Robot Unicorn Attack: Evolution is the third incarnation of Adult Swim’s simple but addictive platform game to hit Facebook. Rather than being a straight port or reskin of the original Flash game with some rudimentary leaderboard support, however, Robot Unicorn Attack: Evolution adds a significant amount of new mechanics to the game, allowing for a greater focus on monetization, viral promotion and user retention.

The basic premise of Robot Unicorn Attack is very simple, which gives the game its enduring appeal among casual and core gamers alike. Taking on the role of the titular robot unicorn, players are thrust into a randomly-generated 2D scrolling play area and tasked with jumping over gaps or using a “dash attack” move to smash through obstacles. The longer the player survives, the more points they get but the faster the scrolling becomes. Additional points can also be scored by jumping through floating butterflies or breaking star-shaped objects.

“When we originally brought Robot Unicorn Attack to Facebook, we focused on leaderboards as its social hook — playing against your friends, trying to beat their scores,” explains Chris Johnston, senior games producer at Adult Swim. “As our first Facebook game, it was an experiment and we kept it simple; we always wanted to bring more to that experience. We’d have these brainstorms of ways to expand the gameplay and its social elements, but we knew we’d have to do it in a way that made sense and kept people coming back. We partnered with Mediatonic for that effort, and they took some of those initial thoughts and ran with them in Robot Unicorn Attack: Evolution.”

These new ideas for Evolution include a combo system. Smashing through four stars in succession without missing any causes an “Evolution,” whereby the background art changes and the unicorn transforms into a different animal — first a panda, then a wolf and onward into other forms depending on player skill. Missing a star causes the player to drop back down an evolution “level,” however, while maintaining a combo in the higher forms gives bonuses to score.

Evolution also adds leveling, powerups and currency to the game. Completing a level earns experience points and “Fairy Dust.” Once the player hits level 3, they unlock a powerup slot, with new powerups and additional slots becoming available with each subsequent level up. These features can also be unlocked early by spending Facebook Credits. Activating a powerup costs a certain amount of Fairy Dust each time it is used, but generally offers some sort of enhancement to the player that makes gameplay slightly easier — one slows the game down slightly, another allows the player to survive one collision with a star if they are not using the dash attack. None of these powerups significantly unbalance the game, however — it is still a very challenging experience.

Fairy Dust is earned after each level, with more earned if more friends are playing. Larger bonuses are also provided upon leveling up, and the player may purchase more using Facebook Credits if they don’t wish to grind for more.

The game also offers daily challenges, with big bonuses on offer to those who complete the challenge five days in a row. This is a feature designed for those who believe themselves to be skilled at the game, however, since trying again after an initial failure costs 1,000 Fairy Dust each time. The base game, meanwhile, can be played as much as the player wants for free, with Fairy Dust optionally being expended on powerups.

The game strikes a good balance between the simplicity, addictive nature and broad appeal of the original Flash game while adding a variety of features that will help to both promote and monetize the game. Its optional Wall posts are also all somewhat sarcastic and humorous in tone, which might appeal more to those players usually disinclined to share their game activity with friends.

“We’re promoting Robot Unicorn Attack Evolution in a number of ways: by cross-promoting with the original Robot Unicorn Attack on Facebook and on AdultSwim.com as well as on TV via advertising during the Adult Swim programming block,” says Johnston. “We’ve got some great plans for the game’s future expansion and ways to give players more ownership over their unicorns and use the Fairy Dust they’ve acquired while playing. I can’t go into specifics right now, but it will be awesome.”

2012 also looks set to be the year of Adult Swim taking bolder steps into the social games market.

“[We're] working with talented developers on new social game concepts with quirky, absurdist Adult Swim twists,” says Johnston. “Developers who find that idea enticing can contact us via game.submission@adultswim.com and get more info on pitching to us.”

Robot Unicorn Attack: Evolution is, rather aptly, a well-considered evolution of the original game’s concept, well-designed for the Facebook platform and social play. The good reputation and recognizable name that its predecessors carry will likely allow the game to build up a healthy and dedicated following, in turn leading to success and profitability.

Look for the game on our traffic tracking service, AppData to track its MAU and DAU progress as the game matures. In the meantime, you can try out the game here.

Play

A much-loved Flash game gets a well thought out social overhaul.

ESPN and Disney Social Games have teamed up to bring the ESPN Return Man game to Facebook. The game is still available in its original form at the ESPN Arcade games portal site, but it has been completely revamped with social play in mind for Facebook. It’s an action-based football game, but rather than covering the entire match, it focuses on the efforts of the titular return man to catch the kickoff and return it to the end zone for a touchdown. There is no team management, no complex calling of plays — simply pure, fast-paced arcade football action: catch the ball, and run up the screen to the end zone. It’s a very simple concept, but one that is executed very effectively, creating a naturally compelling and addictive game without having to resort to more manipulative tactics to keep the player engaged.

ESPN Return Man's arcade gameplay is both simple and effective.

Without a few twists, however, this simple concept could very easily get boring. The game regularly mixes things up, not least with the variety of situations the player must navigate in order to get those all-important touchdowns. Some plays may see the return man accompanied by other team members who will barge the opposing players out of the way, others will see the return man faced by a seemingly endless (and probably illegal) swarm of other players with no support. The return man also has a few tricks up his sleeve that come in the form of special moves and boosters, access to both of which is unlocked through a gradual leveling process. Each play also has several instant-effect power-ups scattered over the field, also, allowing the player to acquire score multipliers and quick speed boosts to get out of trouble.

Special moves, which are available in limited quantities and then must be topped up using the game’s soft currency, generally allow the return man to dodge or inconvenience a defender, with more physically-improbable moves being unlocked as the player increases in level. Four moves may be equipped at once, but an individual move may only be used once per play, meaning they’re far from being an “instant win” button. Boosts, meanwhile, must also be refreshed with soft currency when they deplete, but offer more passive bonuses such as increased speed or the ability to run through mud and snow without suffering movement-hampering effects.

There’s no obligation to spend any money on ESPN Return Man, but those willing to drop some Facebook Credits on the game will find they have access to a number of options which make the challenging gameplay a little easier. Additional blocking players can be purchased, for example, and certain boosts may only be purchased with hard currency. Players may also pay to unlock content before reaching the experience level at which it is normally unlocked for free, and those who wish to play more per day can pay for energy refills.

Unlike many Facebook games, failure is an option here, encouraging players to develop their own skills.

One of the particularly noteworthy things about the game is that it is possible to win without the use of any special moves or boosts — and in fact, players are rewarded for doing so with higher score bonuses at the end of a play. Given the game’s strong focus on topping the leaderboards against Facebook friends, this means that players are encouraged to develop their skills and become better at the game rather than simply unlocking as much content as possible through repeated play.

ESPN Return Man is an excellent, simple sports game perfectly designed for short gaming sessions Facebook users typically prefer. It’s made better by the tension that comes from the fact it is possible to “fail” a game and have to try again from the first play. This fact alone will attract both fans of the drama of sport and the core gamer market, the latter of which often finds itself frustrated and dissatisfied by social games which are either far too easy or impossible to fail at. Sports fans, meanwhile, will appreciate the little touches such as the ability to listen to ESPN Radio during play and the inclusion of the likenesses of ESPN’s Herm Edwards and Trey Wingo in the game. The ESPN branding lends the game a feeling of authenticity and credibility and, if past ESPN-branded titles are anything to go by, will likely see a large initial spike in traffic thanks to the recognizable name.

ESPN Return Man currently has 70,000 monthly active users and 5,000 daily active users. Want to track its progress? Check out AppData, our traffic tracking application for social games and developers.

Play

A simple but effective sports game that deserves to see success among fans of football and arcade games alike.

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.

Cross-platform games are a new frontier for many social and mobile game developers, but some companies have more than a years’ worth of a head start. Meet Germany’s GameDuell, one of the first developers to cash in on cross-platform games for Facebook, mobile and open web.

Founded in 2003 when bandwidth was still expensive by three people with no video games industry experience, GameDuell got its start as a web games portal that offered real cash prizes in skill-based games. Competition became a huge draw for the company and over the years, a strong online community formed around the GameDuell brand.

The developer branched out to Facebook and mobile in 2010 and succeeded in launching its first cross -latform game that summer. According to co-founder and CEO Kai Bolik (pictured), the company now has 70 million registered users in total; our AppData traffic tracking service records 3.4 million monthly active users and over 500,000 daily active users among its Facebook audience alone.

Speaking to Inside Social Games and Inside Mobile Apps, Bolik explains GameDuell’s strategy toward cross-platform releases going into 2012.

Inside Social Games: How did cash prizes guide GameDuell’s early development?

Kai Bolik, GameDuell co-founder & CEO: It was part of our concept from the beginning. People got a thrill from getting prizes and it made it exciting for players, so it was part of our strategy. When we started, there were sites where you would go play mini flash games like Yahoo Games where you play a simple flash game by yourself. What I liked is that we had this pure platform where people could interact and meet new friends and share their specific passion for the games.

That was something that we worked on very early on and we’ve grown very strong. A lot of the people that have been with us after one year, [even from] five years ago — 80 percent are still there. Once people like these games, they stay with the platform.

ISG: Walk us through your expansion onto Facebook and mobile.

Bolik: We started early on Facebook because we saw a strong need from the consumer side. With mobile, our first truly cross-platform game was in summer 2010. Users were actually asking where the mobile games where, so this was the trigger [to launch on mobile]. On mobile, there’s huge potential by itself. Android is growing quite quickly. Around Christmas, we saw 100,000 installs on one game because people bought the new Android and downloaded our games. When they know our games, they like to have them on mobile devices.

ISG: You told us you have 70 million registered users across Facebook, mobile and your own site. It doesn’t seem like Facebook makes up a huge chunk of that audience.

Bolik: We don’t necessarily focus on the growth of monthly and daily active users. It’s much more important to us that we offer a [cross-platform] experience for our users. That’s our strength. On the web, they come and play tournaments. On Facebook, people that know each other already, and mobile it’s having your games anywhere anytime.

ISG: How are your cross-platform games built?

Bolik: On Facebook and our own platform, it’s Flash, and then we use native code on mobile. We have some HTML5 test games running. But right now, we have the feeling that it’s hard to give the best user experience with that. You can do a really good game, but it’ll be inferior to the natively coded game. It’s sound integration, it’s stability — a lot of things that have nothing to do with the gameplay.

For us, “truly cross platform” is a philosophical question. The gameplay should be the same and it should have it the same feeling. But for the [type of] data that’s [moved across] all the different platforms, it really depends on the game. It doesn’t make sense to stop a Fluffy Birds game in the middle on mobile and then pick it up on Facebook. But for games with the same currency, [that makes sense] to have it be persistent on both Facebook and mobile. We really look at what we can do in the different areas to do the best by the user.

ISG: What kinds of promotions or user acquisition do you do for cross-platform games?

Bolik: We track and manage the game graph of our users — when they are on which platforms — and then we do smart cross-promotion on each platform. We have about 16 games on mobile and eight of them are truly cross platform. We’ve been doing that for about a year.

What we use is the concepts you see on Facebook — cross promotion bars and pages. I don’t believe too strongly in giving users something else, so if you play Fluffy Birds on Facebook, we will present it to you [on mobile] as Fluffy Birds. Users will download our games on iOS because they can find them easily and they go and play them on Facebook as well. Sometimes on iOS, we have games that are still [paid downloads] and sometimes users aren’t ready to pay — but they go and play on Facebook and then come back and download the game.

ISG: What’s the plan to grow in 2012? Will you shift to more of a freemium model for mobile and add cash prizes to your Facebook and mobile titles?

Bolik: On iPhone, everyone says future is in [the] freemium model, but we still see a lot of [paid] downloads. We have a portfolio of both and we sometimes offer two versions — a lite version and a paid version. I think it will move to a freemium version like on Facebook, but people are still willing to pay, so I think both approaches are right. We’ve seen different behavior in different areas — like in Asia, they prefer freemium and in other places, they are more willing to pay.

We haven’t implemented [prizes] on Facebook and mobile yet because you need a really reliable platform and that’s a challenge. [Instead], we’re looking at smaller prizes that don’t use real money.

We see the quality on Facebook increasing, but we see room to grow in the genre that we are serving. We are a company of 170 people which isn’t really small, but because we have our own platform, we still have opportunity for growth. We think now is the time to grow the cross platform offering for customers.

GT Racing: Motor Academy is a new 3D racing title designed to run in Google+. Created by established mobile and digital developer Gameloft, the game aims to offer a deep, social racing experience inspired by console and mobile titles such as the Xbox 360′s Forza Motorsport 4 and iOS’ Real Racing 2.

The game offers three main modes of play: a simple “Arcade” mode, which allows players to jump in to a variety of different race types immediately; a multiplayer mode which is currently undergoing beta testing; and an in-depth “Career” mode that tasks players with completing license tests along with purchasing and upgrading cars as well as the racing itself.

Racing takes a realistic approach, featuring 111 different licensed cars from 26 different manufacturers. It’s possible to play the game from a variety of camera angles, including an in-cockpit view featuring authentically-recreated interiors of the cars in question. A healthy degree of skill is required to make progress in the game, though a variety of assistance options are available for those with less experience in realistic racing simulations. These include a “suggested line” superimposed on the track, indicating where players should accelerate and brake; traction control to help prevent out of control skidding; assistance with braking; and an Electronic Stability Program (ESP) setting to help the player stay in control of the car and keep it on the track.

The game is monetized through the sale of soft and hard currency. Most cars can be purchased with either soft or hard currency, and hard currency can also be spent on skipping challenges such as license tests. It’s also possible to purchase experience points directly, which is unusual for a social game. Since experience levels unlock game content such as new cars, those players who wish to jump straight to the part of the game with high-end concept cars can do so by spending money. Conversely, those willing to put in the time and effort to work their way through the early game can gain access to almost all of the game content — though some later cars and performance upgrades can only be purchased with hard currency.

“Gameloft is very excited about offering our games to Google+ users,” said Baudouin Cormon, VP of publishing for the Americas at Gameloft. “GT Racing is bringing a stunning racing experience right in the browser, and we are happy to be pioneering the field with Google to bring the social gaming platform to the next level.”

We didn’t hear back from Gameloft prior to the publication of this review, but it’s clear what the future could hold for GT Racing. Racing games are, by their very nature, modular experiences to which it will be easy to add new cars, tracks and challenges. The game’s multiplayer options will also ensure that an active community will arise around the game, particularly as regular play is incentivized by daily bonus packages.

The social network version of GT Racing: Motor Academy is currently exclusive to Google+. The game is also available for iOS and Android devices, but the mobile editions do not have any link to the computer-based social network versions.

Incorporating real-time multiplayer interactions in social games makes it three times more likely a player will send invitations to friends who aren’t already playing the game, according to Vostu.

The Latin American social game company made the discovery after reviewing the data from GolMania, a casual soccer game with a single player campaign and real-time multiplayer matches. Vostu found that GolMania players who played in multiplayer matches were three times more likely to invite their friends to start playing the game than players who had only played the single player campaign. Overall, Vostu’s players were much more willing to invite their friends to live interactions than they were for asynchronous interactions — the most common type of social elements in social games.

Based on the information gathered from GolMania, Vostu has decided to add real-time multiplayer elements to a number of its recent and soon-to-be released titles, the first of which will be a Puzzle Bobble-inspired title called Candy Dash. Although the game was built to use the same multiplayer technology as GolMania, Vostu didn’t include a multiplayer mode when the game launched at the end of December. As of tomorrow, players will able to access Candy Dash’s new multiplayer mode and compete one-on-one to see who can fill a progress bar the fastest.

Vostu’s next game will be another casual social game and will launch the end of January with active multiplayer features.  The company is currently evaluating how to add similar features to traditional social games, like its biggest hits MegaCity and MiniFazenda.

According to AppData, GolMania’s Facebook user base peaked in mid-November with 910,000 MAU and 100,000 DAU. Since then the game has declined to 650,000 MAU and 50,000 DAU, putting its retention rate below 10 percent. According to Vostu, the company’s games are about 10 times as popular on Orkut as they are on Facebook.

2011 saw a growing diversity in social games with new genre and gameplay types emerging on Facebook, such as hidden object games, racing games, and strategy combat titles with real time multiplayer modes. Based on data collected from AppData, our data tracking service, here are the most popular genres for successful Facebook games this year.

Note: For the purposes of this report, “successful” is defined by games with over 100,000 monthly active users and current retention rates (daily active users as a percent of monthly active users) of 20% or higher. Because many Facebook games (especially those from top publishers) enjoy artificially high usage rates in their first three months, this list only includes games that were launched and reviewed by Inside Social Games between January and September 2011.

1) Arcade — 14.2 million MAU
Three games with the fast casual action of the arcade genre gained strong traffic in 2011: Wooga’s Diamond Dash (11,600,000 MAU), PlayQ’s HotShot (1.4 Million MAU), and GameHouse’s Collapse! Blast (1.2 million MAU). Notably, all three have similar gameplay of matching (or destroying) three like objects for points.

2) Word — 13.8 million MAU
Since launching in July, Words With Friends, Zynga’s Scrabble-like board game, has enjoyed consistently strong growth and engagement rates. It’s the only 2011 game in this genre to reach extremely large user numbers.

Words With Friends’ success is probably due both to its heavy resemblance to Scrabble and its cross-platform feature, which allows Facebook users to play with others both on desktop and mobile. Because Scrabble-type games typically focus on asynchronous play with simple graphics, they’re well-suited to the Facebook platform. Indeed, Electronic Arts’ official Scrabble game for Facebook attracts heavy engagement (if less users, with just 1 million MAU), as does Lexulous, an independently-produced Facebook game once called “Scrabulous” before Scrabble rights owners demanded a name change.

3) Casino — 13.24 million MAU
Led by Playtika’s Slotomania (5.5 million MAU), DoubleDown Interactive’s DoubleDown Casino (4.5 million MAU), and Buffalo Studios’ Bingo Blitz (2.8 million MAU), the gambling-themed casino genre games of 2011 attracted high traffic and heavy engagement. Notably, each of these games currently has very high DAU/MAU rates of over 30%. While the top spot in this genre remains Zynga’s Texas HoldEm Poker, Slotomania and DoubleDown now hold the second and third positions, supplanting other slot machine and card games with a gambling aspect.

4) Hidden Object — 10 million MAU
Disney Playdom’s time travel-themed Gardens of Time (8.3 million MAU) leads this genre, in which players must find valuable game objects cleverly hidden within a graphically dense image. Also gaining heavy traffic is Mystery Manor (1.7 million MAU), developed by Game Insight and published by 6waves Lolapps. Both were launched during March/April, reached a peak of users in September (17 million MAU and 3.75 million MAU, respectively), and have shed users since then, while still maintaining strong DAU/MAU rates. Gardens of Time and Mystery Manor both arrived on iPad this month, but it appears as thoughonly Gardens of Time features Facebook Connect — which could lead to an increase in traffic for the parent game as mobile logins are counted toward its MAU and DAU. Despite the early success of these two games, it’s notable that these were the only 2011 entries in the genre tracked by Inside Social Games throughout this year.

5) City-Building — 4.3 million MAU
A genre in which players get to customize, develop, and manage the economy, infrastructure, and social aspects of their own unique city, 2011 saw the successful launch of Wooga’s Magic Land (2.7 million MAU) followed by Disney Playdom’s Gnome Town 1.6 million MAU). It’s interesting that both games merge city building with a fantasy theme, as do two games launched after September — Zynga’s CastleVille and 6waves Lolapps’ Ravenskye City. This represents a new trend in city-building games, as compared to market leader Zynga’s CityVille (launched in 2010), which has a realistic, modern day city theme.

6) Role-Playing Games — 2.5 million MAU
In a role-playing game (RPG), players customize and enhance their own unique game character, and use it to progress through a series of game challenges and objectives, in a variety of environments and themes. Led by Digital Chocolate’s undead-themed Zombie Lane, the RPG genre added a number of new entries in 2011. The Vampire Diaries: Get Sucked In — based on the TV show of the same name — has 300,000 MAU, while the dungeon crawler-type Hello Adventure has about 100,000 MAU. This year saw the launch of over three dozen RPG games, most of which have lower traffic or engagement rates than these three. For instance, Zygna’s Mafia Wars 2 still has 6.1 million MAU, but less than 10% DAU/MAU, and EA Playfish’s The Sims Social, has 27.2 million MAU but less than 20% DAU/MAU (and trending downward), as does Coco Girl, a fashion-themed RPG (3 million MAU) launched in October. Zynga’s CastleVille, which launched late in 2011, has both strong city building elements (see above) and RPG features.

7) Strategy & Combat — 1.86 million MAU
Three entries in the military and battle-themed genre of strategy & combat maintain high engagement rates: Kixeye’s Battle Pirates (720,000 MAU) and War Commander (530,000 MAU), with Kabam’s Edgeworld between both with 610,000 MAU. Zynga’s Empires & Allies still maintains a large base of players (15.6 million MAU), as does Social Point’s Social Empires (4.9 million MAU), but have seen engagement rates fall below 20% DAU/MAU in December. Their overall size should also be considered as an indicator of the genre’s popularity, however, and we anticipate seeing more entries in strategy & combat throughout the end of the year and into 2012.

8) Game Show — 1.06 million MAU
Led by Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader (650,000 MAU) and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (410,000 MAU), game show-themed trivia games have over a million players on Facebook. Both are licensed from popular TV game show franchises. New entries in 2011 like Jeopardy! have gained smaller, but very engaged audiences. Three other 2011 game show games — Deal or No Deal, $100,000 Pyramid, and 1 vs 100 — have not done as well, however, which leads us to question just how easily a game show’s TV audience is translated to Facebook.

Going into 2012, we expect to see more entries in the casino, arcade, and strategy-combat categories as new developers experiment with the genres. Hidden object games may also see some growth in the new year as Zynga attempts to replicate the success of Garndes of Time with its own entry, Hidden Chronicles. In contrast, the city-building and RPG genres seem to be saturated, though it’s possible that a hybrid of the two genres — say, Zynga’s CastleVille — may still have room to grow.

EA PopCap Games announced today that it’s launching both a new Bejeweled adaptation and a freemium version of its Facebook game, Bejeweled Blitz, on iPhone and iPod Touch. Bejeweled 2, which is currently available on both devices, will be retired.

The move is part of a as part of a new strategic direction for the franchise on mobile. As far as we can tell from the language contained in the press release, this strategy is based on making “expandable, evergreen game experiences suited to every gaming taste and budget” available on mobile devices. The new Bejeweled game for iOS is available as a 99 cent download, while the freemium Bejeweled Blitz can be downloaded for free with microtransactions available in-game to boost scores.

On Facebook, Bejeweled Blitz went through several iterations and feature sets in the last year to convert the classic match-3 game into a social network experience. The primary feature that makes the game social is the leaderboard, where friends’ weekly scores are charted. Power-up items and extra lives for additional gameplay are the main monetization features. Over the summer, Bejeweled Blitz served as a launch title for Google+’s competing games platform. According to our AppData traffic tracking service, Bejeweled Blitz currently enjoys 8.6 million monthly active users and 2.7 million daily active users on Facebook alone.

Bejeweled Blitz for iOS features nearly identical gameplay to the Facebook original, with tweaks to the user interface and retina display support. The new Bejeweled for iOS features:

◊         New high-res graphics and retina display support

◊         3 game modes: Classic, Zen (featuring 6 ambient sound tracks and 6 mantras) and Diamond Mine

◊          In-game leaderboards to track personal high scores

◊          User profiles with gameplay statistics and 30 PopCap icons to personalize the experience

◊          7 achievement badges with 4 levels each (bronze, silver, gold, platinum),  plus 3 elite badges

◊          A player ranking system

Launched in October, Bubble Atlantis is the latest Facebook title from MindJolt.The game is currently MindJolt’s second most popular title after the portal Games on MindJolt in terms of monthly and daily active users.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, Bubble Atlantis currently has 1 million monthly active users and 230,000 daily active users.

Similar to Bubble Speed from GameDuell, which we recently covered, Atlantis is a match-3 style puzzle game set underwater. Players fire multicolored bubbles up the screen at a stack of existing bubbles that is growing ever closer. When a bubble hits two or more of the same color, they disappear and players earn points. Causing a section of bubbles that has others attached to it to fall starts a chain reaction, clearing more of the screen. If the bubbles reach the bottom of the screen, the game ends and players lose one life. If players run out of lives, they must purchase addition lives or wait for them to be refilled over time before playing another level.

Unlike Bubble Speed, in which rounds are timed, the levels in Bubble Atlantis are stand-alone. Players get up to three stars for their performance on the levels, including how quickly they complete it and the score they achieve. Bubble Atlantis uses a world map divided into multiple areas, each containing several levels. Levels can’t be played until the previous one has been beaten.

Bubble Atlantis also features power-ups, which include bombs that destroy multiple bubbles and a stopwatch that freezes the downward progression of bubbles. These cost the player coins, the soft currency used by the game, each time they’re used.

Players can brag about their high scores via viral channels, as well as add their friends to the game so they can compare scores on a real-time leaderboard. MindJolt is monetizing Bubble Atlantis with lives and premium power-ups, as well as through its soft currency, which can be used to buy standard power-ups.

You can follow Bubble Atlantis’s progress using AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

While The Sims Social has dominated the discussion of branded social games on Facebook, Tetris Battle has quietly — and for the most part, organically — become the second-largest brand-based social game on the platform according to our AppData traffic tracking service.

Tetris Battle arrived on Facebook in July 2010, but it was really only a year after that point that the game began to gain traction. At that time in summer of 2011, the title routinely turned up in our top 20 rankings lists for daily and monthly active users and it had just officially broken 1 million DAU with around 4 million MAU for a very high retention ratio of 25%. That trend continues even now with present-day figures of 2.1 million DAU, 6.5 million MAU and a retention ratio north of 30%.

What’s truly striking about Tetris Battle’s success is that it’s Tetris — a decades-old game that people are still paying for on just about every platform on which the game is available, despite the fact that free versions exist all over the Internet. Even on Facebook, where the game is free-to-play, players still monetize at a healthy rate, according to Tetris Online Inc. VP of Marketing Casey Pelkey. The primary revenue stream seems to be mostly in the energy system where players pay to keep playing more matches — or for passes that allow unlimited play for a day or a week — with secondary revenue streams coming from decoration features and from gameplay customization that allows players more control over the falling Tetriminos.

“Getting people to play the game is easy,” Pelkey tells us. “To the extent that they’re playing Tetris Battle is unprecedented. [Creative Director Eui-Joon "Ace" Youm] is a genius to get you to pay for a 27-year-old game.”

Youm came to Tetris Online Inc. in 2007 from Korean games portal Hangame, where he was actually making a knock-off of the original Tetris. His approach to Tetris Battle for Facebook is to push the gameplay into new directions that still feel like authentic Tetris while at the same time challenging players that have been playing the game for years. A large component of that is the multiplayer, where players compete by speed and score. The better a player is at Tetris, the more “line” obstacles they send to their opponents’ boards during the timed match. The friction between one match and the next is very low, resulting in longer play sessions where players are logging between 15 and 30 games a session for over 25 million games played daily.

Tetris Battle is so compelling that we catch many other social game developers playing it both in their spare time and as a point of study for future games. Even those developing titles that don’t fall under the arcade category feel there is something to learn from Tetris Battle’s monetization and matchmaking techniques. Facebook itself has publicly called attention to the title, circulating a blog article among third party developers that highlight’s Tetris Battle’s take on competitive multiplayer modes. And there’s still the mystery of getting people to pay for a game they’ve already bought before — something branded games struggle to do.

Take, for example, Namco Bandai’s two official Pac-Man games for Facebook. Though both title saw initial traction thanks largely to brand recognition and the faithful recreation of the classic arcade game, each has dropped dramatically in traffic and the developer appears to have backed off on the platform for now. Though we can never know exactly what happened or didn’t happen with Pac-Man, it’s possible that the games were too faithful to the original — causing players to lose interest.

“With brands, it’s easy to get [players], but it’s harder to hold onto them,” Pelkey says. “These legacy games come and go and the tried-and-true gameplay works [on Facebook] to some extent, but if it just feels like a copycat without anything new… It’s not a slam dunk.”

Pelkey tells us that to date, Tetris Online Inc. has only done minimal marketing for Tetris Battle. The developer plans to increase that amount for the coming year, with “sky’s the limit” attitude toward how big the game can get on Facebook. In a follow-up email sent to us for the article, Youm says, “We’re just scratching the surface on what we can do with Tetris Battle. Now the real fun begins.”