Younger players from ages 18 to 24 may be the most active gamers in terms of the minutes they spend in apps compared to other age groups. But older players account for the vast majority of revenue, mobile analytics company Flurry found.

The company looked at 20 million users across all of the freemium games it supports. (Flurry has about 110,000 apps in its system.)

The company found that while 18 to 24-year-olds make up 32 percent of the time all players spend in freemium games, they only bring in 16 percent of overall in-app purchase revenue. In contrast, players ages 25 to 34 bring in nearly half of in-app purchase revenue even though they make up 29 percent of the time spent in freemium games. Thirty-five to fifty-four year-olds account for 28 percent of revenue even though they only account for 14 percent of time spent in games.

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

Car Town developer Cie Games announced an international expansion into Asia today with the opening of a Japan office in Tokyo. Its first project, Car Town Japan, launches on DeNA’s Mobage mobile social network before the end of the week.

Speaking to Inside Social Games, Cie Games CEO Justin Choi explains that while Car Town has been and continues to be localized in other languages, the Japan expansion is significant because it creates an international infrastructure for game releases. This strategy differs from other social game developers that rely on partnerships for distribution in specific international regions.

“When we launch future titles, you’ll see us deployed internationally much more quickly on multiple platforms,” Choi says. “We are planning on opening additional offices. We are going to use Japan as a hub to expand into other markets in Asia.”

Before Cie Games begins launching new intellectual property, the developer is focusing on a mobile version of Car Town separately from Car Town Japan. This game is due out on iOS and Android “soon,” according to the press release announcing the international expansion. Car Town Japan, meanwhile, will be operated as completely independent product out of the Tokyo office.

Car Town Japan features a region-specific look and feel while retaining the core gameplay features of the Facebook version. In the game, players race cars to the point of winning virtual currency to spend on buying more cars, upgrades for cars, and decoration options. A key element of the game is the inclusion of real life automotive brands.

While the game is live on Mobage as of this week, attendees of the 2011 Tokyo Game Show will have a chance to play the game at the event next week. Car Town currently enjoys 5.8 million monthly active users and over 770,000 daily active users on Facebook, according to AppData traffic tracking service.

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 Social Point, lolapps, King.com, Majesco Entertainment, TinyCo, 5th Planet Games,  Acquinity Interactive, Kobojo and W3i.

• Product Manager , Social & Mobile Games
• Game Developer

• Mobile Games Senior Marketing Manager

• iPhone Developer
• C++ Game Engineer

• Mobile Game Developer (iOS)

• Product Manager – Social Gaming

• Senior Online Web Product Manager
• Online Marketing Manager
• Junior Online Media Buyer

• Social Media/ PR Manager

Listings on the Inside Network Job Board are distributed to readers of Inside Social Games, Inside Facebook and Inside Mobile Apps through regular posts and widgets on the sites. Your open positions are being seen by the leading developers, product managers, marketers, designers, and executives in the Facebook Platform and social gaming industry today.

Brazilian social game developer Vostu announced the acquisition of MP Game Studio today and plans to consummate the deal with a new online game due out this month.

To date, MP Game Studio specializes in developing games for licensed intellectual property. Some of its partners named in the press release announcing the acquisition include Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, TNT, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Unilever, National Geographic, Clarin Group, and Miniclip. Its highest-profile games include two Ben 10 titles, two SpongeBob SquarePants titles, an Avatar: The Last Airbender game, and a mash-up fighting game that combines several Nickelodeon characters.

This acquisition could put Vostu in a more favorable position for developing licensed games. Up until now, the developer has produced one soccer title and a handful of games that come close enough to cloning Zynga’s FarmVille, Cafe World, CityVille, and Texas HoldEm Poker as to provoke lawsuits. By working with licensed IP, Vostu could shield itself from legal drama while leveraging a preexisting fan base to drive growth in its games.

Vostu’s primary audience is based in Latin America where its games run on a proprietary platform in addition to Orkut, Facebook, and MSN. According to COO Matias Recchia, the company has an audience of 42 million registered users; our AppData traffic tracking service shows 2.7 million monthly active users across all Vostu games available on Facebook.

Social Point’s Social Empires squeezes past The Sims Social to claim the top spot on this week’s list of fastest-growing growing Facebook games by daily active users. Mystery Manor rounds out the top three.

Casino, card, and slot games still make up a healthy chunk of this list this week. JackpotJoy Slots drops off as of press time, but Slotomania, DoubleDown Casino, Texas HoldEm, and SlotSpot all turn up here as the genres expand and converge.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Social Empires	827,038	+486,098	+143%
2.	The Sims Social	7,996,772	+465,676	+6%
3.	Mystery Manor	509,376	+173,058	+51%
4.	Diamond Dash	2,126,432	+134,673	+7%
5.	DoubleDown Casino	938,740	+110,688	+13%
6.	FantaBook	129,027	+87,408	+210%
7.	Mahjong Saga	644,520	+85,427	+15%
8.	Barn Buddy	460,873	+80,795	+21%
9.	Texas HoldEm Poker	6,821,775	+79,649	+1%
10.	Slotomania – Slot Machines	1,424,971	+75,854	+6%
11.	Bubble Island	2,007,868	+74,029	+4%
12.	Total Domination: Nuclear Strategy	199,741	+72,584	+57%
13.	Komşu Çiftlik	752,615	+70,189	+10%
14.	SlotSpot – The Premier Slots Destination	248,143	+69,945	+39%
15.	Magic Land	362,311	+68,834	+23%
16.	Games	1,900,017	+64,051	+3%
17.	The Smurfs & Co	1,422,484	+63,849	+5%
18.	Top Eleven – Be a Football Manager	924,021	+56,306	+6%
19.	BINGO Blitz	572,700	+51,839	+10%
20.	Collapse! Blast	161,826	+41,714	+35%

It’s been a while since we’ve seen Mystery Manor on our weekly rankings of games by traffic. The hidden object game typically turned up behind Playdom’s competing title, Gardens of Time, but here we see it standing alone in the top three. Earlier this week, Mystery Manor’s recent growth spike pushed it into the top 10 on our fastest-growing games by monthly active user list. Gardens of Time, meanwhile, is experiencing a shallower growth spike.

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

Facebook announced a “Labor Day” edition of its platform updates that reveals a streamlined payflow option for Facebook Credits.

Developer now have the option to omit the Credits “bulk-discounted” packages from the pay flow. Facebook provides the following screenshot:

Developers are able to A/B split test the streamlined pay flow to determine what impact it may have on user spending. Facebook often tests new Credits features like these, such as the Frictionless Credits function, however it hasn’t done anything big with Credits features in recent months.

At this point, developers are looking for ways to keep players in-game at all times — even when paying for things. A big step in this direction would be a tweak to the games platform that stops users from automatically exiting full-screen mode whenever a Facebook dialogue box appears. Sean Ryan, Director of Games Partnerships, mentioned such an improvement last month during a press event detailing significant platform updates.

PopCap Games has long adopted a “What happens in Asia, stays in Asia,” approach to its business in the region, giving the unit an unusual level of autonomy to experiment with and localize its titles.

That hands-off approach may be starting to pay off.

The Asia unit is set to contribute about 10 to 11 percent of PopCap’s overall earnings, up from about 5 percent in previous years, according to James Gwertzman, who heads the unit for Electronic Arts. Before it was acquired by EA, PopCap said it made more than $100 million in revenue last year so a back-of-the-envelope guess means we may be looking at a runrate of about $15 million for the Asia business alone.

PopCap’s recent release Plants Vs. Zombies Social also reached close to a half-million daily active users on Renren this past week, thanks to an aggressive marketing campaign by the Chinese social networking platform on behalf of the gaming company.

This traction didn’t come easily however. It’s the product of more than five years of investment and relationship building in the region.

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

2011 will be remembered as the year that Zynga filed for its IPO, Google launched Google+, and Facebook executed the Credits transition. With the first potential social gaming IPO, Zynga plans to raise up to $2 billion to fund its continued global expansion. Meanwhile, Google is putting its weight behind what appears to have the potential to be the most serious competitor to Facebook as a social gaming platform in North America since the demise of MySpace. And at the same time, developers are still navigating through the Facebook Credits migration, while many are also expanding substantially onto mobile platforms to increase growth and expand reach.

Inside Network is proud to announce a new original research report by Justin Smith and Charles Hudson that is exclusively focused on the future of the social gaming market, entitled Inside Virtual Goods: The Future of Social Gaming 2012. This is Inside Network’s third annual edition of the Future of Social Gaming report. It will be released on September 20, but is available for discount pre-order now.

How big is the market, and where will social gaming go in 2012? How will existing players fare as Facebook Credits shifts the social gaming landscape and continued changes to the platform? Inside Virtual Goods: The Future of Social Gaming 2012 provides deeper insight into social game monetization, development, customer acquisition, and the key questions facing the space in 2012 than you’ll find anywhere else.

About the Report

Inside Virtual Goods: The Future of Social Gaming 2012 gives you an inside view of the future at this critical juncture in the intersection of social networking and online games.

We have compiled months of original research from dozens of top executives and entrepreneurs from all parts of the social gaming ecosystem to produce eye-opening source data and analysis that is not available anywhere else. Inside Virtual Goods: The Future of Social Gaming 2010 takes the closest look at the present state of social games and the future of this strong but still rapidly changing industry.

What We Cover

1. Facebook Credits and the New Monetization Landscape: Early Results - Now that the transition to Facebook Credits was completed on July 1, what are the early results that developers are reporting? We take an in depth look at metrics and trends.
2. Will 2012 (Finally) be the Year of Mobile Social Games? – Now that mobile games monetizing through the virtual goods model are becoming a bigger market in the US and around the world, many social game developers have expanded their efforts to tap these new platforms as well.  Will 2012 finally be the year that social games take significant root on mobile?
   
3. Social Game Development and Design – How do small, medium, and large developers organize their teams? What do development cycle times for original titles and “expansion packs” look like? What is the role of testing and metrics in the development process? A few key game genres with proven mechanics and monetization have spawned dozens of fast followers. Understand how publishers are continuing to innovate as we head into 2012.
4. Monetization Data and Payment Trends– Now that developers have proven the virtual goods model, what are ARPUs, ARPPUs, and LTVs really like for different game genres? What is the lifetime value of users, and how long do players stick around? We take an in depth look at monetization methods and rates, and shed light on where payments are headed in the coming quarters.
5. Customer Acquisition and Marketing Trends – As the social gaming landscape has evolved over the past four years, so have the ways that developers acquire and retain new users. How have user acquisition costs changed, and what do Facebook’s changes spell for the future of the marketing funnel? We take an in depth look at data and trends.
6. Facebook’s Platform Changes, and What’s In Store for the Future – Facebook has continued to change Platform communication channels and functionality over the last year, significantly altering the way social games reach users through Facebook. Continued change is likely – what will it be, and how will it impact the industry? Finally, will we see another platform (like Google+) emerge? Our overview covers these developments, their impact on the industry, and what else is in store.

What you get

In addition to our deep dive into key aspects of the social gaming ecosystem, the report also offers extended coverage on:

• A brief history on the evolution and growth of this space in the US, including a description of all key players and how they rose to the top.
• Total social gaming market size estimates for 2012.
• Our take on the key issues facing the growth of social gaming, including our outlook and projections for 2012.

More Data, More Actionable Insights

In 2011, social games continued to show what kind of value can be created on top of social networks. 2012 will be an even more important year.

Social gaming, powered by virtual goods, continues to expand. If you’re involved, or are considering jumping in, Inside Virtual Goods will be one of your most important tools.

One year of original data and exclusive in-depth reports delivered on a quarterly basis is $2,495 and contains:

• A detailed overview of the current state of the industry
• Specific estimates on market size by segment
• Diagnosis of key opportunities and issues by segment