Inside Social Games is changing its reviews policy today to include a three-point ratings scale organized by three simple words: Play, Skip and Wait.

What It Looks Like

The scale is based on time. The most important piece of information ISG can provide is whether or not a game is worth a reader’s time. It takes time to get into a new social game — setting up the permissions, going through the tutorial, adding friends, etc. Even the simplest games with the cleanest interfaces and shortest tutorials take a good five minutes from first click to actual gameplay — and with so many social games launching on Facebook and Google+, that might be time our readers don’t have.

A Play rating means it’s worth the reader’s time to play the game.

A Skip rating means that a game isn’t worth the reader’s time.

A Wait rating indicates that the game might not be worth the reader’s time right now, but it has the potential to grow into a game that earns a Play rating.

Our reviews will still provide gameplay analysis, screenshots, currently monthly and daily active user totals as tracked by our AppData traffic monitoring service and any context the developer can provide if we’re able to reach them. As almost all games now monetize in the same ways and leverage the same social features, we won’t make mention of these components unless a game does something new or interesting with them. We will share a bit of opinion on a game based on our personal response to it — but our reviews are intended as interpretive analysis rather than stand-up comedy.

How It Works

How we pick a rating for a game is based on our approach to social games overall. In contrast to consumer-facing video game publications like Games.com or Gamezebo, we’re analysts that cater to an audience of developers, investors and other industry insiders that need information to make informed decisions — not just about what they’ll play for fun, but what they’ll do with their own companies.

From this perspective, we judge social games based on one question: “Will this work?” That can mean several things for a game: It monetizes, it finds traction on its platform, or the developer is supporting a game so thoroughly that we can expect to see it everywhere for the next year. Notice that we don’t bother to say that a game is “good;” that term is too subjective to have any meaning to our readers. We’ve seen plenty of “good” games on Facebook fail to monetize, fail to attract an audience or go offline after barely six months. Being “good” isn’t a guarantee that a game will work.

The flip side of that is that we won’t tell you a game is “bad” based on the fact that we don’t like it. Plenty of games do things we don’t like such as spamming us, hitting us with pay walls right after the tutorial, playing repetitive sounds, cloning a different game we’ve already spent months playing, etc. Games may also just fail to appeal to us because of art style or genre. None of these things would necessarily stop a game from working, however, unless something is bad enough to be distracting or damaging to the core gameplay experience.

We will tell you when a game isn’t ready. Many times in 2010, our reviewers would encounter games in the early beta stage where graphics are missing, social features aren’t optimized and sometimes monetization isn’t even implemented yet. In 2011, Zynga started providing hands-off press demos of new games just days before launch, sometimes with content that we couldn’t expect to see when the game went live because the developer would decide to cut it based on early user feedback. We could wait these games out and return to them when we think they might be ready — like when a developer “officially” launches the game or once it hits a certain number of monthly active users. But so many games get lost in the shuffle as new titles launch that this approach is sloppy. It’s better we see the game in the conditions we found it (via social discovery, word-of-mouth or sudden spike in AppData activity) and report back to the readers in a timely fashion.

Why We’re Doing It

We’ve gone back and forth over the concept of scoring games since the blog launched in 2008. At first, we used a 10-point scale derived from scores in sub-categories like “graphics” or “sound” that resembles the old methods used by traditional video games press. Sometime in 2009, the then-lead writer scrapped scores after deciding that the practice didn’t make much sense because most of the leading games came from the same pool of developers and each had relatively similar themes and standards of quality. We brought it back briefly at the end of 2011 in the short-lived “What we’re playing” articles; but these pieces lacked context and focus.

We’re trying it again because we feel social games deserve recognition beyond what they can earn for themselves in terms of traffic. The quality bar is higher now for social games than it was just 18 months ago and barriers to entry are rising on Facebook and Google+. While most of the leading game developers still hold top spots in traffic, some developers are taking risks in game design instead of just following whatever trend is hot right now (today, it’s casino games — this time last year it was citybuilders). There are also games that will never break the top 25 in MAU or DAU but can still be counted as successes because they find their audiences and monetize them well. Even without investor funding or hope of a successful exit, a game might still be “worth it” to our readers and a score the easiest way for us to help readers find those games.

The decision to avoid numbered scores reflects an overall attitude in video games journalism — numbers stopped having meaning when journalists stopped using all points on the scale. Score aggregators like Metacritic further obfuscate the actual quality of a game as it relates to the score. Also, as we’ve said before, social games change rapidly and a numbered score can’t possibly keep pace.

Scored reviews will start appearing on ISG today. There are currently no plans to apply the scoring system to mobile games on our sister site, Inside Mobile Apps. As always, we invite reader feedback in the comments or via email at mail (at) insidesocialgames (dot) com.

Twice in the last month, we’ve seen studios come forward to criticize Zynga for being too inspired by their work.

Nimblebit, which recently won Game of the Year from Apple, said a forthcoming Zynga title called Dream Heights unfairly cribs from their hit Tiny Tower. Then this week Buffalo Studios said Zynga copied some user interface and design details from their bingo game.

Frustrating as it may be to indie studios, this has always been part of Zynga’s strategy. It’s almost silly to address it. As long as games from proven genres earn outsized returns compared to ones from unproven categories and the cost of losing or settling lawsuits remains low, developers will keep doing copycat games.

Zynga’s chief executive Mark Pincus even euphemistically referred to the practice in December’s IPO roadshow by saying: “We have a rule of thumb inside Zynga. For any category we launch a game in, we expect it to be three to five times the size of the then category leader.”

He reiterated again in an internal memo this week that:

Google didn’t create the first search engine. Apple didn’t create the first mp3 player or tablet. And, Facebook didn’t create the first social network. But these companies have evolved products and categories in revolutionary ways. They are all internet treasures because they all have specific and broad missions to change the world.

We don’t need to be first to market. We need to be the best in market. There are genres that we’re going to enter because we know our players are interested in them and because we want and need to be where players are. We evolve genres by making games free, social, accessible and highest quality.

Zynga does market research by looking at leading titles, designs similar games that don’t require a learning curve, optimizes them for monetization with its data prowess and then spends and cross-promotes relentlessly.

If Zynga’s titles appear too close to other games, it’s hard to take the company to task because of its deep pockets and fearsomely litigious history. Few small studios have the resources to pay for lawyers, especially against a company that has been so historically eager to sue others for theft of trade secrets and copyright infringement.

It also helps that the intellectual property system is quite fragmented for protecting games. Copyright covers the art and potentially the underlying source code while trademarks covers the brand and logo. Patents, the weakest form of protection for game developers, can cover code and mechanics.

Another factor is that as the gaming industry has moved away from a packaged goods model toward a highly iterative and serviced-based one, it makes less sense to pursue protection like patents. Like in the broader consumer Internet industry, waiting at least two to four years for a patent is absurd considering that a hit game can flame out in months.

The more interesting question to ask here is whether Zynga’s approach can do as well on mobile platforms as it has on Facebook. Zynga does not have an outsized lead on either Android or iOS. It has 13 million daily active users, which is very respectable. But it’s not enough to produce network effects that would shut out rival games from the top 10. Unlike Facebook, which signed a five-year agreement with Zynga, Apple does not have a vested interest in seeing Zynga achieve user growth targets. Smartphones also support more diversity than Facebook. The past month has proved that indie developers like Imangi Studios can nail freemium in more than casual sim or mafia games too.

Here we take a look back at various Zynga social and mobile titles, and whether they worked or not according to AppData statistics and ranking history from App Annie:

Mafia Wars and Mob Wars: Launched in August of 2008, Mafia Wars triggered one of the several lawsuits Zynga went on to become ensnared with. Creator David Maestri and his company Psycho Monkey LLC went onto sue Zynga for infringing on his creation Mob Wars and settled for a reported $7 to 9 million. (But it’s also worth noting that Maestri had to settle with his former employer SGN because he launched the game while working for them when they were called FreeWebs.)

After Zynga launched Mafia Wars, it went on to reach around 10 million monthly active users in about half a year, while Maestri’s game stalled at about 2.5 to 3 million MAU.

PetVille, Happy Pets and Pet Society: Launched in December 2009, PetVille riffed on a long history of casual, animal care-taking games that have existed long before the Facebook platform even launched. It followed Playfish’s Pet Society, which came out more than a year before in the fall of 2008, and Crowdstar’s Happy Pets, which launched the previous month. Both PetVille and Happy Pets saw decent starts but then leveled off while Pet Society kept on growing.

Cafe World and Restaurant City: Zynga’s restaurant sim game Cafe World came out in September 2009 after Playfish’s Restaurant City had accumulated 16 million monthly actives. It added steps by making players chop up or dice ingredients before cooking dishes and requiring users to add friends as neighbors if they wanted to expand their restaurants. Restaurant City actually hit its peak usage two months after Zynga launched its game before it began a slow and steady decline. Cafe World also peaked shortly after at around 32 million monthly actives.

Gardens of Time and Hidden Chronicles: It’s not surprising that Zynga would want to get into the hidden object genre after Disney Playdom’s Gardens of Time topped growth charts for nearly five months in a row. It is a little surprising that it took Zynga so long to do it, however. Hidden object game designer Cara Ely was brought on at Zynga in July — three months after Gardens of Time’s launch — and it wasn’t until January 2012 that Hidden Chronicles saw the light of day. In addition to similar presentation of story elements, Hidden Chronicles also cribs Gardens of Time’s decoration-based progression system.

Mobile has been a more interesting story this past year because Zynga actually started out as the underdog on iOS. Several games like Playforge’s Zombie Farm and Storm8′s Restaurant Story were taking genres that social gaming companies had nailed on Facebook and were executing them well on the iPhone. Nevertheless, Zynga managed to accumulate 13 million daily active users by year-end, largely because of its acquisition of Words With Friends maker Newtoy, but also because it started getting its core franchises right on mobile.

Zynga Poker and Texas Poker:

Poker is a more than 150-year-old game, so it’s hard to say that any company could own it. However, Russian developer Kamagames said Zynga copied user interface details from its hit Texas Poker early last year.

Zynga started fading out non-active players on the board and added a vertical bar to raise and lower bets. Before last year, Texas Poker was trouncing Zynga’s Poker game on the iOS grossing charts and consistently had a top 10 ranking. But in the spring, Zynga Poker began a steady climb and now outranks Kamagames’ title.

Tap Zoo, Tiny Zoo Friends and Dream Zoo: Pocket Gems had an undisputed run as one of the highest-earning developers last year after Tap Zoo held on to a top 10 grossing spot for about a year. Unsurprisingly, Zynga took note and launched Dream Zoo just ahead of Thanksgiving. It took the same zoo concept but added some complexity with feeding and washing games along with more levels for each of the animals. In anticipation of such a move, Pocket Gems phased out its old game Tap Zoo and launched a new version called Tap Zoo 2: World Tour.

None of the games have managed to hold onto a top 10 ranking. In fact, a different zoo game from developer TinyCo is actually the highest ranked one in the genre right now at #17. Dream Zoo remains at #44 and Tap Zoo 2 holds at #77. It looks like all of these companies effectively split the market.

Pocket Gems hasn’t complained, with chief operating officer Ben Liu telling us, “Look. Our games have copied extensively by many, many companies.” He added, “The way we can stay ahead of Zynga is by listening to our users and putting the best features in our game. Consumers are going to judge what’s the best product.” Pocket Gems has been busy launching a number of new games in the last few weeks like Tappily Ever After and Zombie Takeover.

This story originally appeared on our sister site, Inside Mobile Apps.

King.com is expanding its standalone Facebook game portfolio again with Hoop De Loop Saga, the fifth game from its website to make make the jump to the platform as a Saga title.

Hoop De Loop Saga is a combination puzzle and arcade game that challenges players to shoot colored balls into an advancing chain of balls to make matches of three or more. The chain curves back around itself several times to amplify the difficulty and increase the skill required to make shots. The game is similar to PopCap’s Zuma Blitz, but is slower-paced and focuses more on puzzle elements than on achieving a high score in a limited period of time.

When a player makes a match, balls are removed. If the player manages to set off a chain reaction where multiple groups of balls are eliminated with a single shot, a gem is created. The goal of the game is to create gems and move them to the front of the advancing chain of balls. Each round is timed and a player must create as many gems as possible and move them to the front of the chain before time runs out.

Collecting gems increases a player’s score, but gems are also used to craft bonus items called boosters, a new feature to the Saga series of games. Boosters are single use items that players can use to help them in the game. If a player lacks sufficient gems to craft a booster, they can purchase extras with Facebook credits.

Hoop De Loop Saga currently has 70 levels and requirements needed to earn a three star score on each level increases in difficulty as the player progresses through the game. Social elements King.com has used in other Saga games also make an appearance, such as the gifting of items and inviting friends to play to unlock new areas of the game.

King.com is currently the fourth-largest social game developer on Facebook with more than 24.7 million monthly active users and 6.1 million daily active users, a position it has gained in under a year with the success of its Saga games — a process the company is aiming to repeat on other platforms according to Alex Dale, King.com’s chief marketing officer

“In general what we’re doing with King.com is taking games from www.king.com and putting them on to Facebook in the Saga format, then we’re taking them from Facebook to Google+ and we’ll be launching mobile versions of the games as well,” explains Dale.

Although Bubble Witch Saga only launched on Google+ a week ago, Dale revealed the company is “pleased with performance so far” on the platform. According to Dale, the company’s Bucharest studio is also nearing completion on a mobile Saga game, a project King.com has been working on since last year.

Hoop De Loop Saga already has 210,000 monthly active users and 70,000 daily active users according to our AppData traffic tracking service.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Hidden Chronicles	17,600,000	+10,100,000	+ 135%
2.	Words With Friends	18,900,000	+800,000	+ 4%
3.	Diamond Dash	13,700,000	+700,000	+ 5%
4.	Tetris Battle	12,500,000	+600,000	+ 6%
5.	Bubble Witch Saga	12,400,000	+500,000	+ 5%
6.	Empires & Allies	15,100,000	+500,000	+ 4%
7.	Texas HoldEm Poker	31,600,000	+500,000	+ 2%
8.	Bubble Island	10,100,000	+300,000	+ 3%
9.	Monster World	7,300,000	+300,000	+ 4%
10.	Pool Live Tour	4,700,000	+300,000	+ 7%
11.	المزرعة السعيدة	5,500,000	+300,000	+ 8%
12.	Monster Fusion	420,000	+240,000	+ 133%
13.	RISK: Factions	740,000	+240,000	+ 48%
14.	Car Town	4,900,000	+200,000	+ 4%
15.	Games	6,200,000	+200,000	+ 3%
16.	Slotomania – Slot Machines	5,700,000	+200,000	+ 4%
17.	開心農場	2,500,000	+200,000	+ 9%
18.	Fruit Ninja Frenzy	900,000	+110,000	+ 14%
19.	World Mysteries	740,000	+110,000	+ 21%
20.	麻將─神來也麻將	760,000	+110,000	+ 17%

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…

• Hidden Chronicles
• Words With Friends
• Diamond Dash
• Tetris Battle
• Bubble Witch Saga
• Empires & Allies
• Bubble Island
• Monster World
• Monster Fusion
• Risk: Factions
• Car Town
• Slotomania
• Fruit Ninja Frenzy
• World Mysteries

It’s Hidden Chronicles again at the top of this week’s list of fastest-growing Facebook games by daily active users. Tetris Battle and Words With Friends complete the top three.

Toward the bottom of the list, we see some older games like Wild Ones and FIFA Superstars making small DAU gains in the past week. It’s too soon to tell if this is organic growth or the result of user acquisition spending. Surprisingly, EA’s Madden NFL Superstars hasn’t gotten any sort of lift from the current season as it approaches its climax.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Hidden Chronicles	5,900,000	+5,110,000	+ 647%
2.	Tetris Battle	3,400,000	+400,000	+ 3%
3.	Words With Friends	8,700,000	+300,000	+ 4%
4.	Bubble Witch Saga	4,200,000	+100,000	+ 2%
5.	المزرعة السعيدة	1,900,000	+100,000	+ 12%
6.	Pool Live Tour	1,000,000	+50,000	+ 5%
7.	Car Town	820,000	+40,000	+ 5%
8.	Fruit Ninja Frenzy	140,000	+40,000	+ 27%
9.	Galaxy Life	290,000	+30,000	+ 4%
10.	Happy Pets	200,000	+30,000	+ 15%
11.	Men vs Women	260,000	+30,000	+ 12%
12.	Okey	560,000	+30,000	+ 6%
13.	RISK: Factions	110,000	+30,000	+ 22%
14.	Social Empires	960,000	+30,000	+ 3%
15.	Wild Ones	430,000	+30,000	+ 8%
16.	Akvaryum	100,000	+20,000	+ 25%
17.	Bingo Bash	200,000	+20,000	+ 11%
18.	EA SPORTS FIFA Superstars: Real football & soccer!	290,000	+20,000	+ 4%
19.	FantaBook	60,000	+20,000	+ 50%
20.	Fashion Designer	130,000	+20,000	+ 15%

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…

• Hidden Chronicles
• Tetris Battle
• Words With Friends
• Bubble Witch Saga
• Car Town
• Fruit Ninja Frenzy
• Happy Pets
• Men vs. Women
• Risk: Factions
• Social Empires
• Wild Ones
• Bingo Bash
• FIFA Superstars
• Fashion Designer

Developer King.com continues its cross-platform mission today with a Google+ launch of its top-trafficking Facebook game, Bubble Witch Saga.

Speaking to Inside Social Games, King.com Chief Marketing Officer Alex Dale explains how the emerging social games platform fits into the company’s overall cross-platform goals, despite the fact that the G+ Bubble Witch Saga isn’t at all linked to the Facebook version. He also confirms that mobile versions of more of its Facebook games are due out in the next few months.

Inside Social Games: What convinced you to branch to G+?  

Alex Dale, chief marketing officer, King.com: As a part of our multi-platform strategy, we aim to make our games available across a broad range of platforms — Google + was the natural progression within this strategy [because it's] a rapidly growing network and, with Google’s backing, is highly likely to be a huge platform in the long-term.

ISG: Do you expect to see better conversion rates and monetization on G+ compared to Facebook? How about G+ compared to mobile?

Dale: We are looking forward to seeing how G+ converts — we are now on day two, so we’ll have more feedback in the coming months. In terms of audience, our expectation is that the G+ players are younger and more male compared to the Facebook audience. Bringing Bubble Witch Saga to G+ could hopefully help Google [attract] more women to their platform, since we’ve had great success in attracting female gamers to the Facebook version of Bubble Witch Saga.

ISG: Can we expect to see the Facebook-based King.com games portal app make the jump as well?

Dale: Several of the King.com skill games are already featured on Google’s Chrome Web Store, so it would be an easy implementation for us to make if we chose to also publish them on G+. Our skill games site www.king.com is both a successful business in its own right and a test bed for games that could be socialized for Facebook and G+.

ISG: How does G+ curate apps?

Dale: We are working with G+ on different promotional opportunities for Bubble Witch Saga. It’s just speculation on our part, but we’d like to think that their editors select the highest-quality games and try to make them readily available for the G+ players.

ISG: Do you think the competition will continue between King.com and its nearest Facebook competitors or is the ecosystem ripe enough to produce new rivalries with other developers?  

Dale: Wooga is our closest competitor at the moment, both in terms of overall daily and monthly active users [and] also in terms of the types of games that we make. I think that we’ve shown that the ocean of players is vast, and there’s definitely enough room for several apps in the same category on Facebook. For example, Bubble Witch Saga, the sixth-largest game in terms of DAU on FB and wooga’s Bubble Island, the thirteenth-largest game, are obviously both very successful at the same time.

ISG: King.com’s push in 2011 was to go cross-platform with an emphasis on mobile. What do you wish you’d known a year ago to help you meet that goal?

Dale: What we know now is that Facebook can play a major role in application discovery due to the huge impact of the Facebook HTML5-app with Facebook->Mobile app discovery, which was launched in November. The logic is to build an audience on Facebook first and then release to mobile.

Zynga’s Hidden Chronicles once again tops our list of fastest-growing Facebook games by monthly active users.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Hidden Chronicles	7,500,000	+6,000,000	+ 400%
2.	Words With Friends	18,100,000	+1,000,000	+ 6%
3.	Texas HoldEm Poker	31,000,000	+900,000	+ 3%
4.	Bubble Witch Saga	11,800,000	+400,000	+ 4%
5.	Tetris Battle	11,800,000	+400,000	+ 4%
6.	المزرعة السعيدة	5,100,000	+400,000	+ 9%
7.	RISK: Factions	500,000	+320,000	+ 178%
8.	Diamond Dash	13,000,000	+300,000	+ 2%
9.	Empires & Allies	14,500,000	+200,000	+ 2%
10.	Okey	3,400,000	+200,000	+ 6%
11.	Pool Live Tour	4,400,000	+200,000	+ 5%
12.	World Mysteries	610,000	+150,000	+ 33%
13.	11×11 – Online Football Manager	370,000	+120,000	+ 48%
14.	Backyard Monsters	2,600,000	+100,000	+ 4%
15.	Best Casino – Free Slots, Bingo, Poker & Blackjack	1,400,000	+100,000	+ 8%
16.	BINGO Blitz	2,900,000	+100,000	+ 4%
17.	Bubble Island	9,800,000	+100,000	+ 1%
18.	Car Town	4,700,000	+100,000	+ 2%
19.	Collapse! Blast	1,400,000	+100,000	+ 8%
20.	Games	6,000,000	+100,000	+ 2%

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…

• Hidden Chronicles
• Words With Friends
• Bubble Witch Saga
• Tetris Battle
• Risk: Factions
• Diamond Dash
• Empires & Allies
• 11×11 – Online Football Manager
• Backyard Monsters
• Bingo Blitz
• Bubble Island
• Car Town
• Collapse Blast

EA’s Risk: Factions takes the top spot on this week’s list of emerging Facebook games with Vostu’s hidden object game World Mysteries and Broken Bulb Studio’s Miscrits of Volcano Island rounding out the top three.

Miscrits and Bingo Bash are on track to graduate from this list sometime next week if they maintain their current growth rates and break the arbitrary 1 million monthly active user mark.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	RISK: Factions	340,000	+320,000	+ 1,600%
2.	World Mysteries	550,000	+210,000	+ 62%
3.	Miscrits of Volcano Island	860,000	+150,000	+ 21%
4.	11×11 – Online Football Manager	310,000	+130,000	+ 72%
5.	Bingo Bash	890,000	+130,000	+ 17%
6.	Press Your Luck	160,000	+120,000	+ 300%
7.	Super Mario	480,000	+100,000	+ 26%
8.	Toyz & Zombies	490,000	+100,000	+ 26%
9.	Atlantis Fantasy	170,000	+90,000	+ 113%
10.	GameGround	680,000	+90,000	+ 15%
11.	Solitaire Castle	380,000	+90,000	+ 31%
12.	Triviador Mundo	680,000	+90,000	+ 15%
13.	Frogger Pinball	360,000	+70,000	+ 24%
14.	Fruit Ninja Frenzy	740,000	+70,000	+ 10%
15.	Tetris	480,000	+70,000	+ 17%
16.	City Wars	250,000	+60,000	+ 32%
17.	GodsWar: Best 3D MMO RPG Browser Game ★★★★★	320,000	+60,000	+ 23%
18.	Pirates Poker	160,000	+60,000	+ 60%
19.	Poker Fantasy	140,000	+60,000	+ 75%
20.	Treasure City	310,000	+60,000	+ 24%

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Come back next week for our top weekly gainers by monthly active users on Monday, our daily active users on Wednesday, and the top emerging apps on Friday.

Chinese developer ELEX wants to expand its social and mobile game business to cross-platform publishing and ramp up its independent games portal in 2012, the company tells Inside Social Games.

The social games industry knows ELEX primarily from farming sim Happy Harvest (開心農場), which is the second-best performing Chinese-language social game on Facebook in terms of daily active users. The Beijing-based developer currently has 300 employees and raised a single $3 million round of funding from Tencent in March 2009. Coming up on its second birthday in February, our AppData traffic tracking service reveals that Happy Harvest still enjoys 2.2 million monthly active users and 860,000 daily active users on Facebook alone with a retention rate at around 40 percent (compared to most games that are lucky to see 20 percent). Worldwide via other social networks, ELEX says that Happy Harvest broke 10 million MAU in December 2011. Across all its games on Facebook, the developer sees 4.4 million MAU and 1.4 million DAU.

ELEX was one of the first Chinese games developers to cash in on the under-served Chinese-speaking Facebook audience in 2009 when the platform was still young and the developer was only a year old. In most cases, we see Chinese developers take an existing game that saw success in local Chinese games networks (e.g. Tencent, RenRen, etc.) and port it to Facebook more or less exactly as it is. This doesn’t always result in a hit game, however, as the Chinese-speaking audience on Facebook is limited and most Facebook-focused publishers won’t pick up Chinese games because they’re hard to localize in a way that appeals to a Western audience. See 6waves Lolapps’ approach to its Smartron5 acquisition as an example.

Though ELEX built up a global audience on social and mobile game networks in Russia, China, Taiwan, the United States, Latin America and Europe over the past two years, the developer wants to focus on its own platform services in 2012. The XingCloud service, first announced in June 2012, is an all-in-one platform for developers to create, publish, localize and distribute games across a variety of platforms — including mobile and PC download.

ELEX CEO Binsen Tang tells us that XingCloud’s real value is in providing developers with data analysis — an area where he thinks most developers make mistakes.

“Data analyzing is different for Chinese developers,” he explains. “The details in games are often unnoticed. [In] the last few years, Chinese developers have focused more on customer experience, and thinking from the point of view of the player. This is why we’re investing a lot in XingCloud.”

The company is also using 2012 to focus on its own games portal, 337.com. This is a move some Western social game developers like Kabam are making, whenever they reach a certain critical mass of users. Though maintaining an independent platform can be expensive — and risky, if their audience will not follow the game off of Facebook onto a new platform — some developers see it as the best way to maximize profit because they don’t have to pay out fees and revenue shares to platform operators.

In ELEX’s case, this is not quite true as its games see the highest average revenue per user rates on Facebook. (For context, Tang tells us that Happy Harvest is its best monetized game at $1 ARPU.) ELEX reports that in the past two years, its signed over 20 publishers to the platform and enjoys over 10 million MAU and 500,000 daily user visits. Tang claims the platform is popular with Latin American and European players thanks in part to its focus on more “hardcore” games like shooters, racing games and action games. Interestingly, the 337.com interface currently looks a lot like Facebook’s canvas app interface:

The largest opportunity for ELEX in 2012, however, may prove to be mobile as the developer is only just getting its footing on iOS and Android with a Happy Harvest sequel and several original titles. Tang says that though Facebook has been a good investment for ELEX, it’s important for all Chinese developers to keep a second eye on the local market, which is continuing to grow.

“Facebook is already a very successful SNS platform,” he says, “but it is still mainly for English speaking countries.”

Zynga’s Hidden Chronicles arrives at the top of this week’s list of fastest-growing Facebook games by monthly active users a little over a week after launching.

Though we can assume Zynga is leveraging its massive cross-promotion platform to guide users to its newest game, Hidden Chronicles appears to be growing at a much more modest rate than Zynga games released in mid to late 2011. This could be due to the genre of the game, or it could be that Zynga is exercising more caution in flooding new games with users. Either way, it’ll be interesting to see if Hidden Chronicles can break through the one month wall where most of Zynga’s newer games have stopped growing.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Hidden Chronicles	1,500,000	+1,230,000	+ 456%
2.	Texas HoldEm Poker	30,100,000	+600,000	+ 2%
3.	Words With Friends	17,100,000	+600,000	+ 4%
4.	Bubble Witch Saga	11,300,000	+400,000	+ 5%
5.	Tetris Battle	11,300,000	+400,000	+ 5%
6.	Diamond Dash	12,700,000	+300,000	+ 2%
7.	Magic Land	3,900,000	+300,000	+ 8%
8.	المزرعة السعيدة	4,700,000	+300,000	+ 7%
9.	แฮปปี้คนเลี้ยงหม	2,600,000	+300,000	+ 13%
10.	World Mysteries	460,000	+220,000	+ 92%
11.	Empires & Allies	14,200,000	+200,000	+ 2%
12.	Men vs Women	1,800,000	+200,000	+ 13%
13.	Bingo Bash	840,000	+180,000	+ 27%
14.	Miscrits of Volcano Island	820,000	+170,000	+ 26%
15.	RISK: Factions	180,000	+160,000	+ 800%
16.	Backyard Monsters	2,500,000	+100,000	+ 4%
17.	Bejeweled Blitz	9,400,000	+100,000	+ 2%
18.	Bubble Island	9,700,000	+100,000	+ 1%
19.	Car Town	4,600,000	+100,000	+ 2%
20.	Games	5,900,000	+100,000	+ 4%

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…

• Hidden Chronicles
• Words With Friends
• Bubble Witch Saga
• Tetris Battle
• Diamond Dash
• Magic Land
• Empires & Allies
• Men vs. Women
• Bingo Bash
• Risk: Factions
• Backyard Monsters
• Bejeweled Blitz
• Bubble Island
• Car Town