on better ways for you to expand, for you to go viral, for you to acquire customers. That should help, whether it’s sunsetting or expansion.”

Ubisoft leads this week’s list of fastest-growing games by monthly active users with the newly-launched The Smufts & Co., a city-building game based on the 1980s cartoon franchise. Not far behind are Zoo World 2 and Gourmet Ranch from RockYou.

The rest of our list this week is a mix of old and new titles covering everything from old hat restaurant sims to TV tie-in social games. To that last point, we’ll be keeping an eye on Jersey Shore this month as MTV is now airing the show’s fourth season.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	The Smurfs & Co	1,568,701	+1,489,818	+1,889%
2.	Zoo World	7,652,670	+1,008,972	+15%
3.	Gourmet Ranch	3,432,654	+491,952	+17%
4.	Megacity	1,124,147	+417,823	+59%
5.	Texas HoldEm Poker	34,467,096	+377,642	+1%
6.	Mahjong Saga	2,927,567	+366,070	+14%
7.	Gardens of Time	16,353,436	+353,861	+2%
8.	Premier League Fantasy Football	400,999	+332,411	+485%
9.	Collapse! Blast	952,793	+305,757	+47%
10.	Social Empires	3,419,228	+291,850	+9%
11.	ESPN Sports Bar & Grill	471,729	+246,143	+109%
12.	The Pokerist club — Texas Poker	1,549,945	+214,909	+16%
13.	Tetris Battle	4,721,028	+208,125	+5%
14.	Shadow Fight	2,004,979	+197,914	+11%
15.	Slotomania – Slot Machines	4,436,277	+189,338	+4%
16.	Miscrits: World of Adventure	1,783,471	+184,070	+12%
17.	Barn Buddy	1,932,206	+176,530	+10%
18.	Battle Pirates	1,476,293	+170,795	+13%
19.	S.O.S	358,527	+163,616	+84%
20.	Jersey Shore	1,411,625	+160,202	+13%

Don’t be confused by the presence of two Smurf game apps on Facebook. The Smurfs’ Village is a promotion for Capcom’s mobile city-building game that redirects off Facebook to a site where customers can download it for iOS devices. The Smurfs & Co. is an actual Facebook game built and run by Ubisoft, which owns the rights to develop the game on Facebook and potentially for social networks as well. Stick around for a full review of The Smufs & Co. later this week.

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.

Facebook has had a de facto monopoly on social platforms over the last couple of years, and until the launch of Google+ the main other options for developers have been mobile — and those require a distinct set of product and marketing skills.

So you’d expect social developers, especially companies wanting to diversify beyond Facebook on the web, to be pretty interested in what happens with G+. Even so, we’ve been surprised by the optimism among companies we’re talking to, and they’re not just having wishful thoughts. The specific reasons: Google+ is a respectable product, it’s grown quickly, there are clear social communication channels like Streams where developers could promote discovery and engagement, and the transaction fee is likely to be quite low.

Here’s a look at where G+ is so far, followed by details about what a platform launch might mean.

Good Product and Solid Early Traffic Growth — What’s Next?

The initial set of features in G+ accomplished what at least a noticeable subset of internet users have been wanting — Facebook features without the Facebook part. Between the Stream, Circles, the integration with other Google products, and complementary launches like Hangouts, users can experience many of the positive social interactions and information-sharing dynamics that Facebook has defined. The initial result has been impressive traffic growth, with G+ reaching 25 million, according to comScore — and as every would-be platform company knows, the first step to attracting developers is having users to connect them to.

It’s clear that users who love Google and/or hate Facebook are on it in force. And that audience, in and of itself, ensures some sort of longevity for the service. The big unanswered question is how quickly Google+ is going to be adopted by mainstream users, especially considering that the majority of the US and many other countries are already on Facebook. Already, some third-party measurement firms are showing traffic slowdowns (although that data is qualified by the fact that Google has not yet fully opened registration to all users).

Still, the results so far are much better than its past efforts. Its OpenSocial platform standard was widely adopted by other Facebook rivals, but didn’t manage to create big alternative platforms. Buzz, an earlier social product meant to take on Facebook, had a variety of privacy issues and never fully got off the ground.

Going forward, Google is pushing big marketing campaigns and developing tighter integrations with its other products — one can imagine a version of G+ being quite useful for companies using Google Apps, who want a Yammer-style interface for sharing and discussing changes to Google Docs, emails, calendars, etc. All of those efforts should drive many more users.

But what will keep people coming back and socializing? Google still can’t duplicate anything like what Facebook did — launching quietly to closed groups of real-world young people, building on key viral features like Photos — that feature got college students to share their party photos with each other (and tag each other) back in 2006, and that type of voyeurism has been a key ingredient in Facebook’s growth, as evidenced by the massive ongoing popularity of its Photos product.

While Google has been integrating various other content properties, like its Picasa photo service, it doesn’t have the same set of compelling social features that Facebook has offered. And that’s where developers hope a social platform could come in, providing consistently entertaining activities for at least a portion of the user base.

What a G+ Developer Platform Might Look Like

Google has made a few official statements about a developer platform, but there’s plenty of evidence about what the company is up to.

It has been hiring product managers to do things like “Drive feature requirements for Google’’s gaming platform.”

It has a site up for developers interested in working on its platform to sign up for more information.

In an official guide to G+, a now-deleted line informed users that they could find game information in a dedicated “Games stream” that has not yet launched. This stream would presumably be similar to Facebook’s Games and Apps Requests bars on the left-hand column of its user home page, and serve the dual purpose of helping gamers play while keeping the inevitable social spam from polluting the Streams of everyone else.

Google+ source code includes some language about how Game invites might be phrased.

On top of product evidence, Google has also been busy hiring and acquiring gaming and platform talent. The biggest is Slide, a top social app developer on MySpace and Facebook in past years. After selling to Google for up to $228 million a year ago, some of its executives have taken on expanded roles building Google social products, while others are continuing to maintain games like SuperPoke Pets. Having seen all the pros and cons of platform live from a developer perspective, Slide’s team could help shape a platform that strikes the right balance for users and developers.

Other acquisitions include payments service provider Jambool, which more or less got forced off the Facebook platform when Facebook made Credits the exclusive paid currency, and is now helping to lead Google’s new in-app web payments product. Pricing, in contrast to Credits’ 30%, is apparently just 5% of the transaction revenue.

And, Google has also been investing in social gaming companies. At some point it put a significant amount of money into Zynga, although it didn’t confirm reports on the matter until it listed Google as one of its investors in its S-1 filing (which it was legally obligated to do). Earlier this year, it also led a big new round in hardcore social game developer Kabam. Now, both investments could be purely about making money on any platform, but an obvious line of thinking is that these two companies might be launch partners when the platform goes live.

Conclusion: Can Games Make G+ Entertaining?

Developers have regularly gotten hopeful about social platform alternatives to Facebook, but so far the main platform alternatives to emerge have been the not-very-social iOS and Android mobile platforms.

The early growth of G+, the long-term means that Google has to make it keep growing, and in particular the social and low-fee environment, look far more promising than anything else that social developers have seen in years. Some developers have told us that Facebook has been feeling the same way, and has gotten noticeably more responsive to developer issues in recent weeks (although to be fair, Facebook has been trying to improve developer relations since last year).

Expect Google to work hard to woo developers, and expect developers to experiment with G+ more intensely than they have been elsewhere.

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 1st, 2011

• Emerging Paid iOS Apps: iPad Charts Show Greater Activity Further Down
• Even as Android Eclipses iOS in U.S. Mobile Subscribers, It Still Lags in Facebook Mobile’s Footprint
• Zynga Brings Words With Friends to Facebook With iOS Cross-Platform Play
• DeNA’s Net Income Climbs 45% in First Quarter to $121.3M
• Glu Mobile Gets a Foothold in Chinese Market Through Partnership With Hong Kong’s TOM Group

Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011

• New Free-to-Download Platformer, Cordy, Comes to iOS from Android
• Emerging Top-Grossing iOS Apps: Older Titles Get a Boost From New Quests, Social Features
• Glu Mobile Acquires Griptonite, Blammo Games for Stock, Earnouts Worth More Than $50M
• Glu Mobile’s Net Loss Narrows as Smartphone Revenues Rise by 58% in Challenging Second Quarter

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011

• Emerging Top Free Apps on iOS: Skype, Mahjong, & AOL Grow on iPad
• New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: Glu Mobile, Kabam, EA, Tagged and More
• Flurry Adds Age, Gender Demographics in Revamp of Analytics Product
• Storm8 May Veer Down the Funding Route, But A $1 Billion Valuation Would Be Pricey

Thursday, August 4th, 2011

• The Marbians Touch Down on iOS
• Diversifying Beyond Games, Tapjoy Boasts of Driving 10M Conversions for Brands in July
• Glu Mobile Restructures With Departures For Several Marketing, Creative Executives
• Facebook Promotes Mobile Network Operator Partners on the Login Screen
• Electronic Arts Moves Moore Up to COO; Cottle to Oversee Mobile, Social Gaming
• Capcom’s Mobile and Social Gaming Business Brings in $15.5 Million in First Quarter

Friday, August 5th, 2011

• New Hires in Mobile: Big Fish Games, Gameloft, Glu Mobile, & More
• Konami Goes with Disturbingly Cute Concepts in Gesundheit! On iOS
• Q&A: Glu Mobile CEO De Masi on Acquisitions, Third-Quarter Forecast

Inside Social Games

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

Monday, August 1st, 2011

• Zoo World 2, Mahjong Saga, Forest Adventure Top This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Games by MAU
• Zynga Brings Words With Friends to Facebook With iOS Cross-Platform Play
• A Closer Look at King’s Bounty for Facebook, by Russia’s Nival
• 6waves Lolapps Raises $35 Million Post-Merger
• The Top 25 Facebook Games for August 2011

Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011

• Collapse! Blast for Facebook Is A Chip Off An Old Block
• Monster Fusion Brings a Twist to the Facebook Collection Genre
• Social/Mobile Game Developer Service Provider Nextive Acquired by Globant
• Texas HoldEm Poker, 開心水族箱, Ninja Saga Top This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Games by DAU

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011

• New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: FunCom, Tagged, Pocket Gems, EA and More
• Megaband Gets Players to Tune in, Hits the Charts
• Kixeye Raises $18M Third Round, Brings Zynga Co-Founder Trader to Board

Thursday, August 4th, 2011

• 6waves Lolapps Confirms Funding From Nexon, Insight Venture Partners
• Visa’s PlaySpan Finds Life After Facebook Credits Profitable, Educational for Social Game Developers
• New Hires in Social Gaming: 6waves LOLapps, Breaktime Studios, Gamzee, & More
• Updating Discovery for Social Games on Facebook With Algorithms, Better New User Experience
• Electronic Arts Moves EA Sports’ Moore Up to COO, Cottle to Oversee Mobile, Social Gaming
• The Island: Castaway on Facebook Makes Life a Beach

Friday, August 5th, 2011

• 森の物語, Megacity, Collapse! Blast Top This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Games
• An Early Look at Words With Friends for Facebook
• The Sims Social Steps Up EA’s IP Presence on Facebook
• Social Gaming Roundup: Patent Lawsuits, Virtual Goods, Game Updates, & More

Inside Facebook

Tracking Facebook and the Facebook platform for developers and marketers.

Monday, August 1st, 2011

• Page Apps, Dating, Mobile, Calendars, Photos, Badges, Video and More on This Week’s Top 20 Facebook Apps by MAU
• Facebook, Vodafone, Alcatel Lucent Developer $100 Facebook Phone
• Featured Facebook Campaigns: Alamo Rent A Car, National Geographic Channel and Fox
• Roost Local Scorecard Helps Businesses See If Their Facebook Fans Live Nearby
• Even as Android Eclipses iOS in U.S. Mobile Subscribers, It Still Lags in Facebook Mobile’s Footprint
• Facebook Officially Launches Ads API, Opening Efficient Ad Management Tool Development
• The Top 25 Facebook Games for August 2011

Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011

• New Facebook Platform Industry Hires: Claritics, Sharethrough, BranchOut, TBG Digital, Wildfire and More
• Amy Winehouse, “Captain America,” Food Network, Walmart and More on This Week’s Top 20 Growing Facebook Pages
• Facebook Allows Duplicate Pages to Be Merged Into Official Pages
• Facebook Buys Digital Book Creator Push Pop Press for “the Ideas and Technology”
• Page Management Industry Interest in Ecommerce Grows as Vitrue Partners with Milyoni

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011

• PageLever Launches Deep Analytics Tool for Facebook Pages
• Katango’s Web App Auto-Creates Friend Lists and Exports Them to Facebook
• Spotify, Photos, Calendars, Horoscopes, Profile Banners and More on This Week’s List of Top 20 Growing Facebook Apps by DAU
• New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: King.com, FunCom, Tagged, EA and More
• The Facebook Marketing Bible August 2011 Edition Is Now Available
• How to Use Facebook’s “Merge Duplicate Pages” Feature to Gain Fans

Thursday, August 4th, 2011

• Facebook Careers Postings: Data Centers, Security, Measurement, Engineering and More
• Facebook Hires and Departures: Zuckerberg, Deals, Data Centers, Sales, Interns and More
• Platform Update: Social Plugin Performance, App and Website Insights, Notifications, Requests
• Facebook Promotes Mobile Network Operator Partners on the Login Screen

Friday, August 5th, 2011

• Profile Banners, Calendars, Dropbox, Quizzes, Photos and More on This Week’s Top 20 Emerging Facebook Apps by MAU
• Facebook’s “Locations” App Lets Corporate Pages Display a Store Finder and Links to Their Local Branch Pages
• Quixey’s Keyword-Based Facebook App Search Engine Could Become a Powerful Discovery Tool
• Facebook Roundup: London, Pages, School, Spam, Foursquare, Zuckerberg 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 Pocket Gems, Funcom Oslo AS, Tagged, LeadBolt, King.com, Dynamic Signal, Glu Mobile, Kabam and Electronic Arts.

• Associate Producer / Product Manager
• Game Designer

• Senior Communications Manager
• TEAM LEAD -€“ SOCIAL GAMES BUSINESS ENGINE
• SENIOR DATABASE AND BACKEND PROGRAMMER/ARCHITECT -€“ SOCIAL NETWORK GAMES

• Software Engineer – Games
• Game Business Analyst
• Product Manager – Monetization
• Creative Director – Social Games
• Game Designer
• Art Director – Social Games

• Publisher Sales Manager-Digital
• Advertising Sales Director-Digital

• Business Analyst
• Senior Business Development Director – US – King.com
• Business Development Director – Central Europe – King.com
• Advertising Account Manager – King.com
• Business Intelligence Developer

• Front-End Engineer
• Product Management

• Design Director

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

• LEAD PRODUCT MANAGER, MOBILE
• Product Manager (Playfish)

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.

Segan Files Patent Lawsuit Against Zynga — Another patent lawsuit appears this week as Segan LLC, files a suit against Zynga over a “System for Viewing Content Over A Network and Method Thenrfor.” As noted by TechCrunch, the complaint centers around the association of a user to a character icon as well as how to manage character updates.

It Girl to Expand to Russia — CrowdStar is expanding its popular social title It Girl to Russia. Partnering with Russian distributor 101XP, It Girl will go live on Odnoklassniki.ru, Vkontakte.ru, and Mail.ru in the next two months. The game is also currently available on Odnoklassniki.

Exit Games to Power King’s Bounty: Legions — Earlier this week, we previewed the upcoming title, of King’s Bounty: Legions for Facebook. Only a few days later, Exit Games announced that its network engine, Photon, has been selected to power the network features of the coming game.

RockYou Makes Aktiv APAC Sales Partner – Asia Media Journal reports that social game developer and publisher RockYou has made online media sales house Aktiv an APAC sales partner. The move gives RockYou’s new ad platform distribution in the Asian market.

AT&T & ngmoco Bring Mobage to Android — Last week, ngmoco and DeNA brought the Mobage social gaming platform to Android Market. This week, AT&T and ngmoco announced a new agreement stating that Mobage will act as a hub for AT&T Android users to discover and play games as well as connect with other global users.

Blizzard to Use Real Currency for Virtual Goods Transactions — Blizzard Entertainment announced earlier this week that its upcoming Diablo III online game will allow the sale of virtual items via both in-game and real world currencies. For real money trades, Blizzard will take a small transaction fee.

[Announcement] MyTown Expands to Japan — Earlier this week, social and mobile apps developer Booyah and YUMEMI announced a partnership that will bring the location-based iOS title of MyTown to Japan as a new product for iOS, Android, and other feature phone platforms this Fall.

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[Announcement] iWin & Sony Pictures to Bring The $100,000 Pyramid to Facebook — Family Feud developer iWin announced a new licensing deal with Sony Pictures Entertainment that will bring TV game show The $100,000 Pyramid to Facebook later this summer.

The Sims Social is is a life simulation game based on one of EA’s oldest and most successful PC game franchises that runs on Facebook as an app. Built in collaboration between EA’s Sims Studio and Playfish, the game is currently in closed beta and planned for a summer 2011 release.

The game allows players to create and control a single Sim (read: avatar) living in a house that the player can decorate. True to the Sims’ roots, the primary gameplay objective is to keep the Sim happy by satisfying a set of basic needs such hygiene, fun, socialization, sleep, hunger, or bladder capacity. The Sims also have a base personality type (e.g. Creative, Romantic, etc.) that the player can choose to guide the Sim toward over the course of gameplay. Players meet these needs of a Sim by having the Sim interact with various objects that can be bought for the house or by having them interact with other Sims through dialogue trees.

For those not familiar with Sims franchise, the appeal of the series comes from the sense that the Sims have minds of their own, despite the player’s best attempts to manipulate them. Clicking on a Sim and selecting “Flirt,” for example, will not always produce a positive reaction. The exact reaction produced is determined by personality traits preselected by the player during the Sim creation phase, the level of preexisting interaction between the two Sims before “Flirt” was selected, and a “random” variable common to all Sim interactions that may produce completely unexpected results.

The idea of having the Sims on Facebook presents some challenges, both to fans of the series and to Facebook social gamers. For one thing, the Sims hasn’t had a positive track record with gameplay that relies on a social graph as demonstrated by the failed Sims MMO, The Sims Online. For another, Facebook social gamers are used to slightly more static game environments where actions are, for the most part, predictable and largely asynchronous. Though The Sims Social is still in closed beta, it appears as though EA’s two internal studios have found a healthy balance between satisfying Sims fan expectations — right down to the Sims 3 sound effects — and Facebook social gamers’ needs around asynchronous gameplay.

In the Sims Social, most of the gameplay common to all three core Sims games in the PC franchise can be found — such as clicking on toilets to prevent the Sim from wetting him or herself, completing a set of interactions to fulfill what amounts to a quest, and interacting with other Sims to make friends or enemies. What makes The Sims Social unique to the Sims series are the addition of traditional Facebook game elements like an energy gauge that depletes by action and replenishes over time, a farming element where the Sims can grow produce in their garden, or multiplayer where friends can visit each other’s Sims and see what their houses look like. Also, players earn virtual currency for certain interactions like improving a skill or interacting with another Sim.

Progression is an abstract concept in the Sims franchise. In the original game, the Sims had skills that could be leveled up individually through repeating actions (e.g. playing piano to increase the Creativity skill). In newer versions, the Sims gain Lifetime Happiness points to spend on special items and the Sims themselves eventually grow old and die. The Sims Social, however, measures individual Sim progress with an experience point system aligned with levels. The higher the level, the more items the Sim can unlock to purchase and the more interactions the Sim can have with items (e.g. practicing arpeggios on the guitar as opposed to practicing scales). An additional “score” element comes from total home value (which increases with each item you buy), from Relationship progress bars unique to the individual Sims the player interacts with, and from Social Points earned through interacting with other Sims that can be spent on certain virtual items like a hot tub.

Despite the entire game being about socialization between Sims, the actual social elements in The Sims Social come from standard gifting of virtual items, visiting friends’ in-game houses, recruiting friends to complete construction of new rooms and new objects, and from interaction between the player’s Sim and their friends’ Sims governed by a permissions system. The permissions system is a experiment in multiplayer new to the Sims series.

As previously mentioned by EA during The Sims Social’s early development period, the developer wanted all interactions between players to be consensual. That is, a players whose Sims frequently interact with each other need to agree on how the relationship between the two virtual persons interact. Our Sim could visit a friend’s Sim and engage in “Flirt” interactions to move the Relationship bar up to the point of becoming a Romantic Interest — but the relationship won’t graduate to that next level until the player of the Sim being flirted with agrees to a in-game Request. These Requests expire after three days, and as an aside, Romantic relationships can evolve to the point of “WooHoo” (sex), but do not produce Sim children.

Though the game is still in closed beta, the monetization methods for The Sims Social are clear: players are able to skip quests or complete building requirements by spending a premium currency called SimCash, which can be bought with Facebook Credits. SimCash can also be spent on premium decoration items and energy refills, although it is possible to earn certain premium decorations with Social Points and craft energy refills by collecting items earned through interactions (e.g. earning hearts from “Flirting”). Energy refills might prove a valuable revenue stream, as currently all social and currency-earning interactions in The Sims Social cost one energy, while satisfying basic needs like going to the bathroom or sleeping are free.

The Sims Social appears to strike a balance between what the core Sims franchise is and what Facebook players expect, but we do anticipate some friction from Sims fans around the purchase of virtual goods. Though this concept is already used in the Sims 3 with an online marketplace for items and decorations, that game does not rely on the purchase of virtual goods as a means to drive gameplay progression the way The Sims Social does. Depending on how well the developer leverages Social Points toward the purchase of virtual goods (creating the sense that players don’t have to spend real money to achieve “high scores”), this friction could be easily reduced to a non-issue.

The Sims Social is currently planned for a summer 2011 release following the end of a closed beta. EA Playfish is also currently working on Risk: Faction, which may impact the release schedule for The Sims Social. Once the game is live, interested readers can follow the game’s progress on AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.