In our third panel of the day, Inside Network editor Eric Eldon is moderating a panel on monetization, platform growth and Facebook Credits.

The panelists:

Deb Liu, Commerce Product Marketing, Facebook
Kevin Chou, Co-founder & CEO, Kabam
Rex Ng, Co-founder & CEO, 6waves
Jens Begemann, Founder & CEO, Wooga

EE: What has changed on the Facebook platform from a year ago to today?

RN: I think the notifications changes hit pretty hard, and you can see the results in DAU. We haven’t done as badly because we have a lot of games on the network, and smaller, niche games have also done OK.

KC: When we saw the shift in messaging features, we started to focus on content that appealed to a very specific set of people on Facebook. We really wanted to say, how do we create content for a very specific type of audience for whom there’s very little gaming content they want to engage with? We purposely didn’t design many viral features in, and that served us well. It became a big challenge to find that audience, but once we did it was a nice business.

EE: What were features that Facebook changed that really made a difference in 2010?

KC: We purposely said, if we’re going to make a core game mechanic, let’s not design it around a social channel, because we want that mechanic to be totally a content experience instead of wrapping it around a communication channel that may or may not be useful.

JB: Bookmarks are now more prominent — if you play a game more often, it moves up on the bookmark bar. That’s one of those things, if you don’t spam people, but they want to play, they’ll click on that bookmark.

EE: Rex, your business is a bit different, you distribute games. How has that changed? Do you consider cross-promo bars competitive?

RN: Not really. The difference between us and them is that we drive a lot of users into a game very quickly, where they’re slower. A lot of developers are using them to trickle traffic in for testing.

EE: How are other markets developing?

JB: At Wooga, we’re extremely strong in Europe, and in 2010 Facebook grew a lot in key countries for us. It looks like 50 percent of the population is becoming Facebook users, that is the magic number. In those countries where it’s less, that’s where the growth is coming:

RN: Right now our traffic is pretty balanced in Europe, the USA and Asia. I think there are emerging markets, and the games there have higher virality and retention, so it’s easier to go into those countries, and I’m bullish on there being more and more of those.

EE: Which countries will be big in 2011?

RN: I actually like eastern Europe. A lot of the western European games would actually transfer very well.

KC: We’re interested in international growth, but it can also be distracting to chase new markets. As we think of the core gaming markets and the 18-34 male, we’re most interested in North America as a huge market that we just want to serve better and better. As we look at priorities, we think about, not just how much will it cost us for localization and customer support, but how much does it slow down development? How much do those other versions of the game lag behind? That’s a tradeoff that’s easy to overlook. We do have a significant and growing portion of our revenue overseas, but we see a big opportunity at home too.

EE: Deb, how do you feel about it at Facebook?

DL: We’ve been ramping hugely, we’re working with 150 developers and 70 percent of transactions are through Credits.

EE: I’ve heard some negative things from developers, that they’d go out of business if they had to implement Credits…

DL: Every day, developers get to choose between our platforms and other platforms. We think a platform that includes payments is much more compelling. Having users available, the millions of credentials already there when a developer comes to the platform, can be a big positive.

EE: How will you work with developers to help them make more?

DL: Over the next five months, we’d like to open the doors and hear from our developers, what’s working and not working? Some people have already sent us very detailed data, what works in which country, and that’s what we need. Not every developer has the ability to hire a payments person, build out a system, and collect all the credentials. If someone is playing five games, and have to pay separately in each, that’s a lot of friction.

EE: Can you go into any more detail on your efforts?

DL: We’re definitely expanding our payment footprint. We’re continuing to expand to new countries, new payment options, we have partnerships with PayPal, TrialPay and others. Those things are important, because it’s not something that a developer can do on their own. We have gift cards in stores, etc. Another thing we’re doing is really building up a virtual currency system and building in liquidity. And if you have Credits, you’ll be able to participate in future promotions on the Games Dashboard. We’re actually releasing a new feature for micropayments that developers can have directly in game.

EE: Is there more you can share to let developers know what your plans are?

DL: I did want to mention one more feature we’ll be releasing, Buy With Friends. If a user wants to, they can share a purchase they made in the game with their friends. We found that more than 50 percent of users actually elected to share their purchase, and their friends can elect to buy the same thing — get 40 percent off this special monster food, etc. We’re really innovating on social purchasing, and you’ll see a lot of these features roll out over the next few months.

EE: Kevin, your company actually doesn’t use Credits. How do you feel about this?

KC: What’s emerged for us is that we have a very different payment ecosystem. We have a lot of stored value… as we transition to Credits, how do we recreate the payment flows that are unique to our game, and create a similar experience? The other thing when we’re thinking about the program, is that when Deb says there are things only a platform can do, that’s very correct. So how does Facebook get people to not only think of the platform as a virtual economy, but also get more stored card accounts in? The numbers I hear are that Apple has about 160 million.. Deb will have to speak for Facebook. But that’s a huge amount of value, and the ability to reduce that friction in a payment process is so key to the whole ecosystem, that if Facebook can create that…

Audience question: Will there be a policy about killing off payment processes? Will others be prohibited from using other payment flows?

DL: All payments will go through our process, but we actually have a relationship with PayPal that allows us to go through a really seamless flow with them. But yes, you’ll be prohibited.

Audience question: I’m curious about where Credits is going in terms of Facebook’s plans for ecommerce.

DL: We really built Credits with virtual goods in mind.

Audience question: I’ve heard a lot of horror stories about promotional Credits, where you see a high spend and then find out you only earned 50 percent of what you saw. What’s the plan to make sure people aren’t screwed?

DL: We actually seeded many of our users over summer of last year and giving out promotional Credits. This was an opportunity to educate users, and a lot of them came back to make more purchases. We’re not planning a massive seeding campaign again. We may do targeted campaigns again, but not a massive one.

RN: In the beginning, we took a pretty hard hit. But over time it progressively went to a more sustainable portion, for us it’s around 10 percent. So it’s OK, because it brings more people who hadn’t paid before. I think it’s positive for us.

JB: I’ve been talking to a lot of developers who tell me that 60 to 70 percent of their volume is promotional. At Wooga we’ve been using them for a long time — what I can tell you is that when the promotional Credits rolled out the paid volume stayed the same, and there was a huge spend on top of that. Our revenue never went down. I think probably long-term they had a positive effect.

DL: I do want to say, this is actually a reporting issue, and one of the things we weren’t great at was getting reports to users to help them understand.

EE: Across a lot of games, when people buy a block of game currency, the left over game coins were a big incentive to make impulse buys later. Do you have any plans to structure Credits so that people make similar impulse buys?

DL: One of the good things about Credits is that there are usually some left remaining, and also our gift card systems will do that, and there will be other websites that drive Credits purchases. It’s having a balance and liquidity to spend, and we’re seeing really good conversion.

EE: You’re trying to get people to use Credits as their in-game currency, but some developers think it’s better to have their own. Why are you pushing that?

DL: Developers have a choice today. But we’re offering additional incentives to developers who use Credits as their in-game currency, and we think it’s really good for education.

Audience question: Our game is similar to Kevin’s, and we’re very dependent on our whales. Facebook Credits converts really well for small payments, but it seems to be really poisonous to the whales — overwhelmingly, people will choose PayPal, especially when you get up to $500 or more. We’re really concerned that will erode our audience. If we’re going to prohibit people from making that choice, how will that affect an app that works on multiple platforms? Could a user go to an open web version to buy currency for a better rate than they do on the canvas?

DL: I think you have a couple questions. One, you’re asking about whether our system works well for whales. We’d like to take a look at your data. In the next five months, we want to learn about these kinds of things. In the second part of the question, the ability to make purchases on the web, the policy applies only to the Facebook canvas. One thing that’s important to us is that there be price parity, but in your case, let’s talk about it.

Facebook, and social gaming, appears to be a vastly different place for game developers today versus just a year ago. While social gaming visibly grew at astounding rates through 2009 and into early 2010, producing massive successes like Zynga, growth seemed to suddenly stop in the spring of 2010 as Facebook began limiting the viral channels that made big gains possible.

Since then, Facebook itself has repeatedly changed the rules that app developers play by, and has increasingly forced usage of Credits, a virtual currency that skims 30 percent of in-game sales when used, leading some developers to conclude that Facebook is now too difficult to work on.

Growing a game on Facebook is certainly more difficult today than it was in 2009. However, the view that succeeding is too difficult, and that growth has ended on Facebook, is belied by the experience of savvy developers, and hard data about Facebook apps from our AppData tracking service.

Our own view of the Facebook market considers each facet of the market separately. Here’s what we’ll cover below, in brief:

1. Overall audience size for large developers has declined on average, but this is not necessarily cause for concern
2. Small and medium-sized developers are steadily growing
3. Good game design is increasingly important and effective
4. Monetization is improving in several ways

Large Developers

Before we can look at the performance of games across all Facebook developers, we should split out data for what were considered the “top 5” developers on Facebook in early 2010: Zynga, Playfish (now part of Electronic Arts), CrowdStar, Playdom (now part of Disney) and RockYou. This is because views that Facebook’s heyday has already ended are largely based on the performance of this handful of companies.

The trouble for these developers began last March, when Facebook made the first of several viral channel changes that would end their fast-paced growth:

The above table is not an entirely straightforward measurement of how any of the five developers listed is doing, since MAU / DAU measurements alone don’t directly predict revenue; CrowdStar and RockYou also lost significant amounts of traffic from non-game quiz and gifting apps. Even so, only Zynga is arguably doing about as well as it was in early 2010, and only with the massive success of its brand-new game CityVille. Its four competitors lost 30 percent or more of their DAU, which is the best publicly-visible predictor for success.

If Zynga, with over $500 million in venture capital, can’t continue growing on Facebook, what chance do smaller players have? This question has clearly resonated with the wider community; many Facebook developers are now shifting their attention to smartphone games, and investors have by and large ended their investment in pure-play web-based social gaming.

In our view, however, the market still offers healthy opportunities. Expectations were distorted by the outsized success, over just a year or two, of Zynga and its peers. Before the social gaming boom, it typically took several years to build successful companies; now that the “boom” is over, this reality has resumed. The fact that more players of Zynga’s size have not popped up in less than a year of Facebook’s matured social gaming market is neither remarkable or distressing.

This view proceeds from real market data, which we dive into in the following two sections.

Small and Medium Developers

We first found evidence that the social game market was growing for small- and medium-sized developers last September, when we looked at a dataset of 250 Facebook games using AppData. The nascent trends that we discovered at the time have continued as we’ve updated our data. (Note that you’ll need to be an AppData Pro subscriber in order to access full categorized historical data.)

Three brief notes on methodology. First, we’re again measuring daily active users (DAU) here, which (along with other sanity checking) is the best public indicator of healthy engagement. Second, the specific games measured change from month to month; the list includes only the top 250 games for each given month, with a natural churn of older titles slipping off the list and newer ones taking their place. Finally, these users are non-deduplicated, meaning that one person can be counted as a DAU for more than one game; however, since such power-users often monetize well, that is not a problem for our purposes.

The first trend is a flattening of growth for the social game market as a whole. The chart shows one significant uptick at the end, caused by CityVille:

From here, it would be an easy guess that if the “top 5” developers considered above are uniformly declining but the market shows a plateau, some other group is experiencing growth.

To measure this growth, we simply remove games by the top 5 (again, these are Zynga, Electronic Arts, CrowdStar, Playdom and RockYou). This leaves us with a set of about 175 titles, which do show gains:

Note that the above chart, and the two that follow, show a dip at the end, unlike the top 250 chart. This dip is a predictable effect of Christmas, when growth slows for all social games, and is (we think) only temporary; we’ll check again when we record the numbers for February. Still, the chart shows growth of about 23 percent over the course of a year, and 40 percent from the low point in May 2010.

The largest games in the set above include a dozen titles with over a million daily active users, like Millionaire City , Monster World and Car Town – all of which were launched after Facebook made its spring changes that impacted viral growth. In all, the top 25 games excluding the “top 5” includes 22 different developers, all of whom have enough DAU to succeed if their users are well monetized (more on this in the next section).

We can get a final, and most impressive, look at growth by considering games 26-175 on our list from AppData, which takes us from titles developed by growing medium-sized companies down to very small developers:

In the past year, DAU traffic to these titles has more than doubled. In other words, more developers than ever are growing. Among the full top 175, excluding the top 5, the number of games with over 100,000 daily active users rose from 67 last February, to a peak of 107 right before Christmas.

It’s Not the Size of the Boat…

One measure of success that can’t be easily shown in the above graphs is relative profitability of games. Most companies keep this data close to their chests; however, ARPU (average revenue per user), for different games can vary widely, even within the same genre.

Understanding of the correct methods for monetization has varied widely between developers. However, some early examples of games that were finding more success at monetization began to appear in 2010. One example was Millionaire City, the successful city-building game by Digital Chocolate.

As a genre, city-builders have sometimes struggled to make much from their users. By contrast, Millionaire City has at times enjoyed an average revenue per user (ARPU) of several times what normal sim-style games make, according to our sources. The reasons for the game’s better monetization likely lies in fundamental design choices. Millionaire City was able to combine a strong virtual currency system, competitive elements and a clear theme and story, in contrast to the rather bland design of most city-builders.

Other sim games that have led the way in their theme and design have also done well. For example Baking Life, another of the big successes of 2010, was the first baking-themed game on Facebook, and has had better than average ARPU, we’ve heard.

The advantages extend beyond monetization, of course, as games with more unique themes and strong design fundamentals have also attracted more players. In 2010, titles like Nightclub City, Monster World, Car Town, Crime City, Ravenwood Fair and Monster Galaxy all stood out, both attracting more players and, in most cases, making more money than competitors.

Putting effort into theme, story and “fun”-based design would seem like a no-brainer to any traditional game development team, but the social game industry is still learning how to combine those characteristics with its heritage of virality and metrics-based design.

Some developers are also doing quite well with purely competitive, or “hardcore”, games. Kabam is well known for its success with Kingdoms of Camelot, but there are also less-known games like Wild Ones that benefited early on from player vs player mechanics. But for the most part, developers are still learning how to combine competitive gameplay with higher user numbers.

The ongoing shift at some developers to a newer, more creative model is in plain sight. CrowdStar, for instance, is still one of the top developers, by playerbase and revenue, on Facebook. However, its older generation of games, including the hits Happy Aquarium, Happy Island and Happy Pets, all made generally lower ARPU, we hear.

As the first company to sign up to use Facebook Credits exclusively, CrowdStar signed away up to 30 percent of its revenue, plus, in all likelihood, another 10 percent or more for the promotional Credits that flooded Facebook’s economy early on. We’ve thus seen CrowdStar change its strategy significantly this year. Not only did the company switch CEOs and lay off some workers, its last two titles have also been RPGs with their own unique personalities and competitive elements, It Girl and Mighty Pirates.

Risks and Rewards

Despite some clear trends, we can’t necessarily describe what the next hits on Facebook will look like. However, we can make some predictions about life on the platform.

One is that developers should continue to improve monetization, and not always as a direct result of game design. As players become accustomed to playing games online and paying for virtual goods, they become more likely to spend real money. In our most recent Inside Virtual Goods report, which covers the future of social gaming in much more depth, we predict a reasonable increase in ARPU/ARPPU in 2011, and growth of the US-based virtual good market to $2.1 billion.

Another trend is increasing access to international audiences. As we recently pointed out, over half of CityVille’s 100 million MAUs are international players. Finding ways to accept payments from a diverse international audience is difficult, but luckily, developers will not have to handle this problem on their own; dozens of payment networks and publishers are rapidly growing, and Facebook Credits is also constantly adding to its list of supported payment methods used in various geographies. Since a large majority of users on Facebook are now international, developers have a significant opportunity to monetize hundreds of millions of new users opening up to them.

There are challenges. Returning to the example of Millionaire City, the game is Digital Chocolate’s one and only big hit; no matter how well it monetizes, it still has its limits. Having a single hit is not all too uncommon in the social gaming market, caused in part by the necessity of keeping a team of people constantly at work on games after they’ve launched. Some developers seem to be having difficulty getting past their first big game.

Marketing costs also continue to rise. Despite some predictions that Zynga, Electronic Arts and Disney would drive up ad rates on Facebook, pricing pressure is also coming from other industries that have found Facebook’s performance ads a relatively cheap way of reaching new clients. Any industry that can draw high lifetime values from users who click their ads – from merchandisers to online universities – can potentially outbid, and thus push out, competing social game advertisers.

The biggest challenge of all may be staying committed to producing new Facebook games while the fast-growing smartphone market is beckoning. However, the mobile market is still missing social elements and the sheer scale of Facebook. It also offers unique challenges around distribution and, if not on the iOS, payments.

Tomorrow at Inside Social Apps, we’ll be speaking to top players across the whole social gaming market, as well representatives of both Facebook and Google,. When we finish, we’ll have an even clearer picture of where the market is going.

For in-depth stats on applications and games on the Facebook Platform, check out our AppData service.

The number of new sim, farm and city games is once again low on our weekly AppData list of emerging Facebook games, defined as those still under a million monthly active users and growing fast. Several of the top spots are once again held by Chinese-language games, as well.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	購物天堂	483,697	+311,378	+181%
2.	The Pokerist club — Texas Poker	355,220	+204,706	+136%
3.	Miscrits: World of Adventure	835,830	+179,122	+27%
4.	樂業超市	312,793	+172,425	+123%
5.	Bingo Island	807,621	+166,183	+26%
6.	Paradise Life	918,154	+142,777	+18%
7.	Tavla	650,090	+125,970	+24%
8.	Gambino Poker	537,681	+123,584	+30%
9.	Texas HoldEm Poker – Deluxe ★★★★★★	832,044	+103,016	+14%
10.	MilMo	523,642	+88,076	+20%
11.	Pool Master 2	977,894	+88,064	+10%
12.	SNSplus	259,239	+73,119	+39%
13.	Football Life	101,876	+70,036	+220%
14.	龍之刃	264,784	+68,782	+35%
15.	CBSSports.com Franchise Basketball	230,983	+68,141	+42%
16.	UNO® Boost	762,149	+64,467	+9%
17.	Jersey Shore	930,947	+63,100	+7%
18.	Gourmet Ranch	614,684	+60,323	+11%
19.	Glory of Rome	297,088	+58,655	+25%
20.	Fashion City	370,412	+57,155	+18%

購物天堂 has players construct an outdoor mall, while the other Chinese-language game at the top, 樂業超市, is another shop-creation game. These two, along with Paradise Life, were the only sim-style games to grow significantly (a handful also appear near the bottom of the list).

Miscrits: World of Adventure continues to grow with its monster-collection theme, which developer Broken Bulb Studios combined with an explorative RPG mode. In some ways the game is pretty typical, drawing on ideas already well-explored by Pokemon, but it definitely has its own flavor, as we covered in our review.

A competitor that launched just before of Miscrits, Gaia’s Monster Galaxy, has a significant lead with 5.5 million MAU. However, Miscrits is better designed from the standpoint of virality and monetization, so it should fare well even past a million MAU.

It was a good week for poker. The Pokerist club — Texas Poker, Gambino Poker and Texas HoldEm Poker – Deluxe ★★★★★★ all rank in the top ten. While none of the apps is visually or technically stunning, they seem to be growing by tapping international audiences in Asia and Europe.

As for the rest, Bingo Island, Tavla, Pool Master 2 and other titles all present game types that you might ordinarily play in a smoky bar. The only other title to stand out in the top ten is the kids’ MMO MilMo, which has broken past half a million MAU, though its stickiness has fallen to just three percent — whether that’s from players giving up or going to the destination site, we can’t tell.

The day of mega-fundings in the social game space is not yet done. Kabam, formerly known as Watercooler, is announcing a big $30 million funding today led by Redpoint Ventures and Intel Capital, with previous investor Canaan Partners also returning.

Kabam is a bit of an odd man out among the well-funded social game companies. With 7.7 million monthly active and 1.1 million daily active users, it’s several times smaller than a competitor like Playdom, which raised $33 million last June on about 42 million MAU and 6 million DAU.

CEO Kevin Chou considers his company part of a different breed. “Our games don’t really aggressively push the Facebook viral channels, it’s about creating great content,” he says. “We’re much more focused on serving an existing userbase than pushing our DAU numbers higher. Everyone in the industry knows that there is a relatively small percentage of players that actually pay, so you can have a much higher MAU / DAU and not make as much as another company.”

Venture capitalists aren’t great judges of potential quality or creativity, of course. What they can evaluate is technology, which is the other side of Kabam’s story. Right now, Kabam’s only big hit is the strategy game Kingdoms of Camelot, while its next two largest games, Dragons of Atlantis and Glory of Rome, follow in a very similar mold.

These titles all emulate a genre whose rules and typical gameplay were defined much earlier by games like Travian. But Chou envisions a technological evolution toward ever-larger worlds. “We’re really interested in this idea of real time, synchronous gameplay experiences where hundreds of thousands of people are interacting in real time with each other,” he says.

In the typical online strategy setup, players split onto different “shards”, or worlds run on separate servers. Thus multiplayer games can scale from a handful to a few thousand players, but not over that number. Chou thinks Kabam can figure out how to create a single, persistent world containing all its players, though.

“Those are things that are pushing the envelope in terms of massively multiplayer games,” he says. “It’s not something we have in the market today, but it’s something that crazy smart technologists out there are talking about. And consumers are saying they want experiences where they interact with even more people.” The scaling challenges and high server costs incurred by this model are the reason for Intel’s investment, according to Chou.

Besides continuing to add new creative elements to its games and working on the tech, Kabam also plans to continue growing — it’s currently over 250 employees — and potentially make more acquisitions, as with its October acquisition of WonderHill, which netted it Dragons of Atlantis. It’s also looking at continuing its experimentation on Facebook (as with Hero Force) and branching out to mobile.

And while all this is going on, Kingdoms of Camelot, which has been around for well over a year, is not suffering the same decline other social games have experienced. After reaching of 6.5 million MAU peak last September, it has settled down to the six million MAU range and, for the most part, stayed there. Quite a few users have more than a year under their belt, according to Chou, and seem happy to stick around.

Kabam had previously raised $9.5 million between its first and second rounds of funding.

Late last year, BringIt launched with the idea of adding skill gaming mechanics to social games on Facebook, in order to increase monetization. It’s announcing its second major partner today, CrowdStar, and a couple of new ideas and improvements.

BringIt is integrating with two games for CrowdStar: Happy Aquarium and Pop Boom. The latter, a match-3 game, is the actual skill game being used in both. Players sign up for tournaments, pay with virtual currency to enter, and the winners get multiples of their bet.

These games have already produced an improvement in BringIt’s metrics over its performance with RockYou, its first partner. The average player using BringIt plays for seven minutes per session, and the ARPDAU (revenue per daily user, per day) has risen to 11 cents per player within BringIt’s skill games.

For a game like Happy Aquarium, where only three to five percent of players click through to a BringIt skill game, that number is incremental income. But in Pop Boom, every user is effectively playing using BringIt, leading to a larger boost relative to the game’s existing income.

Bringit’s new idea is to use Facebook Credits as the betting currency, while paying out in the game’s own premium currency, in order to help games capture unused Credits that might otherwise be spent elsewhere. Of course, some of the Credits might be promotional, but BringIt CEO Woody Levin says acting as a sink to get seeded Credits out of the system is also part of the plan.

The other idea, not yet implemented, is to reward tournament players with special edition virtual goods. It’s not hard to imagine users skill gaming to get certain items, but the idea hasn’t been tested yet.

CityVille’s gains have dropped almost to the level of the other leading games on this week’s list of fastest-growing Facebook apps by daily active users, with a few mid-sized games also performing strongly. Here’s the full list:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	CityVille	18,985,046	+287,118	+2%
2.	Kingdoms of Camelot	900,104	+255,010	+40%
3.	Ravenwood Fair	695,519	+142,613	+26%
4.	Epic Fighters	204,912	+125,768	+159%
5.	購物天堂	147,982	+117,522	+386%
6.	Texas HoldEm Poker	7,175,754	+116,218	+2%
7.	FrontierVille	5,789,842	+94,631	+2%
8.	World War	181,418	+76,766	+73%
9.	Bubble Island	959,079	+73,912	+8%
10.	樂業超市	93,299	+64,660	+226%
11.	The Pokerist club — Texas Poker	94,547	+63,334	+203%
12.	Farmandia	223,795	+56,645	+34%
13.	Monster Galaxy	414,411	+54,745	+15%
14.	GodsWar Online	149,470	+49,837	+50%
15.	Gambino Poker	122,277	+49,011	+67%
16.	德州撲克(中文版)	1,142,602	+48,184	+4%
17.	SNSplus	45,800	+44,063	+2,537%
18.	Mynet Çanak Okey	345,175	+42,402	+14%
19.	Paradise Life	135,165	+35,442	+36%
20.	Happy Hospital	182,916	+34,814	+24%

A week ago, CityVille had slowed but was still able to add 1.6 million new DAU. This week, as you can see, it’s down to a gain of 287,118 DAU. After breaking past 100 million monthly active users, Zynga seemed to scale back its push on CityVille, although the game is still growing today.

Growth looks good across the rest of the list, but much of it is being spurred by MAU growth, meaning the daily actives may fade away along with whatever promotions caused the gains in the first place. Still, Kingdoms of Camelot and Ravenwood Fair are performing admirably, considering that both stabilized long ago.

Both have publishing partnerships with 6waves and began rising on the same day, so it’s possible that 6waves has been putting more money into its marketing:

Digital Chocolate, Inc. appears to have resumed promoting its MMA Pro Fighter reskin, Epic Fighters, with growth popping up late last week. That’s more or less where the interesting part of the list ends, though, at least for English-language games — most of the remaining games that gained significantly are only showing minor fluctuations to traffic, not real growth.

For several weeks, the small community of domainer blogs (written for people who invest in domain names) have been following a small mystery: Zynga appeared to have bought a site called RewardVille.com, based on a snippet of source code.

Last night a domainer blog called Fusible caught the site launching. For now, it’s just a splash page with a popup, on an attempted login, that says RewardVille is coming in the next few weeks.

However, there are bits of information. On RewardVille’s front page it lays out the idea: play Zynga games, and you’ll earn something called zCoins, which can be used toward virtual goods.

[Update: Zynga's statement. "As a company focused on innovation we're constantly testing new products and features. When experimenting with new products we take the feedback we receive and apply it to deliver the best possible user experience. We look forward to hearing how our users like RewardVille." The company is going to slowly roll it out to a small group of users in the coming week.]

Fusible found a little more info on Zynga’s customer help website — more than Zynga wanted to release, apparently, as the page now appears to be gone. Here it is:

What are zPoints?

Zynga writes: zPoints are points you earn for playing Zynga games. You can earn a maximum of 80 points per game per day, with a maximum of 300 points across the entire Zynga network each day. As you earn points you increase your zLevel and earn zCoins. Currently, you can earn zPoints for playing the following games: FarmVille, FrontierVille, Mafia Wars, Treasure Isle, Zynga Poker

What are zCoins?

“zCoins are awarded when your zLevel increases. zCoins are redeemed in RewardVille for in-game items.”

How do I sign up for zPoints?

“You automatically earn zPoints for playing all Zynga games. To redeem zCoins in RewardVille, you must register for a Zynga account.”

RewardVille looks like it might be a new iteration of the ideas Zynga tested with zLotto, a promotion lasting a few months in which users who came back to play the lotto every day could win limited-edition virtual goods. The catch was that you might not get items in the game of your choice; Zynga could thus get zLotto users to visit games they wouldn’t otherwise try to redeem prizes.

For RewardVille, the idea becomes even more clever: players who want to max out the rewards in their game of choice will have to play games they might not otherwise want to, every single day. To get all 300 points, one would presumably have to play all five games.

Zynga has put more effort into figuring out cross-promotion and retention than any other social game developer so far, so moves like this are worth watching. We’ll keep an eye out for when RewardVille launches.

While many developers consider the farming genre to be yesterday’s news on Facebook, they may have to reevaluate when faced with the growth of FarmVille 中文版, the Zynga port of FarmVille to the Chinese-language market, and Farmandia, which has a mostly English-using userbase. This week’s AppData list of fastest-growing Facebook games by monthly active users shows the two games pulling in almost 1.4 million new MAU.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	CityVille	100,256,070	+3,678,154	+4%
2.	FarmVille 中文版	2,832,729	+823,326	+41%
3.	Farmandia	1,776,561	+567,823	+47%
4.	Monster Galaxy	5,503,284	+540,745	+11%
5.	GodsWar Online	848,335	+388,094	+84%
6.	It Girl	7,671,328	+362,992	+5%
7.	Texas HoldEm Poker	36,337,038	+332,647	+0.92%
8.	寵物戰爭	657,795	+300,872	+84%
9.	購物天堂	393,876	+256,586	+187%
10.	Casino City	2,235,754	+238,557	+12%
11.	Dragons of Atlantis	910,313	+201,637	+28%
12.	Texas HoldEm Poker – Deluxe ★★★★★★	754,209	+191,791	+34%
13.	Bingo Island	690,352	+188,272	+37%
14.	Mahjong Zen	1,688,821	+184,530	+12%
15.	Hero	1,133,791	+162,549	+17%
16.	YoVille	6,348,169	+158,118	+3%
17.	Mahjong Trails	1,945,942	+157,591	+9%
18.	Totally Spies! Fashion Agents	1,147,353	+138,373	+14%
19.	德州撲克(中文版)	6,313,617	+134,956	+2%
20.	Mynet Çanak Okey	1,621,459	+127,114	+9%

CityVille is still the overall leader with 3.7 million new MAU. But its growth has fallen to a couple hundred thousand MAU per day, and could slow more in the coming week, assuming Zynga doesn’t increase its ad spend.

However, Zynga is doing a great job at growing FarmVille 中文版, the significantly upgraded version of the original game, that it released for the Chinese market. The new FarmVille went more or less unnoticed by most; we first pointed it out on the day before Christmas, when few readers in their right mind were around to see. There’s just one potential problem: unlike other Chinese-language games, which typically display excellent stickiness, FarmVille 中文版’s is quite low, at around a 12 percent conversion of MAU to daily active users.

Going back to Farmandia, promotion also seems to be playing a role with this game. Developer Plarium is one of the top app publishers on Russian social network Odnoklassniki, but it has been growing steadily on Facebook since last August. About a week ago, growth in its top two apps (the other is Fashion City) kicked sharply upward.

Whatever promotion Plarium is engaging in is not enough to make an app grow alone, though. Farmandia looks and feels significantly different from other Facebook offerings; like FarmVille 中文版, it uses enlarged farm plots and avatars, in the Chinese style. It also appears to have dispensed with the concept of energy altogether, which rules most American social games.

Most of the remaining games on the list have appeared one or several times in recent weeks. The exception is 購物天堂, a Chinese-language game by SNSplus that was declining until recently. If you can follow the gameplay, it’s worth a look for its up-to-date design and resemblance to Hotel City and similar games.

Most large developers already on Facebook have passed on the idea of making a massively multiplayer game for the platform. But a growing number of smaller outfits and new entrants are looking to try out the genre, including the Oregon-based developer Mad Otter and its German publishing partner, Neonga.

Mad Otter is working on A Mystical Land, a light MMO based on the open-source Torque engine built by Prairie Games. Like any browser-based MMO, A Mystical Land (henceforth AML) will require players on Facebook to download a file to play.

That download, combined with a casual Facebook crowd that’s averse to almost any extra steps, are one big reason that most developers won’t try a Facebook MMO. But as we point out on this morning’s emerging games list, there are already a couple with hundreds of thousands of monthly active users.

AML lead designer Damon Slye has a partial solution for the download, having broken it into chunks within the game. He doesn’t think the download alone is a big reason for slow adoption of Facebook MMOs, though.

“The ones that I’ve seen were just not very good,” Slye says. “The model is a little different, I think, for a game like this. You’ll have more engaging gameplay in our game, and we’ll have players playing for longer, but the challenge we’ll meet is that it’s still casual and easy to get into. It’s not a hardcore, stat-based MMO.”

Some of the play in AML will revolve around the typical fetch and fight quests that most fantasy RPGs have, with some level of grind involved in leveling up. But it will also include time management mechanics — for instance, the ability to eat a meal several times a day in order to make your character stronger or hunt daily bounties.

Mad Otter is also cognizant that many Facebook gamers might have no idea what to do in the game. “We’re learning more and more to put the game on rails for some people. If they want to say hey, what’s the next thing I should do, then it tells them,” says Slye. “It’s definitely still open with movement and freedom of choice. But when we get to a fork in the road and there are two choices — how do we let players know what the normal choice would be?”

Once players get into the game, they’ll be able to pick from various professions, including some that are peaceful or crafting-based. Although it won’t be a feature at launch, Mad Otter plans to eventually offer villages for groups of players to live together in, with player populations who naturally support one another.

For now, most of the work is going into getting a basic version of the game launched. It’s still in closed beta, but the artwork and style looks great; the challenge will just be finding Facebook players patient enough to learn the ropes.

There may be a message for small developers in this week’s list of emerging Facebook games, defined as those growing fastest but still under a million monthly active users. Among the 20 diverse games on the list, only a handful are in Facebook’s current most popular genre, sim games.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	GodsWar Online	748,651	+366,237	+96%
2.	寵物戰爭	646,130	+362,838	+128%
3.	Texas HoldEm Poker – Deluxe ★★★★★★	729,028	+333,434	+84%
4.	Dragons of Atlantis	844,590	+170,897	+25%
5.	Bingo Island	641,438	+162,517	+34%
6.	Age of Champions	549,200	+140,180	+34%
7.	UNO® Boost	697,682	+127,170	+22%
8.	MilMo	435,566	+107,473	+33%
9.	Paradise Life	775,377	+97,482	+14%
10.	Clash of Kingdoms	483,398	+83,366	+21%
11.	Pool Master 2	889,830	+81,787	+10%
12.	Post Season Fantasy Football	279,601	+78,972	+39%
13.	Fashion City	313,257	+76,099	+32%
14.	Habbo Hotel España	940,814	+76,087	+9%
15.	Tavla	524,120	+73,856	+16%
16.	Wildlife Refuge	128,417	+69,054	+116%
17.	Gourmet Ranch	554,361	+66,824	+14%
18.	My Shops	410,801	+59,345	+17%
19.	GooBox – Gratis Spiele	158,574	+48,211	+44%
20.	R2Games Caesary	118,124	+47,743	+68%

GodsWar Online is enjoying a second week of strong growth with a lightweight MMO experience that seems to be appealing mainly to young men outside of the US. It’s not the only MMO listed, with MilMo also enjoying another good week, and GodsWar developer Igg is also doubling up on the list with Texas HoldEm Poker – Deluxe ★★★★★★.

寵物戰爭, at number two, is a Chinese combo of the pet raising and fighting genres. That gives all of the top three spots to Chinese developers, since Igg also seems to be based in that country.

Dragons of Atlantis is the online strategy game that Kabam picked up in its acquisition of WonderHill. Despite having three very similar games now, including Kingdoms of Camelot and the newly launched Glory of Rome, Kabam seems to be doing well with Dragons.

Few of the remaining games on the list are new, but there are a few exceptions to watch: Paradise Life, Wildlife Refuge and My Shops are all well-designed games that are enjoying their first real growth on Facebook.