Indiana Jones Coming to Adventure World — Zynga and LucasFilm have partnered up and announced that they will be bringing Indiana Jones into the social game maker’s latest release, Adventure World. Further details have yet to be revealed.

Social Games Highlighted at Tokyo Game Show — Social games are getting a lot of love in Japan at the Tokyo Game Show this week between GREE and DeNA, says Reuters. The news service reports that the Japanese social gaming market to reach approximately $5.1 billion by 2013.

Double Down Interactive Opens New Office — Social games developer Double Down Interactive is expanding with a new office this week. The company announced its new headquarters within the 505 Union Station building in Seattle which has room to add a another 100 employees atop its existing 52.

Unity Wins Best Development Environment Award — Unity Technologies has announced that its Unity game development platform has won the award for “Best Development Environment” at this year’s CEDEC (Computer Entertainment Developers Conference) in Japan.

Even a Tiny Zoo Can be Cruel According to PETA – TinyCo is the latest gaming company to draw the ire of outspoken animal rights organization PETA. According to a letter sent to TinyCo’s cofounder and CEO by PETA, the game Tiny Zoo “sends the message that life for animals in actual zoos is acceptable when, in reality, captive animals suffer immensely.” The letter suggests that TinyCo could revamp and rename the game in the next release; instead of building a zoo, players could rescue animals and rehabilitate them as they play “Big Sanctuary.” Tiny Zoo is the latest entry in a growing list of games that have been accused of promoting cruelty to animals by PETA.

Raptr Hits New Milestone — Gamer social network Raptr now has over 10 million registered users and a daily active user count of over 1 million.

New Social & Mobile Golfing App – Teepsy is a new Facebook and mobile app, displayed at Demo, that allows users to brag about their golf game. Additionally, it lets users sign up for discounted tee times at certain golf courses. Players can earn badges for their golf accomplishments and track their scores.

HoneyLizer Offers More Monetization Tools for Social Games — Also at the VentureBeat-affiliated Demo conference was Bees and Pollen’s new marketing tool, HoneyLizer. The platform allows developers of social games to better target social gamers, based on their social data, with promotions intended to convert more of them into paying users.

[Launch] Viximo Launches Facebook Title — Viximo has announced the release of its social game, Snap Me Up for Facebook this week.  Already available on networks such as Quepasa, the game involves the buying and selling of photos of their favorite people in a buy low, sell high style of stock market play.

[Launch] Idle Worship — At the TechCrunch Disrupt, Idle Games finally sent its deity sim game, Idle Worship, into closed beta ahead of a larger beta launch planned for the immediate future. The total development cycle is at about 23 months as of now.

[Launch] Metrogames Launches Coco Girl on Facebook — Social developer Metrogames has released its latest title, Coco Girl. The app is a fashion game, targeting women, in which players create an avatar and and customize its look with thousands of outfits, hair styles, and accessories that they purchase within digital malls.

[Launch] Kixeye Unveils War Commander — The creator of Backyard Monsters, Kixeye, has announced the launch of its newest Facebook game, War Commander. The social game is a real-time strategy title in which players command over 27 customizable units as they vi for resources within a war-torn future version Earth.

[Launch] Itsmy Games Launches Games for Web — Mobile and social games developer, itsmy Games, has announced that it has launched its catalogue of over 100 free-to-play titles as mobile web apps. Each game makes use of HTML5 and can be played partly offline.

Chinese developers may not be able play social games on Facebook in their own country (at least not on China’s servers), but that doesn’t mean they can’t find success on the platform.

In the last three months, we’ve seen more Chinese-language games turn up on our weekly rankings charts. Some games — such as Elex’s 開心農場 (Happy Farm) — have been regular fixtures on our monthly top Facebook games lists in the daily active user category. Though growing and able to attract interest from publishers like 6waves Lolapps, it’s unlikely that these games will ever break into the double-digit millions of monthly active users that larger Facebook developers enjoy without Facebook being un-banned in China or without turning game development onto games for Western audiences.

A profile of a smaller Chinese social game developer best illustrates the challenges these studios face in developing for a non-native platform and a completely different culture. Earlier this week, we reviewed BrainJewel, a brain-teaser game for Facebook from a developer called TribePlay. It’s the company’s first-ever Facebook game and their first original intellectual property.

TribePlay is based out of Chengdu, in the Sichuan province — about as far from the game developer-dense Shanghai and Beijing as you can get without winding up in Eastern Europe. Thanks to financial and legal support from the government aimed at beefing up development in Western China, the cost of living in the city is low, as are the barriers to setting up a company and hiring staff.

“Chengdu has become a really rich city and you see more international companies here,” says TribePlay Game Producer Gregor Plath. “You also still have well-educated people in the IT sector here because it’s a [college town].”

Once founded in 2008, however, TribePlay had to find a way to get its games in front of an audience. Plath explains that because of licensing restrictions, it’s very hard for a small game developer to afford publishing costs on Chinese social game networks like Tencent and RenRen.

“You always need a partner or to apply for a special license and it’s almost impossible if you’re not a big company or don’t have a partner,” Plath says. “We’re trying to get in touch with local companies here to find a partner where there’s a chance to do [an exchange], like where they publish our game in China and we take one of their games to publish in Europe or something.”

By targeting game development in Europe and now Latin America and the United States, TribePlay was able to grow its business in the past three years from three employees to an international mix of 35 that includes German, Polish, French and Dutch — and they’re still hiring. Previously, the developer worked only with branded IP, the biggest of which being Eccky, a child-oriented pet sim that Plath says did very well on Dutch social network Hyves at 350,000 registered users. With BrainJewel and future games on Facebook, TribePlay hopes to broaden its international audience and potentially its platform reach onto mobile devices as well.

“We are planning to launch our second game pretty soon,” Plath says. “It’s really complicated on Facebook [to succeed] with just one game. With cross-promotion, it’s easier to grow. So we’re hopefully going to launch our second game in October. We also want to get BrainJewel out on mobile soon, or maybe on iPad.”

TribePlay is also localizing BrainJewel in several emerging language categories on Facebook — including Portuguese.

“Our biggest market seems to be in Brazil,” Plath explains. “We are looking at [launching games on] Orkut. Brazilians seem to be crazy about brain games. We’re also going to do Indonesia, which is also an emerging market on Facebook. [It seems] that people who used to use Facebook have stopped using it, but we’re getting new users in from these other countries.”

BrainJewel launched on Facebook earlier this month. Read our review for more details.

Kabam’s quasi-real-time strategy game Edgeworld takes the top spot on this week’s list of emerging Facebook games. Italian soccer sim FantaBook and Fluffy Birds Flash complete the top three.

If you’re looking for Zynga’s Adventure World, the newly-launching game is just shy of the full seven says of data needed to turn up on AppData rankings. In the past week, the game has grown to 548,827 monthly active users and 247,547 daily active users. Zynga announced a partnership with Lucasfilm today to launch an Indiana Jones integration within Adventure World in October.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Edgeworld	887,982	+104,046	+13%
2.	FantaBook	584,802	+96,957	+20%
3.	Fluffy Birds Flash	870,343	+95,140	+12%
4.	Adventure Slots	565,274	+92,616	+20%
5.	Angry Birds Chrome	734,319	+88,732	+14%
6.	Smeet	938,173	+86,244	+10%
7.	Galaxía Online II, Mejor Juego de Ciencia Ficción	861,644	+82,048	+11%
8.	Türkiye Texas Poker	605,279	+75,901	+14%
9.	Samurai Dynasty	198,257	+73,304	+59%
10.	Fight Camp	203,719	+72,929	+56%
11.	CLASH : Rise of Heroes	148,503	+70,425	+90%
12.	Ninja Saga (Español)	989,226	+53,707	+6%
13.	【洪荒神话】——经典玩法、特色系统、完美蛮宠★★★★★	119,306	+52,825	+79%
14.	Guitar Flash	970,578	+51,386	+6%
15.	BringIt	331,991	+51,194	+18%
16.	開心豬仔	411,326	+49,947	+14%
17.	Fortune Stones	840,078	+48,768	+6%
18.	Crazy Taxi	757,826	+48,624	+7%
19.	Fanta Serie A	324,523	+47,356	+17%
20.	Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?	490,360	+45,151	+10%

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.

Google is launching the first batch of its Google+ APIs to developers today, allowing them to play around with public data already available on the platform.

The Google blog announcing the release walks developers through a few of the simpler API calls that retrieve profile information and recent public posts (a full list is available here). All apps need to be registered before they can send requests to the Google+ API. Apps can collection this information from first-time users with the plus.me OAuth2 scope that generates a dialogue box:

As far as the game-building aspect goes, Google is providing open source libraries for several game-friendly languages, including Java, Python, Ruby, PHP, Objective C, and .NET. Documentation, terms and policies can be found on the Google Developers site.

The Google+ Games platform currently only has a handful of titles available from developer partners including Playdom, Zynga and wooga. Two titles were also developed by Google in-house outfit LabPixies, which was acquired last year. We had hoped to see some games from Slide — which was also bought by Google — on the G+ Games platform, but the studio shut its doors late last month.

Web and social game developer King.com has a habit of breaking out games from its Facebook portal into standalone social games that net the developer a new audience. The latest of these games to get the “Saga” treatment is Bubble Witch Saga.

It’s a fairly simple game that builds on the Snood concept where players fire a colored projectile from the bottom of the screen into a cluster of multicolored objects clustered at the top, trying to match a minimum of three by color. When the player gets a match, the objects are cleared from the board permanent.

Bubble Witch adds a scoring element with cauldrons placed along the bottom of the screen that catch falling projectiles (here called bubbles) once players have knocked them out of the puzzle. Additionally, each time the player makes a match, spiders drop down from the ceiling to hang above the cauldron. Fallen bubbles that bounce off of these spiders on their way to the cauldron gain a score multiplier equal to the number of times the bubble hit the spider. Then, spiders are subtracted from the board each time the player fails to make a match when firing a bubble into the cluster.

The puzzles increase in difficulty as the player progresses through a world map. Like Bubble Saga, each level has up to three stars for the player to earn based on how high they score. A certain number of accumulated stars is required to unlock power-up items for purchase that can make the puzzle easier. Certain levels are friend-gated, requiring the player to invite new players to the game or to pay Facebook Credits to bypass the gate.

Bubble Witch Saga essentially combines all the lessons King.com has learned from its standalone experiments with Miner Speed, Bubble Saga, and Mahjong Saga. With all the similarities in gameplay between the standalone games and their “origin” games still playable on the King.com Facebook games portal (pictured above), one might think the developer is cannibalizing its audience with each new game release.

The data indicates otherwise, however, with King.com growing into the sixth-largest social game developer by monthly active users and the fifth-largest by daily active users at 16.5 million and 2.4 million, respectively. Note that the uptick in growth occurs about a month or so before the developer’s shift into cross-platform development. To date, only Miner Speed has an iOS version with limited integration to its Facebook parent game.

King.com tells us that it’s still working on developing iOS and tablet versions of its Saga games. We know that the company has been staffing up significantly in the last month or two, but as for future plans, King.com kept the conversation limited to Bubble Witch Saga. Players can expect to see tournament play and new power-ups in the coming weeks and there may also be a collaborative multiplayer mode in the works.

As the game only just launched today, Bubble Witch Saga hasn’t yet appeared in our AppData traffic-tracking service. Keep an eye out for it in the coming the days.

The hiring lull in the social gaming space continues over into this this week, according to data from LinkedIn and other sources. Eight companies showed new activity. That said, there were some bigger hires in the past seven days from Double Down Interactive and Zynga. Peter Anderson joins the former as its new vice president of recruiting and human resources while Ryan Lysne joins the latter as its new director of strategic marketing

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

Here’s this week’s full list:

CrowdStar

• Anna Markosian, Finance Assistant – CrowdStar sees a single hire this week with Markosian. She was previously an intern at UBS Wealth Management.

Double Down Interactive

• Peter Anderson, Vice President of Recruiting & Human Resources — Peter Anderson joins Double Down Interactive as its new vice president of recruiting and human resources. His prior role was as the vice president of recruiting and human resources at Big Fish Games.

GREE International

• Joseph Derflinger, Customer & Community Specialist — Derflinger joins GREE International this week. He was formerly a community manager with Perfect World Entertainment.
• Cary Chen, Managing Counsel — Also joining GREE International is Chen, a former associate of the Corporate Group at Morrison & Foster LLP.

Kabam

• Moses Lee, Software Engineer — Now at Kabam, Lee was previously a software engineer and at Involver.

Loot Drop

• Steve Markgraf, Software Engineer — Markgraf joins Loot Drop this week. He was formerly a part of Zindagi Games.
• David Armstrong, Junior Software Engineer — Also joining Loot Drop, Armstrong was previously a student at the DigiPen Institute of Technology.
• Bill Drastal, Animator — Drastal was formerly an animator for Slide and Google.
• Darron Smity, Artist — Smith was previously a part of Massive Black.

Peak Games

• Hasim Karaman, Senior Software Developer — Peak Games hires two new team members starting with Karaman. Karaman was previously a software developer at MagiClick Digital Solutions.
• Barbaros Usekes, Game Tester — Usekes also joins Peak Games. He was formerly a junior PHP coder at 2025 Arena.

PopCap Games

• Ryan Condon, Game Tester — Condon joins PopCap Games this week. Prior to this, he was a build analyst for Zipper Interactive.

Zynga

• Steven Johnson, QA Engineer II — Zynga hires three individuals, starting with Johnson, a former quality assurance tester at Sony Computer Entertainment of America.
• Ryan Lysne, Director of Strategic Marketing — Ryan Lysne joins Zynga as its new director of strategic marketing. Previously, he was the senior engagement manager at McKinsey & Company.
• Elain Eudy, Senior Artist — Eudy was previously a lead artist for Griptonite Games.

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 Nubee, TinyCo, A Bit Lucky,  Wild Needle Games, 5th Planet Games,  JibJab Media, King.com,  TBG Digital and Storm8.

• Technical Game Designer

The Sims Social is back on top this week in our list of fastest-growing games by daily active users. Zuma Blitz and Tetris Battle round out the top three.

There aren’t a lot of new games making the rounds this week, but several old favorites are making mini-growth comebacks. We’ve got Ninja Saga and Shadow Fight, Wild Ones and Miscrits: World of Adventure, and It Girl also makes and appearance. As summer vacation is now completely over in most parts of the world, we’ll be watching older Facebook games for traffic reassurances as people start revisiting old favorite Facebook games from school or work.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	The Sims Social	10,675,264	+2,678,492	+33%
2.	Zuma Blitz	1,126,642	+431,203	+62%
3.	Tetris Battle	1,425,941	+143,703	+11%
4.	Ninja Saga	1,091,485	+94,290	+9%
5.	The Pokerist club — Texas Poker	257,549	+92,314	+56%
6.	Wild Ones	552,652	+67,823	+14%
7.	Miscrits: World of Adventure	354,726	+55,968	+19%
8.	Stick Run	314,490	+53,300	+20%
9.	Pool Live Tour	547,883	+45,756	+9%
10.	GnomeTown	489,262	+44,421	+10%
11.	Zoo World	688,331	+41,664	+6%
12.	Cafe Life	264,085	+40,006	+18%
13.	It Girl	478,086	+38,597	+9%
14.	Athanaton-tr	33,124	+33,095	+114,121%
15.	Pet Society	1,125,384	+31,796	+3%
16.	Angry Birds Chrome	89,719	+31,193	+53%
17.	Cidade Maravilhosa	188,901	+28,709	+18%
18.	Shadow Fight	214,206	+27,578	+15%
19.	開心寶貝	169,655	+27,457	+19%
20.	Mynet Çanak Okey	542,721	+27,180	+5%

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

MindJolt, the casual-social gaming company run by former MySpace chief executive Chris DeWolfe, announces a new string of games today along with the news that the company has successfully transitioned its business model from advertising to virtual goods.

The announcement comes roughly five months after MindJolt acquired social mobile game company Social Gaming Network (SGN) and free online game network Hallpass Media. At that time, MindJolt was very clearly activating on DeWolfe’s strategy to expand off of Facebook onto mobile and open web platforms. The acquisitions also helped MindJolt bring much of its game development in-house, effectively educating the company on how monetize games through virtual goods sales as opposed to advertising.

The result, DeWolfe tells us today, is a successful pivot into a new business model with virtual goods now making up one-third of MindJolt’s revenues. Though he declines to give specific numbers, he confirms that annual revenues are in the tens-of-millions and expected to exceed the $20 million figure reported in November 2010. Since April of this year, the company has released or re-launched a handful of games on iOS, including Warp Dash, Master Shot, Dress-up – Fashion, and Mini Cafe.

In the next few months, we can expect to see seven new games out of MindJolt, the first of which DeWolfe says is coming to iOS in as few as a couple of weeks. The upcoming titles include Fluff Friends – Races, Bird’s the Word, and another game inspired by DressUp, which was a web game bought by MindJolt as part of the Hallpass Media acquisition.

The big challenge now will be tackling cross-platform releases, a task many social and mobile game developers struggle with. Currently, MindJolt is building native apps for each platform — web, Facebook, iOS and, eventually, Android — with only very light integration between games of the same franchise via Facebook Connect. The games essentially look and play the same on each platform, however, and DeWolfe says that this is helpful when it comes to promoting games cross-platform.

Another component of the cross-platform challenge is creating a critical mass of users that support the MindJolt brand. As of right now, the company says it has a pool of over 30 million mobile installs, over 70 million social platform installs on social platforms, and over 25 million unique monthly active users on the web. Moving eyeballs between these platforms is crucial in supporting new game launches — as other cross-platform developers like OMGPOP have experienced when shifting audiences between Facebook and iOS.

“We’re getting a trememndous amount of traffic and downloads from web,” DeWolfe says. “It doesn’t usually work to advertise something on the web and then have people go through the friction of the iTunes store, downloading, and then picking up their device and actually using it.” The near-identical appearance of the apps, he says, reduces the friction.

Going forward, MindJolt is also releasing its first in-house developed Facebook game today, titled Bubble Atlantis. Though still integrating the teams at SGN and Hallpass Media, DeWolfe tells us that the company is still “opportunistically” looking for game developer talent acquisitions or second-party partnerships. After successfully beefing up its mobile business, the bar is now higher for what MindJolt can do on social network game platforms and on open web.