Zynga’s Reynolds, Nexon’s Kim appointed to ISAS board – Zynga’s chief game designer Bryan Reynolds and Nexon America’s co-founder Min Kim have been appointed to the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences’ board of directors.

Harmonix working on Facebook Game – Boston-based Harmonix, best known for its Rock Band and Dance Central franchises is working on a Facebook. Shacknews reported the news based on an updated resume for the company’s lead designer Brian Chan. There is currently a Dance Central Facebook app called Dance Central 2 Challenge. It has 2000 MAU.

Square Enix adds Facebook to FFXIII-2 – Andriasang is reporting that the Japanese version of Final Fantasy XIII-2 has been patched to add Facebook support to the game, allowing a player to post information about their game to their wall.

Crytek unveils GFace, a PC-mobile social game network — PC game maker Crytek has created a PC to mobile social gaming network. The GFace network is currently in beta and focuses on cross-platform, multiplayer gameplay.

Final Fantasy Brigade now has 1 million players – Square Enix’s first mobile social game Final Fantasy Brigade is proving to be extremely popular. The game, which is available on DeNA’s Mobage network, now has over 1 million users according to Andriasang.

Monster Hunter coming to Mobage – Capcom’s ultra-popular Monster Hunter series is coming to DeNA’s Mobage Platform. The game will be a collectible card-battle game and will be called Minna to Monhan Card Master, according to Andriasang. It will launch on both smartphones and feature phones on Feb. 21.

Japan’s social game market to double value by 2016 – The Nomura Research Institute has predicted that the Japanese social gaming market will be worth $5.1 billion dollars by 2016 according to industry watcher Serkan Toto, who translated the report.

Nintendo will allow devs to offer microtransactions - Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has said his company will now allow third part developers on its Nintendo Network to offer microtransactions. Iwata revealed the information at Nintendo’s third quarter financial results briefing on Jan. 27.

DeNA, GREE continue legal slugging match — DeNA and GREE are continuing to play out their rivalry in the Japanese courts. In November, GREE sued DeNA, claiming the company was pressuring developers to sign exclusive contracts. According to Serkan Toto, DeNA is now suing for damages related to GREE’s actions.

[Launch] NASA releases new Facebook Game – NASA has released a multiplayer Facebook game called Space Race Blastoff that tests users knowledge of the space program.

[Launch] ESPN Return Man comes to Facebook - ESPN.com’s popular casual arcade game ESPN Return Man is now available on Facebook. The game was a collaboration between ESPN and Disney Social Games, and is the third collaborative release between the two studios. Our full review of the game can be found here.

[Launch] Microsoft Research launches new Facebook game - Microsoft Research has released its second Facebook, Doubloon Dash, in order to study the reactions of real people engaging in game theory like interactions.

Seattle-based casual game developer GameHouse is still working to make the transition from a downloadable gaming company to a freemium social game leader. In September, the company’s CEO Matt Hulett told Inside Social Games his goal was to break into the top 10 social game developers by daily active users on Facebook.

According to AppData, GameHouse is currently the No. 27 most popular game developer on the platform according to DAU, an increase over the No. 33 spot the company held when Hulett announced his plans. GameHouse now has 821,150 DAU on Facebook and the number has been slowly but steadily increasing. To support the transition, GameHouse recently announced it was doubling the headcount at its Facebook-focused Canadian studio.

Located in Victoria, British Columbia, GameHouse Canada started life as Backstage Technologies, a financial services company that pivoted into Facebook games in 2007. Its game Scratch and Win was one of the first games to integrate with the Facebook API and monetize through the free-to-play model. GameHouse’s parent company RealNetworks bought Backstage in September 2010 to bolster its social game talent, but it’s only now that the company has moved into a much larger downtown office is it ready to push forward with an aggressive expansion plan that will see it grow from 25 to 45 people in the next couple of months, according to Alex Mendelev, GameHouse Canada’s general manager and head of studios.

Inside Social Games had a chance to visit the company’s new offices and speak with Mendelev about the company’s plans in the social gaming space.

Inside Social Games: What can you tell me about GameHouse’s larger Facebook strategy? Earlier this year GameHouse’s CEO Matt Hulett said the goal was to be in the top 10 by DAU within six months?

Alex Mendelev, general manager and head of studios, Gamehouse Canada (pictured right): I think our strategy on Facebook is not necessarily take all the users from our other platforms and bring them to Facebook. I think our strategy is to operate our businesses that run really well. Our casual, downloadable business continues to function really well and we will continue to grow that business in its own way. Social is a giant opportunity to capitalize on. Backstage has been doing it for a long time and at this point we have two studios hitting directly into that market with good numbers and growth to show. Backstage primarily contributes to the social game area of the effort.

ISG: So will you be focusing on new IP or porting existing hits? Are you worried about cannibalizing a casual game’s existing audience by bring it onto Facebook? 

Mendelev: I think regardless of what we do, there are new platforms and new, exciting experiences that people want to partake of. Whether you’re on one platform or another, as new platforms come in, users will want to try them. Some of them will stick and want to play games there and some of them won’t. I think our approach is more to give people a place to play, regardless of what platform they’re on. In that regard, we’re very well positioned with casual downloadable, mobile and iOS and social.

ISG: There’s certainly a precedent for games from casual game portals to find success on Facebook. 

Mendelev:  We’ve seen some great results from some of the titles we’ve had as GameHouse for a long time, such as Collapse, and bringing them to Facebook. Collapse is kind of a classic GameHouse game and it’s shown great results so far and is continuing to grow. Some of the recent titles we’re really excited about are Bayou Blast.

ISG: What is GameHouse Canada working on right now?

Mendelev:  We’re working on a slots game and we’re going to release it early this year.

ISG: With your history working on slots and games of chance, how do you feel you would be positioned if Facebook does make real-money gambling available on the platform?

Mendelev:  It’s really hard to say because Facebook is very good at pivoting very quickly around things. Just because there was an announcement that certain kinds of business would be open doesn’t mean it will happen soon if at all. We’ve learned to kind of temper our expectations in terms of what’s actually going to happen in the platform, so we not actively considering it.

ISG: But if something were to come up?

Mendelev:  We’re always open to looking at new opportunities and consider that as part of our strategy but we haven’t made a decision to move in that direction. It’s really hard to make that decision before Facebook.

ISG: Gambling companies have shown an interest in the platform with some large social game investments like Double Down Interactive and Playtika. What do you think of that?

Mendelev:  I would say that with gambling companies moving into Facebook, they’re recognizing that Facebook is a large revenue opportunity and they’re actively investing in that space. We’re already in that space, so it makes sense for us to continue to invest in the space. If you look at GameHouse as a whole and our entire social gaming effort we have lots of games coming out and they’ll be across multiple genres.

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.

CyberAgent’s growing social gaming business has pushed the company’s first fiscal quarter operating profit to a healthy 4.9 billion yen ($63.6 million USD), an increase of 38.1 percent year-over-year.

According to CyberAgent’s holiday quarter results, the company’s social games businesses saw sales increase to 3.2 billion yen ($41.7 million USD), up from the 1.7 billion yen ($22.1 million USD) the company reported in the same quarter a year ago. The unit is made up of eight consolidated subsidiaries with more than 600 employees between them.

Overall the company’s media businesses recorded an operating income of 909 million yen ($11.8 million USD) largely due to the expansion of the company’s social gaming business and CyberAgent’s net income was 2.05 billion yen ($26.68 million USD), up from 1.47 billion yen ($19.1 million USD) year-over-year.

CyberAgent’s social gaming companies make titles for Mobage, Mixi, GREE, Facebook and its own Ameba platform. The company did not report specific results for GCREST or CyberAgentAmerica, makers of the Facebook games TinierMe and Animal Land. According to our traffic tracking service AppData, CyberAgent currently has 757,510 monthly active users and 112,226 daily active users on Facebook.

After almost a year of anticipation, Angry Birds may finally be making its Facebook debut on Valentines Day.

According to an interview Penn Olson conducted with Rovio’s mighty eagle Peter Vesterbacka and senior vice president of Asia Henri Holm, the company will hold a launch event for the long-awaited Facebook version of the physics-based puzzle game on Feb. 14 in Jakarta, Indonesia

Angry Birds is already available a multitude of platforms including iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Google Chrome, Google+, Symbian, Bada and even Sony’s Playstation 3 and Playstation Portable consoles, but the one platform where it has been notoriously absent is Facebook.

Inside Mobile Apps first reported Rovio would be bringing Angry Birds to Facebook in March of 2011 with a launch expected sometime in the spring. When Vesterbacka announced the Chrome Web Store launch of Angry Birds in May 2011, the Facebook launch date had been pushed back to “later in 2011”. Then in June, The Telegraph reported Vesterbacka had said Angry Birds would be live on Facebook within the next three months. Although Penn Olsen did not report any details about the launch except Angry Birds for Facebook would be released worldwide on Feb. 14, the announcement of a firm launch-date seems to indicate the long-delayed port will finally see the light of day.

Although the move to launch the game in Jakarta may surprise some, Indonesia is Facebook’s second largest market after the US. According to an interview Facebook’s vice president for mobile partnerships and corporate development Vaughan Smith gave in November, Indonesia currently has 45 million Facebook users and according to comScore, Facebook reaches 86.7 percent of all online users in Indonesia.

While the game is not officially active on Facebook (except for a Fan Page, which has more than 12.9 million likes) there are plenty of fake versions of Angry Birds already on Facebook. According to our traffic tracking service AppData, there are over 20 fake versions of Angry Birds on the platform.

Vesterbacka also revealed the Angry Birds franchise has now racked up more than 700 million downloads. In December the company reported Angry Birds had passed 600 million total downloads.

Analysts say Zynga must add nine million new DAU per quarter - Industry analysts Cowen and Company have calculated than in order to maintain its current DAU count across its business, Zynga must add at least nine to 10 million DAU every quarter — approximately 100,000 new users every day — to outpace the number of DAU lost quarterly. According an interview on Gamasutra, Zynga’s games lose about 18.4 percent percent of DAU each quarter.

Japan gets mobile social games platform for adults only - Japanese video distribution company DMM has launched its own mobile social network featuring pornographic social games according to Japanese industry watcher Serkan Toto. DMM is a leading Japanese producer of adult video content.

Namco Bandai: free-to-play damaging game industry – Gamespot is reporting that Olivier Comte, Namco Bandai’s SVP for Europe has come out swinging against the free-to-play model, saying games that follow the model aren’t high quality, and that low-cost games lower the perceived value of games, ultimately harming publishers.

Sterne Agee: Zynga loses $150 to acquire every new paid customer – According to Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia, Zynga has spent $120 million on new player acquisition so far this fiscal year, or $150 for every new paying customer according to his interview with Develop.

513 million internet users in China - Penn Olson is reporting that China now has 513 million citizens online. According to the latest data from the China Internet Network Information Center, 38.3 percent of the country’s population now uses the internet.

MegaZebra appoints Godager and Goeldner to board - Munich-based social game company MegaZebra has appointed European video game industry veterans Gaute Godager and Jürgen Goeldner to its board of directors. Gaute Godager was a co-founder of Funcom.

Japanese social games market to be worth $4.4 billion in 2012 – Japanese market research firm Yano is predicting the Japanese social game industry — driven mainly by mobile social game companies like DeNA and GREE — will be worth $4.4 billion in 2012.

Zynga moves towards online gambling – Zynga has confirmed what many already suspected, telling All Things D that it looking into real money gambling. The company is currently is undertaking “active conversations with potential partners to better understand and explore this new opportunity.” While Facebook does not currently allow real-money gambling on its platform yet, the company will soon in regions were it is legal.

Final Fantasy Brigade has half a million users – Square Enix’s first mobile social game based on the Final Fantasy franchise is now live on  DeNA’s Mobage network for both feature phones and smartphones. According to Andriasang, the game already has more than 500,000 users.

GREE buys stake in Mobicle for mobile social game development - GREE has bought a 6.8 percent share in Korean game company Mobicle. The two companies will co-develop a variety of mobile social games that will be available globally in the second quarter of 2012.

Nexon licenses Unity - Tokyo-headquartered gaming company Nexon has signed a deal to license Unity’s game development platform, reports Develop. According to a statement from Nexon, the company will be using Unity to develop multi-platform content.

[Launch] University of Washington releases Facebook game – The University of Washington Bothell has released its first Facebook game. Called UWB Wetlands Restoration, the game was created by undergraduate students and 100 percent of the proceeds go to restoration of the real UW Bothell wetlands.

Chinese developer ELEX wants to expand its social and mobile game business to cross-platform publishing and ramp up its independent games portal in 2012, the company tells Inside Social Games.

The social games industry knows ELEX primarily from farming sim Happy Harvest (開心農場), which is the second-best performing Chinese-language social game on Facebook in terms of daily active users. The Beijing-based developer currently has 300 employees and raised a single $3 million round of funding from Tencent in March 2009. Coming up on its second birthday in February, our AppData traffic tracking service reveals that Happy Harvest still enjoys 2.2 million monthly active users and 860,000 daily active users on Facebook alone with a retention rate at around 40 percent (compared to most games that are lucky to see 20 percent). Worldwide via other social networks, ELEX says that Happy Harvest broke 10 million MAU in December 2011. Across all its games on Facebook, the developer sees 4.4 million MAU and 1.4 million DAU.

ELEX was one of the first Chinese games developers to cash in on the under-served Chinese-speaking Facebook audience in 2009 when the platform was still young and the developer was only a year old. In most cases, we see Chinese developers take an existing game that saw success in local Chinese games networks (e.g. Tencent, RenRen, etc.) and port it to Facebook more or less exactly as it is. This doesn’t always result in a hit game, however, as the Chinese-speaking audience on Facebook is limited and most Facebook-focused publishers won’t pick up Chinese games because they’re hard to localize in a way that appeals to a Western audience. See 6waves Lolapps’ approach to its Smartron5 acquisition as an example.

Though ELEX built up a global audience on social and mobile game networks in Russia, China, Taiwan, the United States, Latin America and Europe over the past two years, the developer wants to focus on its own platform services in 2012. The XingCloud service, first announced in June 2012, is an all-in-one platform for developers to create, publish, localize and distribute games across a variety of platforms — including mobile and PC download.

ELEX CEO Binsen Tang tells us that XingCloud’s real value is in providing developers with data analysis — an area where he thinks most developers make mistakes.

“Data analyzing is different for Chinese developers,” he explains. “The details in games are often unnoticed. [In] the last few years, Chinese developers have focused more on customer experience, and thinking from the point of view of the player. This is why we’re investing a lot in XingCloud.”

The company is also using 2012 to focus on its own games portal, 337.com. This is a move some Western social game developers like Kabam are making, whenever they reach a certain critical mass of users. Though maintaining an independent platform can be expensive — and risky, if their audience will not follow the game off of Facebook onto a new platform — some developers see it as the best way to maximize profit because they don’t have to pay out fees and revenue shares to platform operators.

In ELEX’s case, this is not quite true as its games see the highest average revenue per user rates on Facebook. (For context, Tang tells us that Happy Harvest is its best monetized game at $1 ARPU.) ELEX reports that in the past two years, its signed over 20 publishers to the platform and enjoys over 10 million MAU and 500,000 daily user visits. Tang claims the platform is popular with Latin American and European players thanks in part to its focus on more “hardcore” games like shooters, racing games and action games. Interestingly, the 337.com interface currently looks a lot like Facebook’s canvas app interface:

The largest opportunity for ELEX in 2012, however, may prove to be mobile as the developer is only just getting its footing on iOS and Android with a Happy Harvest sequel and several original titles. Tang says that though Facebook has been a good investment for ELEX, it’s important for all Chinese developers to keep a second eye on the local market, which is continuing to grow.

“Facebook is already a very successful SNS platform,” he says, “but it is still mainly for English speaking countries.”

Cross-platform in-game advertising company SponsorPay is reporting year-on-year revenues increased 125 percent in 2011, crediting the growth to its new Android pay-per-install network and its video advertising product BrandEngage.

SponsorPay’s growth reflects the increasing popularity of video advertising, as the format has gained traction in both mobile and social games over the past year. SponsorPay launched BrandEngage last July, following on the heels of competitors like Flurry and Tapjoy, who began offering video advertising products after it began to become apparent they performed far better in mobile apps than traditional banner ads. SponsorPay’s BrandEngage product allows advertisers to show players both videos and brand engagement campaigns, which the player can watch, Like and share.

SponsorPay began its life as a virtual goods monetization company on Facebook, but followed the same trajectory as many of its clients, looking to mobile after the mandatory use of Facebook Credits made the platform far less lucrative.

The Berlin-headquartered company picked up $5 million in funding from Nokia Growth Partners in February to develop its mobile product lines. SponsorPay’s advertising appears in games from Ubisoft, Bigpoint, Gameview Studios and Digital Chocolate. The company is predicting similar growth in 2012.

Chinese social, online game markets booming - According to information released at the 2011 China Game Industry Annual Conference, China’s online gaming sector (MMOs, casual games and social games) is now worth more than 42.85 billion yuan ($6.8 billion), 32.4 percent more than it was worth in 2010, reports Penn Olson.

Persona 3 Social has 1 million members – Persona 3 Social, the social spin off game of PS2 hit Persona 3 has over a million members on Mobage, according Siliconera. The news bodes well for the Personal 3 Social creator Index Corporation’s next game, Persona 4 Social.

TeePee Game partners with OK! TeePee Games, a games discovery service based in the UK has signed a deal with The Express Group, the publisher of supermarket tabloid OK! to create a branded games discovery portal for the company’s UK Facebook group called OK! Games.

Vostu adds more Android games to its portfolio – Latin American social games developer Vostu is quietly expanding into mobile. The company soft launched three Android titles last year and will be releasing four more in the first quarter of 2012 according to Business Insider.

Monumental Games shuts down – UK-based Monumental Games, creator of the Facebook 3D MMO Little Horrors and the Prime toolkit for 3D browser and Facebook games has shut down, laying off 20 workers according to a report on Develop.

Cave pivots to social – Andriasang is reporting that Japanese developer Cave is shifting its focus to social games following a disappointing earnings report that predicted the company would only make $650,000 in operating profit this year. The company already makes social games for both Mobage and GREE.

Social games cheaters cheat in real life too – According to a new survey from EA’s PopCap Games, people who cheat at social games are likely to cheat in real life. Of the 1200 people polled, eight percent of social games players admitted to cheating, and of those 8 percent, almost half admitted to cheating in real life situations. Although more women than men play social games, men were more likely to admit to cheating in them.

Google Making its own social game – Google has released a video of an upcoming social game it is developing that uses Google Maps. The game will be available in February on Google+.

Kixeye releases Backyard Monsters expansion – As of today, the first expansion for Kixeye’s popular RTS Facebook game Backyard Monsters will be available on Facebook. Backyard Monsters: Inferno will allow players to explore below the surface of the earth.

Kabam expands Godfather: Five Families - Kabam has added another neighborhood to its social game, The Godfather: Five Families. Greenwich Village is now available to all players on the Kabam website, Google+ and Facebook.

Transformers social game coming to GREE – Beloved cartoon franchise The Transformers is getting a social game according a report from Andriasang. The game, titled Transformers for GREE was developed by Interspace and will be available next month.

Pulitzer Prize winner to pen social game – Gamasutra is reporting that Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is teaming with non-profit developer Games for Change to create a social game about female oppression. The game will be released on Facebook in late 2012.

[Launch] Mail.Ru releasing new browser-based MMO – Mail.Ru Games announced this week that it will be releasing a new browser-based MMO called RiotZone early this year. The game is a strategy game designed to appeal to casual gamers.

[Launch] PerBlue Brings Parallel Kingdom to Facebook - PerBlue’s location based MMORPG Parallel Kingdom is going against the tide of Facebook to mobile expansions and moving onto the web. The game is now available on Kongregate, Chrome and Facebook.