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.

Mobile gaming appears to be a console-style business, at least judging by its premiere platform, Apple’s App Store. Only a small fraction of games and developers get enough users and make enough money to be meaningfully profitable. Due to minimal social features, apps need to get a lot of attention to break through — from ads, the press, being featured by Apple in the store, etc.

But all this is changing, for mobile gaming startup Ngmoco. It now has what may be the first big social gaming business primarily based on the iPhone and iPod touches.

I had the opportunity to do a question and answer session with Jason Oberfest on the topic this week at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas. He’s the company’s vice president of social applications, and a former business and product leader at MySpace. Having worked on MySpace’s developer platform, he has an especially clear understanding of how the mobile and social gaming worlds intersect.

Here are some tips he shared for any developer looking to make a successful social mobile game.

Identify and closely track all key metrics: Ngmoco has “instrumented” all of its software, meaning that when it can measure a wide variety user behaviors that happen within its games. But its not enough to use analytics. You need to know what to track — you don’t want to measure then build around the wrong features. Like social gaming companies, Oberfest says Ngmoco focuses on: the number of daily active users in a game, including the number of sessions they have each day; the viral coefficient of a game; user churn rates over timenumber of friends each user brings in for a game; the average revenue per user; the average revenue per paying user ; the effective cost per thousand impressions (eCPM); and other related factors.

Understand the trade-offs between reach, retention and revenue: Some features might make your game spread fast, others might get people coming back, but they need to be balanced with how you plan to make money. Charging for your application, for example, is a great way to discourage friends from sharing it with each other — free and social have to go well together, he says. And yet, making it really easy for users to share, say, a gift with lots of friends might feel spammy, and discourage users coming back every day.

Plan for virtual goods from the start: Ngmoco has benefited from Apple’s decision to allow free-to-play virtual goods in games, last fall. It can include gifts and other features that encourage users to spread the game for free, then monetize those users through virtual goods purchases later. The company retrofitted some of its games to include virtual goods, but Oberfest says that the real revenue is in designing the game around virtual goods. For example, its forthcoming medieval city-building game, We Rule, features a FarmVille-style ability to raise crops and produce other goods, but also an ability to build stores and then exchange them goods with other users. He also notes that while virtual goods provide a strong revenue base for free-to-play games, brand and app-install advertising can be layered on top; Ngmoco currently makes 40% of its revenue on average from in-app virtual goods purchases and the rest from other revenue sources.

Decide if a mobile social platform is right for you: Ngmoco, along with competitors like Scoreloop and Open Feint, provide social platforms for game developers. They include leaderboards, achievements, and other social features designed to integrate with a variety of mobile applications, thereby encourage users to do things like invite friends to compete. In addition to social features, ngmoco also offers a monetization platform for mobile game developers and a virtual goods platform as well. Mobile game developers should carefully consider these platforms to see how they might improve reach and retention as well as create additional revenue streams in-game.

For more background on Ngmoco’s experiences going social, read our February interview with chief executive Neil Young.

Earlier in the week, we caught wind of Playfish’s coming title, Hotel City. At the time, the game was not actually available — just the beta stages, with little really known. However, we just got access. Here’s our review.

The game turns out to be very similar to our assumptions from a few days ago. Players are presented with a vertical cut-away of a budding hotel. Using a 2D interface, users are able to add new rooms of varying size to the overall structure, decorate them, and hire friends, as they attempt to build a growing hotel business. Obviously, there is a lot more to Hotel City than these generalities, and frankly, each element contains a fair amount of depth; affecting various parts of the game.

With any business-oriented title, income is always the most important. As expected, money is earned by having guests stay for a period of time within one of your guest rooms. Like any hotel, the amount earned is directly dependant on the size of the room being occupied. So, should a guest stay in, for example, the smallest “Budget Room,” they’ll pay one coin upon leaving. If they stay in the larger “Small Room,” they will pay three coins. Curiously, guests will stay in larger rooms for longer, so while they pay more money to stay in them, you go through more customers, faster, with smaller ones.

This actually makes for an interesting player choice that goes beyond larger rooms simply taking up more physical space. Does one try to use many small rooms and rely on high numbers of guests? Or do players attempt to go with quality over quantity? Either business model is viable, which is nice, but likely, most players will choose to build a fair number of the larger rooms due to the greater screen real estate available for decorations.

Like an older hotel game, Chinese title, Happy Hotel, décor is for more than just visual expression. In Happy Hotel, decorating a room leads to a higher cost of renting it for guests. However, in Hotel City, the level of quality your room is at directly affects the star rating your overall hotel receives (just like in real life).

Each room has an experience bar of sorts. As players add new items such as wallpaper, shelves, lamps, and so on, the bar fills up. As you completely fill up these bars, the star rating of the entire hotel gradually increases. Since hotels are only rated from one to five stars, the leveling of this rating appears to be invisible most of the time. Likely, the increase in star rating is exponential, and will require many fully decorated rooms to earn the maximum star rating. Currently, we are stuck at three.

As one might expect, the rating is directly linked to the number of guests that come to visit your hotel, so earning a high one is prudent. Unfortunately, building a hotel is a most expensive endeavor, and you only earn money from patrons so quickly. Thankfully, there are a few ways to increase profits.

Hiring your friends is the most effective long-term method to save on cash. However, in order to hire a friend, they must currently play Hotel City – a surprising change from Restaurant City which did not require them to. Luckily, if you don’t have friends who play as well, the game hires temporary staff computer players to work for a fee. It’s not a tremendous amount, but you must specify just how long they will work and pay all their wages in advance. Once the shift ends (which you can set to be anywhere from two to 48 hours), the hotel will close and a new shift will have to be started.

Another curious means of earning some extra money is by actually poking sleeping guests. You can only do it once per guest; try not to think about how weird that actually is. Nonetheless, sometimes nothing will happen; other times, they will get up, pay, and leave early; and other times, they will leave you a couple hundred coins.

Apparently, the game will also allow for the virtual currency Playfish Cash in addition to the ability to sell back items you bought. Unfortunately, as the game has just gone live and is in early beta, the virtual currency is currently unused and the sell back feature unavailable.

Now, in regards to the elements that are active, one of the best ones has to be the attempt to satisfy the customers. As each guest comes into the hotel, they will tell you what they want, and as the player increases in level (done passively as guests visit your hotel), they will demand more and more niceties. Some will ask for more décor, others will want a gym, and still others may want a night club or bar. These rooms are usually quite large, but will offer areas for multiple guests to enter and pay for.

Beyond the social element of hiring friends, players are also able to keep track of each other’s progress via the standard leaderboard system. As you’d expect, these can also be used to visit your friend’s hotels and earn a little bit of extra cash, daily, by clicking on a money bag that happens to by lying around. Granted, this doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense, and doesn’t really seem justified, but extra income is still extra income.

Overall, the game play complaints for Hotel City are currently minor, with the only significant one being the awkward scrolling the player has to do to see more of where they can place buildings. Beyond this, most of the characters feel very robotic in their movements and the staff does absolutely nothing except stand there. Moreover, the general art style seems a bit too cartoony. While prior Playfish games have incorporated a cartoon style, Hotel City seems almost like something from a bad Saturday morning cartoon. You will either love it or hate it.

Of course, most of these complaints are merely early beta issues, and many of them will likely see new iterations and fixes later down the line. In fact, the only legitimate disappointment, beyond the overlaying visual style, lies in the 2D interface. The isometric views and aesthetic value in games like Restaurant City was phenomenal, and while 2D works for something like Pet Society, when the users has a building filled with dozens of tiny rooms, it just starts to feel a bit… cluttered.

Visual complaints aside, Hotel City still makes for a fun experience. Furthermore, with its concept of having multiple rooms, many players will probably rejoice in the ability to more easily create a variety of styles to suit their tastes. Granted, there are minor issues here and there, but knowing Playfish, these will be hashed out sooner rather than later. That said, if you’re looking to feed your inner interior decorator, than this is an app you should check out… err… check in….

Zynga has been very quiet the last few months, after a string of big launches last fall. Its only game since PetVille in early December is Poker Blitz, which launched earlier this week but is not yet being promoted heavily (judging by its traffic numbers).

But now Zynga appears to be focusing the big trend of this past winter: SimCity-style city building games on Facebook.

The company has been running ads directing users to answer a few questions on social gaming, then offers them $75 in exchange for taking a 30 minute survey. Inside Social Games contributor Eric von Coelln spotted the ads yesterday, and noted that Zynga asks two question specifically about Playdom’s genre-leading Social City. The game has surged to 6.15 million monthly active users and 2.51 million daily active users in just a few weeks, according to AppData, our independent traffic measurement service.

The first is “How frequently do you currently play Social City” and the second is — quite specifically — “Into which of the following ranges does your current Social City level fall?”

Zynga is clearly trying to figure out just how much users are playing the game. These questions should tell the company a lot about the success of the game. If people play the game all the time and have reached higher levels, then Zynga will know it has a serious competitor. If most people say they barely play and are at low levels, Zynga can better discern if most of the traffic is coming from ads or other non-organic sources.

Either way, the company’s interest in city-building suggests it either has a title in the works already, or is about to start one. We haven’t seen any city-building trademarks come through for Zynga — although it has many others — so the name of the app is anyone’s guess. CityVille? TownVille? SimVille? Take your guesses in the comments.

With a recently-announced $5 million from Playdom, Argentina-based MetroGames is a healthy-looking smaller developer. And, despite a horde of other city-building games, including Playdom’s booming Social City, it has a strong city builder of its own, Towner.

This SimCity’esque application appeared at #12 on our most recent top DAU gainers list. It currently has around 190,000 daily active users, while its monthly active users currently tallies in at around 1.1 million. Growth seems to have taken off in late February — maybe it began spending some of its new funds on ads, at that point? In any case, here’s a closer look at the game.

It starts out about the same as any other city-builder. Users are presented with a grid of green space and are told to place House A into Spot B. Okay, fairly simple. As expected, part of the core play is to manage your income (earned passively via “rent” from structures) and create an aesthetically pleasing cityscape.

This is hardly ground-breaking, so Towners does add a few new elements to the game. This is where MetroGames takes a more farming-style game approach than some of its rivals. Players must periodically repair buildings every so often, as well as inaugurate them when their initial construction is complete. If you do not, rent is lost and the buildings “die” (are condemned).

This is an interesting concept, to say the least, but it does beg the question as to how well this will work outside farming applications. Granted, in the grand scheme of things, a digital house is no different than a digital crop. But they are certainly more expensive, which leads to a big repair cost should you, say, leave town for a week.

Perhaps it is mere doom-saying, but if it costs a ton of money to rebuild a city that looks like something out of The Road Warrior, many users may just as soon leave it and move on to a new game. At least with other city builders, the city can live without you.

Regardless, one element to Towners that is better than the competition is the prospect of resource management. Playdom’s Social City does well with players managing citizen happiness, money, and population, but that merely comes down to constructing leisure buildings, factories, and houses respectively.

While Social City resource management is very general, but it would seem the residents of Towners know a little bit more about what they want. Making them happy requires more than just random entertainment facilities and trees. Happiness is actually broken up into six categories: jobs, entertainment, security, fire stations, health, and education. In order for the population to be 100% happy, all six need to be at 100%, and the larger your city gets, the more of these categories’ corresponding structures (all of which are obvious; schools equals more education points, etc.) are needed.

Another interesting element to this app is that it actually makes use of a virtual currency called Towner Cash, as well as Facebook Credits. The Cash is used for expanding your city limits and a few decorations. In regards to the former, however, you can still expand for free based on the number of neighbors you have (friends that play too), but if you can’t get anyone to play with you, you will either need to spend some money, or slowly earn one Towner Cash at a time for every level up.

In regards to the decorations, these are obviously not required, so the need for Towner Cash is less prevalent. Not to be confused with decorations like trees – dubbed “Green Space” – this decorum consists of famous landmarks such as the Arc’De Triunf, a crashed UFO, or the Statue of Liberty. Curiously, some of these can also be purchased through Facebook Credits as well. Logically, this seems a bit odd, but perhaps it is a means to simply entice users that may have Credits lying about, to spend them, rather than buying a new virtual currency.

Another surprise to Towners, is that it doesn’t seem like the player can actually place their own roads. Maybe because the game is “Towners” – town, not city – this is justified, but the only road is one that circles the entire building space. The jury is still out on whether this is a good or bad design. It does alleviate some of the tediousness of placing and layout roads one grid space at a time, but being able to do so gives the player’s virtual space a little bit more uniqueness, and helps to make a city or town feel more complete.

Overall, Towners takes some interesting paths in constructing its city-builder. While it incorporates all of the standards, it does enough differently to stand out. That said, it’s not clear whether or not some of the features will have the effect the developer is hoping for. But so far, so good.

Social sports applications are some of the oldest and most literally “social” games on Facebook: Users compete with friends to do things like create fantasy sports leagues or pick winners for tournaments like the March Madness college basketball championships happening now. These apps can also be a more powerful way for more traditional sports companies to reach Facebook users.

And so, Yahoo is buying Citizen Sports, one of the leading social sports developers on Facebook, for an undisclosed amount. In the announcement press release, Yahoo describes how the company will fit in with its destination site, Yahoo Sports:

Yahoo! Sports’ content will be integrated into [Citizen Sports' products], creating a seamless experience for sports fans wherever they are. On Yahoo! Sports, users will be able to broadcast their allegiances, create or join a conversation with friends and fans and cheer for their teams through Citizen Sports’ applications.

Citizen Sports currently has 719 applications (many for specific teams) on Facebook, according to our independent measurement service, AppData, for a total of 1.51 million monthly active users and 156,000 daily active users. It appears to have an early lead over rivals CBS and Watercooler, in terms of traffic to its March Madness bracket app. Yahoo Sports had 39 million monthly unique users in the US last month, according comScore — funneling these users into Citizen Sports’ apps will lead to more traffic on Facebook.

AllThingsD, which broke the story yesterday, reports that the startup raised $10 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partners Kevin Compton and Doug Mackenzie, through a separate investment vehicle, Radar Ventures. It used to be known as ProTrade, the virtual sports stock market, before it changed its name and product line and started building social apps a couple years ago.

Playfish has been quiet in recent months, but it’s now working on a new title called Hotel City. The game is live, but in the early beta stages, so we’ll be saving a full review for later. Here’s what we see, now.

The game is a cross between Restaurant City and the Chinese title, Happy Hotel. That said, the emphasis will most likely be on the former, as the Restaurant City elements will probably pertain to the concept of streets full of hotels, hiring friends, and decorating isometric interiors. In regards to Happy Hotel similarities, it likely includes the concept of increasing the value of rooms through decor and letting your non-employee friends (as well as non-player characters) check in and pay you fees to stay.

Happy Hotel has a bit more to its guest recruitment than just this. There’s a whole spiel about recruiting better paying guests, critics, and celebrities to increase your hotel’s rating and popularity. Playfish could incorporate something similar, but the company has, in the past, always tried to be more original with its concepts, than others. Expect features that are similar, in essence, to other Facebook hotel games but done in a much more different way. Nevertheless, in the end, all we know for sure is that the game will grant “more customization offers than ever before” and that you “will employ some of your friends,” with the goal of becoming a 5-Star hotel.

On a different note, it is somewhat surprising that Playfish is not taking the city-building route — especially because its parent company, Electronic Arts, owns the formative Sim City franchise. Already we have seen a number of city games from small developers as well as NanoTowns from Digital Chocolate and Social City from Playdom. Meanwhile, other competitor, CrowdStar is going with tycoon games, having released Zoo Paradise.

Still, while the SimCity-esque games seem to be the bigger boom at the moment, Zynga has also trademarked the names HotelVille and Hotel World, so we could be seeing more hotel games soon.

Although Playdom chairman Rick Thompson is personally investing in other social gaming startups, the company itself has just put $5 million into Argentina-based developer MetroGames. The investment is an unusual move for a social gaming company; acquisitions have been the norm.

Although MetroGames has popped up from time to time on our weekly gainers lists, it has stayed pretty quiet — although its new city-building game, Towner, is growing fast. We currently count 8 of its games on AppData, our independent traffic analysis service for Facebook apps. The company says it currently has more than 30 total between Facebook and the web. Playdom chief executive John Pleasants will join its board.

More, from Damian Harburguer in the press release:

We are very confident MetroGames will become one of the world leaders in social gaming during this next wave of explosive growth in the industry. We already have more than 30 games online across Facebook and our own social gaming platform and many more to be released during 2010. We are pleased Playdom has recognized our potential and chosen to invest in us.

The press release says that this money is just part of its first venture round of funding, so the company may have raised more, or could be looking to do so.

Playdom is one of the largest social game developers, with strong presences on Facebook and MySpace. It raised $43 million on a $260 million pre-money valuation last fall and bought social app developer Green Patch and iPhone developer Trippert Labs; it most recently bought OffBeat Creations, earlier this month. Its latest game, Social City, is currently taking our charts by storm.

Gambling card games are easily one of the oldest forms of social games on Facebook, or on the internet in general. They’re easy to make, not very complex, and many people who would be interested in the first place already know the rules. It’s no wonder that Zynga’s TexasHold’Em Poker (now Zynga Poker) was one of the top social games for so long.

However, Zynga Poker is a bit dated and not everyone likes to play synchronously against others (especially when they are learning how to play), and so, the social developer has released Poker Blitz, a Facebook game that adds a little bit of that Las Vegas flare to an old genre.

We took a quick look when we spotted it live last night. Now, here’s our full review.

There are two key difference between Poker Blitz and the older title: The game doesn’t have all human players sitting around a table; and, it isn’t quite the same game format as the many Hold’Em games circulating various social networks. Essentially, players get two cards and the House gets two cards. If you make a bet, you get five more, and if you like the hand you have, make a second (or fold if your cards are bad). After the second bet, the game announces who won, the player or the House, and its on to the next hand.

Each round consists of 60 seconds to earn as many chips as possible; hence the name “Blitz.” However, it is all done so in this highly satirized collection of levels that represent Las Vegas, Jersey Beach, and even, well, Antarctica. Each level, however, is gated based on the user’s level, so the more you play, the more stages become available.

Of course, unlocking new places to play is for more than just aesthetics, as each stage has its own set of rules. For example, in the earlier areas, players have a tutorial help element that displays the percent chance to win and what sort of hand they hold, while later ones do not. In addition to less hand holding, the later, unlocked stages, also tend to have higher stakes per hand, and a few even remove cards from the deck.

As one can imagine, it gets very difficult to play at these later points, and thus harder to earn chips. Currently, however, the individual earning of chips doesn’t seem to mean much. You get to customize an avatar (and eventually a house, that is “coming soon”), but none of it costs anything yet. Nonetheless, your earnings do count towards your Team’s total value.

In addition to leaderboards made up of Facebook friends that play, there’s a weekly challenge. By adding people to your team, the game tallies how many chips everyone has cummulatively. Unfortunately, it’s not 100% clear what the challenge is — the game has been out less than a week — but the current challenge appears to be reaching a tally of 1 million chips, between all your teammates. Certainly, this is a daunting challenge, as you can only bet up to 500 chips at a time at the ealier levels (higher level stages allow for bigger bets, though we haven’t unlocked them yet).

Of course, there wouldn’t be much incentive if it was just a random number. Teams that reach the 1 million mark will become eligible to win an iPod Touch, but they only have five more days to do so after winning. Of course, this number becomes increasingly difficult to attain as players can only play so many rounds until they are out of “tokens” – which basically acts like energy in Mafia Wars - and have to wait an hour or so for them to recharge.

That’s okay though, because the game actually does have some good ways to make the most out of the rounds you have available. Poker Blitz actually incorporates two unorthodox elements to poker games. These are the “Mystery Box” and the concept of power-ups. The former is basically something that you win during play that could contain thousands of chips, or a random power-up. Now don’t think that one is better than the other, because the latter can completely change the tide of a hand, granting players the ability to make their hand “luckier,” swap cards with the house, double the pot, or even view one card in the House’s hand.

Honestly, though, the last power-up doesn’t seem all that useful, because it gives you no real gist of what they hold. That said, there are a number of things one can’t do in games like this. Poker is a strategy game of knowing when to fold, when to bluff, and when and how much to bet. Obviously, you can’t do all of this (especially forms of bluffing) on a game like this where you’re facing computer opponents. To that end, Zynga Poker still seems like the better choice of apps.

Nonetheless, Poker Blitz is still fun, for what it is, and is something a non-poker player would probably love. To that end, there is nothing wrong with gameplay, but there is a bit of a complaint in starting the game up. In fact, this is a complaint for most new social games lately: First of all, Poker Blitz requires you to let them email you with offers and updates in order to play. [Update: Apps can require email sign-ups, but Facebook won't provide emails except through the API. In this case, Zynga directs users through the Facebook API once they click on its interface.] Normally if a player wants updates or offers, they will go to the game and click the offers button. Frankly, this is just a recipe for unwanted spam. That isn’t to say Zynga will do this, but if all Facebook games start making this requirement…. Well, you get the picture.

The other issue, is it feels like a lot of social games are taking advantage of the fact that most Facebook users are not “gamers.” At the top of the last half a dozen games reviewed, there is a nifty little “setup progress” bar. This bar, has nothing to do with being able to play a game, but only consists of steps such as allowing emails, becoming a fan, bookmarking, allowing automatic feed posts (sometimes), and giving a 5-Star review. The reason for doing this is understandable, but always asking players for a 5-Star review defeats the purpose of “reviews,” doesn’t it?

That aside, Poker Blitz is still a wonderful little card game app that most non-poker players will probably enjoy. Considering the level of cross-promotion Zynga games get and the millions of players on its other titles, this is a game that will probably grow very quickly. Whether or not it will get up there with other titles from the developer is yet to be determined, but expect to see Poker Blitz’s AppData page rise in some of our Top 20 charts in the near future.

Most of our readers gladly take the time to look when big developers like Playdom, Zynga, Playfish (Electronic Arts) and CrowdStar launch new games in a popular genre. But sometimes smaller late-comers do a great job out-innovating the big guys — here’s a look at two thematically contrasting titles.

The first game is World at War, a modern warfare-style take on the classic mafia role playing game. That said, the game has all the standards: Money, missions, energy to complete the missions, stamina to battle other players (dubbed “ammo”), and so on.

Really, it’s the style that’s most interesting. Everything is based on modern military technology, with the goal being to build up the largest military force in the world. Of course, to do so, users must complete missions in order to level up, unlock more powerful weapons of war, and use the money earned to build up their forces of land, sea, and air.

This actually is where World at War stands out a bit: when you choose your country, you don’t get bonuses such as “faster energy regeneration” or “faster health regeneration.” On the contrary, the perks go towards branches of your military. As an example, if you choose the United States, your air force is stronger than others. If you are the United Kingdom, your navy is stronger. This obviously plays a fairly significant role in choosing what units to build when.

As far as the units themselves go, these are more or less the equivalent of items in something like Mafia Wars. They add attack and defense stats to your profile, and are required for certain missions, and in the end, a squad of riflemen is still, essentially, the same thing as an uzi or what-not in another RPGs (though it is a bit more gratifying to have little minions rather than just a gun).

Additionally, players can also build up a base to earn periodic income, but what is different is that the user can convert outdated structures to new ones as they increase their level and unlock new buildings. In many other RPGs, you are forced to buy more land (which you can still do here). Furthermore, each building can be upgraded up to three times to improve efficiency, and some of them even grant bonuses to health, defense, attack, and so on.

Okay, granted, World at War isn’t wholly original, but then again, most Facebook RPGs aren’t. Do missions, level up, buy new stuff, invite friends to become stronger, and take over the world – in theory. That’s about every social RPG in a nutshell. However, if you like modern military technology, and you’re sick of mafias and gangsters, then this is an app worth checking out. Moreover, with over 1.1 million monthly active users, you certainly won’t be alone.

The next app is the exact opposite to World at War, in that it is about peace. Called Ocean World, much of the game’s user based appears to speak Chinese, judging from its page; the developer is little-known Stand Up Network. The app has around 255,000 monthly active users.

Ocean World is your standard virtual aquarium game. It is a bit behind the times, as that boom appeared to peak last fall, but the game is still a decent rendition of this common genre. The basics are all present: buy fish, feed fish, plant decorations, and make the world a happier place.

One thing that makes the game stand out, however, is the overall atmosphere that comes with it. The visuals are a cross between Zynga’s somewhat cartoonish FishVille and Tall Tree Games’ more realistic looking Fish World. It actually looks quite good, and there isn’t a bad selection of decorations to choose from either.

What makes Ocean World more interesting is that players are in the ocean, not a tank. That means all of the visuals are centered around reefs, beautiful shells, and actual sunken ships. There are still fun, random, items tailored to special holidays. At the moment, these are decorations themed for St. Patrick’s Day and the Chinese New Year. Unfortunately, these all cost the virtual currency, Sun Coins, or an exorbitant amount of the in-game Shell Coins.

Further adding to the atmosphere, the fish actually grow and change as they reach adulthood, rather than just get bigger. Of course, you sell them when this cycle completes (“release them”), and then buy some more. Standard aquarium game economics. As players continue to repeat this process of buying, feeding, and releasing, they earn new levels and, in turn, unlock new fish and decorations to purchase.

The music helps pull the game together, too. It’s not some bouncing rhythm like so many other virtual aquarium titles have, but rather it’s a very tranquil tune that fits with the mysteries of the ocean. Frankly, with the opening directions of the game talking about saving the sea, it sounds like something you might actually hear at a place like Sea World.

In the end, neither World at War nor Ocean World bring anything significantly new to the realm of social games — but they show that smaller developers can take a tired genre and make it interesting, even when the big developers are using their resources to get the most users.