Pirates: Tides of Fortune from Israeli developer Plarium is a slick, polished new nautical-themed social game that takes its cues from more complex multiplayer strategy titles such as Kabam’s recently-closed Samurai Dynasty, Digital Chocolate’s Galaxy Life and Kixeye’s Backyard Monsters. The new English language version of the game launched as a 30-day exclusive to Google+ on January 11.

Early experiences in the game are taken up with a very lengthy tutorial that walks players through the building of their first buildings, what all the resources mean and the game’s technology researching mechanic. Rewards of the game’s premium “Rubies” currency are provided liberally throughout the course of these tutorial tasks and players are kept safe from attack during the tutorial period. An unfortunate flaw in the system, however, is that if the player completes a tutorial task before it has been formally offered as a “quest,” whether accidentally or deliberately, they are not given credit for having completed it and must do it again. If the task involved the spending of money or resources that the player now does not have, this may lead to protracted wait times or the spending of premium currency. It’s a small issue, but one which should be addressed to provide a slicker introductory gameplay experience — or to cater to those who wish to jump straight in to the meat of the game.

The game has very high production values. The artwork is detailed and well animated, and the majority of the tasks offered to the player are presented with full (though thankfully, given the questionable quality of the acting, optional) voiceovers. An unfortunate side effect of the detailed artwork on buildings is that it sometimes becomes difficult to distinguish buildings from one another without moving the mouse pointer over them, particularly if they are tightly packed together. The 45-degree isometric viewpoint also suffers from the usual problem that tall buildings can easily block out smaller buildings placed behind them, making them difficult to click on at times. Fortunately, as with most games of this type, it’s possible to move buildings once they have been built, meaning that such inconveniences can be avoided with a little rearrangement.

The game is strongly geared towards interaction with other players. Regular popups to invite friends remind players of the various benefits offered by having a large “crew” — the opportunity to claim loot from friends’ havens, the ability to recruit said friends as an army of undead pirates, and the ability to set up alliances. Alongside the usual friends mechanic, the game as a whole takes place in a large, persistent world populated by everyone else who is playing the game, or who has played it in the past. Glancing at the in-game map allows players to visit nearby players’ havens, set up trading agreements with them, scout their defenses or even attack them. Players are protected from attack until they reach level 9 partway through the tutorial, and attacking anyone over level 15 immediately surrenders a player’s “Novice” flag, indicating that they are ready and willing to engage in the full game.

Despite the few little interface niggles mentioned above, Pirates: Tides of Fortune is a polished game clearly ready for the prime time. Its complexity may put off more casual players used to simpler game mechanics, and the long tutorial may put off impatient gamers, but for those seeking a deep, complex and rewarding title in which they can play alongside a large and growing player community, Pirates: Tides of Fortune is a solid offering.

Play

While unlikely to enjoy universal appeal due to its complexity, Pirates: Tides of Fortune is well worth playing for its high production values and deep gameplay.

Inside Social Games is changing its reviews policy today to include a three-point ratings scale organized by three simple words: Play, Skip and Wait.

What It Looks Like

The scale is based on time. The most important piece of information ISG can provide is whether or not a game is worth a reader’s time. It takes time to get into a new social game — setting up the permissions, going through the tutorial, adding friends, etc. Even the simplest games with the cleanest interfaces and shortest tutorials take a good five minutes from first click to actual gameplay — and with so many social games launching on Facebook and Google+, that might be time our readers don’t have.

A Play rating means it’s worth the reader’s time to play the game.

A Skip rating means that a game isn’t worth the reader’s time.

A Wait rating indicates that the game might not be worth the reader’s time right now, but it has the potential to grow into a game that earns a Play rating.

Our reviews will still provide gameplay analysis, screenshots, currently monthly and daily active user totals as tracked by our AppData traffic monitoring service and any context the developer can provide if we’re able to reach them. As almost all games now monetize in the same ways and leverage the same social features, we won’t make mention of these components unless a game does something new or interesting with them. We will share a bit of opinion on a game based on our personal response to it — but our reviews are intended as interpretive analysis rather than stand-up comedy.

How It Works

How we pick a rating for a game is based on our approach to social games overall. In contrast to consumer-facing video game publications like Games.com or Gamezebo, we’re analysts that cater to an audience of developers, investors and other industry insiders that need information to make informed decisions — not just about what they’ll play for fun, but what they’ll do with their own companies.

From this perspective, we judge social games based on one question: “Will this work?” That can mean several things for a game: It monetizes, it finds traction on its platform, or the developer is supporting a game so thoroughly that we can expect to see it everywhere for the next year. Notice that we don’t bother to say that a game is “good;” that term is too subjective to have any meaning to our readers. We’ve seen plenty of “good” games on Facebook fail to monetize, fail to attract an audience or go offline after barely six months. Being “good” isn’t a guarantee that a game will work.

The flip side of that is that we won’t tell you a game is “bad” based on the fact that we don’t like it. Plenty of games do things we don’t like such as spamming us, hitting us with pay walls right after the tutorial, playing repetitive sounds, cloning a different game we’ve already spent months playing, etc. Games may also just fail to appeal to us because of art style or genre. None of these things would necessarily stop a game from working, however, unless something is bad enough to be distracting or damaging to the core gameplay experience.

We will tell you when a game isn’t ready. Many times in 2010, our reviewers would encounter games in the early beta stage where graphics are missing, social features aren’t optimized and sometimes monetization isn’t even implemented yet. In 2011, Zynga started providing hands-off press demos of new games just days before launch, sometimes with content that we couldn’t expect to see when the game went live because the developer would decide to cut it based on early user feedback. We could wait these games out and return to them when we think they might be ready — like when a developer “officially” launches the game or once it hits a certain number of monthly active users. But so many games get lost in the shuffle as new titles launch that this approach is sloppy. It’s better we see the game in the conditions we found it (via social discovery, word-of-mouth or sudden spike in AppData activity) and report back to the readers in a timely fashion.

Why We’re Doing It

We’ve gone back and forth over the concept of scoring games since the blog launched in 2008. At first, we used a 10-point scale derived from scores in sub-categories like “graphics” or “sound” that resembles the old methods used by traditional video games press. Sometime in 2009, the then-lead writer scrapped scores after deciding that the practice didn’t make much sense because most of the leading games came from the same pool of developers and each had relatively similar themes and standards of quality. We brought it back briefly at the end of 2011 in the short-lived “What we’re playing” articles; but these pieces lacked context and focus.

We’re trying it again because we feel social games deserve recognition beyond what they can earn for themselves in terms of traffic. The quality bar is higher now for social games than it was just 18 months ago and barriers to entry are rising on Facebook and Google+. While most of the leading game developers still hold top spots in traffic, some developers are taking risks in game design instead of just following whatever trend is hot right now (today, it’s casino games — this time last year it was citybuilders). There are also games that will never break the top 25 in MAU or DAU but can still be counted as successes because they find their audiences and monetize them well. Even without investor funding or hope of a successful exit, a game might still be “worth it” to our readers and a score the easiest way for us to help readers find those games.

The decision to avoid numbered scores reflects an overall attitude in video games journalism — numbers stopped having meaning when journalists stopped using all points on the scale. Score aggregators like Metacritic further obfuscate the actual quality of a game as it relates to the score. Also, as we’ve said before, social games change rapidly and a numbered score can’t possibly keep pace.

Scored reviews will start appearing on ISG today. There are currently no plans to apply the scoring system to mobile games on our sister site, Inside Mobile Apps. As always, we invite reader feedback in the comments or via email at mail (at) insidesocialgames (dot) com.

Games portal and publisher Spil Games wants to be an alternative for social game developers looking to expand off of Facebook, where rising advertising costs have cut into profits.

Speaking to Inside Social Games, Spil Games’ CEO Peter Driessen (pictured) explains that the portal — which consists of several games sites — spent the last several months adding social features that enable developers to use engagement-driving gameplay mechanics like friend invites or gifting within their games. The result is continued year-on-year growth for the portal; monthly unique users grew by 30 percent between March and December 2011. The portal now has 170 million monthly unique visitors. Based on internal research, Spil reports that average user time spent on a site within the portal is around 85 minutes with average revenue per paying user hitting $60 in some markets. Though Driessen declined to get more specific than that, additional data sent to us by Spil Games indicates that those same markets saw conversion rates of around 4 percent.

The point Spil Games is trying to make is that there are other platforms out there for social games besides Facebook and Google+. The more closely these platforms resemble the social network, the easier it is for developers to adapt their games for release. The real challenge comes from finding which platforms will reach with the demographics that sync up with a game. Though Spil is mostly female- and teen-oriented, the company has seen success with a family demographic and a budding male demographic based largely in Germany — where the higher ARPPU and conversion rates are.

“The users we have are growing as local [social] networks are declining,” Driessen says. “So we’re at the right point of time to make ourselves a success and go above 200 million users this year.”

According to Driessen, a good game live on Spil Games’ network with a team handling community management and post-launch support can gross at least $5 million annually. That’s not a lot for established social game developers, but smaller independent developers would be lucky to see that much in a year from a single title on Facebook given the current platform environment. As of press time, we don’t know how well that stacks up against what individual games can earn on Google+.

“We do the marketing and a revenue share and that’s the way it is [on Spil],” says Driessen. “On Facebook, you have to buy the marketing and that’s why some developers don’t make any money. If [we see] a social game that we really believe in, we give it a good place on our portal and really market it. Also, we do the localization and community management for these developers so they don’t have to spend resources.”

Tagged sunsetting hi5’s gaming network – Social network Tagged has revealed what it will be doing with hi5, the rival social network it acquired in December. According to an interview on TechCrunch, the company will be sunsetting hi5’s gaming platform and replacing it with games developed by the Tagged team.

Zynga to release fourth quarter results on Valentines Day – Zynga has announced it will hold its first earnings call as a public company on Tuesday, February 14th. The company will discuss its financial results for the full year of 2011 and its fourth quarter. The call is scheduled for 2:00 pm pacific, after the close of the stock market.

Amazon still hiring for mobile, social gaming - Amazon is ramping up its hiring of game developers for both mobile and social games, according to job postings spotted by Xconomy. The company’s a2z arm has positions open for mobile game developers, and in Seattle the company is recruiting specifically for social game positions. Last May Amazon posted a job for a game designer to lead the company in creating mobile and social games, which lead to the hiring of game industry vet Jonathan Tweet. While Amazon has been working on its gaming project for a number of months, so far no details have emerged.

Social game school opening in Japan – Japan is getting a school specifically designed to help developers create social games according to Japanese industry watcher Serkan Toto. The aptly named Social Game Academy will open in April in Tokyo’s trendy Roppongi Hills district.

The Sims Social is surprisingly sexy – According to some fun statistics released by EA, since the Sims Social debuted on Facebook, more than 11 million dirty jokes have been told and more than 70 million love confessions have been made. EA also noted that Sims in the game ‘woohoo’ more than 680,000 times a day.

Konami releasing Star Wars social game – Siliconera is reporting Konami will be releasing a social game based on the Star Wars franchise, but only in Japan. The game will be called Star Wars Collection and will be on GREE’s mobile social network.

Virgin Gaming platform now has 1 million members – According to Virgin, the company’s foray into a social gaming with its VirginGaming.com platform has paid off. The service has gathered more than 1 million members since it launched in June 2010.

Google+ now allowing nicknames and online handles – Google+ has added support for alternate nicknames to its service. While it will still require users to register their real names, alternate names will now appear alongside a user’s name.

DeNA partnering with Mixi to open virtual shopping mall - Mobile social games company DeNA has signed a partnership with Japanese social network Mixi to open an online shopping mall on the Mixi platform. Penn Olson is reporting the virtual mall will open in late march.

Andreessen Horowitz looking for $1.5 billion more for VC funds – The New York Times is reporting that Marc Andreessen is raising $1.5 billion to fuel two new funds at his high-profile venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. The firm currently holds stakes in a number of well known social and mobile companies such as Zynga and Instagram.

Developer King.com continues its cross-platform mission today with a Google+ launch of its top-trafficking Facebook game, Bubble Witch Saga.

Speaking to Inside Social Games, King.com Chief Marketing Officer Alex Dale explains how the emerging social games platform fits into the company’s overall cross-platform goals, despite the fact that the G+ Bubble Witch Saga isn’t at all linked to the Facebook version. He also confirms that mobile versions of more of its Facebook games are due out in the next few months.

Inside Social Games: What convinced you to branch to G+?  

Alex Dale, chief marketing officer, King.com: As a part of our multi-platform strategy, we aim to make our games available across a broad range of platforms — Google + was the natural progression within this strategy [because it's] a rapidly growing network and, with Google’s backing, is highly likely to be a huge platform in the long-term.

ISG: Do you expect to see better conversion rates and monetization on G+ compared to Facebook? How about G+ compared to mobile?

Dale: We are looking forward to seeing how G+ converts — we are now on day two, so we’ll have more feedback in the coming months. In terms of audience, our expectation is that the G+ players are younger and more male compared to the Facebook audience. Bringing Bubble Witch Saga to G+ could hopefully help Google [attract] more women to their platform, since we’ve had great success in attracting female gamers to the Facebook version of Bubble Witch Saga.

ISG: Can we expect to see the Facebook-based King.com games portal app make the jump as well?

Dale: Several of the King.com skill games are already featured on Google’s Chrome Web Store, so it would be an easy implementation for us to make if we chose to also publish them on G+. Our skill games site www.king.com is both a successful business in its own right and a test bed for games that could be socialized for Facebook and G+.

ISG: How does G+ curate apps?

Dale: We are working with G+ on different promotional opportunities for Bubble Witch Saga. It’s just speculation on our part, but we’d like to think that their editors select the highest-quality games and try to make them readily available for the G+ players.

ISG: Do you think the competition will continue between King.com and its nearest Facebook competitors or is the ecosystem ripe enough to produce new rivalries with other developers?  

Dale: Wooga is our closest competitor at the moment, both in terms of overall daily and monthly active users [and] also in terms of the types of games that we make. I think that we’ve shown that the ocean of players is vast, and there’s definitely enough room for several apps in the same category on Facebook. For example, Bubble Witch Saga, the sixth-largest game in terms of DAU on FB and wooga’s Bubble Island, the thirteenth-largest game, are obviously both very successful at the same time.

ISG: King.com’s push in 2011 was to go cross-platform with an emphasis on mobile. What do you wish you’d known a year ago to help you meet that goal?

Dale: What we know now is that Facebook can play a major role in application discovery due to the huge impact of the Facebook HTML5-app with Facebook->Mobile app discovery, which was launched in November. The logic is to build an audience on Facebook first and then release to mobile.

Google’s fledgling social network Google+ now has more than 90 million registered users, according to new information revealed by Google CEO Larry Page in the company’s fourth quarter earnings call.

According to Page, 60 percent of users log in to the network every day and 80 percent log in once a week. Although the company did not reveal any specifics about how social games are doing on Google+, the network has been slowly refining the platform for gaming, revamping the Games tab in December to highlight new games, top games and staff picks and gradually expanding its lineup of hand-picked games. The latest game to launch on the platform was Plarium’s Pirates: Tides of Fortune, which brought the network’s total game count to 36.

The new user numbers are actually significantly higher Google+ watchers had previously estimated, which pegged the social network’s total membership at 62 million users at the end of December. In October Google revealed Google+ had 40 million users, meaning the social network added more than 515,000 users every day over the past three months.

GT Racing: Motor Academy is a new 3D racing title designed to run in Google+. Created by established mobile and digital developer Gameloft, the game aims to offer a deep, social racing experience inspired by console and mobile titles such as the Xbox 360′s Forza Motorsport 4 and iOS’ Real Racing 2.

The game offers three main modes of play: a simple “Arcade” mode, which allows players to jump in to a variety of different race types immediately; a multiplayer mode which is currently undergoing beta testing; and an in-depth “Career” mode that tasks players with completing license tests along with purchasing and upgrading cars as well as the racing itself.

Racing takes a realistic approach, featuring 111 different licensed cars from 26 different manufacturers. It’s possible to play the game from a variety of camera angles, including an in-cockpit view featuring authentically-recreated interiors of the cars in question. A healthy degree of skill is required to make progress in the game, though a variety of assistance options are available for those with less experience in realistic racing simulations. These include a “suggested line” superimposed on the track, indicating where players should accelerate and brake; traction control to help prevent out of control skidding; assistance with braking; and an Electronic Stability Program (ESP) setting to help the player stay in control of the car and keep it on the track.

The game is monetized through the sale of soft and hard currency. Most cars can be purchased with either soft or hard currency, and hard currency can also be spent on skipping challenges such as license tests. It’s also possible to purchase experience points directly, which is unusual for a social game. Since experience levels unlock game content such as new cars, those players who wish to jump straight to the part of the game with high-end concept cars can do so by spending money. Conversely, those willing to put in the time and effort to work their way through the early game can gain access to almost all of the game content — though some later cars and performance upgrades can only be purchased with hard currency.

“Gameloft is very excited about offering our games to Google+ users,” said Baudouin Cormon, VP of publishing for the Americas at Gameloft. “GT Racing is bringing a stunning racing experience right in the browser, and we are happy to be pioneering the field with Google to bring the social gaming platform to the next level.”

We didn’t hear back from Gameloft prior to the publication of this review, but it’s clear what the future could hold for GT Racing. Racing games are, by their very nature, modular experiences to which it will be easy to add new cars, tracks and challenges. The game’s multiplayer options will also ensure that an active community will arise around the game, particularly as regular play is incentivized by daily bonus packages.

The social network version of GT Racing: Motor Academy is currently exclusive to Google+. The game is also available for iOS and Android devices, but the mobile editions do not have any link to the computer-based social network versions.

Google+ continues to expand its lineup of social games, today unveiling Pirates: Tides of Fortune, a swashbuckling strategy game that will be exclusive to Google+ for the next 30 days.

Unlike the social network’s previous high-profile exclusive releases from Kabam and Gameloft where the game is only available on G+ or the developer’s own website, Pirates: Tides of Fortune is actually an English language exclusive. The game is already available on Russian social network Vkontakte.

Pirates: Tides of Fortune was developed by Plarium, an Israeli developer that focuses mainly on social networks like Vkontke, Odnoklassniki and Mail.ru where it has more than 12 million monthly active users according the company’s business development manager Leonard Frankel. Plarium connected with Google during Google’s annual Developer Days conference in Tel Aviv and realized Google+ was a perfect springboard to the western market.

“Google+ is a great network for reaching these audiences,” explains Frankel. “The feel of the platform complements the fun experience Plarium offers in its games and they were a natural partner for us in this path.”

Working with Google+ was also hands-on according to Frankel, who praised the Google+ team for its support during the integration process. Frankel tells us that all games on Google+ are selectively screened, and new games are chosen for the social network after being reviewed by a Google+ team — which is what we’ve heard from other developers working with the platform team.

After the English version of Pirates: Tides of Fortune’s timed exclusivity period is over on Google+ Plarium will be bringing the game to Facebook and other local social networks in Europe and Asia.

While Inside Social Games did request information from Google about Google+’s usage and growth, a company spokesperson declined to share, stating it was too early in the social network’s lifespan release any specific metrics. In October Google announced at the Web 2.0 conference its social network had already reached 40 million users, but third party observers estimate the service now has at least 62 million users.

With the launch of Pirates: Tides of Fortune, Google+ now has 36 titles in its Games tab.

The G+ Games platform now has a set of filters that highlight new games, top games, and “staff pick” games, underscoring just how divergent Google+’s approach is to games from Facebook’s.

While the criteria for the new games filter is clear — each of the games listed below arrived on the G+ platform in just the last month — the top games and staff pick filter criteria are bit more obscure. Top games is perhaps the most interesting, as we do not know if these are the games that are played the most, or the ones in which players spend the most money. Staff picks, meanwhile, is as ambiguous as the App Store’s “staff picks” — it could be one employee with a strong opinion, or a voting pool among a larger product team. In any case, the filters currently produce a mix of titles from major developers like Kabam and Rovio, as well as some games from smaller indie devs like Spry Fox. Interestingly, there are no Zynga games in staff picks or top games.

Since launch, Google+ has made it a point to confine games to their own tab in the main navigation bar of the social network. No game notifications or requests ever appear to G+ users unless they are viewing the Games tab. This has led some developers to worry that there won’t be much viral growth for games on the platform. Indeed, we observe that of all the games currently available, many already had established audiences on Facebook and mobile platforms.

Kabam’s newest strategy role-playing social game, The Godfather: Five Families, comes out today on Google+ for a 45-day exclusive launch period.

The Godfather marks a couple of firsts for Kabam: It’s the developer’s first licensed game, developed with Paramount Pictures’ digital entertainment branch. It’s also the first time we’ve seen Kabam launch a game on a social network other than Facebook, where the developer originally got its start (as Watercooler Inc.) with social applications and later with hardcore massively-multiplayer combat titles like 2009’s Kingdoms of Camelot. Based on our early look at the game, The Godfather builds on Kingdoms of Camelot’s combat and citybuilding gameplay mechanics with more emphasis on narrative, art quality and shifting player rankings.

The decision to launch the game on G+ before all other platforms seems like a vote of confidence in G+ social games. To date, Google hasn’t released much information about the growth of its social network and even less data is available on the health of the social games platform, which is segregated from the rest of the social network. We don’t know much about how games are selected for the G+ platform; but we’ve heard that it’s a more intimate and competitive submissions process than what developers experience on Facebook’s games platform.

Speaking to Inside Social Games, a Google spokesperson stresses that at five months in, it’s still early days for the social network. An announcement made at the Web 2.0 conference in October claims that G+has 40 million users. While we’re sure not all of those people are playing games on G+, Google tells us that rapid game launches from major developers like Kabam, Digital Chocolate and Zynga are validation of the market.

Based on the performance of Edgeworld and Dragons of Atlantis — both Facebook games the served as G+ launch titles — Kabam tells ISG that the developer is “pleased” with monetization and traffic on the platform. This was a key factor in determining the exclusive launch period for The Godfather.

“While pleased, we’re not entirely surprised,” a spokesperson says. “We know from experience and research that core gamers actively seek out their games. Equally important is our operational experience to date. The G+ team has been very responsive and supportive of our efforts — they’ve provided excellent service and a willingness to get things done quickly and efficiently.”

Kabam goes on to say that it will evaluate The Godfather’s performance on G+ before rolling it out to other networks and platforms. Additionally, the developer will continue to run The Godfather in open beta on Kabam.com as a means of testing new features. Kabam tells us that it uses a new proprietary technology to adapt and deploy games across multiple platforms more quickly, which will make it easier to facilitate simultaneous releases in the future.

Currently, G+ offers 30 titles in its Games tab — many of which are ports of existing Facebook and mobile games. The Godfather: Five Families has been in beta testing on Kabam.com since the fall.