We’re at the San Francisco Design center, blogging Inside Network’s third annual Inside Social Apps conference.

Electronic Arts’ chief financial officer has resigned. According to EA’s most recent SEC filing, Brown tendered his resignation on Feb. 3 and his last day will be Feb. 17. Ken Barker, EA’s chief officer of accounting will serve as interim chief financial officer until EA selects a replacement.

Brown has served as EA’s CFO since April of 2008, but is leaving the company to take on an operations role at Polycom, where he will serve as the the company’s chief financial officer and chief operating officer. When asked for comment, EA directed us to its official blog post, which reads:

[Today] we are announcing that Eric Brown, our CFO, will be leaving EA.  He has decided to join Polycom, a world leader in communications technology.  Eric’s decision was based on his career goal to combine his expertise in Finance with deeper involvement in Operations.  We have begun a search for a new CFO and will consider both internal and external candidates.

There is no denying the pace of change at EA is accelerating. The successful launch of blockbusters likeFIFA Soccer 12, Battlefield 3, The Sims Social and Star Wars: The Old Republic; smashing our goal for generating $1B in digital revenue; and the dramatic growth of Origin – each of these is a huge milestone in our digital transformation. EA will exit this fiscal year a profoundly different company than we were at the start.  From here on, change is constant.

Brown’s departure is the latest in a series of high profile departures at the company. Last month, Barry Cottle left his position as the executive vice president of EA Interactive to join Zynga. He became the company’s executive vice president of business and corporate development.

EA also announced that Mark Tonneson has left his position at McAfee to join EA as its chief information officer. Tonnesen will report to EA’s chief technology officer Rajat Taneja. Neither Brown’s nor Tonnesen’s LinkedIn profiles reflect the changes yet.

Loot Drop COO and game designer Brenda Garno Brathwaite calls cloning “disgusting,” revealing her company’s first-hand experience with the practice.

“We had a meeting with a publisher and a game designer discussed an idea for a game,” Brathwaite said during the Trends in Social Gaming panel at Inside Social Apps conference. “The publisher came back next week and said they’d be making the game and they might need us to consult on it. That game had been cloned before a line of code had even been written.”

Brathwaite spoke frankly, calling out the social games industry for its “fast-follow” mentality. ”In the traditional space, a great game would come out and you would say ‘how can we make a game that good and improve on that?’ What we have now is ‘how can we change the narrative and make the same game?’ That’s like putting out the Peaches of Wrath rather than the Grapes of Wrath. In any other medium it would be considered a tremendous fail and I think it’s because the space is about monetization and not about creativity,” she said.

The issue of cloning in the social and mobile games space has come up numerous times in the news recently. Triple Town developer Spry Fox is suing 6waves Lolapps over the similarities between its game and 6waves’ Yeti Town, and San Diego-based NimbleBit criticized Zynga for its upcoming game Dream Heights, pointing out numerous similarities between the two titles. During EA’s third quarter earnings call the company was reluctant to reveal details about its upcoming slate of social games, citing the need to protect its intellectual property.

You can read our recap of the Trends in Social Gaming panel here.

Zynga shares jumped almost 17 percent today after Facebook’s IPO filing yesterday revealed that the social network’s payments revenue climbed 20 percent quarter-over-quarter by year-end — suggesting Zynga might see a comparable boost in its own bottom line. Facebook added that the social game developer contributes 12 percent of its 2011 revenues.

At market close yesterday, Zynga was trading at $10.96 per share — slightly higher than the $10 price they debuted at in December‘s IPO. They opened today at $11.05 and peaked at $12.81 in just a little over an hour. By close, Zynga’s market capitalization was up 12 percent to $8.66 billion from $7.4 billion yesterday. Zynga’s Facebook traffic is also on the rise — up 1.9 million daily active users and 6.4 million monthly active users in the last seven days as recorded by our AppData traffic tracking service.

Zynga won’t share its fourth quarter earnings until Feb. 14, but that hasn’t stopped analysts from speculating that the company may report higher bookings for the quarter. If Facebook’s payments revenues went up 20 percent, Zynga might see a comparable rise. Facebook said its payments revenue rose to $188 million in the fourth quarter from $156 million in the previous one, suggesting that its platform may be doing a better job at converting gamers into paying for virtual goods.

In a research note republished on AllThingsD, Baird Equity Research analyst Colin Sebastian estimates that Zynga’s net bookings may have been $315 million in the fourth quarter.

Sebastian’s estimate is rough. Since Facebook reported $1.13 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter and Zynga contributes a 12 percent of that, Zynga may have contributed $135 million to the social network’s earnings. Baird believes 75 to 80 percent, or $101 to $108 million of that, is from virtual goods sales. If that $101 to 108 million is the 30 percent revenue share Zynga must give to Facebook, then the social gaming company keeps $235 to $250 million. Sebastian adds that an additional $65 million may have come from other platforms like iOS, Android and Google+.

Other gaming companies like Gameloft and Capcom have said this week that their mobile revenues ranged from $25.4 million to $52.6 million for the holiday quarter. That suggests that Zynga might easily have a $100 to $200 million-a-year mobile gaming business because it has similarly ranked games.

With Facebook delivering 93 percent of Zynga’s revenues, the two company’s futures are intertwined until at least 2015, when a five-year deal between the two expires. Zynga has taken steps to mitigate the risk of relying completely on Facebook by expanding into mobile and international markets.

Facebook, meanwhile, is trying to forge a stronger, more compelling games platform with improved discovery to offset rising costs to developers on its platform. Through Credits, Facebook takes a 30 percent cut of all in-game transactions. On top of that, social game developers are also a large source of advertising revenue for the company.

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.

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.

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.

We knew that Zynga bought four companies in Q3 2011, but today the company reveals to Reuters the names of four companies it acquired throughout the end of 2011: GameDoctors, Page44 Studios, HipLogic and AstroApe.

Page44 Studios — acquired in September, according to Zynga’s head of mobile, David Ko — is a bit of a surprise as the San Francisco-based developer is only really known as collaborating with indie darling 2D Boy on hit downloadable game, World of Goo. Zynga also acquired San Francisco-based developer HipLogic around the same time; that developer is best known for its mobile UI platform services.

Read the rest on our sister site, Inside Mobile Apps.

6Waves-Lolapps is going more aggressively into mobile gaming by acquiring Escalation Studios, the gaming company it worked with to publish its two very first iOS games.

Escalation is a bootstrapped, five-year-old company out of Dallas that created Yeti Town and Splode, which 6Waves-Lolapps published last month. Splode Free is a music-and-color puzzle that challenges players’ sense of timing while Yeti Town is a game that’s essentially identical to Spry Fox’s Triple Town. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

“We started negotiating a publishing relationship, and we then realized we wanted to make them part of the family,” says Arjun Sethi, who is now the company’s chief product officer. (He was previously Lolapps’ chief executive before the company merged with 6Waves.)

Sethi tells us even though Escalation had a video gaming pedigree, the studio operated more like a highly iterative mobile-social gaming one.

“They looked like a web services-oriented company,” he says. “They’re not very much like a traditional studio. They get games out from a quality perspective, but they also leverage the data as fast as possible, which is pretty rare.”

At the same time, Escalation was looking for greater distribution and reach. The company had a previous publishing relationship with DeNA’s ngmoco, which released its game Dr. Awesome.

“We realized the 6L guys had most of what we wanted. They had a platform, worldwide distribution and so the conversation got steered away from publishing toward acquisition,” says Escalation’s Marc Tardif. The acquisition brings 6Waves-Lolapps’ headcount to 230 around U.S., Hong Kong, Japan and China.

6Waves-Lolapps is one of the last larger venture-backed social gaming companies to make the leap from Facebook to iOS. Zynga has Dream Zoo, Poker and more, while Crowdstar has Top Girl and Funzio has Crime City and Modern War. Germany’s Wooga also brought Diamond Dash to iOS last year.

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

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.”