Of all the sports games on Facebook, soccer-themed games reign supreme, accounting for more than half of the 40 most popular sports games on the platform.

The leader of the pack is Nordeus — a bootstrapped Serbian developer founded by three former Microsoft employees. Its game, Top Eleven – Be a Football Manager is a detailed football management sim, and despite its complexity, has 3.6 million monthly active users and 1.2 million daily active users, far above its closest competitor, the officially licensed title EA’s FIFA Superstars, which currently has 1.9 million MAU and 300,000 DAU according to AppData.

However, what may be most interesting about Top Eleven is the game’s slow burn. Unlike the average Facebook game, which typically sees most of its growth in the first six months, Top Eleven is still adding players 21 months in and is the most popular its ever been. Since the game’s launch in May 2010, Nordeus has taken Top Eleven cross-platform to iOS and to Android and introduced a raft of new features and updates, but has so far been silent about upcoming projects.

Inside Social Games had a chance to interview Nordeus’ co-founder and CEO Branko Milutinović and ask him about the success of Top Eleven, and what’s next for Nordeus.

Inside Social Games: Top Eleven is the most popular sports game on Facebook right now. Why do you think the game has been so successful despite the fact that its competing against officially licensed games like FIFA Superstars?

Branko Milutinović, Nordeus co-founder and CEO (pictured right): As well as double the MAUs, Top Eleven also has over four times more DAUs. That’s really important for us because it means our users are engaged and coming back to play regularly!

But to answer your question, we took the risk of developing a technically very advanced platform that enables rich gameplay, synchronous multiplayer experience and truly cross platform gaming (i.e. it’s exactly the same game on Facebook, Top Eleven.com, iPhone and Android). This gave us the opportunity to offer our users a game they find challenging and exciting to play with their friends.

Another thing we’ve focused on and think is crucial is the level of realism. We’ve tried to be as close to the real world of football management as possible, including a complex match simulation engine based on English Premier League stats. Actually, the only thing missing to bring us to the absolute realism is licensed brands, everything else we’ve covered.

ISG: When you released Top Eleven in 2010, Facebook was a very different platform. Since then user acquisition costs have risen quite dramatically — what are the challenges you’re facing now and how has Facebook changed as a platform?

Milutinović: The platform has changed a lot in the previous two years. We know the Facebook team is working hard to improve the platform for everyone, both users and app developers and most of the changes we find really positive.

From a developer point of view it is true that user acquisition has changed dramatically with viral growth channels narrowed, but I can understand that Facebook had to do that to preserve user experience on the platform. User acquisition is becoming a big obstacle for newcomers and companies that cannot rely on cross promotion from their other games, which is why we think publishing other studio’s games is going to become more common. At Nordeus we look at the changes as challenges we need to overcome. It’s evolution. We improve ourselves every day and try to adapt to the new conditions.

ISG: In September you revealed your relationship with Facebook was “very close” – can you reveal more about how Nordeus and Facebook work together?

Milutinović: Some time ago Facebook launched an initiative to strengthen the collaboration between platform and the developers. We were recognized as one of the brightest examples of how to leverage the platform, build a great product as well as a successful company around it. Since then we’ve been working with Facebook to implement new updates the platform, building the best possible experience for our users. That probably helped Top Eleven to be voted as The Best Sports Game of 2011 by Facebook based on user satisfaction.

The Facebook team is also doing great job in fixing bugs we report and we’re proud that we’ve helped the platform to become better, especially when it comes to Android and iOS support.

ISG: Are you interested in taking on partners for any reason such as publishing, acquisitions, etc?

Milutinović: We’re always open to new opportunities, but on the other hand have full belief in our own capabilities. When it comes to publishing I can say that we are considering the idea of publishing others’ games, but given that developing games is in our DNA we will probably focus all our effort on getting our titles that are under development right now to the market as soon as possible.

ISG: You’ve said before you want to be “the Zynga of Europe” and that you wanted to consolidate the talent in Southeast Europe. What is Nordeus’ long term strategy around this?

Milutinović: When it comes to hiring our long term strategy is actually to continue doing what we’ve been doing in the previous two years, especially in the last few months. We want to combine best young talent of the region with the most experienced experts from the industry. Examples of that effort include our new Head of Business Development who joined us after over 5 years of running sales and user acquisition for Eve Online, as well as a college hire from Caltech, both relocated to Belgrade. (If you’ve ever been to Belgrade you’d understand why ;)).

We’ve also organized initiatives to attract the best talent, like the game development hackathon we held two months ago. Over 200 of the brightest computer engineering students and graphical designers from the region applied. We’ve already hired ten of the students that took part, with more interviews ongoing. We strongly believe our people and company culture are our strongest assets and we will continue to nurture that.

ISG: What’s next for Nordeus? You’ve released iOS and Android versions of Top Eleven. Are you developing a new game or games? Will they be sports strategy games? Will they be on Facebook?

Milutinović: Unfortunately I can’t share as many details about specifics as I’d like to, but we are working full speed ahead on the next generation of games, which will introduce a lot of new concepts. They will continue to carry on our philosophy of unified gaming experience throughout devices, so they will definitely be available on Facebook, Android, iOS, and other platforms as well.

There are a handful of superhero games on Facebook already, but none like Marvel: Avengers Alliance, which gives players the opportunity to fight alongside their favorite Marvel superheroes in RPG-style combat against a series of iconic villains.

Marvel: Avengers Alliance is currently undergoing private beta testing with a final release to the public coming “very soon” according to developer Playdom. The game will be launching with a substantial amount of content, including a total of 28 recruitable Marvel heroes for players to add to their team and fight alongside, as well as a wide range of missions pitting the player’s team against well-known Marvel villains such as Dr. Doom, Loki and Green Goblin.

Players start the game by designing their own avatar, which does not have to share the name and gender of their Facebook profile. This character, known as “The Agent” throughout the course of the game, becomes a member of the Marvel “S.H.I.E.L.D” espionage and peace-keeping organization despite having no discernible superpowers at the outset of their career. Despite this, The Agent is the most customizable of the characters the player will take control of throughout the course of the game, with a wide variety of weapons, armor, special equipment and skills available, allowing players to take full ownership over their character’s development.

By following a series of story-based missions, players will recruit their first Marvel heroes into their team, including Iron Man, Hawkeye and Black Widow. The game’s basic concepts are gradually introduced, starting with the turn-based RPG-style combat which makes up the bulk of the game. The Agent and up to two additional heroes are sent into battle against various opponents in an attempt to work their way across various maps, culminating in a boss fight against a Marvel villain. Combat strategy is based on a system of character classes, where certain types of character are particularly strong and weak against others, meaning as the player’s team expands, heroes must be selected with greater care. Performance in battle is scored according to how quickly the conflict was resolved and how well the player’s team survived, with higher scores contributing to higher “mission mastery” ratings. Higher masteries lead to bigger rewards, which can then be spent on new equipment, training and consumable items.

The game involves little in the way of direct social interaction until after the first few missions, at which point a player-vs-player facility becomes unlocked, allowing players to pit their teams of heroes against one another. Alongside this, players are also able to visit their friends’ cities to “help” with missions by clicking on locations to recover money and items. Players are also able to recover “call for backup” items from friends, too, which can subsequently be used in difficult battles to even the odds somewhat.

Progression in the game will require players to either spend money or recruit friends due to the necessity of acquiring “S.H.I.E.L.D” points for training and researching new equipment. These can be procured either by requesting from friends or by purchasing with the game’s hard currency. Without them, players may still continue through the story, but will be unable to level up Marvel heroes or unlock new equipment for purchase in the in-game store.

There are a lot of things to like about Marvel: Avengers Alliance. The art style evokes the atmosphere of its source material well; the story is simple comic-book fun with some entertaining dialog; and the gameplay itself is straightforward to understand while offering enough depth and challenge to attract more hardcore players. There are a few niggling little flaws which detract slightly from the experience, however — for example, some game terminology is used inconsistently, with “Stamina” and “AP” being used interchangeably in a number of situations, leading to confusion. Likewise, comic book fans will be sure to pick up on the illogical fact that it’s possible to call Tony Stark (a.k.a. Iron Man) for backup during combat even when Iron Man is already in the active battle party. The fact the game switches out of full-screen mode when sharing an achievement with friends — even when the post is created frictionlessly — is also a little frustrating, particularly at times when it’s impossible to immediately switch back to full-screen mode, such as during tutorial messages.

These flaws aside, Marvel: Avengers Alliance will likely attract a broad audience thanks to its deep gameplay and cast of recognizable characters. It also looks as if the game is set to be just the first step in a range of interconnected Marvel games known as “Marvel XP.” Details on this are slim at the time of writing, but the game will offer the facility to sign up for the service via a player’s Facebook account, with progression in Avengers Alliance potentially affecting progress in subsequent games.

Marvel: Avengers Alliance is set to launch on Facebook “very soon,” according to the developer. You’ll be able to follow its progress using AppData, our traffic tracking application for social games and developers.

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The official Marvel license will help this well-produced game find a large audience among comic book fans on Facebook.

Disney Playdom is far from done with hidden objects after Gardens of Time‘s smash hit success. Launching this week is the developer’s second Facebook game for the genre, Blackwood & Bell Mysteries.

At the core, the game plays like Gardens of Time — players complete levels by finding lists of hidden objects and increase their level by decorating a virtual space with items they buy or acquire through gameplay and friend gifting. Blackwood & Bell, however, puts more of an emphasis on story and narrative, connecting story progression to special objects that players must find in scenes to advance the plot. Additional modes like one-on-one multiplayer will also be added to the game post-launch. Beyond gameplay, however, Blackwood & Bell features a darker, more sinister atmosphere than its predecessor, which is how Disney Playdom plans to differentiate the game from Gardens of Time and all the other hidden object games that have launched on Facebook since.

“We hope it overlaps considerably with the Gardens of Time audience,” Playdom Executive Producer Joey Klein tells us. “We’d be really excited if this can broaden the market with its edgier feel. Each chapter will have a distinct feel and it’ll be a little darker — we’ll toe the line between actual reality and fictional exciting characters like vampires. That’s where this game fits into the space.”

Incidentally, story and narrative were how developer Making Fun hoped to set its hidden object game, Hidden Haunts, apart from Disney Playdom’s Gardens of Time. With so many developers trying to break into the genre, it’s not surprising to see similarities like this between new hidden object games. It’s even less surprising to see that both Blackwood & Bell and Hidden Haunts draw some inspiration from classic downloadable games that dealt in similar themes of mystery and tension — like Big Fish Games’ Mystery Case Files.

Klein acknowledges that social game developers are often inspired by downloadable games because they were so successful. His real fear for Blackwood & Bell, however, is its inevitable comparison to Gardens of Time. “The theme and the story and the small tweaks make a better game overall,” he says. “By having a deep storyline with interesting characters you meet along the way — we hope it keeps players engaged for a long time. It’ll be interesting to see how the target market changes with the theme.”

Social game publisher and developer Peak Games announced the acquisition of Saudi developer Kammelna Games today for an undisclosed sum.

The acquisition deepens Peak’s ties to the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region where the publisher makes most of its money off hyper-localized social game adaptations — like Komşu Çiftlik, the Turkish language adaptation of TheBroth’s Barn Buddy. In September, the company raised $11.5 million in a second round of funding to acquire two Turkish studios and increase regional operations in South America and Mexico.

The Kammelna buy brings Peak Games into Saudi Arabia — a country which shows a preference for card or board games, similar to what Peak’s audiences in Turkey and the rest of MENA prefer. Speaking to Inside Social Games at our Inside Social Apps conference earlier this month, Peak CSO Rinah Onur explained that Kammelna is a very small studio that made its name with a single card game of the same name. Peak claims that Saudi Arabia sees the highest average revenue per user (ARPU) by region.

Prom Week, a game developed by a team of students and faculty at the University of California Santa Cruz, is now available on Facebook. The game is a simulation of social interactions between high school students based on a sophisticated artificial intelligence system. None of the stories which the player can experience in the game are pre-scripted, leading to a wide variety of potential outcomes.

Prom Week’s gameplay initially seems very similar to The Sims Social, with players choosing various actions for the on-screen characters to perform and then watching the outcome. Unlike The Sims Social, however, all available activities involve interactions between two characters, and rather than simply playing a short animation, a short scene — complete with procedurally-generated text-based dialog — is played out in front of the player. The player is then given a summary of the outcome of the action, which may affect three “relationship” statistics tracking how characters feel about one another as well as providing more short term feelings.

The structured part of the game revolves around selecting a character and having to fulfill a series of goals by the end of the school’s prom night. The player has a limited number of “turns” in which to accomplish these goals, but they can be completed by taking command of any characters present in the scene, not just the one who is ostensibly the “protagonist” of the story. In fact, many characters’ goals require the subtle social manipulation of other characters in order to accomplish tasks — in the story where the “geek” character wants to become Prom King, for example, he doesn’t stand a chance of befriending the head of the Prom Royalty Committee unless he shows he is enemies with her big rival.

Prom Week is based on a set of 5,000 social considerations or “rules” that govern the characters’ behavior in various situations. The team at UC Santa Cruz studied social interactions in movies and television shows, so the game’s social model is skewed towards popular media’s depiction of what high school life is like, not necessarily reality. This does, however, mean that most players who have seen movies and TV shows such as “Mean Girls” or “Sex and the City” will be familiar with the way these situations work — and the game also includes an “energy” mechanic for predicting and manipulating characters’ responses to various interactions, allowing for scenes to play out in wildly different ways with a bit of nudging from the player.

The game is a fascinating demonstration of what is possible with the use of artificial intelligence. Despite being Facebook-based and revolving around the concept of social interactions, however, the game features no viral social features outside of posting to the Games news ticker when players are playing, and nor does it feature any monetization. It does, however, serve as a bold advertisement for the possibilities on offer at UC Santa Cruz’s Games and Playable Media and Expressive Intelligence Studio departments, both of whom display prominent logos on the game’s canvas.

Prom Week is unlikely to enjoy widespread, mainstream success or profitability for the reasons outlined above. However, what it does show is the exciting possibilities artificial intelligence provides to online games. There’s no reason why elements of Prom Week’s innovative mechanics couldn’t be incorporated into a properly monetized, virally promoted social game, and for that reason alone, it’s very much worth the time it takes to explore.

At the time of writing, Prom Week has just 200 monthly active users and 200 daily active users. It only launched on February 16, however, so it will be interesting to see how the general community takes to it. To follow the game’s progress and observe its usage trends, be sure to check out our AppData traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

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A lack of monetization and social features mean Prom Week is unlikely to be profitable or find a wide audience, but it demonstrates some highly intriguing possibilities for possible implementation in future games.

Kabam moves farther away from its Facebook origins today by launching Dragons of Atlantis on games portal Kongregate and Kingdoms of Camelot on iOS.

The official announcement today only mentions a publishing partnership with Kongregate, but we found Kabam’s first mobile game on the Canadian App Store early last week. Though Kabam VP of Mobile Matt Ricchetti had no public comment on the title, we observe he’ll be speaking at the upcoming Game Developers Conference in San Francisco next month — where he’ll presumably discuss Kabam’s efforts to diversify its offerings as a social game developer that got its start on Facebook.

Kabam’s reputation comes from asynchronous strategy combat games like Dragons of Atlantis and Kingdoms of Camelot. In 2011, the developer landed an $85 million fourth round of funding, the developer started to expand, bulking up its core technology and metrics tracking infrastructure, opening a San Francisco studio and launching games on other platforms like Google+ and its own site. Going into 2012, Kabam acquired Fearless Studios to push its games out of 2D and into streaming 3D. The company also completed some restructuring that resulted in layoffs, the magnitude of which we never quite discovered. As of February 2012, Kabam claims its quarterly bookings are up 10 times over its Q4 2010 and that it believes it’s No.2 behind Zynga in terms of social game revenue.

An interesting component buried in the press release is a proprietary framework called Pyramid that Kabam plans to use to connect all its games in a synchronous environment. The goal for the user-side experience is to allow players on various networks and devices to play together. On the developer-side, the framework eliminates the need for branched code and multiple update pushes for different platforms. It’s unclear how smoothly Pyramid will work in mobile, where Apple’s update policy often trips up cross-platform developers that want to release constant updates.

As Kabam’s attention has shifted away from Facebook, we’re not at all surprised to see its traffic on the platform sagging. Daily active users alone are down over 50 percent since July 2011, from 1.4 million to 590,000, according to our AppData traffic tracking service. For context, Kongregate claims a user base of 16 million monthly unique visitors.

Social Empires developer Social Point has completely revamped and rebranded its Facebook-based strategy game Men Vs Women, which we first looked at back in December, and dubbed it Social Wars.

Rather than basing the game on a literal “battle of the sexes” as before, men and women now live together in harmony and cooperate to conquer an alien threat. The game has been gaining rapid traction since its rebrand and is the seventh fastest growing Facebook game by MAU this week. According to a post on the official forums, the change in the game was not because Social Point considered it to be sexist — rather, it was an attempt to add more action and interest to the title. The new thematic elements — particularly the Orc antagonists — also strongly resemble Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000 universe, adding a degree of recognizable appeal to the game’s setting.

Social Wars is a real-time strategy game in which players build up a base and its defenses, train a variety of attacking and defensive units and then fend of the invading Orc armies in a series of missions. Alongside this, players are also able to challenge other players to battles and take on a series of self-contained challenge missions on special maps.

The game superficially resembles titles like Zynga’s Empires & Allies, but gameplay is actually more reminiscent of popular PC real-time strategy titles such as StarCraft and the Command & Conquer series. Players are able to give direct orders to their forces on the map, moving and arranging them as they see fit. At the same time, the enemy forces are also moving, meaning that careful tactical placement and movement is key to success. In many situations, simply charging in all guns blazing will result in defeat, particularly when attacking a fortified enemy base. Unfortunately, the artificial intelligence that determines the paths by which the player’s units will move does not make the best decisions at times, often splitting forces too thinly across two alternative routes, wandering off in strange directions or inadvertently getting the attention of the enemy too early. Players’ units will fight back if attacked, but their prioritizing of targets is sometimes frustratingly bizarre. This means that combat in the game requires a frustrating and unnecessary degree of micromanagement at times, which may put off more casual players.

The game structure is arranged in such a way that there is always something to do. “Chapter” missions take place on the island upon which the player’s base is located and revolve around completing a specific objective in the local area. These may include fending off invading forces, rescuing prisoners or a variety of other tasks. Upon completing a Chapter, there is a four hour delay before the next one starts, but during that period players are able to take on a Weekly Challenge mission as well as make use of a “Harbor” structure to transport their forces to a self-contained mission map. Once players reach level 8, they are also able to launch assaults on nearby human-controlled bases — but conversely, they are also open to attack, making the building of defensive structures such as turrets essential.

The game features a comprehensive suite of social features with more to come in the future. At the present time, players are able to send gifts to one another; visit each others’ bases and help out; and engage in real-time chat. The game will shortly be adding an Alliance facility, allowing players to team up against common foes. Players gain additional rewards for having more friends playing, but the game is a little too pushy with the pop-up windows encouraging players to invite friends — especially as the appearance of this window often causes the game to break out of full-screen mode.

Social Wars is off to a strong start thus far. This is likely due to several factors: its gameplay offers a little more depth than other base-building fare; the real-time strategy elements make it likely to appeal to more “core” gamers; and the game’s monetization allows more impatient players to progress quicker by having stronger, more effective units. However, the degree of micromanagement required thanks to the game’s poor artificial intelligence will be off-putting to casual players, who may find it too difficult, and the game lacks a degree of polish, with a large number of spelling and grammatical errors in interface elements and notification/share windows blocking animated cutscenes at times. The “invite friends” popups could also do with being a little less obtrusive.

Social Wars currently has 3,500,000 monthly active users and 720,000 daily active users. You can follow its progress with AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

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Needs some refinement, but players are already taking to Social Wars in droves. Social Point have the potential for a big hit on their hands.

News Corporation social game developer Making Fun launches its third Facebook game today, entering the hidden object genre with Hidden Haunts.

The game differs from all other hidden object games on Facebook in that it’s photorealistic — the developer composed physical sets for each level of the game and snapped photographs of the scene to form the basis of the levels. The rest of the game experience will be immediately familiar to fans of Gardens of Time; players click on hidden objects, receiving a scoring bonus for finding objects in rapid succession and progression is tracked both by score and by the number of decorations a player has added to their mansion. To those ready to cry clone, however, Making Fun points out that it changed Hidden Haunts’ story immediately after Hidden Chronicles and World Mysteries launched to remove a missing uncle story element so that Hidden Haunts wouldn’t come off as too similar to other hidden object games on Facebook.

“We would like to be known for richness and depth,” Making Fun President John Welch tells Inside Social Games. “We had to launch Hidden Haunts early because we didn’t want to be left behind [by Hidden Chronicles]. There’s a theme here, and if you already like it, hopefully you’ll really like this game.”

Making Fun has had some success with its other two Facebook games, Clash: Rise of Heroes and Noah’s Ark, and with its iPad title Santa’s Village. Each game is a completely different experience — collectible card game, farming simulation and city-builder, respectively — and this helps Making Fun understand how to tap into different demographics on different platforms. The developer is still learning basic social features and monetization practices, however.

“We’re anti-whale,” Welch says. “But we still have to teach [players] spending.” He relates an incident where Hidden Haunts’ designers went back and forth on whether or not to give players free premium currency and then walk them through the pay flow as part of the tutorial — which is standard practice for most social games, but one designer new to social games worried that it took away some of the fun.

Going forward, Making Fun is exploring new genres both for Facebook and mobile. In a demo reel to be shown at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco next month, we saw snippets of a basketball sports sim for Facebook that looks to be a combination of turn-based play and statistic tweaking. We also saw a tower defense game themed around bugs that looks nearly final. We also couldn’t help but notice a sketch on the wall behind Welch that appeared to depict a hybrid board and matching game based on what looked like Alice in Wonderland; Welch declined to comment on it directly.

Look for our review of Hidden Haunts later this week.

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.

Zynga swung to a fourth quarterly loss of $435 million on a massive $510 million stock-based compensation charge related to its December public offering. Excluding that charge and other costs, earnings per share were 5 cents, beating an average estimate of 3 cents, according to a Bloomberg survey of analysts.

Zynga says that non-GAAP net income (a measure that isn’t in line with generally accepted accounting principles) is $37.2 million compared to $63.2 million a year before. Again, that’s also not necessarily a fair comparison because Zynga only finished its transition to using Facebook Credits until April 2011. If it had been using Facebook Credits the whole time and giving Facebook a 30 percent revenue share, it would have seen a 65 percent year-over-year increase in revenue.

Still, it looks like traders expected a bigger quarter-over-quarter bump in bookings. Shares are down 4.9 percent in after-hours trading to $13.65.

Zynga’s shares had climbed over the past month in anticipation of a stronger-than-estimated quarter. Facebook’s IPO filing revealed that the platform’s payments revenue grew 20 percent quarter-over-quarter into the end of the year, suggesting that Zynga might see a similar increase.

But Zynga did not see a commensurate bump. The company’s bookings were up just 6.6 percent to $306.5 million from the previous quarter’s bookings of $287.7 million. That said, bookings were up 25.9 percent year-over-year from $243.5 million the year before.

For the full year, bookings are up 38 percent to $1.16 billion while revenue reached $1.14 billion, nearly double what it was a year ago. Zynga expects to see between $1.35 and $1.45 billion in bookings for this year. The bookings metric factors in how much users paid upfront for virtual goods while revenue is counted when users actually consume the virtual items they purchased.

Daily active users were flat over the quarter at 54 million while monthly active users rose to 240 million from 227 million in the third quarter. Monthly unique users, which doesn’t double count consumers who play more than one game, rose slightly to 153 million from 152 million in the third quarter.

However, Zynga is seeing growth into the first part of this year with daily active users up at 57.3 million.

The company is also growing its daily active usage on mobile devices. Mobile DAUs have climbed to 15 million, from the 13 million figure the company shared in December before the initial public offering. The company said mobile usage is up fivefold year-over-year and that it’s seeing “good growth” in payments on mobile platforms. Zynga didn’t share any specifics, however.

One thing to consider is that a big portion of Zynga’s daily active usage on mobile is through Words With Friends, which is more advertising dependent than other games. So one would expect that Zynga does not monetize its mobile users on a per-user basis as well as other freemium iOS or Android developers.

Zynga is trying to counter this by launching more virtual currency-dependent games like Dream Zoo, Dream Heights and Dream Pethouse, which are more female-focused and aspirational. Zynga calls them “vest and express” games.

The company also pointed out that it’s doing a better job at convincing users to pay. Monthly unique payers rose 13 percent in the fourth quarter to 2.9 million from 2.6 million in the previous one. Average bookings per user are also up to a record high at $0.061 from $0.058 in the previous quarter.

We’re still going to be updating this story as we go through the filing. Stay tuned.