There is a $100 million discrepancy between what Facebook earned in payments revenue and what it paid out to developers, according to revenue figures in its IPO filing last week.

In the filing it says, “In 2011, our Platform developers received more than $1.4 billion from transactions enabled by our Payments infrastructure.”

But based on the company’s $557 million in payments revenue last year and its 30 percent share of transactions on the platform, Facebook should have paid out $1.3 billion at most. There is at least a $100 million discrepancy here. A company spokesperson declined to comment.

There are a number of possibilities:

Facebook may have comped free Credits for some developers: When Facebook began rolling out its virtual currency Credits, it would give them away for free to entice users to sign-up. Developers would have to eat the extra costs if  players bearing these free Credits showed up to play their games. They complained — loudly. But it’s possible Facebook comped some of this free Credits usage for certain developers.

(Sidenote: This only happened to gaming companies that used Credits as their in-game currency. Some developers like EA and Zynga didn’t change their in-game currency but still used Facebook to manage their payments.)

There may have been initial problems with fraud in the early months of Credits, which the company may have also comped for developers: One other developer told us that there were early issues with fraud and completion in Facebook Credits purchases (as you would expect with a nascent payments platform). So perhaps Facebook covered developers for these problems too.

Certain developers may have gotten a more favorable revenue share: It would be surprising if Facebook discounted its revenue share for favored partners. Facebook has always been adamant about taking a flat 30 percent cut across the board for all developers. Even Facebook’s special multi-year agreement with Zynga explicitly mentions the 30 percent payments share (although there are parts right around that number that are redacted in the contract, which was attached to Facebook’s IPO filing).

From the filing. (Anything marked [*] is a redaction):

“The amount of the service fee described in the Facebook Credits Terms that we charge to you at any given time to redeem Facebook Credits shall be [*] 30% per each Facebook Credit redeemed [*].”

Facebook started doing promotions on Credits with 80 percent discounts last November: One likely explanation might be promotions on Credits that ran from November to January. They gave certain players 80 percent discounts on the virtual currency, but still paid developers as if the virtual currency was priced normally, according to our conversations with gaming companies in the ecosystem.

There are a couple of ways to think about this. On the one hand, when we see individual developers engage in aggressive virtual currency sales, it can be a red flag. It’s a sign that they are sacrificing long-term revenue for short-term gains. They might be trying to boost financial performance to look better in an acquisition or funding round.

But Facebook isn’t a company that culturally operates for the short-term like that. By discounting Credits, the company is potentially getting more users to hand over their credit card data — which will make it more frictionless for them to pay for things down the road with Credits.

Right now, Facebook likely has payments data on just a small fraction of its users. If you consider that 50 percent of Facebook’s 845 million monthly active users play games, and then 2 to 6 percent of them monetize by paying for virtual currency, then a back-of-the-envelope calculation would suggest that they have payments data on around 30 million users. By comparison, Apple has more than 250 million iTunes accounts. Facebook needs more credit card data on more users if it wants to power payments for more interesting areas down the road.

So if the sales were successful in getting more users to hand over their credit card details, that’s a good thing in the long run. But if they just encouraged users who already pay with Credits to gorge on the virtual currency, then it could mean softness in payments revenue going into the first or second quarter of this year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Play

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

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

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

The event kicks off with “Facebook, Apple, Google: Which Platform(s) Hold the Most Opportunity in 2012?” Joining moderator Eric Eldon on stage are wooga founder and CEO Jens Begemann, Kabam founder and CEO Kevin Chou, Funzio and Storm 8 co-founder Anil Dharni and Disney Interactive Senior VP of Social Games John Spinale.

What follows is a paraphrased transcript of the panel.

Eric: Let’s talk about what’s going on with Facebook. Jens, let’s start with you — you’re still focused on Facebook.

Jens: We’re very happy with Facebook. If I look at our four largest games, we had our all time highs last week and some of these games are two years old. We have three times as many users as we had a year ago. If you really focus on the platform and you really focus on having a great user experience. For us, it’s really most organic. Advertising is roughly 5% of new users for us. 40% is viral and 55% is through cross promotion.

Kevin: I think Jens’ experience is a unique. I think looking at the platform for the past few months, advertising costs have gone up 18% and virality is kind of a black box to developers in general. We’re still very excited about Facebook and we continue to work with them, but they’re just starting to learn — they’re really two quarters in with learning how Facebook Credits factors into the developer’s experience. When we implemented Credits, we though conversion would go up 15 to 20%, but I think FB Credits has helped maybe 5%.

John: It is pretty similar for us. At the end of the day, having a unified currency that’s easy for people to understand — I think they made a good choice, but it was a drag on the system. For us it’s less about DAUs and MAUs, it’s more about monetization. While we have a different experience than Jens here where we have to incent our user base to grow, we’ve gotten very good at figuring out how to get people to pay and how to use existing channels.

Anil: There is no clear roadmap on how Facebook is thinking about the viral channels. It’s not clear what channels will exist tomorrow and how they will change today. That’s a growing challenge for us and I’m actually hoping there’s more solidificaiton that they talk about here at ISA. As far as FB Credits, I think it’s a wash out. We saw increased conversion rates, but a gradual decrease in average revenue per paying users. It’s hard to know why, but for games with whales, we see that people just like credit cards and PayPal better than these 99 cent purchases. The percentage of users that are paying are increasing, but total volume has decline.

Jens: We’ve been with Credits since day one, so we can’t really compare. We don’t see negative trends because we can’t compare the pre-Credits revenue to post. I think we should appreciate that the Facebook platform is completely free and only if you make revenue will you do a 30% revenue share and I’ve not heard anybody complain about Apple for their revenue share. It’s apples to apples with Facebook. You get distribution and other things — and only if you’re successful do you give to FB.

Kevin: We’re really excited about mobile. On the web, we have converted more users to paying. On mobile, we’re getting well above the conversion that we see on Facebook. More people have historic credit cards on file, so there’s less friction. But Apple provides less than Facebook.

Eric: Walk us through the transition to mobile. Anil, do you have any regrets?

Anil: The Funzio team has a unique background, we’ve done Facebook and mobile gaming before Funzio. I think our experience depends on what existed at that time. When we were doing Storm 8 our team came mostly from Zynga and we had to look at our DAUs and they were mostly a joke. We had a large portfolio of games to manage. When we launched Funzio, Facebook was the obvious choice. Looking back Facebook was an obvious platform for scale and we can take a game to mobile and google plus. Overall it’s been a good experience. The Funzio team has a unique background, we’ve done Facebook and mobile gaming before Funzio. I think our experience depends on what existed at that time. When we were doing Storm 8, our team came mostly from Zynga and we had to look at our DAUs and they were mostly a joke. We had a large portfolio of games to manage. When we launched Funzio, Facebook was the obvious choice. Looking back Facebook was an obvious platform for scale and we can take a game to mobile and google plus. Overall it’s been a good experience.

Jens: For 2012, we’re very focused on FB, but we’re very interested in mobile. We’ve kicked off as many projects for mobile as we have for social. We’ve brought our IP to iOS like Diamond Dash and we see that this works very well. We see many new users on mobile. We see more new users that have never seen the game before. It really helped when we launched that we had the core fan base download everything because that brought us to the charts and then we attracted many many new users.

Eric: John, you have a bunch of mobile games through Disney and some Playdom games you’re moving to mobile. How do you prioritize?

John: On the social game side of things, we’ve seen social game networks go mobile. We move where the puck is, we’re making sure our existing social games extend to mobile — like on iOS, but we’re also seeing revenue growth on Android meaningful enough that it’s worth doing. It’s more unwieldy and has more overhead, but it’s worth it. It’s not an either or game for us. We take some strategic bets and we love that the vast majority of revenue is still iOS and Facebook but nobody wants a one horse race.

Eric: You’ve been at OnLive so you’ve seen platforms shifting. What do you think is shifting?

John: Back in the PC days when there were a variety of operating systems and a huge variety of consoles fighting it out, this is pretty natural. We started off making games for MySpace and it wasn’t obvious that Facebook would be THE social network and I don’t think they realized they’d be a games platform. Games drive usage and purchases and engagement. Apple came reluctantly to the games space and Facebook came accidentally. A lot of the user engagement and adoption of the platform is driven by gaming and now they’re beginning to stabilize their business around gaming. Now we’re seeing people come in from the outside to make gaming ecosystems. I think mobile is going to take the lead over a several year time frame. I don’t know how long that will take.

Eric: How is HTML5 going for you guys? Any meaningful results from some of the apps you’ve launched? Are we years out?

John: It’s going to be a while. There are a lot of people making incredible prototypes to show it’s real and it’s going to be great. But I don’t think there’s enough feature completeness or momentum where people are going to turn a business on it.

Kevin: We have two mobile games in beta. One is in Unity, the other is in HTML5. Some of our games have less animation, so it’s a lot easier in HTML5. Obviously you can’t access the accelerometer and other things that make mobile great. I’d say it’s probably 2013 or 2014.

Jens: We launched our first mobile game in October. We’re satisfied overall, but many details were not optimal. It was hard to start a game online and finish offline. All of these small things combined to make HTML5 less attractive. It will take some time. It depends on the game — but in the long term, we’re very bullish. Until the user experience is identical — I would say three years from now.

Kevin: It’s not necessarily that there should be parity. We operate on over half a dozen platforms and it’s a single game universe where all our players play against each other. We’re excited about Google+ and several other platforms and we have to think about operational efficiency.

Anil: One of the big trends we’re seeing from a player’s perspective is that they’re demanding better quality games. HTML5 would be a regression for us. We’re interested in new technology, but we’d rather go 3D than HTML5.

Eric: Let’s talk about iOS a bit more — what are the main ways to solve the viral channels issue?

Jens: We see a decent number of users coming from the Facebook to iOS games if they’re connected. IT’s a healthy amount of users. We see much higher engagement from those using Facebook Connect. I think it’s a little bit underrated. I think making mobile games social will increase engagement a lot.

John: For our mobile games that we’ve added social components to like Where’s My Water, which has been a huge success, the level of engagement by adding Facebook has been pretty low, but adding game centric features like leaderboards has been better. I think there are better pure gaming platforms available on iOS now. I think OpenFeint, Gree, ngmoco, there’s a lot of cool stuff going on and I think Game Center could do more. On the flip side of things we’re bring our social games into the mobile platforms. We’re definitely viewing it through two lenses right now but it’s getting better over time.

Eric: What about iPad? We’ve heard that that’s a very big part of how people are playing your games?

Anil: We’re less on the casual side right now, we’re more on the midcore hardcore side. And we’re seeing massive uptake on the iPad. Apple has a massive edge over Android because of the iPad. We’re hoping Google figures out tablet soon because that’ll be a market for us. The ARPU is even higher than what you see on iOS users.

Eric: What are the monetization differences you’re seeing on iOS and Android?

John: It’s a smaller amount of users that get through the funnel. We’re finding that users are more engaged for equivalent games — like Gardens of Time. It’s a meaningful percentage that’s more engaged. That’s were we see the large growth in the market is mobile. To some degree, we take a platform agnostic view as Disney. We’ve been through 20 platform transitions from black and white to radio and so on — that’s how the company at large views platform transitions. For us it’s about story and character connections and crafting them to be appropriate for the right platforms. We need to think about it in the short term and in the long term. When you have a success like Swampy the Alligator, you need to think about how to branch that out.

Eric: Are you shifting more resources to Android this year?

Anil: We’re definitely focused on building out the team.

Eric: But it’s the third place to go after Facebook and Apple?

Jens: We have no team on Android. Going from Facebook to mobile is a big challenge and we want to get it right. Android is an issue because we’re a small company and we don’t have a QA team. The team is responsible for delivering high quality. On iOS that’s possible because there’s a limited number of devices that the team can test. Android needs a large QA team that goes through all the specifics for the devices — and that’s an issue. In time it will happen.

Eric: Does the Google+ platform matter at all to you guys?

Kevin: We’re very happy with Google+. We’re seeing retention similar to what we see on other networks. Monetization is a little worse. Google+ takes a different approach to acquiring users. Putting content on the exclusively gets better featured placement. It’s not an open platform, it’s more of a curated approach. But we’re probably one of the more successful developers on the platform and we’re opening up our catalog of games to the platform. On the unit economic side, we look at how much it costs to get a user and we look at how much planned monetization we get per user and those are similar. On Google, the issue is scale. And the payments cost – which is obviously very favorable. It’s been growing, so it’s hard to ignore. Google+ has been in the news for a lot of things, but the most important news is that it’s growing.

John: Did you get money from Google? [Laughs]

Kevin: Yeah.

John: I see the potential, that they’re very serious about what they’re doing and they have an opportunity to approach it differently. To be able to weave games and building a community on that platform is very different and it’s not head to head any longer. What’s interesting is how we can approach people from a different angle. We have a few games on there with smaller user numbers, but they monetize well.

Eric: Any other platforms we should talk about?

John: We just published Spry Fox’s Triple Town — which came form Kindle. There’s not much there yet, but it’s a great game to come from that platform.

Eric: How about the international networks? Aren’t they declining?

Kevin: I don’t track the platforms, I look at the growth in the games. The large majority of our new users are not on Facebook. It’s Google+ and 600 other social networks — we just launched on Yahoo and we’re launching on games portals. There’s a lot of opportunity around the web.

John: We’ve launched on loads of social networks over the course of Playdom’s life cycle and we’ve narrowed it back down to Facebook and Google+ and a couple in Russia like Mail.ru that are still pretty vibrant. But the number keeps shrinking. It gets down to true development efficiency.

Eric: Windows Phone? You guys ready?

Jens: I’m from Europe, so I’m bullish on what Nokia can do with Windows Phone. Here in the U.S. it’s not a big brand but in Europe and Asia it’s still huge. I think it will be a third platform that will be relevant. We’re focused today on Facebook and iOS and we’re trying to create the best games possible.

Now into the Question & Answer segment…

Q: With regards to monetization, we’ve heard that 95 percent of users don’t monetize, but advertisers are coming in and getting interested in the space. What’s the difference between pissing off users with advertising and monetizing those users who haven’t monetized yet?

John: I think users recognize that programming needs to be paid for in some way. Having contextual, relevant advertising typically isn’t a problem. We haven’t embraced advertising in its fullest form. We see it as a pretty big revenue stream overall and we’re leaning into it. We’re not at the bleeding edge.

Jens: We don’t have advertising in our games because we’re focused on selling and monetizing though virtual goods. The large majority of people who never pay, so there should be a meaningful revenue stream. Everything we’re hearing though says its not yet there. One of the big issues is standardization. I don’t know what this issue is, but if we could could get a standardized format I think it could become big.

Kevin: When we do the math for ourselves we see we can make $10,000 – $20,000 a day through advertising with a lot of work, but we can make the same by monetizing with our users better.

Anil: I don’t think the ad products are there yet. They can actually hurt the user experience. If you have products that are more innovative and don’t impede a user experience we’ll look at them.

Q: From a global user acquisition point of view, which platform has been the most valuable – HTML5, Android etc?

Jens: For us, the focus is on Facebook and iOS. Facebook is blocked in China, and the parts of Asia where Facebook is big monetization is very low, so our focus is mainly on Europe and North America.

Kevin: On mobile you’re going to get global coverage, but on the web it’s different. Facebook has low penetration in Japan and it’s blocked in China, but for a casual audience, you pretty much want to be on Facebook. If you’re looking to go after a niche market, you can get into smaller markets and networks.  In China you want to be on Tencent and Sina. Japan is very interesting with GREE and DeNA, in South Korea you’ve got Nexon and a number of others.

Q: How do users discover new games on Facebook?

Jens: On Facebook it’s really through requests and news feeds. Our users come because their friends are playing.

John: Paid advertising on Facebook is a well-oiled machine on Facebook. You can also pull in from outside channels — we’re seeing a massive influx of people from outside the Facebook platform through more traditional channels like PR and marketing that I think we do well as a company.

Q: Eric Eldon: What can Facebook do to become a successful mobile platform?

Jens: Facebook is already huge on mobile. They’re doing the right things to make the platform right to develop for on mobile. We want to make mobile games that are really social and I think Facebook is doing the right things with Facebook connect to make it more social and use the social graph.

Anil: We’ve found that gamers don’t care about their friends, they want to find other gamers. They need to have a game graph and I think that would be a lot more relevant on mobile. It would be the secret sauce.

Kevin: I think what Facebook needs to do is figure out how to get around the 30 percent tax that mobile platforms charge them. I think that’s why they’re betting heavily on HTML5 so they can bypass the app stores and go from a mobile browser to a game. I think it would be very difficult for any developer to pay two 30 percent taxes. They need to go HTML5 and push the entire ecosystem to HTML5 to make it successful.

With all the talk of “cloning” recently, it’s easy to think that original ideas in the social gaming sector are getting increasingly hard to come by. And while there may be a finite number of ways you can represent particular styles of gameplay, that doesn’t stop some developers thinking of an interesting, original twist on an established formula. Such is the case with Team Slots from Product Madness, a new video slot machine game for Facebook. Unlike most other Facebook-based slots titles that focus either on personal gain or competition against friends, Team Slots adds a cooperative element to the format.

When starting the game, players are randomly assigned to the Red, Green, Blue or Yellow team. The assigned team is persistent for the player’s entire Team Slotting career, with no facility to change at this time. Wording on the official FAQ suggests this may be under consideration for the future and indeed it may provide an additional monetization opportunity for Product Madness — however, it also opens up the possibility of unbalancing the game if a large proportion of the player base suddenly decides that it wants to be on, say, the Blue team.

When playing any of the game’s virtual slot machines, the player’s individual accumulated winnings are tallied up and added to that of the rest of their team. Whichever team has the highest cumulative winnings between them at the end of a 30 minute round wins a gold trophy, with second and third place achieving silver and bronze ones respectively. At the end of a day, the team with the most trophies wins the daily competition, providing them with a shower of coins to spend on the next competition. The teams also compete for dominance over the course of a month, with bigger prizes on offer.

As players compete on the machines, they earn experience points and level up. Each level up provides a small coin bonus and, after certain milestones, unlocks additional machines for play. The higher-level machines have fewer players playing them, so individual winnings tend to have a greater impact on the team’s results as a whole. Potential winnings are also higher, so it’s often in a player’s best interests to play the highest level machine they can. Most machines work in the same way through the use of various-shaped “win lines” which players can turn off and on by increasing or decreasing their bet, so once players have the hang of one they can move to the others easily. However, those new to playing slots may find it initially confusing, since the in-game explanations of how the machines work are not presented very clearly.

A few technical flaws prevent the experience from being as polished as it could be, not least of which is the fact that the game runs very slowly even on a powerful computer. This doesn’t appear to be the fault of the game itself, which is presented in Flash like most other social games. Rather, it appears to be the fault of the real-time social feed under the game — each team has its own fan page on which both players and team administrators can post comments, and the feed from this page is continually updated beneath the main game window during play, allowing players to interact with one another. The way this feature is currently implemented leads to that part of the game page almost constantly refreshing itself, which creates constant loading, a flickering mouser cursor and poor frame rates. The issue could perhaps be avoided by refreshing only once every few minutes, when a player actually posts a comment or through a manual “Refresh” button.

Aside from this issue, Team Slots provides an original take on a simplistic game genre. The addictive nature of slot machines provides plenty of monetization opportunities from among those players who enjoy protracted play sessions and/or runs of bad luck. The slow income of coins from competitions, leveling up, individual winnings and a regularly-provided bonus will likely be enough for casual players, but those serious about their virtual gambling or contributions to the daily and monthly competitions have the potential to make the game very profitable. It’s a shame to see the game spoiled by the issues mentioned above, however.

Team Slots currently has 460,000 monthly active users and 60,000 daily active users and is still on an upwards trend after its launch in mid-December last year. To track it’s progress, check out AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

Wait

An original, social and cooperative take on the slot machine genre with a user experience marred by technical issues and unclear explanations for new players.

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.

Digital Chocolate has unveiled its newest Facebook game, New In Town. The game is a life simulation game that allows players to customize an avatar and take another shot at life after high school, choosing a career and establishing themselves in a fictional city.

Unlike Digital Chocolate’s most recent title, the space strategy game Galaxy Life, New In Town is likely to appeal to a more casual, female demographic, which could help the developer regain many of the monthly and daily active users it has lost over the past six months.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, Digital Chocolate had 18.9 million MAU and 2.5 million DAU back in August. Since then, however, the company has steadily lost users on Facebook, dropping to 7 million MAU and 1.2 million DAU.

While Galaxy Life has hit its stride with 1.5 million MAU, 320,000 DAU and a retention rate above 20 percent, many of Digital Chocolate’s other titles on Facebook have gone into decline. Its hit Zombie Lane shrank from 5.7 million MAU to 1.9 million; Army Attack dropped from 4.5 million MAU to 990,000; and Millionaire Boss — which struggled to find an audience after its July 2011 launch — peaked at just over 690,000 MAU before sinking to 9,000 MAU and 400 DAU.

Rough patch on Facebook aside, Digital Chocolate has been diversifying its product offerings, launching its own games portal and taking Zombie Lane and Millionaire City to Google+. The company also launched Zombie Lane on iOS and announced it would be bringing Zombie Lane and Army Attack to Android and other browser-based channels. If New In Town finds its footing on Facebook, we may see it spread to other platforms.

Cricket is a somewhat under-represented sport in the world of computer and video games, and it is with this in mind that Indian gaming company Zapak has brought CricVille to Facebook. The game is a social cricket game that combines business management simulation elements with skill-based gameplay during matches.

After installing the game, players are launched into a brief tutorial in which they are introduced to their new cricket ground — little more than a dirty wasteland at the outset. This is where team management mode introduced. While in the management part of the game, the player is able to hire, fire and train players, with their abilities affecting match outcome; hire coaches for limited periods of real time to provide bonuses to the team’s skills; acquire sponsorship deals with numerous rather unsubtle bastardizations of recognizable brands to provide income; and build up the team’s stadium to provide greater rewards from playing matches. Incentive to continue playing is provided through a gradual unlock system, with better coaches and stadium parts available to higher-level players, or those willing to spend real money on the game. Gameplay in this section is simple but provides opportunity for players to build up their team — optionally guided by a series of tasks at the side of the screen — and see the fruits of their labors through the growth of their ground.

When the time comes to play a game, the player has two options: a practice match against a computer-controlled team, or a social match against either a friend or another worldwide player. A tournament facility is also planned for an upcoming update. During practice matches, the player takes on active control of the batsmen in the game, while the team’s turn to field is simulated at high speed with no visuals. In a social match, gameplay is asynchronous — the challenging player is first up to bat against the opposing team’s bowlers with their abilities determined by their statistics, then a challenge notification is sent to the other player to inform them it is their turn to bat. When both players have played, the final result is calculated.

The game assumes a basic familiarity with the rules of cricket as it does not take any time to explain how to play outside of showing the basic keyboard controls. These are kept simple, with two shot buttons for varying degrees of power and directional controls determining in which direction the ball will be hit. If the player successfully lands a hit on the ball, they are able to trigger their players running by simply pressing a key, with their speed determined by their statistics and upgrades.

A match is straightforward and relatively quick to play, and allows cricket fans the opportunity to enjoy the game at a much faster pace than real matches, which often continue for several days. The player is encouraged to develop a sense of ownership and pride in their team by customizing their colors, choosing a name and even renaming their players — with a profanity filter firmly in place. Presentation is solid with clear visuals in the management section and realistic sound effects and smooth animation in the match section. The only element which feels somewhat unfinished is the fact the management part of the game is completely silent, with no music or sounds at all.

One mildly questionable aspect of the game is the amount of  unnecessarily sexist imagery throughout. While it’s a fact that Indian Premier League cricket (on which the game is based) does indeed make use of female cheerleaders in revealing outfits, in the case of this game every “out,” “four,” “six,” and even the end of a match is punctuated by a gratuitous full-screen animation of three cheerleaders gyrating provocatively. The whole game is presented in a lighthearted, cartoonish style but this feels a little too much at times — and may even be off-putting to some fans considering playing the game.

Even so, CricVille is a well thought out game that is easy to understand yet provides a great deal of opportunity for friendly competition between fans — and, by extension, a strong built-in viral promotion and retention strategy. Even those with only a basic grasp of the rules of cricket will be able to find the experience of challenging worldwide opponents and Facebook friends to be enjoyable.

From a business perspective, the usual reliable combination of premium items and an energy mechanic mean that — assuming Zapak is able to acquire a healthy player base — the game has potential to be quite profitable, particularly in those parts of the world where cricket is a popular sport. Developer Game Ventures saw some success last year with its Facebook cricket game, Howzat Cricket.

CricVille has picked up 6,000 monthly active users and 1,000 daily active users since its launch in late January. To follow its progress, check out AppData, our tracking service for social games and developers.

Play

Questionable imagery aside, this is a solid offering for cricket fans.

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.