This Week’s Headlines From Across Inside Network

• Oct 9th, 2011
Social Games

Links to all the news Inside Network brought you between October 3rd and 9th.

Inside Mobile Apps

Tracking the convergence of mobile apps, social platforms and virtual goods. 

Monday, October 3rd:

Tuesday, October 4th:

Wednesday, October 5th:

Thursday, October 6th:

Friday, October 7th:

Saturday, October 8th:

Inside Social Games

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

Monday, October 3rd:

Tuesday, October 4th:

Wednesday, October 5th:

Thursday, October 6th:

Friday, October 7th:

Saturday, October 8th:

Inside Facebook

Tracking Facebook and the Facebook platform for developers and marketers.

Monday, October 3rd:

Tuesday, October 4th:

Wednesday, October 5th:

Thursday, October 6th:

Friday, October 7th:

Saturday, October 8th:

New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: Lolapps, Jelli, CrowdStar and More

• Oct 8th, 2011
Jobs

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, Jelli, Entertainment Games, Mindspark Interactive, Acquinity Interactive, Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., TinyCo, Wild Needle Games and CrowdStar.

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 Gaming News Roundup: RockYou, Elvis, Cow Clicker, Mafia Wars Shakedown and Dungeons & Dragons

• Oct 7th, 2011
Social Games

Sony & RockYou Team for Zookeeper Promotion – Players of Zoo World 2 on Facebook will notice a few new features in the popular Facebook game soon. Sony has teamed with RockYou to add characters and activities tied to its movie Zookeeper. In addition to getting special edition animals to collect in game, players who purchase Zookeeper on Blu Ray will receive $10 worth of Zoo Bucks for the social game.

Report Reveals Social Media Strategies of World’s Largest Companies – Buddy Media has released the results of a study they conducted in association with Booz & Company that breaks down the social media strategies of more than 100 industry leaders. The resulting report titled “Campaigns to Capabilities: Social Media & Marketing 2011” revealed some very interesting facts. For example, only 35% of respondents indicated their company had a senior executive responsible for social media. The full report can be found here.

Cow Clicker Shuttered by its Creator - Game designer Ian Bogost has shut down his “protest against social games” social game Cow Clicker, according to Kotaku. Originally conceived of as a joke that aped only the worst features of free to play micro-transaction funded Facebook games, Cow Clicker proved to be unusually successful, much to the annoyance of Bogost. The entire article and interview can be read here.

Mobile MapleStory Game Launches in Japan, Only on Mobage - Nexon’s latest game MapleStory: Bokurano Boken, a social game based in the MapleStory universe, has made its debut on DeNA’s Mobage platform. As with previous iterations of the hit franchise, players of Bokurano Boken team up with other players to defeat monsters.

Hide Your Daughters, Elvis Coming to Facebook, Google+, Mobile - Games Blog is reporting that Entertainment Games has reached a licensing deal with Elvis Presley Enterprises to bring the King himself to their as yet unannounced, celebrity based, storyline-focused social game. In a press release, the Pennsylvania based company said that Elvis will be just one of the celebrities featured the the nostalgic themed game.

TeePee Games Expands Offerings Again – TeePee Games is aggressively growing its network. This week they announced a new deal with Alpha Digital Network to bring the Facebook game Lands & Legends to their platform.  Readers may recall last week we reported that UK based TeePee Games had inked a similar deal with SetGo bring aboard its game Castaways.

Car Town Teams With Walmart to Sell Fast Five Blu Ray – Cie Games has announced a promotional partnership with Walmart that will allow players of its popular Facebook game Car Town to pre-order Fast Five in virtual Walmart stores. Car Town has been promoting the auto racing movie since April, when Cie Games added a Rio de Janeiro race environment based on the movie’s key location to the game.

Former Mythic CEO Moves into Social Games – Two former heavyweights of the gaming industry have teamed up to venture into the red-hot social gaming market. Mark Jacobs, co-founder and former CEO of Mythic Entertainment and Andrew Meggs, former senior software engineer at Bethesda, Mythic and Trioka, announced last week that they had formed City State Entertainment in March. City State will focus on creating what it is calling “brand-focused” mobile and social games.

Mafia Wars Shakedown coming to Android? - Last week Zynga revealed that a new Mafia Wars game, Mafia Wars Shakedown, was coming to iOS. As they’ve done before, Zynga went on a domain name buying spree in anticipation of the launch. Tech blog Fusible noticed, Zynga registered several domains such as MafiaWarsShakedownAndroid.com, which point towards an eventual Android release. For the full list of Shakedown domains, read the Fusible article here.

You’ll Probably be Seeing More Social Game Movie Promotions – According to a study commissioned by RockYou, social gamers are also big fans of movies. The results showed that 41% of social gamers preferred to watch movies in the theaters, and that more than half of them had watched at least one rented movie in the last thre months. On average people who identified as social gamers had watched 15 movies in the last three months, four in theaters and 11 on DVD/Blu Ray/Streaming.

[Launch] CW’s Vampire Diaries Now on Facebook – TV is proving to be the next great frontier of Facebook Games, with the CW premiering The Vampire Diaries: Get Sucked In, on the social network. The game will build upon the plot of the TV show, challenging players to complete missions given to them by the show’s characters. The game is free, but also gives players the option of using Facebook Credits to purchase in-game items and new areas to explore.

[Launch] Dungeons & Dragons Officially Live on Facebook – Atari announced the official launch of Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes of Neverwinter on September 15; we got an early look at the game back in June. Neverwinter allows players to create their own characters and venture through dungeons slaying monsters and collecting items. Players can also take on the role of dungeon master, creating adventures that other players can complete.

[Launch] BBC’s Being Human Coming to Facebook as Social Game – Utinni Games is bringing the BBC’s ultra-popular supernatural drama Being Human to Facebook. Players will be able create their own characters and explore the universe of the TV show as they work through an extensive and persistent storyline, according to a promotional video on Utinni’s website.

[Launch] Ravenworld Expanding into RavenSkye City - Lolapps is adding more content to their hit Facebook game Ravenworld Fair with an expansion called Ravenskye City. According to the developer, Ravenskye maintains the look and feel of Ravenworld Fair, but adds more character development, more quests and allows for interplay between other Ravenworld games.

Social Discovery Works for Games on Facebook if You Trust Your Social Graph

• Oct 7th, 2011
Design, facebook, Social Games

Social games on Facebook might suffer from a lack of focus with no centralized “games” destination on the platform, but we’ve found that social discovery is a viable means of navigating games.

Over the summer, Facebook introduced new features to the games platform that were meant to restore some of the virality lost when the social network limited game posts to the news feed. The most striking of these features so far has been the Games Ticker, a live feed displayed to the right of a game on the Canvas page. This feed displays only games stories and the occasional sponsored story, which is a contrast to the general stories and occasional games story seen in Live Ticker that now appears on the default Facebook view.

From the Games Ticker, players can jump between active games by clicking directly on stories. Recently, Facebook also added a popover window to these games stories that allows players to comment on or Like a specific story, which can promote that game story to the players’ news feeds over time for increased visibility. Both of these activities serve to increase retention for individual social games, but it’s not immediately clear if it could increase installs for games.

It all depends on what motivates a player to click on a friend’s games story. Game developers can have some impact on this decision by crafting clever or amusing games stories that pique interest or at least appeal to the competitive nature of players (e.g. an Achievement story that says “Jane Doe destroyed John Doe with DOLDRUMS in Words With Friends by 86 points,” or a game install story that reads “Woo Hoo Jane Doe in The Sims Social”). A larger factor in play, however, is how much the player trusts other players’ judgement in social games — something over which the developer doesn’t have much control.

Here’s an example from our personal experience: While playing War Commander this week, we noticed Friend A generating stories in the Games Ticker from something called HappyLife. We didn’t click on these stories because that friend usually only plays pet sims and restaurant sims; ergo, we assumed HappyLife was more of the same (which it is). Friend A currently only has two social games in common with our own games library.

Meanwhile, Facebook Friend B generated stories in the Games Ticker from something called Hero Generations. We clicked on that story because we know this friend plays many of the same games that we play and he’s also a fan of role-playing games and strategy games. It comes as no surprise that Hero Generations is a role-playing game with strategy elements. Friend B currently has more than five social games in common with our games library.

Given the way we believe the Ticker’s algorithmic sorting works, we’re probably not going to see as many stories from Friend A going forward as we are from Friend B. The implications here interesting as players will unknowingly self-select into player types (e.g. “likes word games,”). Depending on how transparent this information is to Facebook or to developers, certain ads could be targeted to player types from the Sponsored Stories section of the Canvas page or from the Games Ticker itself.

Facebook and game developers might also be able to target “power players” that carry the most influence with their games stories whenever they begin playing a new game. A really dedicated developer could even grow a “power player” from within its staff to function as an additional means of user acquisition. For example, they could hire on a top player as a game moderator and trust that player’s social graph to do the rest, or task a community manager to friend specific influential players on Facebook so that their games are more likely to be discovered.

Heart Shaped Games’ Hero Generations Will Make You Famous on Facebook

• Oct 7th, 2011
Design, facebook, Reviews, RPG, Social Games, Strategy

IndieCade 2011 finalist Hero Generations from developer Heart Shaped Games for Facebook has a unique take on role-playing game genre in the form of heroes with finite lifespans determined by movement across a world map.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, Hero Generations currently has 1,523 monthly active users and 48 daily active users.

Hero Generations calls itself a hybrid of strategy and art game, where the goal of gameplay is both to achieve winning conditions and to invite the audience to think more deeply about a topic — in this case, the best use of a person’s time given a limited lifespan. The core gameplay involves players moving a hero avatar across a world map one square at a time. Each movement costs the player a certain number of years off that avatar’s life with an overall life expectancy meter gradually falling to zero as the player continues. While moving squares, the player will encounter a series of events from villages to enemies that impact not only their lifespan, but also a fame score. At the end of an avatar’s life, the fame score determines the player’s score which is displayed on a leaderboard.

The key twist comes in making choices about trading off years of an avatar’s life for fame. At certain points during an avatar’s lifespan, they hit “milestones” where they age and gain new attributes. By the time they hit middle age, the game suggests that the player seek out a mate for their avatar. Mates are non-playable characters that live in village squares; visiting one of these will cause the hero avatar to mate with the NPC, producing a new playable avatar that carries attributes of the parent hero (strength, life expectancy, stat bonuses, etc.). Additional traits are selected by the player from a set of face-down cards. Note that certain mates will not copulate with your avatar unless that avatar meets certain conditions (e.g. total fame points, money).

The primary way to gain fame is to explore the world map by moving squares and thereby complete certain quests. As the avatar moves, so do enemy NPCs in various squares inside and outside of the player’s view. Colliding with an enemy triggers a brief combat sequence where the player’s strength is calculated against the opponent’s strength, plus any bonuses either character may have from traits (e.g. the Warrior trait) or items (e.g. a broadsword). Winning combat earns the player fame while losing deducts years off the avatar’s lifespan. Certain quests pit the player against enemies with far superior fame and strength, which requires the player to spend more time avoid the enemy and exploring the map to gain the experience needed to beat the enemy.

Another way to gain fame is by building structures like towns, observatories, or barracks. Each structure costs the player a certain amount of soft currency and grants the player gameplay bonuses like extra strength points or revealing additional squares on the map. Towns also grant tributes to avatars when they visit the square if the avatar is carrying a treasure item back to the town from another location.

Hero Generations reaches “game over” if the player’s current avatar runs out of years in its lifespan. Play can continue if the avatar mates with an NPC before reaching the end of its life, but the map and quests are all reset as if the player had begun a new game. If the player leaves Hero Generations in the middle of a playthrough, the map also resets, but the playable avatar retains its fame and lifespan. At any point, the player can start completely over with a New Game option from the main menu.

Social features in Hero Generations are currently limited to the leaderboard that tracks a player’s highest fame score. The fame score is also tracked by avatars within a player’s generational family. Monetization comes from the game’s premium currency, Cards, which can be used to buy special items at shop locations on the map. Cards can also buy extra traits during the trait-choosing phase of mating. Other items can be bought with the game’s soft currency, Money, which is earned through exploration and combat.

Heart Shaped Games is actively tracking player responses to various components of gameplay with surveys. As the game is very new to Facebook, changes to existing features and new content are being updated regularly. IndieCade 2011 takes place from October 7 through October 9 in Los Angeles, CA; finalist games like Hero Generations will be displayed during the Game Walk event at the festival.

3D Slots, Dirty Dancing Top This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Games

• Oct 7th, 2011
AppData, Social Games

3D Slots slips past Dirty Dancing to claim the top spot on our list of emerging Facebook games. Even so, we expect the cult-movie-turned-social game to class out of this ranking as of next week if it continues its current growth rate.

We may also be bidding goodbye to City Wars and War Commander next week as both games appear to be on track toward breaking the 1 million monthly active user mark. Keep in mind that we use this figure as our cut-off point between “emerging” and “established” Facebook games because most titles that break this total continue on a growth track for a sustained period of time. However, as ESPN Sports Bar & Grill demonstrates at No.10 this week, a game may well return to this list after leaving it should MAU fluctuate around 1 million.

Quick note on FIFA 12: This app was not functional at time of press, so we could not verify its classification as a social game. It may be a community fan app for EA’s newly-released installment in its popular soccer video game series.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

Name MAU Gain Gain,%
1.  3D Slots 562,570 +275,521 +130%
2.  Dirty Dancing 852,738 +201,746 +31%
3.  City Wars 824,084 +200,541 +32%
4.  War Commander 814,997 +197,740 +41%
5.  Heroes of Neverwinter 384,166 +190,198 +145%
6.  House of Fun – Slot Machines 589,336 +179,519 +57%
7.  Sin City Holdem 666,886 +120,519 +24%
8.  Castle Age: Heart of Darkness 718,704 +89,532 +15%
9.  Fruit Ninja Frenzy 833,806 +84,084 +11%
10.  ESPN Sports Bar & Grill 972,316 +79,581 +9%
11.  CLASH : Rise of Heroes 407,558 +65,653 +19%
12.  Jungle Jewels Flash 761,543 +58,533 +9%
13.  Name Analyzer 155,337 +55,967 +56%
14.  FIFA 12 348,999 +53,685 +19%
15.  亂世天下 509,087 +53,146 +11%
16.  แฮปปี้เกาะ 582,665 +49,526 +9%
17.  Madden NFL Superstars 744,853 +47,627 +7%
18.  Punch Punch Revolution 284,605 +45,646 +19%
19.  Vampire Wars 744,704 +44,108 +6%
20.  Serf Wars 103,292 +43,428 +73%

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.

The Sims Social: 50 Days In and Gunning for CityVille’s Top Spot

• Oct 6th, 2011
AppData, Business, Design, facebook, Metrics, monetization, RPG, Sim, Social Games, zynga

After nearly two months of rapid growth, EA Playfish’s The Sims Social is at a critical moment in its traffic cycle where growth has slowed. Depending on how the game performs in the next few weeks, The Sims Social could go into a period of decline or finally unseat Zynga’s CityVille as the largest application on Facebook.

Current Traffic

As of figures tracked by our AppData traffic monitoring service today, The Sims Social enjoys 65.6 million monthly active users and 9.8 million daily active users. In the last seven days, the game has lost a little over half a million in DAU — which brings it down a total of 1.4 million from its all-time high in that category. Meanwhile, MAU has continued to grow, though at a much more modest 3% gain for the past week compared to the 9% growth experienced the week prior.

Cultivating Critical Mass at Launch

The Sims Social soft-launched in mid-August to a fairly large audience that was already aware of the game through extensive press coverage. Additionally, the game’s Page actively recruited fans by incentivizing its overall number of Likes with content reveals. By the game’s official August 19 launch date, The Sims Social already had 4.8 million monthly active users and 2 million daily active users. The first 30 days saw steady growth in MAU and overall growth in DAU punctuated by two sharp spikes in early September.

We cannot know for sure how much of The Sims Social’s early growth was due to advertising or user acquisition activities facilitated by Nanigans. We do know that while Nanigans is currently involved with the game, in early August EA Playfish denied that its partnership with the service provider included The Sims Social. We also know that EA updated its PC Sims series such that when users loaded up the game, an ad for The Sims Social appeared in the Game Launcher window.

It’s also interesting to note that EA revealed The Sims Social to press both through closed beta access and a party-like event that included attendance from Facebook’s Ethan Beard, Director of the Facebook Developer Network. In its core video game press campaigns, these EA party reveal events are common — but it’s almost unheard of for social game launches. As a result of that event, high profile video game press outlets covered the game, further extending The Sims Social’s reach beyond what other social games had been able to grasp with game launch announcements (although Zynga appears to have tapped the same outlets for Mafia Wars 2 pre-release announcements).

Sustaining Growth With Frictionless Virality

Progression in The Sims Social occurs on several fronts: Sim level, house value, and individual skill rank for various activities. The core gameplay loop involves players satisfying their Sim’s basic needs — hygiene, energy, bladder, hunger, fun, socialization — before setting them to performing various activities like cooking or painting or complete tasks like tending the garden or cleaning house. The better satisfied a Sim is, the more soft currency (here called Simoleons) the Sim can earn for performing activities. Money can be used to purchase new activity items and house remodeling or decoration items, which are restricted by the Sim’s level and their skill rank for relevant activities. Certain items can only be bought with Sim Cash, the game’s hard currency, which also can be used to bypass level and skill rank restrictions.

The first 10 levels of The Sims Social experience go by very quickly. The player doesn’t begin to encounter any real resistance to progression that might motivate them to buy Sim Cash until around level 12 when the game invites them to expand their house by adding a room. This activity is friend-gated such that the user needs three people to click Accept on a help invitation before the room is completed. For players reluctant to harass non-player friends, The Sims Social makes it easy to recruit help from the neighbor bar at the bottom of the screen by showing the Sims of the player’s friends on Facebook that are already active in the game alongside the friends that are already in-game neighbors.

Note: The Sims Social also contains a standard “Ask Friends” menu common to other social games that filters the player’s friends into All or Likes Games. Somewhat recently, the Likes Games filter was replaced by a Sims Friends filter.

Further reducing friction, The Sims Social was one of the first Facebook games to introduce the new Frictionless Requests before Facebook announced the feature in late September. This tool allows players to send in-game requests to friends using only one dialogue box as opposed to the old system that required a second approve-request dialogue box. We’d previously seen this feature being tested in Zynga’s Pioneer Trail. The Sims Social added it just a few weeks after its official launch.

Closing the loop is the request-fulfilment activity. When logging into The Sims Social, players are immediately shown all requests or gifts sent from friends — which is the norm for most social games. Clicking the Accept button on each notification clears most notification types from the list with only gift notifications remaining in place with an updated Send Thank You Gift option. Once cleared or when the player clicks Done on the bottom right hand side of the notification screen, the player is already in their game with most of the content loaded, as opposed to staring at a Free Gifts or Marketplace screen where some social games send users after clicking on notifications from friends.

Getting Greedy or Getting Needy?

Approximately two weeks ago, it appeared as though EA Playfish was experimenting with new growth tactics. An in-game pop-up that appeared frequently during our twice-daily play sessions would prompt the player to add new friends, suggesting users that were not already playing The Sims Social. These pop-ups have since decreased in frequency and haven’t shown up at all in today’s play sessions.

In this same time period, the developer introduced land expansions to the game that require the user to send out still more invites to friends to help in the form of gift items. Gift requests have also been divided into direct messages sent to friends via invites and wall posts that the player must hope some other Sims user stumbles on to fulfill.

Whatever the reasons for or the results of these changes, DAU began to decline around that time to its present-day levels. It wouldn’t be fair to draw a direct correlation between the two trends, but we are confident in saying that as players reach higher levels and “run out” of things to do that are unique to this game, The Sims Social starts to introduce content that resembles what we find in other RPG and house-decorating social games.

That’s Great, but Can The Sims Social Top CityVille?

The easy answer is: yes, it’s possible. It’s not a done deal, however, as Zynga still has its IPO trump card to play, plus a larger advertising and user-acquisition budget dedicated exclusively to social games, and a much larger network of users to leverage with cross-promotion.

Even with all those factors working for it, CityVille has age working against it. The game hit its critical mass of users between January and March of 2011 and it’s been all downhill from there. The decline, however, is steady and modest — down just 5% in MAU and 2% in DAU for the past 30 days. It actually appears as though Zynga will try to rally CityVille this month, with a high-profile celebrity promotion set to begin later this week. We’re already seeing slight gains across MAU and DAU reported for the past seven days.

If EA Playfish can keep MAU going and at the very least hold DAU steady throughout October, it has a real shot at toppling CityVille, assuming Zynga doesn’t do anything to flood its juggernaut with new traffic (e.g. launching an expansion or sequel, name-dropping the game in IPO announcements, etc.). The way things are going, however, it’s unlikely that The Sims Social will ever see the massive all-time traffic highs of 101.2 million MAU and 21.5 million DAU that CityVille enjoyed in its heyday. At best, The Sims Social can hope to take home the top spot in the leaderboards with just around half of that.

All data in this analysis was collected with our AppData traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

Russia’s Pixonic Ready to Bet on Facebook, Mobile

• Oct 6th, 2011
Business, facebook, international, Other platforms, Social Games

Russian casual game developer and publisher Pixonic got off to a late start on Facebook and mobile, but it hopes to launch up to five new games for the social network and 10 on mobile devices by the end of 2011.

The change in strategy coincides with Facebook’s rising prominence in Russia, Latin America and Europe where local social networks have traditionally held the lead in total number of register and daily active users. Since opening its doors in 2009, Pixonic focused primarily on Russian social networks like Odnoklassniki and MyMail.ru.

In 2010, the company shifted to European social networks like StudiVZ in Germany and nk.pl (formerly Nasza-klasa.pl) in Poland. Only in the last four months has the company taken a stab at Facebook with The Island: Castaway and Little Helper. The Island: Castaway reached an all-time high of 45,172 daily active users and 326,193 monthly active users one month after its July launch before declining toward its present-day levels.

“A year ago StudiVZ was the leading in Germany, Orkut in Brazil, and NK.PL in Poland. Now, they’re losing ground,” Pixonic CEO Elena Masolova tells us. “I think that those local networks still have two to four years on the market before Facebook becomes dominant.”

Masolova (pictured) does note that there are still some markets where Facebook has a long way to go before coming close to the top dogs — specifically in Asia where Mixi rules Japan, Korea has Cyworld, and Facebook is banned in China. Even Russia presents a significant challenge, she says, although most Facebook-oriented developers have been slow to realize this.

“If you look at Vkontakte, Odnoklassniki and my.mail.ru, they have more than 60 million registered users each and DAU is very high,” she says. “Many [longtime] developers on Facebook were missing this opportunity. They didn’t believe the market was large enough here. When we talk to them and say the numbers in several cases of games, usually they are surprised by the game and how fast it is growing.”

Pixonic’s business model is a hybrid of developer-producer-publisher that uses a mix of traditional partnership agreements and a partial ownership arrangements where Pixonic owns a majority stake in a studio in order to facilitate development on a game. Masolova says that Pixonic likes to be hands-on with its developers throughout the creative process, although there are times when the company will limit its involvement to investing in a company and then marketing its game. Altogether, Pixonic has 40 games to its name across 14 social networks, including Facebook. It also has a single title on iOS, Little Helper, which didn’t perform nearly as well on the U.S. social network as it did in the U.S. App Store, coming in at No.6 in top games the week of September 5, 2011.

“Little Helper was very much a Russian game,” Masolova explains, detailing the Russian fairytale story about a magical creature that clean people’s houses. “It was an experiment on Facebook. It’s going to be our first Android game.”

Pixonic is a bit more cautious in its approach to mobile, despite Little Helper’s apparent success. Rather than just proving the funds for its developers to creative native apps on iOS and Android, Masolova says the company prefers to choose its most successful social titles and handle all of the mobile porting itself. Pixonic then splits revenues with the original developer.

“For mobile, I don’t believe in [just] publishing,” she tells us. “First, the IP doesn’t belong to the publisher, it belongs to the developer. Second, in the mobile space, the advantage of having traffic — I’m not even sure that it exists. If you look at social, the advantage [of cross-promotion] is real.”

Going forward, Pixonic hopes to launch up to five games on Facebook before the end of the year — some from its existing catalogue of games, and some perhaps entirely new IP. On mobile, the company is looking at 10 titles in roughly the same time frame, of which seven will be ports.

Pixonic closed a round of funding in May, picking up $5 million from VCs Ventech, Kite Ventures, and TA Ventures. Combined with two smaller previous rounds, the company has $6 million in total funding.

New Hires in Social Gaming: 5th Planet, Vostu and Zynga

• Oct 6th, 2011
Hires, international

Hiring was down sharply this week in the social gaming space. At least according to data from LinkedIn and other sources. Eight companies hired just 12 new employees in total. Most of the activity was in the form of single hires, with only Zynga breaking the trend with a trio of new team members. This week’s highest profile move was Braden Moulton, who was RealNetwork’s director of business development, but left to take a position at 5th Planet Games as the chief business 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.

5th Planet Games

  • Braden Moulton, Chief Business Officer – One of this week’s highest profile moves is Moulton, who left his position as director of business development at RealNetworks to take on a new position at 5th Planet Games.

CrowdStar

  • Kari Wolkwitz, Consultant – CrowdStar brings on a single new face this week. Wolkwitz was formerly a research analyst at the Nevada Institute for Children’s Research & Policy.

Gameloft

  • Adi Pratomo, Project Manager - Gameloft brings on one new face and move up another employee this week. New hire Pratomo was formerly a consultant with Competitive Capabilities International.
  • Dwi Antoko, Android HD + Quality Assurance - Antoko moves up from his previous position as massports quality assurance at Gameloft.

King.com

  • Martin Evald, Game Developer – Evald moves from GJS Applications where he was a programmer and designer.

Lolapps

  • Skyler Leigh, Software Engineer – Lolapps also adds a new face, bringing on Leigh from Google where he was a software engineering intern.

Nordeus

  • Igor Stojković, Software Development Engineer - A single hire at Nordeus, who bring on Stojković from his position at Ascendant Technology where he was a consultant, portal and websphere commerce developer.

Vostu

  • Vincent Iadevaia, Designer – Two new hires at Vostu. First up is Iadevaia who moves from The Barbarian Group, where he was a production artist.
  • Daniela Álvarez, Community Analyst - Also joining is Álvarez, who comes from Círculo Huggies.

Zynga

  • Colin Fogle, Quality Analyst - A trio of new hires at Zynga this week. First up is Fogle, who was formerly a quality analyst at Edge of Reality
  • Vianney d’Hostel, Forum Moderator - d’Hostel also comes aboard, moving from the Franco-Thai Chamber of Commerce where he was a manager assistant.
  • Özgür Bayraktar, Community Specialist – Finally, Bayraktar who was a founding partner and director at Krombera.

The Big Bang Theory: Mystic Warlords of Ka’a Brings Popular Sitcom’s Favorite Game to Facebook

• Oct 5th, 2011
Board, facebook, Reviews, Strategy

Mystic Warlords of Ka’a is based on a fictional card game played by the characters in popular CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory. The game was brought to life on Facebook by Dire Wolf Digital, in conjunction with Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. Warner Bros. Television is one of the production companies on the show.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, The Big Bang Theory: Mystic Warlords of Ka’a currently has 65,760 monthly active users and 6,324 daily active users.

Mystic Warlords of Ka’a is a fairly straightforward, fantasy-themed collectible card game in the vein of Magic: The Gathering. Players square off in card combat with other Facebook users and their friends in an attempt to reduce their health to zero and win duels and battles. There are two different types of games, differentiated by the way the cards themselves are played, and both can be played directly or “auto-played.” The basic game system takes into account the rank and runes printed on each card, with higher ranks or runes overruling lesser ones, with the winning card dealing the amount of damage printed on it. When one of the players has their health reduced to zero, they lose. Participating in duels or battles requires energy, which refills automatically over time or can be purchased.

Cards are broken down into “squads” of 10, with players able to select two squads to enter battle with. Winning matches rewards players with coins and experience points. There is a quick duel mode, in addition to a story mode containing missions (various battles) to take part in. This mode includes the player’s Stronghold screen: a world view of Ka’a that features their stronghold, barracks, and other buildings that become unlocked as the player levels up and completes missions. These are locations that players use to build their squads and buy new cards. The screen is also home to the player’s airship, which can be used to go on raids, in which they battle to win ingredients used to craft special cards back at their stronghold. In another part of the game, players can challenge characters from The Big Bang Theory to duels five days in a row to earn special cards.

Players can invite friends to play the game with them and, once they’ve started playing, visit them once per day in order to earn extra energy, experience points, and coins, the latter coming from participating in a daily duel with their friends. Free gifts, including energy, cards, and crafting ingredients, can also be sent to friends.

The game is monetized via a combination of soft currency (coins) and Facebook Credits. Coins, won in combat, can be used to purchase additional cards and other items. Energy refills and additional coins can be purchased using Facebook Credits. Single cards, campaigns and stronghold extras including decorations can also be purchased using Facebook Credits.

Dire Wolf has been upgrading and patching Mystic Warlords of Ka’a on a regular basis since the game launched in July, and continues to do so. The developer recently recently overhauled the animation system, resulting in smoother gameplay, and has added new cards and other content.

This game marks Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment’s entry in social games. The video game publisher is best known for its core video game franchises like Batman: Arkham Asylum, Scribblenauts, and various licensed games around Warner Bros. Pictures properties. In the last year, the company has been acquiring developers to beef up its in-house offerings.

You can follow Mystic Warlords of Ka’a’s progress using AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

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