In the last few months a number of casual gaming companies have created social games. Four of the titles, that we know of,  have broken 1 million monthly active users, including: 1) Bejeweled Blitz by Popcap Games at 9.83 million, 2) Bubble Popp by GameDuell with 3.11 million, 3) Jungle Jewels by GameDuell at 2.62 million and 4) Icy Tower  by Muskedunder Interactive at 1.12 million.

While the MAU for these games are nowhere close to those of dominant contenders coming from social game developers, they are still interesting case studies that demonstrate which aspects of a casual game development mentality work on Facebook and which don’t.

What works

Addicting Skill Based Gameplay: Thumbs Up

All four casual games ported to Facebook are skill-based games. Bejeweled Blitz and Jungle Jewels are puzzle games that reward users for aligning certain gem combinations quickly. Bubble Popp scores users for popping as many bubbles as possible in a limited number of shots and gives users bonus points for popping diamond bubbles. Icy Tower rewards user for reaching higher levels of the tower before time runs out.

Like casual games from time immemorial all of these games use scoring to capitalize on users’ competitive desires and thus engagement. They do this by providing scores and leveraging users’ social graph to popularize these scores between friends (and in some cases between other users of game who are not friends). Not all of them do this well.

Viral Distribution: Thumbs Down

With the exception of Bejeweled Blitz, all of these games miss many opportunities for integration of viral hooks. Jungle Jewels and Bubble Popp do not auto-prompt you to share score information at the end of each game with a popup Facebook message. Instead, the sharing option is blended in with other options on the results screen.

Another of these casual games, Icy Tower, has no scoring wall messaging at all. Users who beat a high score of one of their friends send their friend a Facebook notification, a viral element that does not leverage the social graph of either the person who beat the high score or the one who was beaten as these notifications are not visible to all of their friends.

Bejeweled Blitz, however, does a very good job with viral distribution. Like the other games Bejeweled Blitz is a classic casual game that has seen much success outside Facebook. However, the makers of the Facebook version of Bejeweled Blitz understood that the key to a successful social game is interaction with other Facebook friends. Because of this they have not only made high score posting to Facebook walls easy and obvious but have also added many other social features such as the “Jewel Jabber” which allows you to trash talk your friends who are playing the game on their walls. Also unlike the other games as well as many social games — where the copy for the message inviting friends to the game is often bland and uninspiring — the copy for Bejeweled Blitz taps into users’ competitive motivations.

Monetization: Thumbs Down

Being skill-based scoring games, they don’t lend themselves to virtual items. Because of this, three of the games Bejeweled Blitz, Bubble Popp, and Jungle Jewel have no real system for monetization except for what seems like incentivizing users to leave Facebook to go to their own game sites. According to PopCap’s director of online products, Jon David, the company has had success with this, although he declined to tell us how much. He also said that theyhave plans further to monetize Bejeweled Blitz.

One exception to this strategy is Icy Tower which uses pre-game and interstitial advertising to motivate users to purchase or fill out offers for its in-game currency. This currency can then be used for customize the Icy Tower avatar.

It is unclear how successful either of these strategies have been.

And the Final Score Is… One Thumb Up, Two Thumbs Down

This brings the total score of these four casual games ported to social networks to -1. As we can see from their successes viral distribution is possible for skill based games but the viral events and messaging must be carefully thought out. As for monetization, skill-based score casual properties have fewer monetization opportunities. However, there are many other casual game properties that are better suited for monetization. We look forward to seeing more of these on Facebook in the coming year.

Sana Choudary runs Traffichoney. It works with casual game companies who are having the challenge of understanding how to build social games, helping them understand how to use and optimize viral channels and social game design to build popular social games. To contact her or learn more about what Sana is up to please visit Sana’s blog at www.traffichoney.com

Recently we have seen a move towards games that combine more complex game design seen in traditional casual flash games with social networking provided by popular Facebook games. We just covered one of these games: Battle Punks from Gravity Bear. Another one like this is Restaurant Life by CrowdStar.

Restaurant Life has been steadily growing since launch, in part because Crowdstar has added Restaurant Life to its cross promotion toolbar on Happy Aquarium and Happy Pets. Today, the game has more than 1.8 million monthly active users.

Of course, Restaurant-themed games are not new on Facebook. Playfish has Restaurant City and Zynga has Café World. And, like these games, Restaurant Life lets players earn cash by preparing and serving food to visiting patrons. Also, like the other games, you can hire your friends to serve the food. Lets look at some of the things that makes Restaurant Life different from existing games.

Sophisticated game play

More established restaurant rivals and even other games by Crowdstar have a cartoon-like look and feel. Restaurant Life on the other hand has a more realistic look and its graphics are rendered with a lot of attention to detail.

Also unlike other restaurant games where visitors have to eat whatever the restaurateur is serving, in Restaurant Life the visiting friend can choose what they would like to eat. During the meal they can also asynchronously interact with friends by sharing a meal with them, paying for their meal, and playing object recognition based memory games.

All of these in game actions create a more engaging game environment for those players who desire more interactivity and realism in their games.

Extending your social graph

Most Facebook games are created so that you can only play them with your existing friends. From a user standpoint this can be a problem both when the game is new and there are fewer friends playing it with as well as when the game is old and the ability to move up is restricted by ones’ social graph. We know that users experience this problem as evidenced by the multitude of Facebook (and sometimes in-person) social game groups as well as threads on application forums, all of which involve users asking each other to add them in order to be more active in the game.

Limiting game play to a user’s existing social graph is also a problem from a developer’s standpoint as it represents the loss of an opportunity to provide users to engage with the game longer.

Restaurant Life cleverly surpasses this problem through a restaurant city guide feature, which allows users to find and visit rated restaurants of others Facebook users who they may not already be friends with. To make sure visitors going to new restaurants through the guide have a quality experience, Restaurant Life only allows restaurants that have remodeled the default version to list themselves in the guide.

The app style and game play are significantly different for earlier Crowdstar apps, which made us wonder if this was an outside developer app being promoted by Crowdstar.  Yvonne Lee, marketing manager at Crowdstar tells us that the app is developed by Crowdstar Labs, a skunkworks team assembled occasionally inside CrowdStar with the charter to try innovative new ideas.

Restaurant Life definitely fits the bill for innovation of games on Facebook.

Sana Choudary works with traditional game developers who are having the challenge of understanding how to build social games. She helps them understand how to use and optimize viral channels and social media marketing to build popular social games. She blogs at Traffichoney.com.