[Editor's note: How can social game developers create unique new products? In the first of a two part series below, guest author Tadhg Kelly discusses how the social gaming industry fits into the "red ocean/blue ocean" business framework -- basically, why social games are so often copies of each other and what developers can do differently in order to succeed. He covers the red ocean aspects below, and will get into the blue ocean part in a follow-up post.]

I was inspired to write this article by Blue Ocean Strategy. In the book, authors W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne explore methods that companies can use to understand how everything that their competition is doing falls into well-defined types, and then create completely new ways to overcome them and consequently new markets.

Most companies, they contend, are locked into competition with each other in the red ocean (i.e. bloody) side of the economy. This means that most of the time they are trying to compete along well-understood existing lines, and that the results of this kind of competition are angry and merciless. In studying red ocean companies, they observe how they all tend to study competitors’ tactics and then emulate or attempt to differentiate themselves. Such tactics seem to be the main way that red ocean companies think and act, as though they are at war, and this leads to a lot of very similar products created, marketed and sold in much the same way.

One particularly effective example that the book cites is the US wine industry: Wine is sold along two lines, premium and budget, and all of the participants in the market tend to compete using the same factors. Premium wine makers talk about heritage, complexity of taste and image. Budget wines also use image, but they talk less about complexity of taste and more about price. While each wine works hard to differentiate itself, Blue Ocean Strategy argues that most of it tries to differentiate itself in the same way. Wine X has 12% more medals than Wine Y, while Wine A has 50 years more heritage than Wine B.

The authors produce a diagram to illustrate the strategic profile of the wine industry, called a Strategy Canvas. The horizontal axis shows the various factors, whereas the vertical reflects the offering level for buyers (meaning the amount invested by the winemakers in the factor, or the price to the buyer).

Their wine canvas looks something like this:

The book’s conclusion about red ocean markets is that they are a result of focusing on competition for existing customers, or existing types of customer. Red ocean companies offer better solutions for existing problems rather than alternatives solutions for new problems, so wine makers try to win medals and plaudits for the complexity of their product in order to win existing customers away from their competitors. Their customers, consequently, are educated enough in wine to look for more and better of those traits, and wine makers by and large ignore non customers entirely.

Facebook Games

I think that Facebook game developers find themselves in a newly red ocean. While it was blue in all directions a few years ago, increasingly it has become dominated by key factors and competition that are analogous to the wine industry. It may not be blood red yet, but it is certainly a reddish purple.

There are a lot of games from a lot of developers, some heavy hitters, one huge hitter in particular (Zynga). While many of the smaller developers (championed by Inside Social Games and others) certainly have grown to interesting audience sizes, the top of the end of the market outside Zynga has actually been declining for a while, with no obvious new competitor to shake things up. The Facebook market seems to reward financial muscle more than anything else in terms of raw marketing and distribution power.

Yet at the same time even the smallest developers are competing along much the same lines as the big boys. Like small wine makers talking up their own heritage and complexity, smaller Facebook developers commonly make games that are very similar to those of their larger brethren.

99% of the developers in the market are convinced that they are hunting after the same customer, and most of the successes are happening purely because the tide is still rising. Facebook itself is still growing, so in those conditions many clone games will still do well. A rising tide may raise all ships, but the problem with high tides is that they do eventually peak, leaving many boats stranded on the rocks.

Most of the games in the Facebook ocean are virtually identical as a product category. They look identical, are marketed the same way and try to engage the player in the same sort of relationship. They are also branded very similarly. Like wine, they seem to be trying to differentiate in the same way.

If true, then that would mean that Facebook games are also competing along well defined lines. So what would the lines be on the Facebook canvas, and what would the corresponding factors for those lines be?

Types of Games and Apps on Facebook

Broadly speaking, I think Facebook games fall into three easily-understood lines:

* Social apps
* Casual games
* Extended games

Social apps can achieve very high MAU for short periods of time, but even at their height they rarely see more than 5% DAU/MAU engagement from users. Early social apps featuring a single quiz or a top-movies list have long since given way to aggregator applications that allow users to create their own content. Aggregator applications are much more sustainable than their forebearers, but still pretty un-engaging on a DAU/MAU basis. They primarily monetize through advertising or cross-promotional activities.

Casual games are games which are meant to serve as single-play experiences. They may retain high scores, but their focus is largely based on skill. Bejewelled Blitz, Texas Hold’Em or the variety of games offered by Mindjolt are all in the casual ballpark. They monetise with a combination of virtual goods for things like chips, play bonuses or advertising for the game aggregators.

Extended games are the farm, mafia, city and pet simulators. They are the largely time management games that encourage players to creatively invest in them, but also meter play out to encourage virtual economy participation. Most of the very successful games on Facebook are extended games, mostly because they invite a considerable quantity of daily visits and just-checking-in behaviour. Early versions of this kind of game were PHP-built role-playing games, but in the last 24 months they have moved over into isometric sim games instead. This category also includes sports sims like Bola and FIFA Superstars.

Factors

So if those are the strategic lines, then perhaps these are the factors:

Virality: Social games, goes the conventional wisdom, are built on virality. What this pretty much means is that they are hooked into the Facebook graph, and they use whatever free marketing channels are available to publish, notify, email or otherwise message new and existing users on a constant basis. This makes virality a high priority for all social applications, and virtually every game on Facebook prompts its users to Publish at least once every 5 minutes, usually to announce a high score or ask for help.

Gameplay: Casual games use skill-based gameplay the most, social apps the least, and extended games are somewhere toward the bottom of the middle. What’s interesting within these three categories is how similar the gameplay is. Casual games will typically have a minutes-length gameplay with tight actions and dynamics (Poker may count as a bit of an exception here). Extended games are entirely based on timed activities such as spending energy, acquiring levels and completing gated tasks, requiring neither strategy nor skill. And social apps may have a simple test (like a quiz) with the objective of creating a socially relevant viral publishing action. There really are very few games outside those types.

Character: Facebook games are almost universally friendly. There is no bad language, no violent imagery, and a surfeit of cute characters. They generally have no dark side, nor much of a sense of humour. Both are unusual traits in comparison to many other kinds of video game but may well make sense given the tone of the site itself and the international nature of its audience. Certainly in comparison to many other kinds of game, the character of social games could at best be described as mainstream, or at worst bland. Regardless, it doesn’t seem to be of high concern to most of the existing players in the market.

Play Area: All Facebook games operate within a constricted page of 760 pixels width, and most are between 600 and 700 pixels tall. Most social apps are built with standard Facebook API components, while games are built in Flash. There are a very large number of commonalities across games, including isometric landscapes, social friend bars, lower action bars, right-side high scores tables, upper bar level and energy meters, and purely mouse-driven controls. Very few games (if indeed any) make innovative use of the play area, however, with games simply squashed in to the available space.

Financial Model: There are, broadly speaking, three distinctive business models in social games: Advertising (which is low value), Power-ups (medium) and Property (high). Social apps focus on the former, casual games on power-ups with some property, and extended games on property with some power-ups. Financial innovations were a big feature of why social games took off in the first place, and considerable investment is made by many companies in making sure that they are on top of their e-commercial activities

Branding: The game concepts in Facebook are generally describable by their names (in what the British call Ronseal marketing), and require the audience to understand nothing beyond that to immediately grasp the game idea. Level of recognition is based more on visibility than through marketing stories. More typical game branding (celebrities, licenses, movies and TV shows) are mostly not effective, yet at the same time the brands that have come through from Facebook are largely not well regarded nor sought after. FarmVille is probably still the most famous social game by brand, but it’s not exactly loved.

Advertising: Most companies (thought not all) take advantage of as many advertising channels as possible. Given the nature of the Facebook advertising space, advertisements tend to have to be immediate and blunt, with a variation of a Come Play Now message. Advertising content tends not to be too broad in terms of tone. Extended games tend to feature more heavily in advertising than any other, most probably because they can afford it with their revenue model.

Cross Promotion: Nearly every Facebook application cross-promotes. Cross promotion is conventionally held to be the best way to create visibility within the platform because of the positioning and the largely visual content. Big developers learned to cross-promote early, while later or smaller developers use Applifier or Appstrip to cross promote among one another. The positioning and type of cross promotion in all Facebook games is virtually identical, consisting of a long strip across the top of the game (this makes sense because of the width restrictions) showing 5 or 6 icons of other games. Social apps’ primary purpose is arguably to cross promote into other games, while extended games have used tactics to encourage audiences to move from one game to another. Casual games cross-promote, but feel like they don’t entirely want to send users away.

Reward-Drivers: Social apps have almost no real reward drivers, which is why their retention is generally very low. Casual games tend to make rewards all around skill, which is a compelling way for many players to pass some time, but has its limits as most players will reach their maximum mastery with most casual games early unless the game has a particularly good game dynamic. Weekly high scores competitions and special upgrades help. Extended games, on the other hand, use time as a factor to make players wait, obliging them to keep returning to tend their gardens, kill mob bosses or perhaps acquire more energy to do more of the same. It’s very clever, but also copied by many games in an identical fashion to the point that energy-and-levels are regarded as de-facto parts of making social game retention work.

The result is something like this:

Why Has the Red Ocean Developed?

While Facebook developers may talk a good game about using metrics to validate users and develop minimum viable products, the reality is – like most businesses – they tend to just copy each other. It’s simply faster and cheaper for companies to ape each others’ products where possible because successful standard bearers take all the risk, while more risk averse investors simply hang back and wait to see what’s a proven idea or not. We see this all time in technology, from tablets to netbooks, and also in games.

Conventional wisdom forms around the leaders in the market, and the choices that they make become baked in regardless of whether they actually are a good idea or not, nor whether later metrics then tell the developers that the idea doesn’t actually work. Red oceans develop because companies become convinced that their job is to compete along existing lines and for existing customers, so the market tends to calcify around certain ‘known knowns’ because it makes the business easier to understand.

In social games, my favourite example of this is the use of isometric perspectives. Since Restaurant City and Farm Town, almost all extended games from FarmVille to Crime City have incorporated isometric perspectives to give a sense of three dimensionality to their games. But if you stop and look at some of the more silly examples, such as Monopoly Millionaires, it simply makes no sense from a user perspective.

The Facebook environment is the most constricted in terms of screen real estate, and the most competitive in terms of distracting content around a game. And yet these developers go ahead making isometric games in which the players cannot see any meaningful amount of game real estate. Why? Because that’s just what everyone does, so there must be some reason to do it that way. Right?

In the real world of course, nobody knows. And that’s where Blue Ocean thinking first begins.

Tadhg Kelly is the author of a challenging book about, as he describes it, “Reclaiming games as an art, craft and industry on its own terms”, entitled What Games Are. The blog for the book is whatgamesare.com. You can also follow his tweets on Twitter (@tiedtiger).

Facebook-integrated massively multiplayer online games have been done before –titles like City of Eternals have made use of the social network as a sort of portal leading to a stand-alone site. Such is the case with an app by the name of DDTank. On our emerging list a few weeks ago, the game currently garners only around 300,000 monthly active users. Nonetheless, both this number, and its daily active users (around 46,000) continue to grow at a steady pace.

Developed by 7th Road, DDTank is almost like a massively multiplayer rendition of or the classic Worms franchise. Sounds interesting, yes, but the game has a number of shortcomings, only somewhat made up for by its visual style and the addition of MMO-style features, such as equipment.

Planted in the middle of a very chibi-anime-style of world, players are immediately engaged in a basic tutorial. Unlike other MMOGs, DDTank doesn’t have users milling about an entire world, but blasting opponents with a rocket launcher within isolated matches. The basic idea of the game is to join matches and beat other players in a Worms-style bout.

Taking turns, players move about a destructible terrain and lob shots at each other using similar physics to the predecessor. With each shot, players must take into consideration elements such as wind, angle, and firing power, with the winner taking home the most experience. Even when losing, however, players are able to choose from a deck of overturned cards with each containing a random amount of coin.

With each battle, varying numbers of people can join, depending on how many the game creator allows, but in context, the MMO aspect of the game feels somewhat lost. Regardless, it can be amusing to play as players make use of various special abilities to do extra damage, fire more shots, or even fire more missiles. Unfortunately, the resource that governs these abilities is a bit vague, so it’s hard to determine what limits it uses (usually we can only combine two, but have seen other players use more).

It’s part of the natural growth that many MMOGs have. Such games often only explain the basics, and leave it to the player to resolve the rest on their own. Unfortunately, this tends to be a problem as many users are not going to take the time to figure it all out and can often be overwhelmed when it is all available at once. Which is the case here.

Of the MMOG-style mechanics, players can actually perform quests that will reward the user with random items and gems. In one of the few aspects of this explained, these can be augmented with bonus stats through an in-game armory. However, this section of the game actually has five different things the player can use to improve items; only one of which is explained.

What makes matters worse, is that not only are many features available right away, but each item comes with a slew of tooltips displaying half a dozen or more different statistics, none of which are explained. For veteran role-playing players, the stats will be logical (e.g. Luck probably factors in to a critical strike rating), but such will not be the case with everyone.

Though the game doesn’t make direct use of Facebook for its social elements, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t social stuff going on. One aspect of the game that is of interest is that there are actually scheduled activities for users to participate in, and in a virtual world type of fashion, even a Japanese hot spring space to visit and chat within. Aside from these, however, the social is all standard to MMOGs, meaning chat, guilds (called “Leagues” here), and synchronous play.

The real issue with DDTank, however, is that it just doesn’t feel all that special. It’s basically a classic game, put online, painted with new artwork and called an MMOG. The new title isn’t ‘bad’, but it doesn’t really do anything that stands out at all. The virtual world integration of a Japanese spa is nice, but even this is underused and actually seems expensive (10,000 coins) to enter. Of course, coins seem to be easy to come by, but while on the topic of such, we actually had to search quite a bit to find out where the amount we had was shown. That’s a usability issue, as it was within a backpack that was lost in a sea of stats, tooltips, and features.

Overall, DDTank feels bloated with a myriad of superfluous features that feel more tacked on to the core Worms-style combat rather than integral to it. In that, the core of the game is lost and watered down, and time spent on these could have been spent on making everything feel more unique. Again, the game isn’t terrible, but it’s not all that exciting either. With underused Facebook elements, shallow additions, and seen-before-gameplay, DDTank just feels average, at best.

Loot Drop Bets on Talent to Compete in Social Games — Loot Drop has been adding to its list of veteran game creators as it moves to introduce its own games, VentureBeat details. It now includes Doom co-creators John Romero and Tom Hall, game designer Brenda Brathwaite (who was formerly at Lolapps), and chief executive Rob Sirotek. The first title is slated for release in the next few months.

SupersonicAds Launches BrandConnect — Virtual currency monetization firm, SupersonicAds, has announced the launch of BrandConnect this week. The new virtual currency monetization solution uses cost-per-engagement (CPE) brand engagement such as videos and branded widgets.

Electronic Arts Expands Partners Program to Social & Mobile Games – Electronic Arts has announced the expansion of its EA Partners program to the social-mobile space this week. Through Chillingo the company will support iOS and Android titles, and through Playfish, it will support Facebook.

San Francisco Mayor Announces Kabam Move — Social games developer Kabam is moving its office to downtown San Francisco. Announced by Mayor Edwin M. Lee during The San Francisco Business Times, the company will not only relocate and bring 150 jobs.

WeeWorld Launches Social Game Advertising Network — A new ad network for social games and virtual worlds has launched this week says Engage Digital. Created by WeeWorld, the new Social Game Advertising Network (SGAN) will help advertisers incorporate branded virtual goods campaigns into various titles.

The Duchess of Poker to Host Zynga Poker University — Zynga has announced that Annie Duke, “The Duchess of Poker,” will be instructing Zynga Poker University at PokerCon this month. The event will take place March 18-19 in Las Vegas.

Motorola Invests in Moblyng — Motorola Mobility has invested HTML5 games developer and publisher Moblyng this week. Though the amount is not disclosed, TechCrunch notes a filing indicating that Moblyng raised $7.5 million out of a $10.9 million round. Moblyng develops titles for Android, iOS, Facebook, and WebOS platforms.

CyberAgent Announces GameWave Social Game Platform — In a post from Serkan Toto, CyberAgent has announced it’s new social game platform, GameWave, for the iPhone. The platform is noted to be available this spring.

A long-time developer on MySpace, BitRhymes began building games on Facebook starting in 2010. Now it’s getting some results, in the form of Salon Street. Recently appearing in our fastest-growing Facebook games list (based on monthly active users), the game has been steadily growing in the MAU department. Currently hosting over 1.3 million MAU, the daily active users have been much more sporadic, totaling, currently, approximately 112,000.

A basic business-sim, Salon Street doesn’t do anything drastic to differentiate itself. Peppering in a few new features, it does come with a few extra elements, like customized salon services. Where it does falter, however, is in the initial hook, granting users too little money and too expensive of items to buy.

As the name of the game suggests, players are given their very own virtual salon, with the whole objective being that of every other social business-sim on Facebook: Level up, make it pretty, and make it a success. The basic rules of the game stem from the variety of similar games already on the market.

Players are given a “service chair” (with more available for purchase with higher levels) in which to perform various salon services for incoming patrons. There’s actually a wide variety of services ranging from a simple haircut, to piercing, to crazy manicure mineral bath deals. Regardless, each service must have supplies in order to be performed, and as such, the game takes a more Market Street approach.

Supplies are ordered via a catalog and will take varying amounts of time to be delivered. Depending on the value of the service they are used for, they will take longer to arrive, and will, unfortunately, expire should the player not use them to stock a service chair. Yes, the stock is used the stock the chairs themselves. It’s more or less the same as stocking drinks or food products on a counter in Café World — one set of supplies per chair.

Once stocked, customers seeking specific services will wander in, and start generating a small stream of revenue. As they are taken care of, the player will earn fame — which causes more customers to arrive — and should they have to wait too long, or their desired service is unavailable, fame will decline. Also, the amount they pay is not a set number. It is, in fact, augmented by the “Luxury” level of one’s virtual space, which is increased by placing décor.

Moving into slightly newer territory: Depending on the player’s level, they will receive various VIP customers. Consisting of both friends and random non-player characters, these customers will pay significantly more for services, which consists of everything from hair coloring to nails. In both cases, players have to pick out the style they are asking for, but it appears that anything can be chosen and they will be happy. Moreover, these customers are treated via a VIP chair that never needs to be restocked. However, the number of VIP customers the player receives is finite and recharges over long periods of time.

As another gating mechanism, players have a rack of towels that is used to service all customers. These, however, cannot be restocked like normal supplies. Lasting several hours, they can only be refilled by friends who visit one’s virtual space, or every eight hours by an NPC.

Beyond this, other social mechanics stem from the many similar games that came before Salon Street. Like in games such as Hotel City, all employees within the space begin as temporary workers. These workers take a bit of the player’s revenue, but can be replaced by friends, who provide free labor. Other social mechanics are more standard. This consists of leaderboards, gifting, and even helping one another upgrade service chairs by sending parts as gifts. As a side note, upgraded chairs unlock new services.

That’s really the biggest complaint with Salon Street. Everything feels so undifferentiated. Granted, the game has mixed many different mechanics into it, but they’ve all been done before. They’re all just “safe.” Salon Street needs an identity of its own, be it a more unique core mechanic or even just a truly creative style to it (and this doesn’t refer to just static visuals, but rather a flair such as that found in Nightclub City).

Sadly, the static visuals fall short as well. This isn’t so much the art style, as much as it is how much the player can do with the space early on. All of the decorative items in the game are rather high in price, and the amount of starting money is very low, comparatively. Furthermore, the initial services that players can perform in that first sitting don’t exactly make much of a pay day.

In our first sitting, it was only possible to purchase one in-game currency decorative item, one virtual currency item, and some wallpaper (and not even enough to paint the whole wall). This is often the most enjoyable element to business-sim games like this, and the player isn’t given enough resources to truly get into it, thus the hook of the game is much weaker. To draw comparison, the amount in which new users could initially decorate their virtual space in Casino City is fantastic.

On the upside, there is at least one new, interesting, element to the game. In addition to ordering basic supplies, users can order “personalized” nail art which is not only creative, but can be shared with friends, as supplies, for free. This particular feature is something that could be significantly expanded upon, and become a much more interesting hook to the game should users be able to customize more things (e.g. hairstyles and tattoos). While on the topic of potential, and as a side note, the title Salon “Street” actually suggested that players might be able to host a chain of salon businesses; which would have also been interesting.

Nevertheless, the game is marked as a beta version (though most games never seem to leave it), and is subject to change and improvement. Overall, Salon Street is not a bad game, but even though it rearranges various mechanics from other past games, it just doesn’t feel terribly unique. Thankfully, the game does at least change a few things and is trying to combine older mechanics to create something newer feeling. In that, there is potential, but the biggest change needed for this and all other future games of this ilk, is either a core play or style element that truly makes it stand out.

Eight top developers have shown hiring activity based on LinkedIn updates and other sources. In terms of major hires, two older updates from Playdom and Zynga came our way in the form of BioWare’s Gordon Walton and Valve Software’s W. Wright Bagwell. The two join the respective companies in the roles of executive producer and director of design. More recently, Keith Zentner is noted as PopCap Games’ new director of franchise marketing and Benjamin Cooley is now CTO of studios (STG) at Zynga.

As always, if your company is hiring new people or making a notable promotion, please let us know. Email editor (at) insidesocialgames (dot) com, and we’ll get it into this or next week’s post. Also, please note that information about most new hires, below, comes directly from company updates from LinkedIn.

Looking for new opportunities? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.

Here’s this week’s full list:

Digital Chocolate

• Petri Sorsakivi — A single hire from Digital Chocolate, this week, as Sorsakivi joins the team as a junior game artist. He was previously a student at the Lahti University Of Applied Sciences.

GameHouse

• Jamie Toghill — GameHouse, the social gaming arm of RealNetworks, starts off its long list of hires with Toghill, who joins as a senior producer. Toghill was previously a lead designer at Disney Interactive Studios.
• Cliff Stefanuk — Now a product manager at GameHouse, Stefanuk was previously a sales manager at Filogix Limited Partnership.
• Daniel Kristjanson — Prior to joining GameHouse as a game artist, Kristjanson was an animator at Smiley Guy Studios.
• Robert Sanchez — Sanchez joins GameHouse as a game designer. Before this, he was a 2D artist/UI designer at Big Fish Games.
• Joseph Boutilier — GameHouse gains a new game designer with Boutilier, a former student at the Vancouver Film School.
• Steven Pennington — Joining GameHouse as a software developer co-op is Pennington, who was previously a BlackBerry multimedia applications Java developer co-op at Research In Motion.
• Aimee Paganini — Previously a senior producer at Humongous Entertainment/Atari, Paganini now fills the same role at GameHouse.
• Eric Glomstad — Now a web developer for GameHouse, Glomstad was previously filling the same role at Clearwire Inc.
• Morgan LaVigne — LaVigne is now a software development engineer at GameHouse. Prior experience stems from clients such as Microsoft and White Stripes.
• Krystle Alvarez — GameHouse brings on Alvarez as their newest game artist. Before this, Alvarez was a web designer at ShareBuilder from ING Direct.
• Suneetha Talasila — Talasila is now a senior software developer at GameHouse. Talasila was previously a consultant for Frontier Technologies LLC.

Kabam

• Stanislave Vishnevskiy — Kabam brings on a new software engineer with Vishnevskiy, a former software developer for Casamba Inc.
• Sasan Padidar — Now a software engineer for Kabam, Padidar was previously an analyst and programmer for Virtusales.

Metrogames

• Pedro Mancheno — A single hire for Metrogames this week as Mancheno joins the team as an iPhone developer. Prior to this, he was a Unity3D developer at Band Of Coders.

Playdom

• Gordon Walton — As noted already, Gordon Walton has joined Playdom as an executive producer (as of mid-February). He was previously BioWare Austin’s VP and co-general manager.

Playfish

• Sam Miller — Miller joins Playfish, this week, as their newest game artist. Before this, he was an artist at Rare.

PopCap Games

• David Schulman — PopCap hires on Schulman as a social gaming business analyst intern. Prior to this, he was a financial analyst intern at Marcus & Millichap.
• Keith Zentner — As noted earlier, Keith Zentner joins PopCap as its new director of franchise marketing. Zentner was previously a managing partner at Copious LLC.

Zynga

• Vince Livings — In an internal change at Zynga, Livings moves from 2D artist to 3D artist.
• Ange Maestas — Now an executive assistant at Zynga, Maestas was previously filling the same role at Beche Group, LLC.
• John Egan — Egan joins Zynga as “freelance.” He was a a freelance art director and Flash animator at Organic.
• Randall Smith — Zynga gains a new 3D artist with Smith, a former artist from Kuma Reality Games.
• Hiten Kapadia — Previously a payroll accountant at Cascade, Kapadia joins Zynga as a senior payroll accountant.
• Annie Krambuhl — Before joining Zynga as a graphic artist, Krambuhl was a graphic designer at Dapper/Yahoo!.
• Owen Lopez — Now an associate engineer at Zynga, Lopez was previously a security guard at Cypress Security.
• Benjamin Cooley — As stated prior, Benjamin Cooley is now CTO of studios (STG) at Zynga. He was previously a programmer for Booyah.
• W. Wright Bagwell — Also one of Zynga’s bigger hires recently, W. Wright Bagwell joins the team as the new director of design. Before joining, he was a designer at Valve.

Like last month, 16 of the 25 largest Facebook games by monthly active users have experienced user declines, with seven, including CityVille, steming from social developer Zynga. Many of these games were launched a year ago or earlier, and massive new games are not emerging to take their place, at least in terms of equivalent MAU numbers.

But before we get into the details, the other important thing to note is that while MAU shows total size, the daily active user count is a better measure of the popularity of a game with serious users, and the game’s ability to monetize through virtual goods. CityVille, for example, has been losing MAU but gaining DAU in the past month; Zynga has flat DAU overall versus a month ago, at 52.9 million today. (For details on these stats and much more, check out our AppData service, which tracks the traffic to top Facebook apps and developers.)

MAU numbers still provide valuable information about what new games are gaining significant numbers of new users. Ravenwood Fair, It Girl, and Mall World have done especially well. Moreover, two newcomers join the list from Gaia Online and wooga in the form of Monster Galaxy and Monster World, respectively.

Also, remember that the big trend in 2010 was a wide range of smaller games growing and figuring out how to monetize effectively, as we’ve covered before.

With all that, here are the highlights for the Top 25 Facebook Games for March 2011:

• Zynga’s CityVille sees a significant drop this month, losing over 3.6 million monthly active users (MAU). Even with the decline, the game still boasts nearly 95 million MAU in total.
• Texas Hold’Em Poker (Zynga Poker) marks one of only two Zynga apps to gain numbers this month with a growth of 544,040 MAU.
• Millionaire City from Digital Chocolate surpasses Treasure Isle for the #7 spot, but still loses over 475,000 MAU.
• As noted prior, Ravenwood Fair, from LOLapps continues its impressive climb up the charts with the highest gain this month. Growing by approximately 3.7 million MAU to come in at #11.
• Right behind Ravenwood comes CrowdStar’s It Girl which grows by approximately 1.2 million MAU.
• The #17 spot hosts our first newcomer to the list this week with Monster Galaxy from Gaia Online. The game grows by just shy of 1.5 million MAU for a total of 6,864,568.
• Mall World is the second “girls-only” title on the list the month. From developer 50 Cubes, the game earns a total of 6.6 million MAU.
• Zynga sees its second gain this month with YoVille which earns 85,374 MAU.
• Coming in at #24 is the next newcomer to the top 25, Monster World from wooga. Gaining 456,0623 MAU, the title totals out at just shy of 6.1 million.

There are many a game on Facebook that claims to be a strategy game, but very few do so in a real-time fashion. The latest to attempt this is developer Social Point in Social Empires. Currently earning over 800,000 monthly active users (MAU) and just shy of 109,000 daily active users (DAU), the game is continuing to grow at a steady rate.

Similar in respect to other social games such as Backyard Monsters — as well as popular traditional PC games like the Age of Empires series – the well-polished Social Empires gives players a much more active role in the game in allowing them to control most of the game’s minor nuances (combat, resource management, etc.). The main downside is that the level of micromanagement can get tedious at times.

Players take on the sole goal of building up an army and expanding their medieval empire. To do so, they must build various structures to produce the resources of gold, food, wood, and stone in order to construct future buildings and units. Done by a basic “Villager” unit, resources may be collected in one of two ways.

The first means to do so will be the most familiar for social gamers. Players simply build a structure and assign a villager. Over a period of time, resources will be produced. However, in many cases, this will take several hours, so for users seeking more immediate return, villagers can be sent out into the wilds to gather smaller bits of resources from nearby trees, mines, and animals.

It’s actually a good addition, but this is where the game gets a little bogged down. Gathering from these external nodes does not take very much time (only a few seconds) but players can only control one villager at a time and harvest only one item at a time. And, there is no way to queue up actions like most social games, and when users start to get a sizable number of villagers to micro-manage, it becomes extraordinarily annoying after a while.

Once a steady flow of income is pouring in, players are then going to have to start concerning themselves with housing, which allows more units to be made. It’s not a tremendous deal with just villagers, but once an army starts being built, more houses are going to be needed more quickly. From cavalry to archers, players can construct a variety of medieval units to not only defend their own empire, but to expand and conquer those around them.

To get players familiar with combat, their virtual space is littered with trolls and troll camps about the outskirts of their kingdom. There’s not a tremendous amount of depth to units — consisting of basic stats like speed, armor, and damage — but it is rather fun to watch armies clash together. Also, players can control where and when to attack, adding some basic tactical choices. As an added bonus to all of this, defeating all trolls in one’s kingdom will earn a significant bonus to gold.

The real problem with this is that unlike traditional PC real-time strategy games, there is no intuitive marquee select for the armies. Players are initually stuck with just single-clicking each unit or double-click each type of unit to select all of that type. In this case, the micro-management gets in the way and just makes things less fun. It doesn’t make the game bad, by any means, but it does get in the way of what it could be (especially when having to move  many units long distances). All that said, there actually is a marquee select, but the player must first select a unit and draw the marquee from there. In traditional strategy games, this the marquee is drawn regardless of what the mouse is hovering above. Moreover, this tool is not made known to the user.

The other half of this combat comes in the form of defenses. With a name like “Social Empires” one can imagine what that might mean. Yes, while friends can gift one another, earn bonuses for being allies, make Facebook wall posts, and compete via a leaderboard, the real social play comes from the “World” mode. From here, players can attack any other user of comparable level and earn gold and experience from the battle. Moreover, users can send out an eagle to spy on their prospective opponent’s defenses (e.g. their defensive towers and units) before committing to battle.

Also in the World mode, players can sail about the ocean fighting kraken and other such sea monsters for even more bonus gold and experience as well as “invade” islands full of non-player enemies and their armies. So far, we’ve seen only trolls, but as one travels about, they tend to get a lot bigger and a lot meaner.

Social Empires suffers from some fixable usability issues but as a social game, it is actually a good bit of fun, and with a lot to do early on, can become extremely addictive, extremely fast.

Zynga Prepaid Cards Coming to Latin America — Social games developer Zynga is partnering with Mentez this week, says VentureBeat.  Through the Brazilian social game publisher, Zynga will make its prepaid cards available at over a million locations across Latin America.

MySpace Sale Process Begins — According to Reuters, News Corp has begun exploring the sale or spin-off of MySpace. Thus far, early interest in the site has come from about 20 parties, with more expected as the weeks go on. News Corp is slated to begin talks in the second week of March.

News Corp Launchs Social Game Publishing Service — In other News Corp news, the company has announced the introduction of “Making Fun” — a gaming startup it quietly bought last November, that is now serving as a “full-service publisher” that will work with social game developers to fund, market, and distribute their titles.

Zio Studios Raises $1.3 Million — Latin American animation and social gaming company, ZIO Studios has announced the closing of its first funding round. The funding totals $1.3 million from fund manager Promotora’s venture capital division.

Ravenwood Fair Continues to Grow — VentureBeat has highlighted some interesting numbers from LOLapps’ Ravenwood Fair. With nearly 10.5 million monthly active users, the company is also highlighting that around 3.3 million have purchased virtual goods with 90 cents paid, on average, per transaction.  Moreover, 14% purchase something daily.

[image via VentureBeat]

Media Chaperone Raises $1 Million — According to EngageDigital, Media Chaperone has raised $1 million in funding this week. The funding is to  go towards further development of their Facebook app Piggyback, which allows parents to monitor their childrens’ online activity and spending within partner games.

Casino City from DNA Games has been quietly creeping up on our AppData leaderboards over the past several months, today reaching 2.3 million monthly active users and 327,000 daily active users. It’s worth a closer look.

A simple business-sim centered around the gambling world, Casino City focuses more on style and the visual rather than any new game mechanics of significance. Giving the user a tremendous amount of creative control, as well as tossing in a few casino mini-games to play (e.g. slots), it’s a quality application whose only real complaint stems from frequent, yet minor, bugs and irritants.

Similar in respect to games such as My Casino (though we were hearing about Casino City before the RockYou counterpart), players are tasked with building a successful Vegas-style casino. This business mechanic in mind, the heart of the game is really no different than that of Restaurant City or Nightclub City.

For those that may not have played those titles, here’s a basic breakdown: Players must manage income, rating, and customer happiness. Revenue is the easiest to deal with, as players merely place a variety of casino games for their patrons to play. Since the game has been out for some time, the choices are very wide as well, ranging from basic slots to blackjack, to even baccarat. Most of these can be upgraded for in-game currency over a period of time. As customers make bets, the income (dubbed “Chips”) piles up into the various games — with different, higher level or more expensive, games holding more — and the user must return periodically to collect them.

Interestingly enough — and this is an odd aspect of most casino games on Facebook — the patrons never actually “win” in these casinos, so users never have to pay out any rewards to them. Ironically, their happiness will still go up. There’s actually not a lot to this stat though. So long as there are games available, the happiness of patrons will continue to rise. Other than this, when players return to their casino, it will need some cleaning, which will also lower happiness until remedied. Of course, the latter is fixed with just a few clicks on the scattered trash, and even if there are no games available and happiness is dropping that way, users can buy their guests drinks (though this feature feels rather arbitrary).

Truth of the matter is that happiness feels a little pointless from a functional standpoint (meaning something players have to actively manage). It is really more of a way to gauge how well one’s casino is doing at any given time. The stat that matters, besides money, is rating. Represented by a star, this works identically to Nightclub City in that as players place decorations, this will increase. The higher the rating, the more customers one receives.

Obviously, none of this is significantly original, but the focus certainly doesn’t feel like it’s on game mechanics. What really stands out about Casino City is the amount of visual control the player has. Part of this is a result of the maturity of the game, but users can decorate their virtual space in dozens of different ways. While everything fits with one overarching style, themes ranging from western to Roman exist, giving players a very respectably sized palette to work with. It’s also worth mentioning, that the items purchasable with virtual currency are very high quality looking as well, ranging from bouncers, to Elvis statues, to sleek cars.

Additionally, players are able to get hooked early because it is very quick to level up early on, thus unlocking more items, but the payout from even the basic slot machines is significant enough to get a good fiscal start. Furthermore, the sound and music, in general, have this very lively, almost quirky feel that helps tremendously in giving the space a little bit of extra life. Between these elements, new users can easily start to create quality looking casinos.

Another thing that helps in this regard is the ability to play casino-oriented mini-games at any of their friends’ virtual casinos on a daily basis. While other casino-oriented titles have done something similar, they have often been limited in terms of selection (e.g. just slots) or have felt fairly watered down. Here users can play slots, video poker, blackjack, or roulette in a very complete fashion.

Each game seems contains many of the Vegas rules involved in the analog version of the game. Giving blackjack a try, it was surprising to have the options to double down or split. That said, it would probably be beneficial to have an explanation of these rules for non-gamblers. Regardless, these mini-games make for a significant source of income if the player plays wisely, and since they can access a non-player casino right form the get go, they can potentially earn a good bit of coin for their own virtual space.

What is also nice, is that players can continue to play until they either go broke (determined by a daily allotment of chips) or “cash out.” Nevertheless, that limitation is only for one friend. Users can play at other friends’ casinos as well if they’re feeling lucky.

The major downside to Casino City is actually only a few minor graphical issues. In terms of the latter, whenever the player attempts to edit the layout of their virtual space, the last item touched always ends up on top of everything, even when it is, perspective-wise, supposed to be behind. Thankfully, the issue tends to fix itself a few seconds after placement. Curiously, however, the same issue presents itself with the patrons that walk around the casino. Be it walking through doors or to machines, they frequently clip objects, appearing partially behind them. Functionally, this doesn’t hurt anything, but it does detract greatly from the presentation value of the app as a whole.

Overall, Casino City is a pretty good game. It’s not exactly anything new, design-wise, from a core game play stand point, but it allows players a great deal of creative control over their virtual spaces. Additionally, the game does a great job of getting the player started and allows even the lowest level users to create something that is gratifying and visually appealing, as opposed to other Facebook titles that give users only enough to buy, maybe, one item. With the only significant issues being some graphical qualms, Casino City is certainly worth a try. That said, if you’re looking for a wholly original business-sim, you won’t find it here.

With a variety of somewhat successful sports gaming titles on Facebook, including EA’s FIFA and Madden Superstars, Playdom’s Bola and ESPNU College Town, and Nordeus’ Top Eleven Football Manager, the National Basketball Association is making its own move to attract Facebook users. Released about a week ago, the NBA and developer Lionside have created a new Facebook title by the name of NBA Legends.

It focuses more on developing the individual player than many other sports games we’ve seen, removing management elements, seen in most Facebook sports titles, such as recruiting and trading players. Although well put together, with a good amount of social interaction, the title suffers mostly from a lack of pizzazz and style. Other than the use of official NBA teams, players, and logos, there’s just nothing terribly special about this app.

Players start out as an NBA rookie, with the idea being to work one’s way up the leaderboards to a Legend status. In order to do so, players utilize a Game Credits(energy) resource to play games and perform drills in order to improve the overall performance of the “team.” Truth is though, there’s not much of a team, as the player really only sees their avatar, with the only control over the rest of the team being who plays what position in the starting line up.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be any recruitment elements as with other sports games, but likely that decision is made because all of the teams are made up of the actual NBA players. That said, not all of the game’s features are available right from the start. Rather than level, many features are gated via the in-game mission system, requiring users to complete a specific mission before something unlocks. The downside, is that many missions can take a while (several hours), making unlocking everything a bit slow at first. Additionally, one cannot see future missions — only the ones currently assigned, thus there is no way to know when a new feature will be unlocked.

One of the things that can slow players down are drills. These are basic RPG-style actions that can be done to improve a variety of player statistics (like outside shooting) over the course of a few minutes up to a day. There’s nothing particularly extravagant about these other than that they enhance specific offensive or defensive stats, but these do play a role in the social play.

Users can actually perform team drills with both friends that play and non-player characters on the actual NBA team. These drills only take a few seconds, but allow for users to gain a stat called “Chemistry.” Draining over time, higher chemistry enhances the performance within games. Moreover, performing drills with friends will help boost their player stats as well which comes in the form of a blue basketball that must be collected by the friend.

While on the topic of friend interaction, players can also taunt one another. This is more than just a little bit of bragging, but will actually drain, and steal, their Chemistry over the course of a few hours by placing a foam finger in their virtual space. It appears to be in place to act as a means to mitigate the natural decline of Chemistry, but if one has vindictive friends, may be more trouble to use than its worth. That said, the taunted player can remove the taunt upon their return to the game and prevent further Chemistry draining.

As for other minor social elements, invited Facebook friends act as “fans” in game as well. Once unlocked, players will receive endorsements that produce periodic income, with more becoming available with more friends. Other than this, the game has more standard social mechanics such as gifting and wall posts (e.g. bragging/sharing when players win a game).

As for the games themselves, these are all automated in a rather, unspectacular, simulation with the team holding the better stats typically winning. There are a few ways to augment these results though. The first is players can use the money they earn from games to purchase special, consumable, enhancements that will boost a stat (like shooting) for the duration of that game. In addition to these, players can also eventually purchase both uniforms for their avatar and décor for their virtual home court. Both of these will also boost various player stats on a more permanent basis.

Players play against actual users of a comparable level and can do so in both exhibition or season matches. In the former, the games are picked by the player, but the latter will put users through a mock season, playing users that correspond to teams that the game picks out. Technically speaking, there doesn’t appear to be much of difference, but the season mode does have an added goal of trying to make it to the NBA Finals.

The biggest problem with NBA Legends is that the game just doesn’t feel all that exciting. Everything it does is an element that’s been done before, and feels like it was implemented because it had worked before. The game just plays it safe, and other than having the official NBA brands, offers nothing terribly unique or special. At most, the features revolving around Chemistry are interesting, but even then, similar mechanics where player stats drop due to inactivity is nothing new either.

On the monetization front, NBA Legends is fairly standard. Consisting only of items that cost virtual currency (Lion Bucks) and the ability to add the energy resource (Game Credits) when they run out. Other than these, players can replay a match they lost at the cost of virtual currency — at least in the season mode — as what appears to be a sort of “redo.”

In the end, NBA Legends may be an official NBA game, but there’s just nothing significantly new that it brings to the table. It is well put together, and has a few interesting perks here and there, but just holds no style of its own. All the same, the application is very new and will likely evolve over time; hopefully, for the better.