Hiring in the social gaming industry was steady this week, with eight companies reporting 10 new employees. According to data from LinkedIn and other sources Zynga showed the most activity this week with three hires. The biggest moves were at Loot Drop, where former Zynga employee Erin Hoffman came on as lead game designer, and Zynga, where Kevin Paskowski was promoted to a director level position.

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

• Jim Wagner, Community Manager – Vancouver based East Side Games begins our hiring roundup this week with a single hire. Wager was previously a video producer and marketing specialist at Hothead Games.

Game Insight

• Marina Goncharova, Senior Game Producer – Game Insight makes a rare appearance on our hires list this week. Goncharova was formerly the head of web division/digital producer at Noviy Disk.

Loot Drop

• Erin Hoffman, Lead Game Designer - Loot Drop adds Hoffman as lead game designer. She previously worked at Zynga as a lead systems designer.

Kixeye

• Matthew Hokanson, PHP Engineer - Kixeye returns to our hiring roundup for the second week in a row with the acquisition of Hokanson, who was previously a software engineer at Radical Fusion.

Playdom

• Bryan Diggs, Artist - Playdom brings on Diggs from UTV Ignition Entertainment, where he was also an artist.

Playtika

• Oran Almog, Graphic Designer – Playtika makes a rare appearance on our hiring roundup this week. Almog was a designer at DMNT before making the jump to Playtika.

EA PopCap

• Paolo Maninetti, Game Programmer - EA PopCap brings on Maninetti from Milestone S.R.L, where he was also a game programmer.

Zynga

• Kevin Paskowski, Director of Outsourcing/Art Coordinator – Zynga makes three moves this week. Paskowski gets a promotion to director of outsourcing/art coordinator. He was previously a 2D/3D artist and 3D outsourcing lead for Mafia Wars 2 at Zynga.
• Joey Knight, Quality Assurance – Knight moves from a quality assurance position at ArenaNet.
• JiHwan Jung, Animator - Finally, Jung was an animation apprentice at Rhythm & Hues.

As 2011 winds down, we’ve compiled this year’s Facebook games reviewed by Inside Social Games and measured their performance on AppData, our data tracking service.

Below are 2011’s top ten winners, defined for the purposes of this report as 1) Facebook games that officially launched between the start of the year and September 2011, which 2) have the highest current number of monthly active users with 3) current retention rates (DAU as a percent of MAU) of 20% or higher. This list only includes games reviewed by Inside Social Games during that period. Note that these factors distinguish our list from the top 2011 games rankings published by Facebook, which were compiled using a mix of active user counts and user reviews.

10 — Collapse! Blast: 240,000 DAU, 1.2 million MAU
GameHouse’s match-3 puzzle game launched in late July, reached a peak of about 1.25 million MAU before the end of August, and has maintained close to that level of users ever since.

9 — HotShot: 350,000 DAU, 1.4 million MAU
PlayQ’s pachinko-style arcade game that strongly resembles EA PopCap’s download title, Peggle, launched in early May and has enjoyed steady growth and strong engagement throughout its run, with a DAU/MAU rate well above 20%.

8 — GnomeTown: 340,000 DAU, 1.5 million MAU
Disney Playdom launched its fantasy-themed city sim game in July, reached a peak of over 500,000 DAU in September, and has remained close to that level for the remainder of 2011. The game got a significant boost a month or so after launch when the developer added Disney branding to the game’s interface and display ads.

7 — Slotomania – Slot Machines: 1.600 million DAU, 5.5 million MAU
Playtika’s slot machine gambling game actually launched in the final weeks of 2010, but only began showing strong growth toward the middle of 2011. It has maintained strong DAU/MAU rates through the year, even approaching the 30% range for several months.

6 — Zombie Lane: 400,000 DAU, 2.1 million MAU
Digital Chocolate’s zombie-themed RPG launched in March, enjoyed sharp growth from April to June, peaking at about 1.5 million DAU, then began a slow slide of users for most the rest of the year. Its growth finally stabilized around October.

5 — Magic Land: 520,000 DAU, 2.4 million MAU
Wooga’s fantasy-themed city sim launched in August, and has enjoyed strong, steady growth of DAU since then, reaching its current peak this month. A mobile companion game debuted on Facebook’s HTML5-based mobile platform in October.

4 — BINGO Blitz: 880,000 DAU, 2.8 million MAU
Buffalo Studios launched its Facebook-era update to the classic board game around the start of the year, and has enjoyed strong growth and very heavy engagement rates since, with a DAU/MAU rate in the 30-35% range for most of its run.

3 — Gardens of Time: 2 million DAU, 8.5 million MAU

Launching in April, Disney Playdom’s hidden object puzzle game enjoyed sharp growth in its first couple months, a slower growth rate in the next three months, then saw a steady but gradual loss of users starting in September. However, the game’s DAU/MAU rate has remained strong throughout its run, and has fluctuated between 22% and 26% in the last three months.

2 — Diamond Dash: 2.8 million DAU, 11.8 million MAU
Wooga officially launched its arcade-style matching game in March, and has maintained a DAU/MAU rate of about 20% since then. Growth of DAU has also been consistent, with the game reaching its current peak this month. The game went cross-platform on iOS at the beginning of December.

1 — Words With Friends: 5.6 million DAU, 13.5 million MAU
Zynga launched the Facebook component of its Scrabble-like board game in July, allowing Facebook users to play games against users both on desktop and mobile. Growth has been consistently strong since then, with the game reaching its current peak of MAU and DAU this month. Words with Friends has maintained retention of over 40% since October when Facebook debuted its mobile platform with the game as a launch title, making it by the far the most engaging game on this top ten list.

A notable absence from this list is EA Playfish’s The Sims Social, which launched in late summer and still maintains a very large userbase of 5.1 million DAU and 27.7 million MAU. The reason the game didn’t make our top is due to a decline in overall traffic begun in October that brought retention rates below 20%. Similarly, the DAU/MAU rate of Zynga’s Empires & Allies (now with 16.1 million MAU and 3.1 million DAU) has been trending below 20% in recent months. Other prominent absences from our list include 6waves Lolapps’ Ravenskye City (launched in October, 20% retention), Zynga’s CastleVille (launched in November, 21% retention) and Zynga’s Mafia Wars 2 (also launched in October, 8% retention).

Interestingly, no single game genre dominates our list: Three are classified as casual arcade, two are fantasy-themed city sims, and two are gambling-themed with just one RPG and one hidden object game, plus a Scrabble clone at the very top. Also notable: The top ten games were created by nine different developers, with only one, wooga, creating two of the ten. While previous years in Facebook gaming have been dominated by one genre (such as farming sims) or one company (such as Zynga), 2011′s most popular games suggest a growing diversity and sophistication of the market.

Seasonal promotions and Christmas campaigns are nothing new to social games, but this year Facebook game developers seem to have invested even more effort into holiday content.

We did a quick survey and found that 21 out of the 25 most popular Facebook games have incorporated holiday themes, items, quests, giveaways and content this year — a massive increase over last year, when we saw less than half the most popular social games put in the effort. Here’s a breakdown of the various ways in which these developers have introduced holiday-related content in the weeks leading up to Christmas and New Year’s Day.

Timed Holiday Quests

As seen in: Pet Society, CityVille, Animal Town

As most developers are already aware, adding new objectives and goals can maintain or raise retention rates in social games. Christmas offers the perfect excuse to roll out new quests that coincide with the holiday. In previous years, these themed quests had no time limit — but in 2011, most holiday content is now specifically timed to expire if the player doesn’t complete the quests before the holiday itself. These limited time quests may actually produce better retention rates as players feel pressured to log more time to complete the quests. This year we’ve seen games with lighter campaigns, such as Animal Land’s holiday plant and shop quests; and much more engaged campaigns that add to the overall plot of the game, like CityVille’s Holiday Saga.

Themed Decorations

As seen in: The Sims Social, Gardens of Time, The Smurfs & Co.

While social games monetize in a variety of different ways, one of the most common is through the purchase of premium decorations and items. Just as people decorate their homes and workplaces in real life, developers assume that some players won’t mind spending a few extra Facebook Credits on holiday decorations, particularly if the game has already made seasonal cosmetic changes that make those extra items seem even more appropriate and desirable. As with quests, the type of decor a game adds can range from something minimal but Christmas-inspired, like Tetris Battle’s present shaped tetriminos, to The Smufs & Co’s Christmas themed decorations that provide additional bonuses besides looking festive. The Sims Social’s in-game store is so far the only game we’ve seen that offers Hanukkah decor items like dreidels and menorahs.

Cosmetic Changes and Gifts

As seen in: Triple Town, Ravenskye City, Car Town, Bubble Witch Saga

Cosmetic changes and holiday giveaways are probably the lowest impact way for developers to incorporate Christmas into their games. This is a trend we’ve seen far more of this year as mid-market and smaller developers have invested more in art quality and presentation. Gifts are useful because they keep players logging in every day, and we’ve seen quite a few games doing 12 days of Christmas-themed events. However, what might be the most common theme of all this year is snow — a simple decoration that developers can automatically add to games without involving the player. Most cosmetic changes we’ve seen this year have been paired with premium decor items.

Seasonal Sales

As seen in: Tetris Battle, The Sims Social, FarmVille, The Smurfs & Co.

It’s a common practice for retailers to discount items in December to take advantage of relaxed credit card limits and increases in spending behavior, and we’ve seen a lot more developers add seasonal sales this year. Ubisoft has introduced a discounted Christmas decoration kit into The Smurfs & Co. that bundles together a value pack of the game’s new Christmas decor items and buildings, and Tetris Battle and FarmVille are taking an even more straight forward approach, discounting the amount of Facebook credits required to purchase in-game currency until after the holidays. The Sims Social offers less of a discount on holiday items in the Specials section of the store.

Charitable Efforts

As seen in: A Better World, FarmVille

Last but not least is a trend we’ve seen some developers pick up on — converting in-game items and quests into results for real-world charities. While there are a few social games that were created specifically with charity in mind, such as Sojo Studio’s new game WeTopia, this year we’ve seen a couple of games incorporate specific holiday giving campaigns. Toon Ups’ A Better World has challenged its players to perform a million good deeds in real life and report them in the game. If the goal is met by January 31st, the developer will donate $10,000 to Cure.org. Zynga has also incorporated its charitable arm, Zynga.org into FarmVille’s gameplay this year, allowing players to purchase special holiday themed decor items for their farms, the money from which will be given to Save The Children.

Zynga’s CastleVille launched on Facebook a little over a month ago and continues to grow. The game is now entering a critical period, however, where traffic may already begin to decline as several of Zynga’s more recent games have done.

Early Growth Slowing Down

Though CastleVille took off like a shot in the first 10 days of launch, we observed at the time that several of Zynga’s more recent launches have “burnt out” after only a short period of growth on the platform. In some cases, we’re beginning to see signs of recovery — such as a recent resurgence in monthly active users for Adventure World — but most of the games launched from Empires & Allies onward have experienced loss of users after about a month. This doesn’t necessarily mean that these titles have “failed,” as we know that games tend to see higher average revenue per users after early (non-paying) adopters drop out. A consistent decline in traffic across multiple new games, however, could indicate that Zynga is struggling to attract new users while longtime users continue to lapse.

According to our AppData traffic tracking service, CastleVille’s growth is slowing down. In its first 10 days, the game reached nearly 10 million monthly active users and almost 6 million daily active users. For the next 10, it grew 120% in MAU to around 22 million MAU and a more modest 26% in DAU to 7.6 million. For the 10 days after that period, growth slowed to 50% in MAU and just under 12% in DAU. In the last eight days, CastleVille has grown 15% in MAU and has lost 1% of DAU.

Gameplay Gives Players Lots to Do Early On

At launch, CastleVille provided players with a larger landscape that any other Zynga game (save perhaps for Adventure World) with familiar gameplay mechanics to get them started on opening up new areas of the playable map. There are 81 sections of land on a 9×9 grid that the player can only unlock by first having a minimum “castle level” (determined by what structures the player has built in their town), then by having a certain number of Exploration Crystals (which are crafted by gifted materials after the player has built a workshop), and lastly by spending a fixed amount of coins. Some sections of land contain bonus items like free structures or animals, a few have new non-playable characters that provide players with new quests, while others contain only new resources to be harvested.

Cast in the role of a medieval settler, players begin the game by meeting two non-playable characters that provide them with their first quests that involve clearing land and building structures. As players complete these quests and unlock new areas of the map, a main storyline guides them toward a search for the source of “Beastie” enemies that periodically show up as the player is completing everyday game tasks (e.g. harvesting crops or collecting money from structures). Certain “coming soon” structures discovered on the map (see below) imply that the player will be able to leave their map to explore some other terrain — much like the new gameplay mode Pioneer Trail expansion introduced to FrontierVille.

Where CastleVille differs from other social games is primarily in presentation and the amount of virtual items available at launch. The game has a rich art style and very high graphics quality and a soundtrack provided by a full orchestra. Aside from those features, most of the game’s core elements — farming, building, visiting friends, crafting, character and building customization — had previously been implemented in other Zynga Facebook games. CastleVille notably ditches the Collections system introduced first in FrontierVille, instead incorporating the collection element into the crafting system.

Scaling the Walls with New Features and Cross-Promotion

In the 40 days since launch, the developer has added decoration content packs and some minor tools to make the game more manageable (e.g. adjusting the crafting menu to display the last page the player viewed rather than starting at the very top of the list). It’s also now possible to sell most items in a player’s inventory, although the game still hasn’t introduced the item trading feature highlighted during CastleVille previews. Special holiday-themed quests and content have also appeared in the game within the last two weeks as we move closer to December 25th.

In general, we do not see decoration content packs kickstarting growth rates among games — particularly those that are still in their first three months on Facebook. Holiday content also doesn’t generate much growth as most players take a break from social games for at least a few days of the holiday season, which can bring down overall growth. More complex content updates that add new modes, however, may show traffic increases — and Zynga has been able to spike growth for some of its titles using cross-promotion between games.

The issue here is that the strongest cross-promotion comes from similar games and CastleVille could be missing out on that. For example, a CityVille cross-promotion in Mafia Wars did trigger a sharp climb in MAU and DAU for the latter — but nearly all the new DAU in Mafia Wars disappeared within the week likely because CityVille players found the text-based crime sim to be too different from city-building. In contrast, promoting Empires & Allies within CityVille in the first month of the former’s launch helped drive in early users as the games feature identical city-building mechanics. CastleVille is enough like FrontierVille to where one game could support the other with cross-promotion, but FrontierVille has suffered a serious decline after the launch of its Pioneer Trail expansion failed to migrate all FrontierVille users to the new app.

Storming the Castle in 2012

Based on the behavior we’ve seen from social game players on Facebook in the 2010 holiday season, we expect to see slowed growth or decline in traffic across most games in the last week of December continuing possibly into the first week of January 2012. A notable exception to this behavior is CityVille, which beat out the holiday slump in 2010 to become the largest Facebook app of all time in early January 2011. At this point, with growth slowing as it is, we do not expect CastleVille avoid this sluggish period. The game could, however, bounce back in early 2012 depending on Zynga’s cross-promotion strategy and on any major content updates the developer might make to CastleVille. New game releases — such as the upcoming Hidden Chronicles — could also trigger growth if those games are successful in attracting users new to Zynga games.

As for whether or not CastleVille will pass CityVille on our AppData traffic tracking leaderboards, we can only say it is possible — as the latter game continues to decline — but not likely to occur for another month or so.

Facebook has compiled a list of its most popular games for 2011, as well as lists of other games with notable achievements for the year.

The data was compiled primarily using active user counts and user reviews. Facebook adjusted its methods for counting active users in October, which may have had an impact on the final figures used to compile its lists. Facebook also tells us that, of its monthly gamers, 25% play at least ever other day with the average gamer playing more than three different titles per month.

Here’s the list of Facebook’s top 10 most popular:

Most popular games in 2011

1. Gardens of Time (By Playdom)
2. The Sims Social (By EA)
3. Cityville  (By Zynga)
4. DoubleDown Casino (by DoubleDown Entertainment)
5. Indiana Jones Adventure World  (By Zynga)
6. Words With Friends (By Zynga)
7. Bingo Blitz (By Buffalo Studios)
8. Empires & Allies (By Zynga)
9. Slotomania-Slot Machines (By Playtika)
10. Diamond Dash (By wooga)

Facebook also broke out special categories for the fashion, sports, and casino genres as well as a category for most popular games with 50,000 to 100,000 users and another for games with highest engagement figures in the 100,000 to 500,000 user category. You can check these out on Facebook’s blog.

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 Natural Motion Games, Social Point, 50 Cubes, 24MAS Group, W3i, Kubra and Acquinity Interactive.

• Product Lead

• Executive Producer/Product Manager

• Senior Game Designer / Producer

• Ad Sales for Facebook/Social Apps

• Manager- Regional Sales- US West

• Sales Executive – Online Marketing

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.

The under-served Facebook crossword puzzle genre gets a huge addition today with Crosswords from new social game developer PuzzleSocial. Through licensing agreements, the developer has secured many of the top crossword puzzle constructors in the United States to supply the game with new content daily.

Speaking to Inside Social Games, PuzzleSocial founder and crossword enthusiast Jeb Balise explains that though there are 50 million people in the U.S. that solve at least one crossword puzzle per week, only about 50 to 60 people are responsible for creating that content (we call them “constructors”). Fourteen months ago, he founded PuzzleSocial with the intent to create a crossword puzzle social game; in the last six months, he’s been able to secure the rights to constructors’ puzzles that appear in nearly all the major newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post. Incidentally, Balise says that many of the constructors and top competitive players featured in the 2006 documentary film “Wordplay” are also featured in the game. Bios for each of the puzzle constructors are available from the game’s main menu.

Crosswords is launching with two game types, two game modes, and four types of crossword puzzle that are updated daily. The game types are Singles or Doubles, where players complete the puzzle alone or with a friend. The modes are “for fun” or “for stats” where players can choose whether or not to rank their performance in solving a puzzle (speed, accuracy, etc.). Lastly, the puzzle types are divided by Newsday (the puzzles that appear in daily newspapers), A.V. Onion Club (which appear in the humor publication), CrosSynergy (which runs in the Washington Post), and a proprietary type called Celebrity where each of the daily puzzles is relevant to a piece of celebrity news gossip circulated that week. Each type gets new puzzles daily.

While playing Singles or Doubles in any of the daily puzzles, players can choose to receive word hints, reveal solutions for individual words, toggle a red-text “wrong” hint that shows players when a letter is incorrect, or reveal the entire board solution. All of these tools are provided for free, and players can even print PDFs of the puzzles to play with more traditional pen-and-paper. In Doubles, players are both playing the same puzzle in real time with each filling in words in their own time with no tracked score (although statistics will be counted if playing Doubles in stats mode).

Crosswords also features tournament and head-to-head competition play, which is one of the ways in which Crosswords monetizes. Players are given a certain number of “puzzle tokens” to spend on entering tourneys or creating head-to-head matches; additional tokens can be purchased with Facebook Credits. While in tourney mode or a head-to-head match, players are graded on speed and accuracy and do not have access to some of the puzzle-assisting tools available in the non-competitive modes. Head-to-head does lock correct words in place so that players cannot write over another player’s correct answer.

Scores also fluctuate in the competitive modes consistent with real life crossword competitions, where a correct answer is 1 point and an incorrect answer is -1 point. Taking a hint from Tetris Battle, Crosswords features a changeable level system where player can move up or down levels depending on their performance in tourneys or head-to-head. This determines which tourneys a player can enter, although in the future, head-to-head mode will allow players to challenge their friends at any difficulty level.

The second key way in which Crosswords monetizes is through ads. An integration with MediaBrix‘s ad platform allows the game to show players display or video ads just after completing a puzzle, similar to what Zynga is doing in Words With Friends. Viral mechanics include earning puzzle tokens for inviting friends to the game, and an “Add Friend” button that allows players to add strangers that they meet in tournaments or head-to-head mode to their Facebook friends list.

Crosswords launches on Facebook today. Developer PuzzleSocial currently has around 10 people on staff and is in the process of raising a first round of funding.

It’s the first week in over a month that we haven’t seen a Zynga game on our list of fastest-growing Facebook games by daily active users. Our top three spots this week are occupied by Ninja Saga, Diamond Dash, and Tetris Battle.

Diamond Dash made the jump to mobile early this month with a cross-platform iOS version. Just after the launch, Diamond Dash DAU jumped by 300,000 — which may be directly related to mobile users logging into the app with Facebook Connect. German developer wooga was one of Facebook’s launch partners for its HTML5-driven mobile platform, which does function on Android , so we expect to see Diamond Dash Android-bound sometime in the near future.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Ninja Saga	850,000	+280,000	+ 49%
2.	Diamond Dash	3,000,000	+200,000	+ 7%
3.	Tetris Battle	2,800,000	+200,000	+ 8%
4.	المزرعة السعيدة	1,300,000	+200,000	+ 18%
5.	開心水族箱	1,500,000	+200,000	+ 15%
6.	Magic Land	530,000	+120,000	+ 29%
7.	Galaxy Life	240,000	+90,000	+ 60%
8.	Men vs Women	190,000	+80,000	+ 73%
9.	Miscrits of Sunfall Kingdom	210,000	+60,000	+ 40%
10.	GodsWar: El Mejor 3D Juego De Fantasía	60,000	+58,000	+ 2,900%
11.	Bayou Blast	130,000	+50,000	+ 63%
12.	GnomeTown	360,000	+50,000	+ 16%
13.	PokeristClub	140,000	+50,000	+ 56%
14.	Pool Live Tour	760,000	+50,000	+ 7%
15.	Stick Run	320,000	+50,000	+ 19%
16.	Ninja Saga (Español)	150,000	+40,000	+ 36%
17.	Pool	50,000	+40,000	+ 400%
18.	Top Eleven – Be a Football Manager	1,000,000	+40,000	+ 4%
19.	Zoo World	300,000	+40,000	+ 15%
20.	Okey	500,000	+30,000	+ 6%

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

Read our reviews of…

• Ninja Saga
• Diamond Dash
• Tetris Battle
• Magic Land
• Men vs. Women
• Bayou Blast
• GnomeTown
• Stick Run
• Top Eleven
• Zoo World 2

With a makeover of its original hit game on iOS, Crowdstar is ending the year by pulling in 50 percent of its current revenues from mobile while the rest is coming from Facebook and abroad. (This isn’t a cumulative figure over the year. It’s revenue flow now.)

It’s a sign of the times as many of Facebook’s leading game developers have migrated toward more promising fronts on Android and iOS as growth for social games has slowed. Crowdstar, Zynga, Funzio and Booyah have probably had the most noticeable crossover success this quarter. Other Facebook stalwarts like EA Playfish, Wooga and Disney’s Playdom haven’t had as much visibility on the top-grossing charts, however.

This past week, Crowdstar retouched its iOS hit Top Girl by polishing the game’s artwork and relaunching it under the name Social Girl. Crowdstar’s changes underscore an industrywide trend toward higher production and better art, which we’ve seen in other titles like Tap Zoo 2 from Pocket Gems.

>> Continue reading on our sister site Inside Mobile Apps.

Facebook publisher-developer 6waves Lolapps has finally made its move into mobile publishing with Yeti Town and Splode Free now live in the App Store.

Both games are puzzle titles apparently developed by smaller games studios and published by 6waves Lolapps. Yeti Town is a matching game nearly identical to Spry Fox’s Triple Town; Splode Free is a music-and-color puzzle that challenges players’ sense of timing. Both games are available for free, with Splode Free’s title implying that a paid version is on its way. Splode developer Escalation Studios previously published its mobile game, Dr. Awesome, through ngmoco.

UPDATE: 6waves Lolapps tells us Yeti Town was also developed by Escalation Studios.

As more mature companies on Facebook expand their operations into both publishing and mobile game development, we’ve been curious to see whether those same companies would attempt to become mobile publishers. So far as we know, 6waves Lolapps is the only company that’s combined both branches of business, while developers like Zynga and Crowdstar have stuck to developing and self-publishing their own titles for mobile even as they consider expanding into Facebook game publishing. (However, Zynga recently hired Sony executive Rob Dyer to be its head of partner publishing, suggesting it’s closer to marrying mobile to publishing.)

Mobile is a very different story. While traditional video game developer EA has expanded many of its own franchises onto iOS and Android, it also acquired Angry Birds-publisher Chillingo for third-party games. DeNA’s ngmoco also simultaneously maintains arms for in-house content and third-party apps. Plus, several game developers like TinyCo, Crowdstar, Gamevil and more have opened funds to tease out promising developers to partner with.

6waves Lolapps was born of a merger between Facebook publisher 6waves and Ravenwood Fair developer Lolapps. The company closed a $35 million round of funding led by Nexon shortly after the merge, and has since launched a developer fund aimed at publishing games for both social and mobile platforms, and acquired Chinese developer Smartron5, which is currently working on both mobile and social titles.