Slingo, a popular slots-and-bingo hybrid from the developer of the same name, is coming to Facebook today by way of Zynga in a licensed game called Zynga Slingo.

Slingo may be familiar to web game connoisseurs, given the game’s 15-year history on its own site and portals like Yahoo Games. Players spend balls on individual spins of a number-generating slot machine attached to a bingo card above. Once the numbers appear, the player must select as many of their tiles as correspond to the numbers, hoping to complete rows, columns or specific patterns to score points. Special joker cards and other powerups alter the dynamic of the game, allowing players to select corresponding numbers faster or gain better odds each spin. More advanced players have access to larger cards with more numbers.

Where Slingo becomes a Zynga experience is in the energy mechanic and the social features. The game is organized into five worlds with nine levels in each world. Players must spend different increments of energy to access different levels, with higher difficultly levels costing more. At launch, social features will be limited to friends-only leaderboards, gifting energy or powerups. Zynga tells us, however, that it is testing a multiplayer feature where players can challenge one another to beat their high score on individual levels. Primary monetization comes from the sale of powerups and energy refills.

As to why Zynga and Slingo partnered on this game when Zynga already developed its own games for the Zynga Casino franchise, both companies say the move made sense given Zynga’s experience in social games and Slingo’s experience in i-gaming — internet gambling. Though Zynga hasn’t entered the i-gaming word quite yet, it’s well-positioned to do so with Zynga Poker on Facebook and mobile and potentially with its other casino franchise games. Last month, the developer told AllThingsD it was looking for partners in i-gaming — this month, COO John Schappert told investors on its Q4 earnings call that Zynga saw i-gaming as a “very interesting opportunity.”

The licensing partnership with Slingo moves Zynga that much closer to seizing the opportunity. Slingo already has strong ties to real casinos via gaming machine supplier IGT — which acquired social game developer DoubleDown Interactive earlier this year — and it has a firm grasp on how i-gaming revenue compares to what social games are seeing.

“It’s 10-times plus, how much people will spend on some of the games out there,” Slingo CEO Rich Roberts tells Inside Social Games. “Remember you’re not buying items, you’re at a slot game online. There are numbers on one operator where certain operators are driving seven figures in profit on one game in one operator. When these numbers start coming out, once [i-gaming] becomes legal in the U.S., you’ll see more and more developers seeing this as the next opportunity.”

As to why Slingo went with Zynga, Roberts explains that it was the strongest possible partnership opportunity to make the classic game social. As a company, Slingo has developed along two paths for the past decade and a half: its online presence and its for wager presence in real life bingo games and slot machines at casinos. “For online, it’s our website, our past history with AOL and our future social game with Zynga,” Roberts says. “We look at i-gaming as a mix of both worlds of us — that’s our future, down the road. Today, it’s how we’re going to build our brand overall with our partners — including our new partner, Zynga.”

Update: A Zynga spokesperson says Zynga Slingo will not be a part of the Zynga Casino franchise. This contradicts what Rich Roberts told ISG.

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

The second panel of the day is “Trends in Social Gaming”. Joining moderator AJ Glasser on stage is Loot Drop’s COO and game designer Brenda Garno Brathwaite, Zynga Dallas’ creative director Bill Jackson, Gaia Interactive’s CEO Mike Sego and King.com’s co-founder and chief creative officer Sebastian Knutsson. The following is a paraphrased transcript of the discussion.

AJ: I wanted to talk about the evolution of social games. Are they going to mimic the path of traditional games?

Bill: I come from that sector — for me it’s not a separate path, it’s the same path and one continuum. Atari, Nintendo and PCs all brought in larger audiences. I think the mission in my mind is to make the audience larger and make room for play.

Mike: I think the evolution of social games has been in an interesting path. It’s been very different from the evolution of console games. Games that evolve with better graphics are missing the point, I think the point of social and mobile is to expand the audience and bring in new players. I think it there is room for a wider variety of games. Three developers working out of a garage can open up a new segment on social and mobile and invent a new genre of game.

Brenda: I do see a trend that the social space is actually following the development path of the traditional games industry. The traditional games industry got very “genre-fied” and the social game space is following that. We’re getting a culture of fast-follow where we take things and copy it and there’s a lack of innovation.

AJ:  King.com has been very good at innovating on older games like Snood and Puzzle Bobble and making it into a totally different game. Can you tell us about your development process?

Sebastian: Our focus as has been to stay with our core demographic and make games that are easy to play and get into. Even though people are asking for more advanced graphics, the strength is social. People want to play with their friends.

AJ: What do you see as the future use of friends in social games? Will it just be leader boards?

Sebastian: I think the focus will be on cooperative and collaborative gaming, allowing people to hook up with other players, not just their friends.

Brenda: I think playing with your friends is just a bribery function right now. In the game I’m working on I very deliberately didn’t want to do that. I wanted to make sure that having it there felt like a natural and intrinsic part of gameplay for both casual and hardcore players. That was probably one of the most important features in the design.

AJ: One of the trends that we’ve seen is combat – what impact do you think real-time competitive play will have on social games?

Bill: I think that’s a tool and the game needs to demand that tool to use it well. I think there’s an opportunity in the space for synchronous play. So far we haven’t had a giant hit but I don’t think there’s a reason there couldn’t be. I’m excited to expand on asynchronous play because I think that’s one space where social games have innovated.

Mike: I think Facebook and the web is very successful as an asynchronous platform. It’s a platform where I can update what I did three hours ago and get feedback on it. I think the success of Words With Friends is based off how well it fits with Facebook’s usage habits. That said there’s a lot of people playing games on Facebook and people are interested in playing synchronous combat games. Facebook does compete with other platforms, and when you play a game on Facebook you’re not playing on another a platform. For synchronous play to be a hit, there needs to be a game were you can bring in players that wouldn’t play a real-time combat game and bring them into that experience, even if they’re not the type to play a game for two hours on a console.

AJ: When we talk about branching out the different genres of social games, where do you see the opportunities to go into new territory and bring in new users?

Brenda: I see Facebook as one part of a whole. My game may be on Facebook, iOS and PC, but it needs to work together for the greatest monetization. If the game is fun you’ll get money. If you have to bribe or use tricks you’ll break the game. The most social game I’ve ever played is Minecraft. That game doesn’t have a marketing budget but it’s a wonderfully social game and I’m happy to give that guy money regularly.

Bill: As a game developer I think that fun is something you need to aspire to, but it’s not everything — for example some players have limited time and you need to give players a way to keep up with their friends if they’re limited on time. That means there are other items like accelerators that people will covet, but fun is the core.

Brenda: You can have fun or pay to have fun faster.

Mike: I think what monetizes is what people feel strongly about — creating an emotional experience. Size is also what monetizes. There’s a much wider variety of what monetizes on Facebook now. If you looked at the top three games last year it was CityVille, FarmVille and maybe poker and the other games were following along those lines and trying to make the same kinds of game. Today there’s a much broader variety of games that can all monetize in different ways and monetize thorough different audiences.

AJ: When you’re testing your games, how do you know when you’ve hit that sweet spot of “fun?”

Bill: I follow a combination of design and metrics. When we’re designing a game we start with design and then you start collaborating with players to improve the game. It’s a combination of feedback, the data that backs up that feedback and working from that feedback.

Sebastian: We find the real issue is hitting the sweet spot in the difficulty curve. If it’s too easy or too hard they won’t come back or they’ll get frustrated. Users tend to prefer shorter playtimes so we err on that side.

AJ: Bill — was there anythigng that you changed or fixed in the first 14 days of CastleVille being live?

Bill: There’s definitely issues with difficulty curves. In Castleville we had issues with balance and crafting and getting that right. In this discussion we talked about fun, but these are social games and so it’s not just a conversation, but that it will scale when it gets to be truly social and how players will interact together. How is it that you’re engaged as a single player and how are you engaged as a community? I think people will love a game world and the environment when they’re engaged in a larger community.

Mike: I think that goes back to user feedback and that’s not just user feedback that comes to you but that users share with each other and the meta community that springs up. I think if people both love your game and hate your game it means you tapped into an emotional response.

Brenda: I don’t think we’ve tapped into feeling that users get from games like World of Warcraft where you will feel bad if you don’t log in and do something at 10 pm every night because you’ll be letting your guild down. Social games haven’t done that yet.

AJ: How do you feel about mobile? How do you approach bringing a game to mobile?

Sebastian: We’ve focused on keeping the game the same on each platform. Our games are simple and it fits us very well to create cross platform games.

Bill: I also think it depends on the type of game and what’s right for the platform. I do see mobile as a way to keep in touch with a comfort zone of what you’ve established. Our express apps have been very popular.

AJ: My last question is a difficult one that Brenda has agreed to take. What about what could harm the social game space? What about cloning?

Brenda: Cloning is a disgusting subject. The technology isn’t a challenge. You can license an engine and outsource the art and develop a game in two months. What matters now is the idea. Inside of Loot Drop we had a meeting with a publisher and a game designer discussed an idea for a game and 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. I’d never heard the term fast-follow until I came into the social games industry. We as game developers need to be phenomenally protective of our games — 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 its because the space is about monetization and not about creativity. I think that could hurt innovation because developers may not come into this space and may choose to stay in console development. I think its very unfortunate. As we see bigger companies come in, they’ll have money to fight the clone wars that smaller developers may not be able to do.

After a tentative start on Facebook that includes MapleStory Adventures, Zombie Misfits and Wonder Cruise, Korean free-to-play giant Nexon is ready to launch its popular KartRider franchise on the platform.

KartRider is an online multiplayer racing game that has racked up over 270 million registered since its 2004 launch. Players control a single kart and can race against human and computer controlled opponents in various gameplay modes. Nexon Mobile released an iOS version last year that topped 1 million downloads in a little over a week; the company reports that the game is now at over 6.7 million downloads. The Facebook version, KartRider Dash, is due out in March.

Nexon has taken its time finding footing on Facebook. Aside from launching MapleStory Adventures in 2011, the Korean publisher experimented with different ways to engage with the platform throughout the last year — including investing in developers A Bit Lucky and 6waves Lolapps and co-developing or publishing new IP for the platform. Results have been mixed with MapleStory Adventures performing well while Zombie Misfits struggled to find an audience and Wonder Cruise has yet to really set sail. Speaking to Inside Social Games, Nexon EVP of Social Games Aron Koh acknowledges the learning curve — but says “we can do better than what we’re doing now.”

“We’re still learning how to approach players on Facebook and [other] platforms besides our core PC business,” Koh says. “It’s been challenging. It’s not easy to push out multiple updates to get the metrics up. But we’re very conservative when it comes to acquiring new users. We spent very, very little on [MapleStory Adventures] and we could see that the IP was popular and that was the main factor in acquiring users. It was a very good experience and we’re very happy with how our original IP translated to the platform.”

Aside from the appeal of the franchise itself, KartRider has a shot at defining the racing genre on Facebook. Leading car game Car Town only has a nominal, asynchronous racing game; Title Town Racing never made it big; and BMW xDrive Challenge is an advergame first and a racing game second. At one point, it looked like EA might bring its Need for Speed franchise back to Facebook (in fact, it still might); but so far, there isn’t one racing game that’s made it big on the platform. Meanwhile, over on Google+, mobile developer Gameloft proves that a rich 3D racing experience is not only possible on a social network, it’s probably a good way for a developer to distinguish itself from all the citybuilders and the puzzle games.

“One thing I’m very interested to see from our own [studio] and from other companies is more synchronous games on Facebook,” Koh says. “There a couple of synchronous games out there, but it’s very limited. As a company we’re interested to see more players jumping into that arena.”

Nexon raised $1.17 billion in its initial public offering late last year.

Closed beta tests and “sneak preview” open beta tests are getting more popular with social game developers on Facebook. Tetris Online Inc. and EA PopCap provide two recent examples with Tetris Stars and Solitaire Blitz.

Betas on Facebook are tricky. Open betas run the risk of “losing” users that have no patience for unfinished games; several developers have told us releasing a game on Facebook before it’s optimized is a death sentence compared to other social networks where you can get away with less-than-perfect. Closed or limited betas, meanwhile, usually can’t be monetized and sometimes aggravate potential users when friends in the beta bombard them with invites that won’t actually get them into the game. Past examples include MetroGames’ Auto Hustle (launched before it was ready), EA2D’s Dragon Age Legends (unstable invite-only beta lost player data) and EA PopCap’s Pig Up! (which doesn’t seem to be going anywhere).

Despite the risks, betas are crucial for social games because they provide early feedback on core gameplay, presentation, monetization and retention. It’s easier for developers to make changes or roll out fixes with a smaller user pool than it is to redo an entire early user experience while serving 100,000+ daily active users. Even without monetization implemented, a beta can buy the developer the time it needs to take a game from mediocre to successful.

Take, for example, Tetris Stars. Developed by Blue Planet Software and published by Tetris Online, the game entered an open “Sneak Peek” beta sometime in winter 2011.The game updates the classic puzzle game with a “digging” feature where each line of the puzzle cleared removes a layer of dirt or rock. The goal is to unearth as many buried Stars and power-up items in 60 seconds with Stars freed and special moves earning the player points. The entire game is controlled via the mouse rather than keyboard buttons.

“We’re doing a fairly quiet release at first so we can work with [Blue Planet Software] to optimize the code and balance the gameplay,” Tetris Online VP of Marketing Casey Pelkey tells us. “We’re also anxious to see how users respond to the mouse controls.”

From what we can see, the mouse controls haven’t changed much in the past two months. We have seen, however, the number and price of power-ups have been adjusted, the flow of gameplay tweaked and bonus time has been added for each Star freed. The overall impact is the game went from being too easy in December to too hard in January. As of now, the game is somewhere between the two points and Tetris Online still isn’t ready to officially launch the game.

EA PopCap’s Solitaire Blitz, meanwhile, is off to a stronger start than Pig Up! Neither title has ever been officially announced by the developer — PopCap only owned up to Pig Up! after it was reviewed by Games.com — although Solitaire Blitz at least has a cross-promotion bar with other EA games on Facebook. It seems like the developer learned from the lack of response to Pig Up!’s bare bones beta, however, as Solitaire Blitz had monetization and viral sharing features up and running when the game entered open beta late last month. We actually found the game entirely through invites.

Solitaire Blitz is a variation on solitaire where players are racing the clock to clear as many columns of cards as possible to uncover treasures hidden underneath each column. An EA PopCap spokesperson declined to comment on the game, but it seems as though gameplay tweaks are still being made.

Some users are once again seeing the “Discover New Games” module in the right sidebar of Facebook.

The Discover New Games module highlights games a user’s friend is playing or that are otherwise popular. This time around it includes a larger game thumbnail instead of their friends’ profile pictures as we saw in March 2011. The module still includes the prominent “Play Now” call to action.

This is an additional way the social network is trying to please game developers and help them gain users after a period in 2010 when they cut off several viral channels. In a developer blog post on Monday, Facebook announced a few new ways it is promoting games on the platform, including a games-only activity feed and aggregate News Feed stories.

Although we’ve seen the company recently identifying games by genre to encourage users to click over to them, it has not done so in the latest version of the Discover New Games module.

This story originally appeared on our sister site, Inside Facebook.

Disney Playdom’s Marvel Avengers Alliance is a turn-based combat game heavily influenced by classic role-playing games.

Playdom acquired the rights to develop the game from Marvel after Marvel was bought by Disney in 2009 but before Disney acquired Playdom in 2010. When the game finally debuts on Facebook in North America, Marvel Avengers Alliance will have been in development for nearly 17 months all told.

All that time has been well-spent according to Michael Rubinelli, Disney Playdom’s VP of studio operations. Not only did the development team at Playdom-acquired Offbeat Creations have plenty of time to collaborate with Marvel on perfecting the IP, but the design of the gameplay deepened over time to reflect a higher degree of polish and layered complexity that Rubinelli deems “future-proof” for social game platforms.

“We are absolutely opposed to cloning,” Rubinelli tells us. “It’s one thing to be influenced by something — but this [game] is very specific to Marvel and it stands on its own.” He believes that because of the depth and because of the Marvel brand, no developer would stand a chance at actually being able to clone the Marvel Avenger Alliance experience.

Rubinelli and Offbeat Creations COO and co-founder Robert Reichner walked us through a hands-off demo of the early and mid-game experience. Players take the role of a S.H.I.E.L.D. trainee in the Marvel universe — an extra-government agency tasked with protecting Earth against terrestrial and extraterrestrial threats. A force from space called Pulse unleashes a chemical called Iso-8 in New York City. As Marvel’s supervillains race to collect it, the player teams up with Marvel superheroes to stop them.

Core gameplay is combat. The player forms a team with their own customizable character and up to two Marvel heroes, each with their own individual stats that can be improved by training, with consumable items during combat, or with Iso-8 upgrades the player earns through gameplay. The player’s team appears on screen against up to three enemy combatants with turn order determined by individual character statistics. Like the classic RPG gameplay made famous by Final Fantasy, players have a range of options to use during a character’s turn — like attack, use item, summon additional hero or a special attack. Some attacks are unlocked only as the player levels up or as that individual superhero levels up. Superheroes each have 12 levels.

Fights themselves are governed by health for each character and by overall stamina that is used by each individual combat action. Players can use health or stamina packs on themselves or on superhero characters. The player can also choose to skip a turn in order to recover lost stamina. If a player’s character is knocked out during a fight, the player can still control the remaining superheroes; but they can no longer use health and stamina packs or any special items that would increase or decrease character stats.

Outside of combat, there is a deeper level of strategy involved in forming player teams and training characters. As players progress through the main story of the game, new heroes become available for the player’s team. Heroes are divided into one of five character classes — Blaster, Bruiser, Scrapper, Tactician and Infiltrator — that have a rock-paper-scissors balance of strengths and weaknesses. Aside from the combinations of those classes, players can also tweak their teams through weapon and armor equipment items available in the store or as quest rewards. With the added feature of a “distress call” summon that can bring a Facebook friend’s superhero into combat for a single attack, the customization options for forming the “perfect” team are pretty complex. Leaderboards track players’ high scores as well as which team combinations they prefer to use.

Overall gameplay is governed by various types of currencies. Silver is the soft currency earned in combat or through timed “remote ops” missions that the player can spend on items in the store. S.H.I.E.L.D. Points are a social currency gained by visiting friends and can be spent on unlocking new customization and upgrade options for characters, weapons and armor. Challenge Points are a regenerating currency that is spent only on asynchronous player versus player matches where player teams fight one another. An energy mechanic is applied to each fight encounter in the story mode. The remote ops missions are limited by a staffing mechanic where a player has to recruit friends in order to send heroes out on missions to other cities.

With so much content and so much history behind it, Marvel Avengers Alliance runs the risk of overwhelming new players. Rubinelli and Reichner both feel that the game hits that fine balance between too much and too little exposition on the story side — meaning both Marvel fans and newcomers can easily follow what’s going on. The developer went with modern visualizations of Marvel characters, based in part on the recent run of movies like Thor, Captain America and the upcoming Avengers film, so that characters should be easily recognizable. As for adapting to the combat style, individual matches can be completed in game sessions of no more than 10 minutes, which won’t intimidate the average social game player. We observer that many core video game players will also naturally take to the combat, as it should be familiar from classic Japanese RPGs.

At launch, the game will have 28 hero characters and just over 100 Marvel characters total (counting villains). The opportunities for expansion through characters are wide; especially as certain characters have premium missions that the player can purchase to gain a bit of extra story around their favorites. A partial lineup provided by Disney Playdom includes:

• Human Torch
• The Invisible Woman
• Mr. Fantastic
• The Thing
• Colossus
• Cyclops
• Kitty Pryde
• Nightcrawler
• Phoenix
• Storm

We’ll have a review of the game once it enters open beta in the coming weeks. Marvel Avengers Alliance is still on track to launch on Facebook in Q1 2012. Rubinelli could not confirm a Google+ launch, but Disney Playdom already had a publishing relationship with that platform, so it’s not unreasonable to think the game could find its way there.

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.

Facebook is testing a games-only activity feed that groups all friends’ game stories in one place. The social network is also considering scrapping the games-only ticker that appears along side canvas apps.

As detailed on the developer blog, the new games-only activity feed is actually a sub-menu option under the apps and games dashboard called “Friend Activity.” When selected, the view condenses all friends’ game stories into one feed organized by most recent stories first. This effectively creates a one-stop destination for games on Facebook — which is something the social network has tried to avoid in the past even as Google+’s rival games platform embraces it.

Meanwhile, Facebook is deciding whether or not to keep the games activity ticker. The blog reports that the feature hasn’t been a significant driver of traffic and that Facebook is looking into other options “improve and simplify” the games experience. Games bookmarks are here to stay for the time being, however, as Facebook reports they do drive significant traffic and re-engagement. Both features have been updated several times since launching over the summer.

Other discovery features announced include the News Feed and Timeline units we’ve seen this month, both of which play into the theme of social discovery. The current unit that appears for games in News Feed not only shows recent game activity for friends, but also identifies games by genre. The “recent games activity” section in Timeline currently only displays game achievements, but the new unit (pictured, right) adds high scores and a bookmarks section for most-played games. It’ll be interesting to see if the unit can also display friends’ comments or Likes on individual game stories.

Lastly, Facebook reminds developers that app profile pages will be discontinued on Feb. 1, which means all Likes and vanity URLs need to be migrated to an existing Facebook page before the change goes into effect.

Facebook now displays genre categories below game names in News Feed stories.

The change is mostly a cosmetic one as there is no way to view Facebook games by category. Even so, just seeing the word “Puzzle” below a game may help users navigate toward new games that they have a higher chance of liking because they know what to expect from it.

Game genres are a tough subject for some game developers as some descriptions are too broad to accurately target a game at its intended audience. For example, in the screen above, both CastleVille and Zoo World are tagged as “Simulation” — but the two games play very differently, to the point where it might make more sense to call the former a role-playing game and the latter a simulation. Another challenge is that some games fall under more than one genre; like how Zuma Blitz is both an arcade game (because it’s based on speed of reaction) and a puzzle game (because players have to match colors).

Zynga kicks off a closed beta today for the next title in its Casino franchise, Zynga Bingo.

The game is a recreation of the classic gambling game where players receive cards with numbers placed along a grid and each column is identified by letter. A “caller” draws numbers at random from a pile, calling out the letter and number while players search for the corresponding spot on their cards. Should a player find the number called, they place a “dauber” token on the number; if they fill an entire line of numbers with daubers, they have a “bingo” and can claim a prize. Other winning conditions include filling up an entire card with daubers, placing daubers on each of the four corners of the card or completing specific number sequences that have been marked for prizes by the organizers.

Zynga’s main update to the game comes from power-up and bonus items, which are either bought, earned or gifted from friends. The power-ups are unlocked and used during the actual game of bingo; a boost bar fills up with each play, and once full, the player can click it to activate whatever power-up item they have queued. The power-ups available at launch are limited to placing down a dauber on certain numbers as if they had been called in normal play or increasing the number of bonus items received at the end of a game. Bonus items include soft currency, tickets (which are used to purchase bingo cards), mystery crates and keys to unlock said crates. The crates can contain power-ups, soft currency or tickets.

Other features in Zynga Bingo include real time chat, themed rooms that sometimes draw from Zynga’s own games and a Zynga Casino navigation bar above the canvas that presumably allows players to jump easily from Zynga Bingo to Texas HoldEm Poker or other Zynga Casino games as they are released. During a press demo, a Zynga spokesperson declined to discuss any upcoming features related to the Zynga Casino interface beyond what had already been revealed at Zynga’s 2011 Unleashed preview event.

Among social games, bingo has been slower to catch on than other casino titles like poker or video slots. It wasn’t until the beginning of 2011 that Buffalo Studios’ Bingo Blitz began to gain traction, hitting 2.8 million monthly active users and 930,000 daily active users before the end of the year. Other bingo games have since launched on Facebook to more modest success and some virtual casinos have added it to their lineup of games.

Zynga Bingo is the developer’s second Facebook title of 2012. Its first 2012 game, Hidden Chronicles, launched in the first week of January and currently enjoys 12.5 million MAU and 6.1 million DAU as recorded by our AppData traffic tracking service.