Words with Friends is a traditional word-forming board game from Zynga. It launched in beta last month after two years of availability on Apple’s iOS based devices and a shorter stint on Android devices.

As the game launched just today, it hasn’t yet been registered by our traffic-tracking service AppData. Facebook reports that the game currently enjoys 4,426,598 monthly active users.

A play-alike of Hasbro’s classic board game Scrabble, Words With Friends pits two players against one another in a contest to see who can rack up a higher score by creating words out of letter titles on a 15×15 game board. Players are given seven tiles at a time and must place two or more either horizontally or vertically, with all but the first word played required to utilize at least one of the existing letters on the board. Once played, the points assigned to each letter are added to the player’s score. Score multipliers exist in the form of special titles that, if used when forming a word, either multiply the point value of the letter placed on them or the entire word. Some letters, such as “Z” and “X” are worth more than others, and players will sometimes receive a blank letter tile that can be used as any letter they wish. The game ends when the 104 titles available at the outset are depleted.

Social features of Words With Friends on Facebook include the ability to invite friends to play games, and these opponents can be playing using Facebook, iOS or Android devices, making this a true cross-platform title. The game also sends reminders to friends that it’s their turn to play a word, and allows players to gloat on friends’ Walls when they’ve formed an especially valuable word. Like its mobile counterparts, the game has its own chat function, in addition to recommendations of friends to begin games with. Players can have multiple games running concurrently.

Zynga isn’t currently monetizing Words with Friends, and the game exists on mobile devices as either an ad-supported free version or paid version free of any in-app transactions. Since neither mobile version makes use of any power-ups or other such gimmicks, it seems unlikely the Facebook version would add them in order to become monetized in that fashion.

You can follow Words with Friends’ progress using AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

Collapse! Blast stays strong but 森の物語 (Forest Adventure) and Megacity slip past it to take the top two spots on this week’s list of emerging Facebook games, while Playdom’s ESPN Sports Bar & Grill restaurant sim misses the top three by about 78,000 users.

Farther down the list are a handful of newer games, like S.O.S., Premier Fantasy League Football, The Island: Castaway (which we recently reviewed), Divinitz and Rocket Bird. The Sims Social makes another appearance at No.15 this week, having almost broken the 1 million monthly active user mark needed to graduate from emerging games rankings. The game is currently still in closed beta.

ETA: Due to a miscategorization, iWin’s 1 vs. 100 was left off this list in error. It should appear at No.6 this week with 161,167 new monthly active users for a total of 636,676 MAU for 34% growth.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	森の物語	911,560	+317,699	+53%
2.	Megacity	962,131	+295,790	+44%
3.	Collapse! Blast	798,314	+280,792	+54%
4.	ESPN Sports Bar & Grill	353,847	+202,533	+134%
5.	S.O.S	291,926	+189,229	+184%
6.	Millionaire Boss	616,212	+158,348	+35%
7.	Premier League Fantasy Football	200,658	+147,658	+279%
8.	Galaksi Online II Türkçe: En İyi Bilim Kurgu Oyunu	369,227	+147,277	+66%
9.	The Island: Castaway	309,623	+146,665	+90%
10.	Divinitiz	144,829	+134,083	+1,248%
11.	RocketBird	336,744	+131,702	+64%
12.	Monster Fusion	343,012	+120,992	+54%
13.	Little Cave Hero	416,729	+116,876	+39%
14.	Fantasy Football 2011	263,730	+108,639	+70%
15.	Buraco by Gazeus	268,870	+89,909	+50%
16.	The Sims Social	998,037	+88,496	+10%
17.	Sanal Okey	475,332	+84,715	+22%
18.	Mynet Çanak 101 Okey	899,687	+66,419	+8%
19.	Megaband	161,717	+64,077	+66%
20.	SlotSpot – Best Free Slot Machines	226,058	+61,672	+38%

Rocket Bird could prove to be an interesting case study of physics-based mobile games ported to Facebook. Like its iOS original, players “tilt” a flying bird seen in the first person perspective to navigate him down a trail, past obstacles for an overall score. Though the Facebook version tracks cursor movement as a means to move the bird, it’s clear that the game was designed with an accelerometer or finger swipe in mind. That might not necessarily count Rocket Bird out on Facebook, but from what we’ve seen, Angry Birds clones and direct ports like Trade Nations haven’t been able to find traction on the platform after making the jump.

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.

Developed by Russia’s Pixonic, The Island: Castaway is a role-playing game with city-building elements that made its Facebook debut on July 1. The title made our list of emerging Facebook games the week of July 22.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, The Island: Castaway currently has 248,579 monthly active users and 45,172 daily active users.

The game revolves around survival on a desert island, with players taking on the role of a character that has washed ashore and must build shelter, scavenge and explore in order to survive. At the outset, players must expend energy to clear room to build and perform other actions, fashioning rudimentary tools from odd items they discover. After making space and collecting raw materials, players build shelter and begin establishing a foothold on the island. As the game progresses, players develop more and more of the land with various buildings and farming resources, which provide income over time. Players can customize the look of the island and their burgeoning civilization, using income to add animals to their environs as well.

Experience points are given for performing actions and completing tasks, most of which require several energy-consuming steps in order to satisfy their requirements. Players level up by collecting experience, recharging their energy and unlocking the ability to purchase new items in the process.

Players can add friends as neighbors and visit their islands to see what they’ve done with it, and also collect items for additional money and experience points. A gift-giving and receiving mechanic is also present. Some tasks the player encounters require them to invite more friends to play the game in order to progress.

Totems are the game’s hard currency and can be used to purchase more elaborate items early on in the game, as well as speeding up the completion of tasks. They, along with the game’s soft currency, can be purchase with Facebook Credits. We observe that, as with Perfect Getaway, the pay flow almost makes it seem as though the player is purchasing the Totems directly instead of purchasing Facebook Credits to then spend on Totems or coins.

The Island: Castaway is expanding at a rapid pace and Pixonic seems to be committed to delivering new content to satisfy its growing user base on a regular basis. The developer could not be reached for comment as of press time, but Wall posts from users reference timed missions being added to the game in recent weeks.

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

Electronic Arts shuffled its executives today with EA Sports’ head Peter Moore taking over as chief operating officer. He is filling the position that John Schappert left open when he left the company for rival Zynga.

Barry Cottle, who had been executive vice president of EA Interactive, becomes head of that division, which oversees all of the company’s mobile and social gaming initiatives. PopCap Games, which the company just agreed to acquire for up to $1.3 billion including earnouts, will also fall under its umbrella.

> Read the rest on our sister site, Inside Mobile Apps.

Developers can expect to see virality restored to social games in the latter half of 2011 as the platform adjusts its discovery methods, Facebook Director of Game Partnerships Sean Ryan tells ISG.

At Casual Connect in Seattle last month, Ryan alluded to some API changes that would help surface game stories to the Facebook users that actually play social games as opposed to spamming the News Feeds of all players’ available friend. In a recent follow-up interview with us, he details an algorithmic solution that will not only show players more stories, but also filter out only those stories that players are likely to click on.

“Last year when we made the changes because of the spam issues, we really dialed back [virality],” Ryan says. “Now that we feel confident about our automatic [filter] systems, we can start dialing back up virality with better targeting and better quality. So that if your game is sending stories through the news feed that users don’t like — they don’t click on it — then over time, the algorithm adjusts and users see fewer of those stories. We want quality to be about whether or not users like it.”

The key to this system is social discovery, something that doesn’t work for new users on the Facebook platform. This is where Ryan’s team finds itself pulled in two directions — on the one hand, wanting that user’s social graph to determine what games that user sees; and on the other, needing a Games destination site to give a new user a place to start figuring out what (if any) games they like.

The reason Ryan shies away from a Games destination on Facebook, like the version currently available, is that users expect to see lists of the 10 most popular games on destination sites because that’s what they’re used to seeing in the App Store or Android Marketplace. Ryan says these lists tend to be self-fulfilling, and the idea of Facebook dictating to a new user what they should or shouldn’t play goes against the platform’s philosophy of social discovery. Even so, he admits that there needs to be a better new user experience available to those just now entering the social games ecosystem on the platform, though Facebook hasn’t found that answer yet.

As it stands, a new user can stumble on the destination site through the Games tab (which has made several moves around the default Facebook view in the last six months) or by clicking on a Games-related post in the Facebook.com landing page like the one pictured above. The developer-oriented Facebook+Games page is also functions as a discovery tool for games new to the platform.

Beyond the end of 2011, Ryan says the team will continue to look at new games platform features that will work for Facebook. By studying other games ecosystems like Xbox Live, PlayStation Network, or Kongregate, Ryan says there may be lessons to learn that could contribute to better discovery systems.

“We look at voice chat and text chat and other types of game platform features as we [plan] the next 6 to 18 months,” he says, “But we come back to our strength, which is discovery. Because it’s social.”

It has been a busy week in the social games hiring space as 11 highlighted developers bring on new individuals according to LinkedIn and other sources. Moreover, many typically quiet developers showed new activity with Zynga hosting a massive hiring streak all its own.

Two leadership hires were also reported this week, including Michael Scholz, who joins Gamzee as its new Chief Technology Officer, and Phil Frazier, who joins Zynga as an executive producer (although he appears to have been in that role since June).

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:

6waves LOLapps

• Jonathan Akhavan, “People Team” — The LOLapps side of the newly merged 6waves LOLapps notes the hiring of Akhavan this week. Akhavan was most recently a recruiter for Ask.com.

Breaktime Studios

• Heidi Anspaugh, Community Manager — Anspaugh joins Breaktime Studios this week. Before this, she was a Home community manager at SCEA, PlayStation Network at Sony Computer Entertainment America.
• David Leistiko, Software Engineer — Leistiko was previously a software engineer at Sony Online Entertainment.

Gamzee

• Michael Scholz, Chief Technology Officer — As noted prior, Gamzee hires on Michael Scholz as its new CTO. Scholz boasts experience from several studios, including Sierra Online, WildTangent, THQ, and SkillJam.

Kixeye

• Nicole Tanner, Game Writer — Kixeye brings on Tanner this week. She was previously an editor for IGN Entertainment.

Mindjolt

• Bhaskar Upadhyay, Software Engineer — Mindjolt shows its first activity in a while, hiring Upadhyay. Prior to this, he was an ASP.NET programmer intern at Civic Resource Group.

NaturalMotion

• Frank Kitson, Art Director — NaturalMotion hires on four new team members this week, starting with Kitson, a former senior art director at Crytek.
• Straun Robertson, Product Director — Also joining NaturalMotion is Robetson. He was most recently a student at The University of Edinburgh.
• Andy Johns, Senior Technical Artist — Johns was previously a senior technical artist at UTV Iginition Entertainment.
• Patrik McCormack, Producer — McCormack was formerly a producer at Activision.

Nordeus

• Tamara Stojanović, HR Assistant — Nordeus also shows hiring activity this week, starting with Stojanović. She was previously a student at the Univerzitet u Beogradu.
• Nemanja Posrkača, Online Marketing Manager — Also joining Nordeus is Posrkača, a former project manager at AIESEC Serbia.
• Marija Mitrovic, Software Development Engineer — In an internal change at Nordeus, Mitrovic moves up from an internship role.
• Zarko Petrovic, Software Development Engineer — Petrovic is noted to hold prior experience with PSTech.

Playdom

• Juny Chen, Art Intern — Now at Playdom, Chen was previously a student at the Academy of Art University.

PopCap Games

• Stephen Byrne, Artist — In a single hire for PopCap Games, Byrne joins the team this week. He is currently a freelance illustrator for RTE and storyboard artist for H2 Films, and he was previously a storyboard artist for Irish International.

Wooga

• Esko Javanainen, Product Manager — Javaninen joins wooga this week. He was formerly a gameplay designer for Remedy Entertainment.

Zynga

• Fransiskus Xaverius, Software Engineer — Xaverius kicks off a heavy week of new Zynga hires. He was previously a software engineering intern at Google.
• Keith Brown, Desktop Support Technician Vendor — Also joining Zynga, Brown is also a student at Year Up, and was previously a student at City College of San Francisco.
• Wei Hai, Software Engineer — Hai was formerly a programmer for Uniplay Design.
• Channing Corn, Software Engineer — Prior to Zynga, Corn was a senior software developer at Multimedia Games.
• Neil Chheda, Product Manager –  Chheda was a business analyst at McKinsey & Company.
• Keki Burjorjee, Software Engineer — Joining Zynga this week is Burjorjee, a former software development engineer for Amazon.
• Amy Luu, Lead Analyst — In an internal shift at Zynga, Luu changes roles from a fraud/risk analyst.
• Gyan Upadhyay, Software Engineer — Upadhyay was previously a White Box QA engineer at BetaSoft Inc.
• Phil Frazier, Executive Producer –  Phil Frazier is noted to have become a new executive producer for Zynga. Prior to this he was an executive producer for EA Tiburon. That said, he has been in the role since June and this is merely a late update.
• Todd Freedman, Senior Accounting Manager — In another internal Zynga change, Freedman moves up from his prior role as an accounting manager.
• Adarsh VN, Talent Acquisitions — Adarsh VN was previously a senior recruitment specialist at the Yahoo Software Development Center.
• Sunil Kata, Software Engineer — Kata was previously a product engineer at Rediff.com.
• Ramkrish Raja, Software Engineer — Raja was most recently an IT manager and web developer at the University of Pennsylvania – Weiss Tech House.
• Lei Zhang, Art Producer — Zhang was formerly a project manager and art lead for Funcom.
• Kalyan Chakravarthy, Software Engineer — Chakravarthy was previously a software engineer at ESPN Cricinfo.

Though Visa’s somewhat recently acquired PlaySpan can no longer serve as an in-game purchasing method on Facebook, the payment service is still finding profit on the platform now that Facebook Credits are implemented across all social games.

If anything, things have actually gotten better for PlaySpan, says Robb Lewis, Marketing Director at Visa. Through a partnership with Facebook, it provides many of the international payment options for Credits.

“Now we have broader distribution across all Facebook versus a game here and a game there,” he says. “But we would like to see them take [back] our Ultimate Game Card as an in-game payment method. We’re still pushing Facebook for that.”

PlaySpan still gets a lot of millage out of the Ultimate Game Cards, which people can purchase at retail outlets to spend in a variety of PC games. In the past, PlaySpan has even co-branded the cards with Facebook logos, but Lewis concedes there’s small chance of Facebook going back to that now that they have their own Facebook Credits retail cards.

“It might be confusing to users,” he says. “We understand what they’re doing, but we actually have a bit broader distribution platform than Facebook. We actually did very well in Turkey, but Visa Europe as slowed us down there since the acquisition. I would say we’re stronger in some of the Asian markets than Facebook.”

Even without serving as an in-game payment method for social games on Facebook, PlaySpan is still gathering data on those who buy Facebook Credits through its service. According to data collected by the service provider throughout the month of July 2011, PlaySpan finds that women are three times more likely than men to spend Facebook Credits on virtual goods.

As for what kind of virtual goods people buy — and what kind developers ought to make — Lewis says social game developers can learn best practices for offering bonus items as incentives and even a bit about packaging virtual goods for more attractive sales.

“Anything involving bonus items or exclusives, things you can only get once a month or once a week, [players] will respond to very well,” he explains. “The other thing [developers] could learn from [our study] is how packaging up the currency a little bit differently makes people spend more. Like maybe if they buy the next level up, they’re going to get that next item. Retail stores do it where if you pass $30, you get free shipping. There’s a parallel there that we’ve seen in our data for virtual goods where players will spend a little bit more if there’s something extra that they gain if they bump up to the $20 purchase instead of the $10 purchase.”

Recently merged social game developer and publisher 6waves Lolapps confirmed today that it has raised funding, naming Nexon and Insight Venture Partners as investors.

Though 6waves Lolapps did not disclose terms of the investment, previous reports based on an SEC filing put the total at $35 million.

While the New York-based Insight Ventire Partners has had a history of backing social game companies, Korean company Nexon is fairly new to the space — both as an investor and a developer. Its most recent activity was the public beta launch of Maple Story: Adventures, a Facebook role-playing adventure game based on Nexon’s long-running MMO, Maple Story. Prior to that, the company invested $5 million in social game developer A Bit Lucky.

Backyard Monsters developer Kixeye announced a third round of funding today totally $18 million from Jafco Ventures, Trinity Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partner. Additionally, Zynga co-founder Andrew Trader will join the developer’s board.

Back in April, the company formerly known as Casual Collective re-branded as Kixeye and focused all development on the Facebook platform. Since that time, the developer has launched Battle Pirates and is set to bring out a third Facebook-only game, War Commander, later this summer. The total employee headcount of the developer has gone from 3 to 60 in the last 18 months and our AppData traffic tracking service puts its overall growth in monthly active users up 41% to 5.1 million and its daily active users up 37% to 1.1 million since the start of 2011.

The key to Kixeye’s success appears to be targeting a niche “hardcore” market in a manner similar to Kingdoms of Camelot developer Kabam. These focused approaches appear to be paying off; Kixeye claims that Battle Pirates players spend 20 times the industry average. Even with revenues like that, however, the developer has had raise some capital to become completely profitable, netting $4.5 million in funding prior to this round.

Launched in November of last year, Megaband from Ubisoft puts players in charge of their own band, tasking them with rising from an aspiring garage start-up to an international sensation. The title made ISG’s list of fastest-growing Facebook games for the week of July 27.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, Megaband currently has 132,413 monthly active users and 18,006 daily active users.

In Megaband, players create avatars for up to six band members, starting with one and unlocking more as they level up by gaining experience points. After picking a name for their band, dressing up its first member and choosing an instrument (guitar, drums, keyboard, vocals) players must rehearse before playing a gig. During rehearsal, players’ avatars have “mega needs” — clicking on the avatar initiates a simple matching game, with rewards given for finding and matching as many similar tiles as possible under a time limit. After the rehearsal has finished, players can choose from several venues, such as a concert hall and disco, in which to play their main gig. The game offers multiple songs in several music genres to “play.”

Once a song has been chosen, the gig begins. Players place their band members on stage and the music starts, at which point the audience begins throwing various items (ice cream cones, underwear and other oddities) on-stage. Clicking these items rewards the player with experience points. Crowd surfers and other, stranger “guest characters” will also appear in the audience and can be clicked for XP. The player has a “Rock Out Bar” that is filled while rehearsing and can be spent to boost the amount of XP gathered by clicking the various objects that appear on-screen.

In addition to clothing and accessories for their band avatars, players must also purchase décor for their pads. Depending on the items purchase and placed, players receive boosts to their attack and defense stats that come into play when accessing the Battle Center. This portion of the game allows players to go up against others playing the game in a simple stats-based battle that requires no direct interaction. The winner comes away with a reward of cash and XP. Expanding the player’s pad also extends their stamina, which allows them to play more gigs before needing to wait for it to refill, or purchasing more.

Players can recruit friends to join their bands, and also make them neighbors, which serves to increase their health for Battle Center matchups and allows them to visit one another’s pads to collect bonus XP. The game also lets players brag about their accomplishments through viral channels and send/receive gifts.

Megaband is monetized through the purchase of pad items, avatar extras and various methods of speeding up tasks in-game. Facebook Credits can be spent to purchase Band Cash, the game’s soft currency, and Mega Credits, its premium currency. Some items and actions can only be purchased using Mega Credits — like the ability to skip rehearsals.

As of press time, Ubisoft could not be reached for comment on future plans for Megaband. We observe, however, that the game appears to be in “official launch” mode now that the MAU and DAU are rapidly rising. Ubisoft has not maintained a presence on the game’s Wall.

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