MindJolt’s new standalone game, Bubble Atlantis, top our list of emerging Facebook games this week with Social Game Universe’s Dirty Dancing and Peak Games’ Trendkiz rounding out the top three.

MindJolt is in the middle of executing a mobile strategy that relies on creating a critical mass of users from a mix of web and Facebook games. This is similar to what RealNetwork’s GameHouse is attempting with its series of casual and arcade titles on the platform. The idea is that because the mobile market is so fragmented, it’s far easier to get a new game going if you have a platform of games in a centralized location from which to evangelize new releases.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Bubble Atlantis	983,431	+419,420	+123%
2.	Dirty Dancing	322,605	+294,636	+1,053%
3.	Trendkız	529,984	+196,360	+66%
4.	Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?	649,377	+159,017	+32%
5.	Adventure Slots	718,350	+153,076	+27%
6.	Slot City – Slot Machines	896,625	+147,551	+20%
7.	The Stratagems	456,724	+126,408	+38%
8.	熱血海盜王	805,521	+116,461	+17%
9.	Aviator	493,634	+113,732	+37%
10.	Angry Birds Chrome	840,595	+106,276	+14%
11.	Sin City Holdem	315,177	+105,709	+122%
12.	Noah’s Ark	409,460	+98,652	+32%
13.	CLASH : Rise of Heroes	236,691	+88,188	+59%
14.	Crazy Taxi	842,656	+84,830	+11%
15.	Fight Camp	288,390	+84,671	+42%
16.	FantaBook	660,896	+76,094	+13%
17.	Samurai Dynasty	270,455	+72,198	+36%
18.	Pet Tales	646,987	+62,073	+11%
19.	GodsWar – Best 3D MMORPG Browser Game ★★★★★	450,190	+61,884	+16%
20.	BringIt	392,939	+60,948	+18%

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.

Hiring was up this week in the social gaming space. According to data we gathered from LinkedIn and other sources, 10 companies hired 20 new employees. While most of the activity was in the form of single hires, Canadian developer East Side Games swelled their ranks by bringing on six new members. This week’s highest profile hire was Steve Klei’s move to Kabam as the company’s new chief financial officer.

If your company is hiring new people or making a notable promotion, please get in touch with us. Email us at: mail (at) insidesocialgames (dot) com, and we’ll get your news into an upcoming post.

If you want to know who else is hiring, the Inside Network Job Board showcases current openings with the industry’s leading companies.

East Side Games

• Aldric Sun, Data Analyst – Vancouver, BC based social game company East Side Games adds six new faces this week. Sun comes to East Side Games from United Front Games where he was a game designer.
• Ashleigh Inman, EA/Office Manager – Inman moves into the games industry from film, where she worked as an executive producer’s assistant on Stargate Universe.
• Trudi Castle, Artist – Castle was previously a storyboard/concept artist at Crytek.
• Jesse Roberts, Producer – Roberts takes up the role of producer.
• Heather Harvey, Artist – Harvey joins the team as an artist.
• Jacob Krarup, Producer - And finally Krarup also comes on as a producer.

Happy Elements

• Sergio Rivero, Translation & Localization - Rivero joins Happy Elements, moving from KC Standard Business Consulting, where he was previously a consultant.

Kabam 

• Steve Klei, Chief Financial Officer - In this week’s highest profile hire, Steve Klei joins Kabam as their chief financial officer. Before making the move, Klei was the chief financial officer at software-as-a-service company Jigsaw.
• Xavier Nicolas, Project Manager-France – Also joining the Kabam team is Nicolas, previously in customer care at DCLUX.
• Viet Ngo, Player Experience Associate - And finally Ngo, who comes from Aeria Games, where he was previously game master.

KIXEYE

• Jonathan Spivack, Quality Engineering Intern – A pair of hires for KIXEYE, who bring on Spivack from the Stanford University School of Medicine, where he was also an intern.
• Michael Borgmann, User Acquisition Manager – Borgmann comes from Facebook, where he was previously a specialist for online sales operations.

Lolapps

• Thinh Ngo, Animation Internship – Ngo is this week’s single hire for Lolapps, who joins the company having previously worked The Gap.

ngmoco

• Jason Reinstedler, Support Engineer -  One new hire for ngmoco this week, who bring on Reinstedler from the Yale University School of Medicine, where he was a C&IS specialist/senior analyst.

Nordeus

• Mladen Milić – Software Development Engineer – Nordeus make our list after promoting Mladen Milić internally from intern to software development engineer.

Peak Games

• Kaan Baltaci, User Acquisition Specialist - Peak Games also shows life with a single hire. Baltaci joins the company from Kupon Kent, where he was an advertising specialist.

PopCap

• Brian Lelas, QA Tester -  PopCap is the last company to bring on one new person this week, hiring Lelas, who joins the company from Waterstones.

Zynga

• Justin Lauria, Associate Software Engineer – Zynga bucks this week’s trend with a trio of new hires. First up is Lauria, who makes the move from Autonomy where he was previously a Jr. developer.
• Renju George, Associate Software Engineer – Also joining is George, who starts his career, coming straight from Kannur University.
• Kiel Cravatta, Intern Producer – And finally we have Cravatta, who makes the move from Skubiak and Rivas Law, where he was the web manager.

EA and Disney shared optimistic outlooks in The Rise of Social Gaming panel at f8, while panelists from Kabam and Zynga appeared more hesitant.

Moderated by Facebook’s Sean Ryan, the panel addressed issues like the increasing importance of branded intellectual property, new business models, advertising revenues, multiplatform development, genres and distribution. Zynga’s Owen Van Natta, Disney Interactive’s John Pleasants, EA’s Barry Cottle and Kabam’s Kevin Chou responded based on personal experience with their own titles along with consistent references to The Sims Social’s current progress on the Facebook platform.

For branded IP, the panelists agreed that it was becoming a larger part of the market. In EA’s case, it was about finding the right IP to bring to social networks. Zynga and Kabam saw it as an opportunistic experience where if the developer has the right game for a brand already in the works, a partnership makes sense (e.g. Adventure World’s Indiana Jones branding, Kabam’s upcoming Godfather game).

Disney, meanwhile, had some interesting points to share on a branding experiment conducted in Gnome Town and ESPN Sports Bar & Grill. The publisher found that by adding the Disney logo to the former, the cost of user acquisition dropped by a third. By running commercials for ESPN Sports Bar & Grill on the TV network, Disney attracted a group of users whose lifetime value was far higher than the users attracted to the game through ads on Facebook. The findings, says Pleasants, are encouraging enough for Disney to launch two to four recognizable Disney properties as social games in 2012.

Business models was a topic where Disney and EA showed optimism compared to Zynga and Kabam. Chou did say that Kabam had experimented with subscription models and, in general, didn’t want to monetize their games the same way over and over again because they’d become predictable. Van Natta said very little, citing Zynga’s current quiet period pre-IPO. Cottle was a bit more vocal, saying that audiences could be better monetized with a mix of microtransaction, subscription, and advertising. Pleasants came out with actual numbers, each estimating that in-game advertising accounted for 5% of Disney Playdom’s social game revenues and stating that he’d like to see it grow to 10%.

Another point of interest that was briefly touched on by the panelists and in the Q&A segment was the concept of casual players merging with core players that come from the traditional video games space. This move has been occurring in social games gradually over time as more core game developers migrate to the space, but with upcoming tweaks in console technology, it will be possible to see more integration between social games and console titles.

The last bit that came as almost a parting shot had to do with Google+ not a single developer on the panel said they were working on anything for the rival social network. It might’ve had something to do with the fact that today is all about Facebook. But Chou’s lack of detailed response was interesting given that Kabam announced Edgeworld simultaneously for Facebook and Google+.

Facebook’s updates to Open Graph now expose social game activities from the app ticker to a Facebook-wide live ticker for an increase in viral discovery.

As of today, all Facebook users — whether they play social games or not — will see a live app ticker on the right side of the Facebook home screen. This ticker is similar to the live app ticker that players can see on the Canvas page when accessing a social game. The Facebook ticker will display “a lightweight stream of everything that’s going on around you,” according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. This includes social game activities.

An interesting feature of the games activity surfaced in the live ticker is that the games stories appear to be for specific in-game actions. This is possible, Zuckerberg says, because every piece of content in Open Graph has a picture associated with it.

The example displayed at F8 shows a games story from Zynga’s Words With Friends that names the friends playing the game and the specific word a friend played in that game. A non-player clicking on that story can view their friends’ Words With Friends game board and for there, potentially convert to player by starting up a new game.

Despite cutting back on virality of social games a year ago, this segment of Facebook is still the biggest feature of the Facebook platform. By dialing back up the virality with Open Graph and the recent Canvas updates, socials games are only going to get bigger.

Follow updates from f8 on our liveblog.

Zynga’s profits fell by 90% for its June quarter this year thanks to a mix of spending and a lack of major game releases, according to a regulatory filing reviewed by Reuters.

The filing reveals that the company’s total costs and expenses increased by $149 million compared to the same quarter of last year, and rose by $59 million compared to the previous quarter. Revenue for the quarter ending June 30, however, rose to $279 million for a 115% increase over the previous year year.

Reuters speculates that the June 1 launch of Empires & Allies on Facebook might explain the dip in profits. We observe, however, that Zynga had a similar summer release schedule for 2010 where FrontierVille didn’t launch until even later in the month of June. Zynga did, however, spend more money on acquisitions in 2011, picking up talent from Wonderland Software in April and purchasing Casino City developer DNA Games in May.

Zynga reduced the probability that it will IPO by five percentage points in a valuation exercise in August. It put the probability of an IPO at 75 percent, down from 80 percent three months earlier amid global market turmoil. Zynga said a third-party valuation in August found that its outstanding equity was worth $14.05 billion, up from $13.98 billion in May despite the global equities rout.

Casual game developer GameHouse wants to break into the top 10 social game developers ranked by daily active users on Facebook in the next six months. The company plans to accomplish this goal with its franchise of “Blast” social games, beginning with Collapse Blast and continuing with the upcoming Bayou Blast.

Speaking to ISG, GameHouse CEO Matt Hulett explains that the developer is in the process of shifting its business model from casual game downloads to freemium social and mobile games. Since joining the RealNetworks-owned company a little over a year ago, he’s shuffled about 50% of the staff, broken out mobile and social game development from the download segment and says that this year the company will be profitable thanks to taking out some operating costs. The next goal, he says, is getting into the top 10 developers ranked by DAU in the next six months.

Compared to the existing top 10 social game developers on Facebook by DAU recorded by our AppData traffic tracking service, GameHouse got off to a much slower start on the platform with a mix of casual titles, arcade games and licensed properties like Uno and Uno Boost. It wasn’t until the recent releases of Collapse Blast and Adventure Slots that the developer really started to see a sustained lift in DAU (and monthly active users) for the past three months. GameHouse currently enjoys 4.6 million MAU and 657,847 DAU across all 18 of its apps on Facbeook — making it No. 31 in MAU and No. 33 in DAU among social game developers on the platform.

In other words, GameHouse still has a long way to go to get past even mid-market developers like 6waves Lolapps or 50 Cubes to break into the top 10. The road to there from here is paved with new game releases from the developer across both social and mobile platforms with licensed and original IP. At present, Hulett says that GameHouse has about 20 million users spread across a network of three GameHouse-owned sites off Facebook. Migrating that audience to Facebook while also attracting new users on the platform will set the stage for GameHouse to dial up its mobile development with standalone games that leverage Facebook.

The key to all of this is building good games on Facebook (and later mobile) that loyal GameHouse users recognize. Hulett tells us that the back catalogue of GameHouse owned and developed IP is fairly large — which is where Bayou Blast comes from. It’s a variation on the match-3 genre of game that has players dragging a cursor over connecting clusters of gems, trying to create a line between contiguous gems of the same color.

Once made, the gems are cleared from the board for a score bonus and new gems fall into the puzzle to replace them. Play continues until a timer expires and then the player’s total score is calculated to determine their rank relative to their friends’ scores. At launch, the game will be monetized through the sale of power-ups. In the future, it’d be easy to create more monetization around the number of times per day a user can play and any friend gates the developer would like to add to new levels.

It’s an easy enough mechanic to grasp, even if it does seem like the kind of game better suited to a touch interface on tablets. Hulett says its important to grow an audience on Facebook first before carrying over to the mobile market because mobile is simply more fragmented.

The “Blast” treatment for classic GameHouse titles isn’t too different from what King.com does with its “Saga” series of casual games on Facebook. The difference here is that GameHouse doesn’t offer a portal app on Facebook that allows players to experience essentially the same game in two locations. Hulett’s feeling is that portals would dilute average revenue per user across all its apps.

Bayou Blast launches on Facebook toward the end of October. After that, GameHouse plans to release a game based on Fremantle Media’s Lets Make a Deal game show. Hulett declined to detail the developer’s current release schedule for mobile games, but he did remind us that GameHouse already has experience in the market and licensing deals with games like Doodle Jump for non-iOS devices.

You can follow GameHouse’s progress on its six month quest using AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

Zynga is hot on the heels of EA Playfish’s The Sims Social with Adventure World and Words With Friends both gaining ground in our list of fastest-growing games by daily active users.

At No.6 this week is newcomer Dirty Dancing, a Facebook game based on the 1987 romance film of the same name from Toronto-based developer Social Game Universe and entertainment company Lionsgate. Expect a full review from us later this week.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	The Sims Social	11,299,942	+624,678	+6%
2.	Adventure World	3,947,666	+246,973	+43,027%
3.	Words With Friends	3,579,635	+107,107	+3%
4.	DoubleDown Casino – Free Slots, Blackjack & Poker	974,055	+89,875	+10%
5.	Games	1,790,633	+69,407	+4%
6.	Dirty Dancing	68,607	+67,704	+7,498%
7.	GooBox – Jeux Gratuits	259,054	+59,584	+30%
8.	Slotomania – Slot Machines	1,406,092	+54,433	+4%
9.	Battle Pirates	270,327	+52,098	+24%
10.	HotShot	392,239	+46,498	+13%
11.	Monster World	1,637,684	+43,015	+3%
12.	Mahjong Trails	411,232	+41,710	+11%
13.	Pet Tales	90,577	+36,847	+69%
14.	Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?	139,620	+33,741	+32%
15.	The Stratagems	54,700	+33,295	+156%
16.	Diamond Dash	2,045,431	+32,573	+2%
17.	Backyard Monsters	1,003,649	+32,127	+3%
18.	Collapse! Blast	200,577	+29,620	+17%
19.	Happy Pets	318,125	+27,975	+10%
20.	Best Casino – Free Slots, Bingo, Poker & Blackjack	216,559	+27,862	+15%

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

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 Lolapps, King.com, Games Cafe Inc, Majesco Entertainment Company, 5th Planet Games, Wild Needle Games, TinyCo, TBG Digital and Arkadium.

• Game Writer with passion for storytelling
• 3D Artist
• Product Manager , Social & Mobile Games
• Game Developer

• Social Game Designer
• Game Programmer

• Mobile Games Senior Marketing Manager

• Mobile Game Developer (iOS)

• Lead Mobile Developer at Exciting New Game Startup

• User Acquisition Specialist
• Data Analyst

• Ad Ops Analyst

• Director of Analytics
• Associate Games Analyst

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.

Social game publisher and developer 6waves Lolapps is announcing a $10 million fund today for social and mobile game developers in need of extra money to get games up and running.

The “6L Fund” comes with a publishing contract under 6waves Lolapps, giving recipients access to the company’s network of 39.5 million monthly active users on Facebook across all its published and in-house developed apps. The concept behind the fund is two-pronged: to support fledgling developers in the social and mobile space, and to bring new games into the 6waves Lolapps network of games.

Speaking to Inside Network, 6waves Lolapps SVP of Publishing Jim Ying explains that the 6L Fund is a natural extension of the company’s business model. Publishers already cover a lot of costs on behalf of developers, making back their money on revenue share agreements. With up-front costs in social and mobile games rising, it makes sense for 6waves Lolapps to provide more monetary support at the beginning of its relationship with a developer. This is why the 6L Fund is specifically targeted at developers that don’t already have a publishing relationship established with 6waves Lolapps or other social and mobile game publishers.

Ying was keen to point out that the 6L Fund is 6waves Lolapps’ tentative first step into the mobile games business. To date, the company has made most of its money on Facebook with games like Ravenwood Fair and Mystery Manor. It also publishes games on Japan’s Mixi social network and is currently in talks with Tencent in China to extend publishing there. Ying says about Asia makes up about one-third of its audience.

As for outright acquisitions of mobile developers, Ying says 6waves Lolapps is “always looking” for opportunities and that the company would “definitely consider it” if the right mobile developer came along. 6waves Lolapps is only two months into its merger between publisher 6waves and developer Lolapps and not quite three months past the point where it acquired the Fliso Flash-based social game engine. The company scored a $35 million round of funding led by Insight Venture Partners with participation from Nexon at the beginning of August.

Those interested in applying for the 6L Fund can go here.

The first game to come from Australian developer 3 Blokes after being acquired by RockYou will be a real time strategy game set in space called Galactic Allies.

Speaking to Inside Social Games, 3 Blokes VP and Creative Director John Passfield explains that though the theme is similar to the developer’s previous title, Galactic Trader, Allies is a combat-oriented game with more narrative-driven gameplay and non-playable characters. Players construct fleets of starships, each containing up to six vessels that the player can control individually during combat. The combat phase is real time with actions occurring as the player or the computer instructs the units. At launch, Galactic Allies will allow for player versus player combat between friends, but the activity will be asynchronous with the computer stepping in to control a friend’s fleet when we attack them.

Galactic Allies differs from the current portfolio of RockYou-owned games in several key ways. First, it’s a strategy game aimed at a more niche and largely male audience compared to, say, the Zoo World franchise. Second, the game is launching without as much as hype or extensive marketing compared to Zoo World 2 and other RockYou games published through its partners program. Third, Galactic Allies is launching with RockYou’s new ad platform already in place.

RockYou SVP of Games Jonathan Knight lays out the strategy behind Galactic Allies as one of gradual, steady growth. He says that the opening will be “smaller and slower,” with RockYou 3 Blokes reaching out to the community for feedback in order to fine-tune the game. Knight explains that because there is a larger pool of RTS games on Facebook than ever before, the audience is already there for Galactic Allies. The trick is attracting it to the RockYou brand, where traditionally, it’s been all about women-oriented animal and farming sims.

“We think about it in terms of audiences,” he says. “RockYou has a strong audience around the Zoo franchise. Gourmet Ranch [appeals] to a similar audience. [Loot Drop's] Cloudforest Expedition will leverage that audience, but we’ll have a much larger male audience, given the nature of the game being about adventure and exploration an traditional role-playing game elements. That’s an audience that we’re building and with Galactic Allies, it’s the start of a new audience for us that we’re trying to attract.”