Inside Social Games

Tencent Brings in $1.8 Billion in 2009 – When it comes to virtual goods transactions, China’s Tencent is one of the company’s making the most money: the internet media company reports an impressive $1.8 billion in revenue for 2009, a 74% increase over last year. Kai Lukoff has a good analysis over at Venturebeat. Comparively, we’ve reported that Facebook is between $600 and $700 million.

Composed of multiple services such as QQ Messenger, QQ Show, QQ Game, and so on, the network offers free and exclusive virtual goods for each one. However, these services require a “diamond membership” of different colors. Only by having that color membership, – $1.50 a month, for one – do users get the goods for its corresponding service. Currently, around 10% of Tencent’s active user base pays for them. Furthermore, over 75% of their revenue stems from such “internet value-added services.” Services with a noted 94% growth rate in 2009.

Zynga Recruits Steven Chiang - Yet another veteran from the colossal gaming studio, Electronic Arts, makes his way into social gaming. This time, it is veteran EA exectutive, Steven Chiang, as he joins social developer Zynga as president of the company’s social development studios. Among other changes, co-founder and Executive Vice President of Sales and Business, Andrew Trader, recently left the company.

PlaySpan Partners with Changyou – Monetization services company PlaySpan has a new partner, Changyou.com. Offering popular MMOs such as Dragon Oath, Changyou will provide its users in the United States, Europe, and Malaysia purchase options for virtual goods using PlaySpan’s UltimatePay method.

Nintendo Dabbles in Social Games – While Microsoft and Sony have been adding social elements to their consoles for some time now, Nintendo has rarely expressed any real interest in the space. However, their frequent boasts about an 93% bigger screen size on their upcoming portable device, DSi XL, has led to an amusing Facebook application, aptly dubbed “93%.”

Essentially, it is nothing more than a poll that lists funny objects and asks which ones users would like to see 93% larger. However, Nintendo has recently stated that it plans to “significantly boost the social fun of portable gaming.” Unfortunately, their definition of social gaming seems to merely be crowding around one screen, but perhaps that outlook will shift with the release of two “social games,” America’s Test Kitchen: Let’s Get Cooking and WariorWare: D.I.Y. which will allow multiple participants and the sharing of mini-games respectively.

Russian Company, Nival Network gets $7 Million in Investments – This past week, Nival Network raised a hefty $7 million in funding from DST (a former Facebook and Zynga investor), 1C Company, and Sergey Orlovskiy, Quintura reports. The company is the developer and operator behind Russia’s top online gaming and social networking portal, ZZima.com and provides both free-to-play online games (developed, published, and operated by Nival Network) and as well as massively multiplayer online games such as Dragonica, Shaiya: Light and Darkness, and Cabal Online. Such services are available throughout Russia and other former Soviet countries.

Live Gamer Partners with Kount – Payment solutions provider Live Gamer announced Friday that it has partnered with a company called Kount. The latter company specializes in “card-not-present” fraud control. Though details are not completely clear, the two companies have stated that Kount’’s fraud protection tools, such as device fingerprinting and proxy piercing, will be integrated into Live Gamer’s element platform.

Free Realms & 7-11 Promote Virtual Currency with Dinosaurs – Sony Online Entertainment, creator of MMOs such as Everquest and Everquest II, is offering a free virtual dinosaur (a T-rex, to be exact) mount for players in its title, Free Realms. The catch? They will need to purchase $10 worth of the developer’s universal virtual currency, Station Cash, at brick and mortar 7-11 locations. The special promotion will last until April 19th, and membership is not a requirement.

As a lesser note, customers will also receive a free green hat for their virtual pet dog in Free Realms as well. Of course, if they don’t have one, they’ll still have the $10 in Station Cash to buy one.

Chinese Consumers Spend $5 Billion on Virtual Goods – Last week, Gamasutra outlined consumer spending in the MMO market. Long story short, U.S. consumers spent 15 times more than Europeans, tallying in at $3.8 billion in total for 2009. However, this total is for all MMO spending, not merely virtual goods, which we had estimated to be just over $1 billion last year. However, that number is dwarfed as CNN reports that Chinese consumers have spent well over $5 billion in virtual goods for 2009.

Considering that many Chinese citizens are reported to have “limited disposable income,” the total may be a bit of a shock. However, the business model for virtual goods transactions is primarily centered around $1 to $2 transactions, further proving how lucrative these small, impulsive purchases can be.

Apple Now Accepting iPad Developer Applications – The company is looking for developers to build early applications on its soon-to-launch iPad device. Applications due on March 27. TechCrunch has more.

Zen Bound 2 Revealed for the iPad – Despite the buzz circling Apple’s new iPad, little has been actually seen regarding games on the coming platform. However, via a post from Kotaku, we’ve been able to catch a glimpse of Secret Exit’s Zen Bound 2, a “sequel and a revision” of the original iPhone application. In a nutshell, the original rendition is about attempting to wrap a rope around an oddly shaped object, with the sequel’s concept being more of the same. However, as you can see, the bigger and more powerful iPad sure does make it look better. A full gallery can be found here.

Frosmo Expands to Asia – Frosmo has seen a good deal of success with its tournament and team-based platform of the same name, in terms for social gaming. Already the company has expanded its collection of titles across Europe and into Facebook, but now the Finnish company is expanding into the Asian game market as well. Currently, the company is slated to let 10 different Asian game companies use its tournament system, and be available through 51.com, China.com, Ren Ren, and Mixi.

Platogo Gets Casual Games Facebook Ready – Though third party firms helping developers socialize their titles is nothing new, a social games platform from Austria, Platogo is looking to socially enable casual games directly for Facebook. Dubbed “Platogo Wrapper” this tool allows developers to integrate their games into Facebook withonly a few lines of code. With this new tool,  apps will be able to take advantage of Facebook friend invitations, leaderboards, achievements, and player challenges.

Game Investments Dropped 29% in 2009 – It would seem like the video game industry has seen some hefty decline due to the recession as VentureBeat reports that of 115 game startups, only $663.1 million in funding was raised during 2009 (discounting those with undisclosed amounts). That is 29% lower than the $936.8 million raised in 2008. In fact, had it not been for Zynga’s acquisition of $180 million deal from Russia’s Digital Sky Technologies, the year would have been down a depressing 48%.

Tapulous Taps Into Kings of Leon – The popular rhythm-game company for the iPhone, Tapulous, has added another new title to its collection of Tap Tap games. The new app is dubbed Kings Of Leon Revenge, and if you hadn’t guessed already, features, well, the Kings Of Leon. In addition to hosting 10 of the band’s top songs, the new game will also include a curious ”Battle Mode” that will allow users to directly compete with each other using the iPhone’s bluetooth capabilities.

Unity Games Gain a Social Platform Through dimeRocker – More and more frequently, social games empowered with Unity3D are appearing around both Facebook and the web. To that end, Overinteractive Media Inc. has announced the launch of a new social platform, specifically tailored to support Unity enabled games, dubbed dimeRocker. Through the platform, games will be able to support microtransactions, achievements, leaderboards, friend invites, challenges, and be deployable on both the Facebook and MySpace networks. Already, around 150 developers have signed up for the service’s beta stages.

Facebook App Penny Drop Teams Up with Kiva – A simple Facebook application called Penny Drop – powered by CircusPop - is out to help the working poor. The quasi, game-like app consists of players using tokens (earnable through logins every few hours and inviting friends) to drop the price of featured items by one cent until someone purchases it. However, working with Kiva, from March 11th to March 22nd, for every token used in Penny Drop, a penny will be donated to Kiva in order to help poor entrepreneurial individuals and businesses grow.

Gowalla Adds New Platforms & Branded Goods – Location-based iPhone app Gowalla has launched its social game on two new platforms this past week: The Android and Palm’s webOS. In addition to this new support, the game is also bringing branded virtual goods to the table from the Travel Channel’s show, Food Wars. With the new deal, players will be able to earn special badges and virtual items by visiting locals featured during the show.

IMVU adds Voices as a Virtual Good – Popular teen-oriented virtual world IMVU announced a curious partnership with Vivox this Thursday. Now, the virtual world will be capable of integrating voice services, but beyond being just another feature, it will also add a new source of revenue. Currently, 25 different voice styles are being offered for the cost of 990 IMVU Credits.

Sometrics Launches GameCoins.com – Social analytics firm, Sometrics announced the launch of GameCoins.com this week - the company’s first direct-to-consumer play. Game Coins will serve as a community site for gamers, allowing them meet new people as well as participate in forums and blogs that revolve around various social games and virtual worlds. More than this, however, the site, per its name, will also be an online marketplace for virtual goods and currencies. From the portal, players can make use of the Sometrics Offer Solution to complete ad offers and earn goods and currency for their MMO, virtual world, or social game of choice. The company tells us it plans to help grow the community through users discovering relevant content in searches. The idea is that by helping people play these games better, its monetization services will get even more usage.

50% of Gamers Will Earn Virtual Currency – According to a survey performed by comScore for Offerpal Media, and released at the Game Developers Conference this week, alternative payment methods enable greater monetization capabilities that one would think. Derived from comScore and Offerpal’s own monetization analytics, 53.3% of players are “very likely” to complete a marketing actions (i.e. completing a survey, watching a video, or shopping online) in order to earn virtual currency for their favorite games. Conversely, only 22.8% of those surveyed stated they’d be willing and able to buy it.

In fact, 29.7% of social gamers actually don’t have the means to buy virtual currency in the first place; at least not with cash options. Curiously, even among those that could, 34.9% stated that they were “very unlikely” to do so.

Given the success of simulation games like Zynga’s FarmVille, it has seemed a matter of time until social game developers started making social versions of the hit computer game SimCity. And they have, over the last couple of months – and now we have what could be quickly becoming a hit. Playdom launched Social City around March 3rd, and a little over a week later it has grown to 3.23 million monthly active users (MAU) and 1.67 million daily active users (DAU).

Check out our review of the game if you want to get the details — basically, Social City is one of the better titles in the genre, that we’ve seen so far. And other titles are growing, too. Broken Bulb Studios’ My Town is up to 3.52 million MAU, albeit it’s had a couple months to grow. It and a smaller city-building game from an unknown developer, Towner, both made our most recent list of the games that have gained the most DAU in the past week. My City Life, by a developer apparently named City Life, has been cresting at slightly above 4 million MAU.

We assume these games aren’t just growing because people like telling their friends about how much fun they are. Playdom, for example, has been running what appears to be a big ad campaign on Facebook promoting the game; it likely hopes the title will become the FarmVille of the genre before other big social gaming developers build their own. It has also been promoting it across its other applications. So far, the results seem to be paying off.

While Hi5 has increased its amount of rhetoric against Facebook, it has made some precise moves to attract game developers — especially from the Facebook Platform. It’s not clear if the moves will work, in part because Facebook has likely grown by the size of Hi5’s 50 million monthly active users already this year.

Hi5 is continuing to aggressively make the social network more of a gaming destination. Last week, it began supporting Facebook’s platform APIs, meaning developers with Facebook applications can more easily repurpose them to Hi5’s platform. Now, it’s announcing a special “Game Developer Program” intended to give third parties numerous advantages in reaching Hi5 users and making money. The catch is that all developers need to apply (here) to get into the program — a way for Hi5 to maintain quality. The specific benefits of the program include special ways for developers to reach users and make money.

Facebook recently took away notifications, a tool that many apps engaged users. Hi5 says it will give games a special one-click game install interface, access to let them send notifications to users in friend updates, and “un-capped invitations.” The last item means that developers in the program will not have apps limited by, say 30, invites a day — Facebook has made limits to help control spammy behavior. Hi5’s solution is to carefully approve and monitor its game developer partners, presumably kicking them out of the program if they get too spammy. Other special access points include APIs allowing games to add items in to user profiles, including user achievements and high scores.

And, Hi5 is going to be providing free banner ads, special appearances on its Games page (which is linked directly from the homepage) and in its games toolbar, recommend games to users, and more it will announce later. The plan here is to give smaller games a boost in users without having to buy advertising — on-site advertising is an increasingly important way for developers to reach users on Facebook.

Regarding money, some developers have been using Hi5 Coins, the site’s virtual currency, in their own games for many months. Now, anyone in the program will be able to, although it’s not saying what payment cut it’s taking. The currency includes 60 payment methods in 30 currencies. Hi5 also runs premium advertising alongside games, and it will share some of this revenue with games in the program.

So, while Hi5’s application platform will still exist, the program is intended to lure developers in to a tighter relationship with the company. New partners include: Detonator Games, Exponential Entertainment and Immortal Games.

Given its size and mature platform, Facebook is still going to be the priority for many developers. The second-largest social gaming platform, MySpace, has also just made big improvements to attract game developers. Hi5, however, is arguably the social platform most focused on games — specialization is a classic business strategy for a smaller competitor, and given where Hi5 is at, we think it’s making the right moves. We’ll see if it will work.

Monetization service providers that first got traction on Facebook are continuing to diversify, with the latest example being offer company Super Rewards. It has just launched a new version of its offer wall, intended for Flash game developers who distribute their creations across the web. The service is basically the offer wall that Super Rewards already provides, but available for developers to embed within their Flash game interfaces. Advertising offers are performance ads, drawn from various ad networks and advertisers, and users can participate in the ads in exchange for virtual currency in games.

Super Rewards is letting people who play Flash games that use virtual currency take these offers and earn the currency without having to leave the game page. In this example, you can see how it works: Click on “get more coins” and you’ll see the offer window appear overlaying the game. Then you take the offers, get the currency, and buy virtual goods within the game.

While the company offered a way to add offer walls via an XML integration, the new service allows developers to do so in what it says takes less than an hour. Developers can check out the implementation information here. Other companies that provide in-Flash payment services include Jambool and its Social Gold product. We should note that social games on Facebook that use Flash normally include offer walls on separate pages within applications.

Super Rewards, a part of online advertising company Adknowledge, hasn’t announced any developer partners yet. But the service is live, so we expect implementations to start popping up soon.

Offer quality has been an issue for basically all offer providers on Facebook, and Super Rewards has been trying to improve what offers appear where. Here’s what the company tells us about its efforts for Flash developers: “All the functionality of the core SuperRewards product applies to this including the industry’s first white and black listing functionality. We work as closely as we possibly can with both platforms and publishers to ensure that our offers meet both the letter and the spirit of platform guidelines as well as more specific controls that the publisher wishes to apply.”

Aurora Feint Generates 5 Million iPhone Game Downloads – Distribution has always been a problem for iPhone developers, but in an effort to improve the odds on this problem, Aurora Feint created a special promotion on its OpenFeint social platform. The experiment was called the “Free Game of the Day Promotion,” and over the past four weeks has generated 5 million free game downloads.

The success has led to the launch of FreeGameoftheDay.com and will put free game offers at the forefront for a stated 15 million users. To draw a parallel on the success, an Aurora Feint partner in this endeavor, Origin8 creator of Space Station: Frontier, saw 160,000 downloads in a single day, and 1 million overall.

iPad Coming in April – We’ve talked a lot about the iPad in recent weeks, but now it looks like the masses will get to check things out for themselves soon enough. Apple announced today that the official launch of it’s new device is scheduled for April 3rd in the United States.

The Wi-Fi only model will be available first, with the 3G added later in the month. However, both will be eligible for pre-order come March 12th, with a cost ranging from $499 to $629, respectively for the 16GB version and $699 to $829 for the 64GB version.

Kwedit Raises $3.3 Million – Kwedit, the virtual goods payment site that allows users, 13 and up, to borrow money for virtual items and pay it back later, has, according to TechCrunch, gained another $3.3 million in a second round of funding led by Maveron. The company says it has signed six new merchants including VoIP provider, PokeTalk, an unnamed MMO, a test prep service, and a credit record protection service.

Peanut Labs Gets New Partners – Earlier this week, ad offer network Peanut Labs announced not one, but three new partnerships including the virtual world Meez, massively multiplayer online game publisher IGG, and virtual currency payment service Zeevex.  Each of the three are slated to integrate the networks collection of products in the near future.

Meez Promotes the Red Cross – One of Peanut Labs new partners, Meez, had news of its own, as the browser-based virtual world announced its promotion of the Red Cross throughout the month of March. The teen-oriented realm incorporates a virtual blood bank where avatars can visit and donate virtual blood in order to receive a limited edition Red Cross t-shirt in-game. Within the digital donation destination, however, will be links to the Red Cross website where they can learn more and even find out how to make real donations.

Assassin’s Creed II Multiplayer Comes to iPhone – Previewed, briefly, in early February, Ubisoft has finally released, according to appadvice, Assassin’s Creed II Multiplayer for the iPhone. Essentially a game of deadly hide-and-go-seek, players sneak about trying to kill each other over a Wi-Fi connection. Sadly, this means the game is not 3G compatible (yet), but as a launch promotion, the game is currently free, so that is quickly forgiven. The promotion was only slated at 48 hours and the game was released early in the week and is still free as of Friday. So… yeah, download it for free now while you can, as it will cost $2.99 soon enough.

Lord of the Rings Online Links Up to Facebook – Looks like the MMO Lord of the Rings Online is following World of Warcraft’s footsteps out of Middle Earth and into Facebook. Through a basic Facebook application, LOTRO Player Feed, users will be able to sign in using their My LOTRO account information and track/publish accomplishments to their feeds. This includes level ups, rank ups, quest counts, deed counts, and so on. It even tracks when you log on and off (don’t worry, it waits a while after each as to avoid spam). Also, all of the automatic publishing for each in-game achievement can be toggled on or off.

Exponential Entertainment Raises Funding for Hollywood Games – Earlier this week, Exponential Entertainment raised a round of funding from angel investors totaling $700,000, VentureBeat reports. This amount is in addition to another $1 million in convertible debt, but according to to Chief Executive Dave Long, the company is already in talks to raise a total of $3.25 million. Already, the company has Hollywood trivia games on HollywoodPlayer.com, Facebook, and the iPhone.

Heatwave Experiments with Platinum Life - Heatwave Interactive launched and interesting beta test on Facebook Wednesday. The game is called Platinum Life Web Edition and incorporates the music life into a role-playing title where players move from a nobody to a platinum hip-hop star. However, according to Anthony Castoro, the end goal is to create a massively multiplayer online version of the game with the ideas and lessons earned through the social network – and later MySpace and Twitter as well – being applied to the final rendition.

Booyah Introduces Location-Based Virtual Goods – Location-based iPhone app MyTown, from Booyah, has seen a tremendous amount of check-ins and claims more registered users than its competitors. Now it’s partnering with the Swedish clothing chain H&M, and it will be offering users location-sensitive virtual goods. When a users is near an H&M store, they will not only be able to buy unique virtual goods in the MyTown Store, but if they check-in, they’ll even get discounts and promotions for the actual items on sale in the store.

[via VentureBeat]

WildTangent has been around since 1998, and its business has long included running ads within developers’ games, including incentivized ads where users watch videos or otherwise interact with an ad in exchange for limited access to a paid game. But its customers have been in more traditional parts of the gaming world, like console and downloadable games.

The company is now making a bigger push into online games — especially social gaming — by making it possible for users to earn virtual goods, or gain one-day access to online subscription-based games.

If this concept sounds familiar, it’s because a wide range of advertising offers companies have been using doing essentially the same thing in social games for years. But other companies have typically provided advertising offers that require users to take other actions — sign up for a Netflix subscription, take a survey, etc. However, in recent months they’ve been introducing ways for users to earn points through branded ad campaigns. Check out the video ads that gWallet and SocialVibe have been testing for some examples.

So, WildTangent may not be the first ad company to enter the social gaming market. But it has 75 of the top 100 advertisers in the US, and it has those advertisers used to advertising within games. The company  tells us it expects “virtually all” of these advertisers to use BrandBoost.

It also says it has some big social gaming companies lined up as partners, who it will be announcing soon. Clients with live implementations of the service, called BrandBoost, include Sony Online Entertainment, Outspark and OMGPOP. While WildTangent isn’t disclosing the exact revenue share with developers, it tells us the split is the same as what it does with download-game partners.

Facebook’s Credits virtual currency continues to expand. It brought on a huge new payment service provider, PayPal, last week, and it began showing apps that use Credits within the “Featured” column of its new Games dashboard. We’ve also been hearing rumblings from developers about expansion, with the possibility that Facebook might somehow make Credits compulsory.

This weekend, Ryan Spoon of Polaris Venture Partners spotted another way that Facebook appears to be giving Credits new emphasize: running in-house ads on users’ home pages. Per his screenshot, the headline of the ad says “Happy Island & Credits,” and the text highlights the fact that you can “[c]reate the island of your dreams with Facebook Credits!”

We asked Facebook about the ads, and here’s the response:

As part of our continued testing with Facebook Credits, we’ve started a small amount of targeted user education to help people easily identify where they can interact with Facebook Credits, and better acquaint them with these applications.

Happy Island was launched by CrowdStar last December as the first game from a big developer to exclusively use Credits. The company has since made Credits the sole virtual currency for its other games, including Happy Aquarium and Happy Pets. And, last week, Facebook appeared to only be showing CrowdStar within the “Featured” column — today, however, we’re seeing other games appear here, that have Credits as one of several options.

It’s not clear how much home page advertising Facebook plans to do for Credits, nor if these sponsored ads will also show games that only have Credits as an option. These on-site promotions all appear to be in the early testing stages — which is how Facebook describes the point Credits is at, overall.

In November, global games publisher and developer Merscom said that it was looking for more beyond the casual space and into the social scene. Not to long ago, the company gave us a first look at the alpha rendition of its new social Facebook title, The Crazies Tower Defense. Based on the upcoming movie, the app has been deemed, by the developer, ready as ever to be seen by public eye as Merscom has more 137,000 monthly active users, according to AppData.

In a nutshell, the film is about a toxin that gets into the water supply of a small Iowa town – when is it not a small Midwestern town? – that drives its victims insane before killing them. The few sane people remaining must band together to survive and that’s where the game comes in.

Already we see Merscom’s casual roots appear in this application with its “tower defense” title. As one of the older, and more common forms of casual games, it is a fun genre, but rarely original. Nonetheless, it looks like the developers are more than aware of such issues, as this defense app has a few key differences to make it feel a bit different than the sea of others.

Unlike the hundreds of other tower defense games, The Crazies does not give the user a set path that the enemies will follow. When they start the game, they are basically told, “This is your house. This is where bad guys come from. Enjoy.” Okay, yeah, there are tutorial prompts too, but you get the point. Regardless, between the player’s house and the alleyway where Crazies spawn from, there is nothing but a big open field to start out with (there are other, unlockable maps), and it’s up to the player to build a path – with bullets.

Starting with basic pistol wielding soldiers, users plant them down in little sandbagged bunkers to automatically shoot at passing enemies. With all tower defense games, this first “tower” has limited range, damage, and no area of effect (it can only hit one enemy at a time). Luckily, the game also grants new players with a slightly-better shotgun solider and some sandbag barricades (which are used to block off where enemies move) as well.

As Crazies die, cash – referred to as “Dollars” in this game – is automatically put in your wallet, with the occasional stack of money dropping on the playing field and needing to be picked up with a click. This is your in-game currency in the sense that it is used to purchase new soldiers and ammunition during battle.

Yes, you have to buy ammunition. This is one of the other interesting elements to The Crazies Tower Defense. The more towers you have, the more bullets you use, and if you run out…. Well, let’s say it won’t end well. It truly is a simple, but interesting feature though, as it adds a bit of chaos, urgency, and resource management to the game. Of course, if you need more Dollars to afford more, you can always buy a nest egg’s worth with the virtual currency, Gold.

Purchasing Gold is fairly standard, with offers, PayPal, etc, but what makes it worth buying is that you need it to buy new soldiers (snipers, mortars, etc.) at the weapon shops as well as upgrades for them. Thankfully, Gold is earned, slowly, through in-game means (killing Crazies), so a player is never forced to make a purchase in order to continue playing.

As a social game, yet another difference puts this app over most other tower defense titles. Beyond simple leaderboards and wall posts, the game has a handful of achievements for users to try and accomplish, as well as the ability to visit a friend’s map layouts, and even gifting. Nothing says “Be My Friend” like a sack of bullets, no?

Tower defense games are an enjoyable lot, so there isn’t a whole lot to complain about here other than minor usability issues. Honestly, the only true irritation was that the price of a soldier was not displayed upon a mouse-over. Instead, you had to click it and view its entire set of stats (in a different part of the screen) to see the cost; hardly intuitive when it is grayed out (because you don’t have enough money) or time effective when there’s about 9000 Crazies at the front door. On the other hand, the game did feel a bit easy, so perhaps the latter wasn’t that big of a deal after all.

Regardless, The Crazies Tower Defense does make a few nice changes to a pretty tired genre, and we’re interested to see how effective the game is at promoting the film.

FarmVille Wins Major Award – In only a few years, social games have changed the video game industry as a whole. However, now that change has been officially recognized as this past week hosted the Interactive Achievement Awards in Las Vegas. At the event, the first-ever award for excellence in social gaming was given out by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences. The winner was Zynga’s ever popular FarmVille who was granted the title of social game of the year. Currently, the social game has over 80 million monthly active users.

Vegas, the Dating Market, and Making Serious Business a Success — Siqi Chen talks about founding and growing his social gaming company, coming up with the idea behind its formative social game, “Friends for Sale,” moving to Silicon Valley, and much more in this in-depth interview with Kim Ngo of Intimate Math. Chen’s company sold to Zynga for an undisclosed amount in a deal announced last week — his story includes a lot of good advice for entrepreneurs building Facebook games. Check out the video below for more:

World of Warcraft Partially Resumes in China – Having been in censorship battles for over a year, NetEase has obtained a license to operate World of Warcraft in China; the last expansion, anyway. While The Burning Crusade is now reactivated in the country, word on the most recent expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, has yet to be heard.

Pandaren Pet Sales Raise $1.1 Million for the Make-A-Wish Foundation – In other Warcraft related news, Blizzard’s first major use of virtual goods, a pair of digital pets for World of Warcraft, raised a nice bit of money for a good cause. Of the two pets, the Pandaren Monk, had 50% of its sales donated to the Make-A-Wish Foundation between November and December of last year. The benevolent little critter’s sales led to a donation of over $1.1 million to the charity.

Apple Gets Strict on Sexual Content – While sex does sell, it would seem like it’s going to sell a little bit less often in the App Store. According to reports from TechCrunch earlier this week, a number of sexually oriented applications have been removed from iTunes completely. Based on an email to Jon Atherton, the developer of Wobble iBoobs, his app (and, likely, many others) was removed due to “overtly sexual content.” Oddly enough, some similar apps, such as Sexy Girls Uncovered, still work, leaving the that “overtly sexual” line a bit obscure.

Rixty Announces 13 & Under Payment Service – Payment service provider Rixty says it can now safely and anonymously provide payment services for children under the age of 13. In adherence to the Children’s Online Privacy and Protection Act (COPPA) and with the help of Coinstar, Rixty users under 13 can sign up without having to give out any personally identifiable information. All that is required is a username, password, birth date, gender, zip code, and a parent’s email address. Upon the latter’s entering, the parent will receive immediate notification with the options to delete the account or to be notified whenever the child tries to make a purchase.

Ultimate Game Card Expands – Popular prepaid card, the Ultimate Game Card (UGC), from PlaySpan is expanding. Earlier in the week, the card was made available in the regions of Taiwan, South Africa, Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. With the expansion, the UGC is now available in over 70,000 retail locations around the world and can be used to purchase virtual goods and premium services in over 300 online games, and over 700 social, Facebook and MySpace games.

Topps Forgives Mom With One Major League Virtual Good (But Don’t Keep This One Virtual) - With the slogan, “We’re giving you back the cards your mom threw out,” trading card company Topps announced its Million Card Giveaway. For every sixth pack of Topps trading cards, there will be special cards with a nine-digit code redeemable at toppsmillion.com. The digital code will then reveal either an ordinary card from last year, or a vintage 1952 card that can be delivered, kept in online Topps accounts to trade, or used in sweepstakes.

Of course, of all the possible cards to get, the company states there are at least three Mickey Mantle rookie cards up for grabs.

Android Gets Flash Support - The Android has, unfortunately, taken a back seat to the iPhone in times past; especially in the realm of gaming. However, expect some changes in the future in how developers create their mobile Android games and apps as Adobe officially announced at the Mobile World Congress that both Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR are now supported on Android.

Richard Garriot Launches Portalarium – Creator of the Ultima game series, game designer Richard Garriot has launched a new social games company by the name of Portalarium. By the looks of things, the company will be creating a social games platform that will support games of higher quality than the current Flash standard and will make use of a plugin called the “Portalarium Player.” Already, the company is getting under way with the development of a social suite of casino games, starting with Sweet @$! Poker.

Gas Powered Games Gives Behind-the-Scenes Looks – Game designer Chris Taylor announced the latest game coming out of studio Gas Powered Games this week. The new real time strategy game will be dubbed Kings and Castles will be coming out on the PC and “next-gen consoles,” but the real treat for fans is that Taylor will be making use of kingsandcastles.com, Twitter @DeathBot9, and Facebook let show the development of the title until its release.