Adobe confirmed today that it is no longer adapting its Flash Player to newer mobile devices, instead guiding developers to package native apps with Adobe Air or build cross-platform applications in HTML5.

The move indicates just how badly Apple’s ban of Flash hurt Adobe in terms of getting traction with mobile developers. Apple frequently called out the inefficiency of the Flash platform on mobile devices, most recently in an April 2011 blog post from the late Steve Jobs. A ZDNet report came out last night, breaking news of Adobe’s decision.

There were a handful of apps (e.g. iSwifter) that could more or less convert or run Flash apps on iOS devices, but this doesn’t seem to have been a long-term solution for most game developers looking to take their Flash-based games cross-platform. This leaves Flash-loyal game developers with two options: write native apps for each mobile device, or explore alternatives that can produce a single product that runs on various devices.

With a big push from industry giants like Google and Facebook, HTML5 has emerged as an alternative to writing native applications, despite frame-rate issues that present challenges for game developers. Facebook recently launched its own mobile platform with support for HTML5 games from a test pool of established mobile and social game developers.

A handful of indie developers are currently launching HTML5-based arcade and board game titles on Facebook, iOS and Android. Though some of these titles are experiencing growing pains in their early days, they are functional on both web and mobile. Most developers have told us, however, that it’ll be at least another year before HTML5 comes into its own for game development.

Adobe says that it will now take a larger role in contributing to HTLM5 development both through investment and by working with Google, Apple, Microsoft and RIM. Hopefully this will yield better HTML5 tools more quickly than a year out from now, as Adobe’s strength has always been tools.

The rest of its mobile work will focus on native app packaging with Adobe Air and the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook. The developer will also supply bug fixes and security updates for existing Flash mobile apps. Adobe Flash Player 11 and Air 3 launched in October with a keen emphasis on high-end gaming graphics and HD video for PCs; Adobe says it’s already at work on Flash Player 12.

Zynga said it reached an average 9.9 million daily active users of its games on iOS and Android through the third quarter, according to an amended filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission today.

It means that Zynga is gradually weaning itself off the Facebook platform. Nearly one-fifth of the company’s 54 million daily actives are now on iOS and Android —  which are platforms not operated by Facebook. Keep in mind though, that Zynga’s daily active metric double-counts users who play more than one of the company’s games.

That figure may also make Zynga the company with the most daily actives relative to any other developer on iOS and Android. Storm8 said it had 4 million daily actives on iOS and Android in June. Glu Mobile said yesterday that it had 2.1 million daily actives across its network of games in its quarterly earnings call.

>> Continue reading on our sister site Inside Mobile Apps.

After acquiring OpenFeint for $104 million and then bringing in new leadership to run the company, Japanese gaming company GREE says it will launch an entirely new mobile-social gaming platform next year.

The goal is to combine the best parts of the GREE platform in Japan with those of OpenFeint and built a single network that reaches more than 1 billion Asian and Western users. It’s slated to launch by the middle of next year.

GREE, which originally said it would keep its Japanese platform and its Western-oriented side separate, says it’s not taking cues from rival DeNA in building a unified global gaming network.

> Read the rest on our sister site, Inside Mobile Apps.

San Francisco-based startup Swrve is ready to exit beta today with its cloud-based feedback and testing tool of the same name. The graduation comes a little over a month after the company netted $2.7 million in seed funding to put toward developing its service and hiring new staff.

Swrve is a tool that creates multiple split tests within a game where developer can try, fine-tune and deploy changes live. Company CEO Hugh Reynolds explains that the service isn’t an analytics platform like Kontagent or its competitors, but rather a component that allows developers to see and act on feedback collected from split tests conducted in-game. As an example, he says a card game developer can deploy five versions of the same piece of art for one card type in-game, interpret which performs best among its demographic breakdown, and push the one art piece that performs the best live. Or, Reynolds says, a developer could even consider deploying more than one art piece for the card in-game that varies depending on the user’s demographic.

“People look at it and say it’s more like a game editor than analytics tool,” he says. “It’s something that ‘regular people’ that don’t have a PhD in analytics can use day-to-day to guide development.”

Swrve is now launching version 2 of its server architecture, allowing the service to scale to a larger pool of developers. One of its earliest clients is Facebook social game developer 5th Planet Games; Reynolds tells us that about 18 more customers across mobile, social and open web game developers are also evaluating the product. Swrve uses a business model similar to a phone bill where customers have a low point of entry and then pay for usage with no lock-in agreement. It’s possible to use the service on a month-to-month basis, but there are incentives for quarterly or annual subscriptions.

As an interesting aside, Reynolds and Swrve CTO Dr. Steven Collins are known in the video game industry as the creators of the cross-platform Havok physics engine, which powers games like Fallout 3, L.A. Noire, and Dead Rising. Havok sold to Intel in 2007 and Reynolds and Collins went on to found Swrve in 2010.

We’re here at Zynga headquarters in San Francisco for the Zynga Unleashed press event.

The highlights include the launch of major new or sequel titles on Facebook, HTML5 games that use Facebook’s new mobile platform, and the introduction of Project Z, aka Zynga Direct, formerly known as Zynga Live — a Facebook Connect-based gaming platform that has been in the works for two years.

The following is a lightly-paraphrased transcript of the presentations.

The Live Blog

After a promotional video about Zynga games, Mark Pincus has taken the stage.

10:38 We started a few blocks from here. Tells story about growing from there.

Tells story about the new office — it had been the Sega building back in the 80s. Now it’s getting remodeled.

Zynga launching ten new products, that have been in development for over a year.

Before we show you the products I wanted to take a few minutes to talk about what we’re trying to do. What’s in all these games that we have now. How do you string it all together, tie it back to our mission that we’ve been pursuing for the last five years.

We challenge ourselves every day with the question “how do we get you guys to play.” You don’t have time to sit and play games, yet we really think that play is this macro theme activity that we all need to fit back into our lives. Everything behind the products we’re creating is our mission to build what we think of as a platform for play.

We’re not trying to be the company that makes the next hit game — although we want to do that too. We want to do something broader. Make up a platform for play. We’re going to talk about the technology, infrastructure, behind all that we’re doing to create socialness. To help and inspire you to many more friend connections. In any given session, we’re measuring and tracking how well our teams do with the content. To inspire you to connect with more people in meaningful ways.

We’re trying to design the games — we have some design principles. The First Time User Experience. The FTUE. We believe in those first moments, those first three clicks, why you want it, why you want to check out more of it. It’s kind of a three-click deal — we sold you or we didn’t.

We can’t ask for more than 15 minutes of your time. We don’t want to ask you to change your day. Just like a good show (I’ve been addicted to Breaking Bad lately). Like a good show, if you do like our games, we hope to give you enough depth that you can keep playing for three months or a year.

We hope to enable a platform for direct relationships. Wether on the web or mobile. We hope to create socialness around the game.

Friends from Facebook (corp) are here. We’re excited to be a launch platform for their mobile platform. We’ll be showing you 3 HTML5 versions of our games I think launching today. We’ll start unveiling pieces of Zynga Direct. We hope you’ll see that it’s the deepest integration with FB Connect of any service on the web or mobile.

In terms of the games we’re showing today, including one that launched last night…. with every game we hope it moves the genre, answers the question “how is this more social.”

They took this component of the game — clan fighting — and brought it front and center.

We think that’s going to be a new spin on social crime-fighting. We’re going to show you CastleVille. That game is built by a team in Dallas that has a long track record building Triple-A PC titles like Age of Empires. We think the art and graphics are really beautiful. The design, the user-driven story line, character development, new ways to collaborate and get ahead through partnering with other players in the game.

We’re going to show you another casual game category called Hidden Chronicles. A first for us in the hidden objects and puzzle category, a long established category in the download market. We hope to show a more social spin on it, let people collaborate and compete to do puzzles.

David Ko is going to show you a bunch of mobile titles now and in the next few weeks. We’ve really ramped up our mobile game offering, worked to deliver mobile in social context. With our FB Connect integration, and a lot more firsts for mobile social gaming.

10:50 After going through the first few games in mobile, we’re going to introduce our Zynga Direct offering, which has been two years in development. The first of many many releases that you’ll see in the coming weeks and months.

I really hope you get the chance after this to touch and play the games.

I’m going to turn this over to Cadir Lee (CTO). We’ve worked together since he was 22, when he was in his first job. We both learned product development at the same time. Lucky to have him come back and build out the tech.

I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the tech. Over half the Zynga employees are engineers, and are hard at work making the games better.

I wanted to share some of the highlights. The gaming engine itself: can display thousands of objects in a world, make the world come alive, show animations. All of our game engines focus on making it easy to build game, and enhance game. We’re also hard at work on new capabilities with Flash 11.

We think there’s a lot more to come. We also talk a lot about infrastructure; we’re long-time public and private cloud users. We have our own, Z-Cloud. Worst thing is if you can’t play one of our games. We try to make sure they’re available all the time. We’ve been known to deploy 1,000 servers to meet a game launch. Elasticity of key, makes play always available.

One of the things I want to share with you today.

We’re working on HTML5, R&D to make games entirely from HTML, CSS and Javascript. Snapshot of one of our test games.

Analytics — long been known as an analytics company. Not what to build, but how the things we build are working. How to match up with the right somebody across the street, across the country, across the world. We’re trying to make sure it’s not the data that comes in but the personalization that comes out. How do you make sure the right player with the right skill-set can have a fun and challenging game.

I’d like to introduce you to Roy Sehgal, vice president and general manager.

Today, I’m pleased to unveil a new game genre for Zynga. Hidden object games. Our first game in this new genre: Hidden Chronicles. A new journey for our players, and one we’re excited to share today.

And now for the first time ever, let’s take a sneak peek at the game.

[Video starts.]

The game is about mystery, discovery, social competition. Use skills to find thousands of hidden objects within beautiful scenes. Begin at Ramsey Manor. Here, you’re going to explore, build, discover, customize, the self expression we know our players love.

Compare scores….

Hours of play within a single scene. I’m proud of our team. Unique sound, animatics — make you feel like you’re underwater. Deep, rich, engaging. A new and unique art style for Zynga.

Mafia Wars 2.

Easiest the edgiest game we’ve had: Franchise, feel, friends and fighting. Mafia Wars launched in 2008. Great honor to work with veterans of Mafia Wars team to create sequel. But even greater to give back to our players from the first game. All about rising up, getting revenge and kicking ass with your friends.

[Video starts]

11:00 Epic missions with your friends. Example: blowing up casino and getting stacks of cash. Happened asynchronously, but shared social experience. Moment that’ll continue through the game.

Also bosses: very important story points in the game. A don is sending thugs to take cash — won’t stop until I fight back. Use power-ups and defense, call friends. Also hit boss on my game board. First boss. Took him out. Future bosses are super tough, have lots of tactics to defeat.

Fighting: bone yard, any weapons. Any guns. Shotguns, rocket launchers, even chainsaws to cut people up. Lots of sophisticated matching. Lots of fun rewards.

[Our review here.]

Go to others houses. Take their cash, products. Then they call their friends and come fight you. Friend bars. But we built a rival bar — keep track of the friends you hate. Keep these cycles going. That’s a little taste of Mafia Wars 2.

Before I go. We also just went live on Google+ with Mafia Wars 2.

Here to talk about Zynga Poker, our first social game. Launched in July 2007. Still the world’s largest and most social social game. While the game is traditional Texas Hold’Em poker, we have social features — fantastic presence across Facebook, Google+, Android and special interface for iPhone and iPad. We realized we could broaden our scope and go beyond.

We’re launching a new franchise. Zynga Casino. We’re bringing fans the full Monte Carlo experience with the launch of Zynga Casino. You can’t always take your friends on a plane to Vegas. But you can on Zynga poker tables and other rooms.

Joining the franchise: Zynga Bingo. This is the first new game in the Zynga Casino Franchise. It was created by our talented New York team with our poker studio.

Zynga Bingo features a number of themed rooms. The Zynga ball shoots out of a Cadillac. Or  a sweet shop. Or FarmVille background. Fun social twist — friends with benefits. More friends playing, more advantages in the game.

Launching on Facebook soon.

11:10 We’re bringing players a new way to play. Also on Zynga devices.

Bill Jackson, creative director from Zynga Dallas. Before we were Bonfire Studios — Age of Empires, Age of Mythology, Halo Wars. Zynga was *the* company putting social in gaming. We’re very proud to be putting on the next “-Ville” game. CastleVille. FarmVille was about social expression, brought social games to mainstream like no other.

Frontierville was all about narrative. Then CityVille, fastest-growing of all time. Number one on Facebook.

CastleVille is latest, most beautiful to date. New level of social. Caste of characters: Giselle a singer, dragon-slayer Tom, Sonia the pirate, George the viking. Antonio the playboy woodsman.

[Video starts.]

We put a lot of love and attention to detail to our characters.

CastleVille: true manifestation of Zynga’s social magic. Improves upon each of the things of the games before. Build castle, craft art, armor, potions. Help friends with those, as we progress through the epic journey through the game.

Go through the free market to trade. Work with friends to defend against Beasties that lurk outside of the castle walls. New storytelling in a personal way. Players create their own story, own path through games. New locations, items, hidden characters. Your journey will be different from your friends. I might meet Antonio, you might meet Giselle. We learn the characters’ stories as we work our way through the games. Zynga is bringing massively multi-player role-playing games.

One more thing is music: orchestral arrangements.

Couldn’t show you without heart and soul that Dallas team puts into it.

I hope we’ve given you a taste, a flavor of where we’re taking the Ville franchise.

Mark is back on stage. Turns out there’s an open building space with five stories packed full of Zynga employees watching us cover the event. Sort of surprising.

11:20 Introducing John Schappert, new COO (until recently at EA).

[Video starts about players.]

People want to play everywhere. David Ko, chief mobile officer, now on stage.

Super excited to talk to you today about Mobile. Update you on many of the exciting initiatives that the team is working on. You’ve heard about Zynga equaling play. Delivering where our players are. Not just because I’m the mobile guy, although I may be biased.

Talks about Words With Friends going across platform.

Talking about HTML5 initiative. Launching three on the platform.

Words With Friends and Poker.

New game is FarmVille Express. Wanted to do some actions on the go. Harvest, plant, plough. That’s what we’re offering.

Fourth game, which I’m excited to talk to you about, is Mafia Shakedown. Here’s the gist of the game. The don of all dons has been killed. Bunch of things that you’ll do with requests, missions, gives you opportunity to become the next don. You can steal from your friends. This game will be coming shortly so stay tuned.

Lastly, this fifth game is called Dream Zoo. Zynga’s first game in zoo genre. You get to manage the dream zoo, no cages, the animals get to roam.

[Video starts.]

You can create all sorts of animals….

11:30 Schappert back on.

In addition to mobile and social. More than 60 million daily active players. We know that because we have great stats. We learn a lot more not just from stats but from talking to them. Yes they like our games, play them a lot. Playing our games with friends.

Sneak peek of something new: Project Z.

Centered on bringing players together, giving them what they want. Social environment just for games. Facebook Connect-enabled platform to play environment tailored just for games. Here’s a sneak peak.

[Video starts.]

Link is: Zynga.com/ztag

Can reserve own Zynga tag at Zynga.com. Having own alias. At work I’m “Jon” or probably other names. But online: SchappAttack.

Coming to you. Bringing back MarkPinc to close out the show.

We tried to share a lot with you guys. Hopefully in pretty quick order. More efficient way to share product launches. Even tried to share some things that are works in progress. Project Z, Z Tags, games that aren’t launching yet.

We really want to build a platform for Play. Committed to one vision, one mission, hasn’t changed since we founded the company. You should expect it won’t ever change in the future.

We want to be the biggest macro bet on social gaming. We believe in social gaming, we believe that how more than us in this building, how everyone in the world will embrace play in our lives. Everything we’re doing is an attempt to bring that to life. It’s early, it’s primitive. The game play and socialness is at an early point. We know that in the next couple years its going to come to life, be mobile. More of the WoW feeling, but packaged up in something you can understand and like in 3 clicks, and play in 10 to 15 minutes.

We hope we gave you some more of our flavor, our team, a bunch of our leaders.

[Zynga employee photo courtesy of Anthony Ha.]

Facebook finally unveiled its long-awaited effort to help mobile developers market their native and HTML5-based apps through its platform today. iOS developers will get to take advantage of bookmarks, requests and the news feed in the same way that Facebook canvas developers do.

The interesting parts of today’s launch are:

Facebook is playing nice with Apple on viral distribution for native iOS apps, not just HTML5-based ones: If a developer wants to distribute a native application, Facebook’s notifications will send users to the iTunes app store.

So Facebook is not pressuring developers to build HTML5 apps in order to use its viral channels. This is a big deal because it means Facebook’s mobile platform will have greater adoption by iOS developers who don’t want to split their limited resources between developing natively and on HTML5. While promising, HTML5 apps still have a noticeable performance disparity compared to native iOS applications. It’s especially pronounced with games, which are the largest revenue driver on both platforms.

It’s unclear if Facebook will get affiliate revenue for the downloads it drives like other mobile-social gaming networks such as GREE’s OpenFeint do.

Parallel viral channels on Android will be coming soon. There’s no official date though.

Facebook Credits have arrived for mobile web apps (as was widely anticipated): HTML5 developers that want to use Credits as their payment mechanism must use it exclusively. Native iOS apps have to use Apple’s payment system, however. This split in payments between web-based and native apps is expected given that Apple is unlikely to give up revenue from in-app payments and paid downloads.

We were the first to report that Facebook might use an HTML5 platform as a way to extend Credits to mobile back in February, four months before any mainstream outlets wrote about it. And we also correctly reported the launch date as three weeks away from f8 while other blogs incorrectly said this would launch last week at Apple’s event.

On the eve of Apple’s expected iPhone 5 launch tomorrow, it appears that revenue for top-grossing games on the platform has leveled off in the last few months.

“Revenue levels for top games appear to be stable instead of accelerating,” said Peter Farago, vice president of marketing at Flurry, which serves analytics and ads in more than 100,000 iOS and Android apps. “Games on the higher end of revenue generation can certainly earn more than $3 million a month.”

The $3 million-per-month figure is the more or less the same as what we were hearing about four months ago in June.

A developer that reached the #1 top-grossing spot in the U.S. market within the last month told us that one could expect $40,000 in revenues per day after Apple’s platform cut and returns. (Returns refer to when a user buys an app or virtual currency and decides to return the purchase.)

“The dirty little secret is that with returns, Apple takes out the return amount and they still keep their 30 percent. So they hit hard,” the developer told us.

There are a couple reasons why we might be seeing slower revenue growth. First, consumers are likely holding off on purchases of new iPhones in anticipation of the iPhone 5. When consumers buy new iPhones, they tend to stock up on apps, especially if they’re new to iOS. Many will browse the top of the store and download whatever is popular, benefiting apps already at the top of the charts.

> Continue reading on Inside Mobile Apps.

MindJolt, the casual-social gaming company run by former MySpace chief executive Chris DeWolfe, announces a new string of games today along with the news that the company has successfully transitioned its business model from advertising to virtual goods.

The announcement comes roughly five months after MindJolt acquired social mobile game company Social Gaming Network (SGN) and free online game network Hallpass Media. At that time, MindJolt was very clearly activating on DeWolfe’s strategy to expand off of Facebook onto mobile and open web platforms. The acquisitions also helped MindJolt bring much of its game development in-house, effectively educating the company on how monetize games through virtual goods sales as opposed to advertising.

The result, DeWolfe tells us today, is a successful pivot into a new business model with virtual goods now making up one-third of MindJolt’s revenues. Though he declines to give specific numbers, he confirms that annual revenues are in the tens-of-millions and expected to exceed the $20 million figure reported in November 2010. Since April of this year, the company has released or re-launched a handful of games on iOS, including Warp Dash, Master Shot, Dress-up – Fashion, and Mini Cafe.

In the next few months, we can expect to see seven new games out of MindJolt, the first of which DeWolfe says is coming to iOS in as few as a couple of weeks. The upcoming titles include Fluff Friends – Races, Bird’s the Word, and another game inspired by DressUp, which was a web game bought by MindJolt as part of the Hallpass Media acquisition.

The big challenge now will be tackling cross-platform releases, a task many social and mobile game developers struggle with. Currently, MindJolt is building native apps for each platform — web, Facebook, iOS and, eventually, Android — with only very light integration between games of the same franchise via Facebook Connect. The games essentially look and play the same on each platform, however, and DeWolfe says that this is helpful when it comes to promoting games cross-platform.

Another component of the cross-platform challenge is creating a critical mass of users that support the MindJolt brand. As of right now, the company says it has a pool of over 30 million mobile installs, over 70 million social platform installs on social platforms, and over 25 million unique monthly active users on the web. Moving eyeballs between these platforms is crucial in supporting new game launches — as other cross-platform developers like OMGPOP have experienced when shifting audiences between Facebook and iOS.

“We’re getting a trememndous amount of traffic and downloads from web,” DeWolfe says. “It doesn’t usually work to advertise something on the web and then have people go through the friction of the iTunes store, downloading, and then picking up their device and actually using it.” The near-identical appearance of the apps, he says, reduces the friction.

Going forward, MindJolt is also releasing its first in-house developed Facebook game today, titled Bubble Atlantis. Though still integrating the teams at SGN and Hallpass Media, DeWolfe tells us that the company is still “opportunistically” looking for game developer talent acquisitions or second-party partnerships. After successfully beefing up its mobile business, the bar is now higher for what MindJolt can do on social network game platforms and on open web.

China is fast-becoming the second-largest market in terms of downloads for many developers including companies like Rovio, but it lags behind in terms of monetization. The country came in just behind the U.S. in page views on Google’s AdMob advertising network in July, according to statistics the network shared at an iOS developer conference in China this past weekend.

The promise is there, but how do mobile developers take advantage of it?

Over the past two weeks in Beijing and Shanghai, I’ve had the chance to talk with several mobile developers like High Noon-maker Happylatte, PapayaMobile, PopCap Games and other companies being incubated in former Google China head Kai-Fu Lee’s incubator Innovation Works.

It’s an incredibly complex and different market from the U.S., but here are a few insights into developing and marketing iOS and Android apps there:

1) Android may be the long-term bet, but iOS is showing surprising resilience in spite of lower incomes here: 

iOS has leapt up the ranks of mobile search referrals to Baidu in recent months and sends more queries to the Chinese search engine than Android does, according to a source at the search company familiar with the data. Google’s AdMob also said that close to three-fourths of the pageviews on its network in China are from iOS as compared to Android during the same presentation that the picture at the top is from. Nokia is still the biggest platform in China though.

There aren’t good public estimates available on the actual number of consumers carrying Android and iOS devices considering that there are many “Shanzhai” or knock-off phones that are based on Android but are incompatible with the platform. Plus, many people bring phones into the country through relatives and friends abroad. The country’s largest carrier China Mobile — which doesn’t even sell the iPhone — said it had 7.44 million iPhones on its network in its last quarterly earnings call.

Dianxin, one of the makers of a local variant of Android known as Tapas, estimates there are 12 to 15 million Android devices currently circulating in the country. Many other local mobile-focused companies like PapayaMobile say they’re building products assuming there are at least 10 million iOS and 10 million Android phones circulating in the country.

An unlocked iPhone 4 costs 4,999 renminbi here, or roughly $780, well above its American price and even farther above the discounted price with a two-year plan that most U.S. consumers choose. That is about twice what the average new Android phone from Samsung, Motorola or HTC retails for at 2300 to 2600 renminbi or $360 to $410, according to China-focused research firm ZDC. Most people buy their phones unlocked — and often at full retail price — then pick a carrier afterward.

Apple is an incredibly revered brand in China. Based on observation, it’s hard to say there is a more potent and accessible status symbol for Chinese consumers with newfound discretionary income than the iPhone. There is a reason there are fake Apple stores here. There is a reason why Apple’s newly appointed chief executive Tim Cook said in the company’s last earnings call that China brought in $3.8 billion in revenue in the most recent quarter and $8.8 billion in revenue in the fiscal year to date.

Apple has also gotten away with a lot more than many other Western consumer technology companies which have come here only to fall flat on their faces. Unlike Google, Apple maintains a favorable relationship with the Chinese government. It likely censors sensitive content from the local version of the app store to comply with the Chinese government’s restrictions. Google doesn’t support paid apps in Android Market in China and unless it censors its store (which would require substantial changes to the store’s current review process), it would be hard for it to gain mass adoption here. In that case, alternative Android app stores may thrive.

2) There are many local variants of Android, but none of them are really that big — yet.

Unlike many other Western markets, there are several custom versions of Android here that are tailored to the needs of Chinese consumers (or in less promising cases, the needs of Chinese carriers and OEMs). Because the Android market here is still so new, most Android users still have the standard version of Google’s OS.

“None of them are really big right now,” said Si Shen, the chief executive of Android mobile-social gaming network PapayaMobile.

Don’t worry about them for now. But if you are interested, the handful that come up most often in conversation are:

> Continue reading on Inside Mobile Apps.

Windows Phone to Gain Xbox LIVE Games & Features — Microsoft previewed several Xbox LIVE games and features for the Windows Phone at Gamescom. Features include Avatar Awardables (unlockable Xbox LIVE avatar items), Game Add-ons via in-app purchases with Microsoft Points, Parental Controls, and Fast Async (improved synchronous and asynchronous multiplayer). Fourteen new games were also announced, including Bug Village, Burn the Rope, and Gravity Guy.

Sony Reveals New Social Applications for PS Vita — Sony announced several new social enhancements to its mobile platform, the PlayStation Vita. At their press conference, they announced the integration of Facebook, Twitter, Skype, and Foursquare.

Battlefield 3 for iPhone Previewed — One of the few mobile games displayed at Gamescom last week was Electronic Arts’ and DICE’s Battlefield 3: Aftershock for the iOS. Pocket Gamer notes that the military first-person-shooter hosts no traditional campaign/story mode, but does contain single-player challenges and multiplayer via EA’s new Origin platform.

[image via Pocket Gamer]

The Sims Social Receives “Best Browser Game” – The Sims Social won an award at Gamescom for “Best Browser Game.” Currently, the game boasts a daily active user count of nearly 3.5 million.

According to Digital Spy, an EA representative stated that The Sims Social will be getting a mobile companion app. Players will be able to access the game via java-supported mobile handsets such as Android.

iQU Launches Online Games Analytics & Marketing Service — VentureBeat covered the demo of a new marketing and analytics platform for online games from iQU. The company is a data intelligence firm and states that it can better help with game marketing due to its larger database of gamers and how they act within the social, mobile, and web spaces.

Activision States Social Game Company Valuations are “Out of Whack” — Activision-Blizzard believes that the valuations of social game companies are a bit too high. According to Bloomberg, CEO Eric Hirshberg stated in an interview that “valuations of some of the companies in that space are out of whack, so that’s an issue when it comes to acquisitions.” Nevertheless, Activision is planning to methodically move into the space (no official announcements regarding Facebook games have been made) and is slated to introduce a social network for players in Call of Duty with “Call of Duty Elite.”

Through Call of Duty Elite, players will be able connect with other users and play with people that share similar interests and skill levels. They will also be able to compete in community tournaments and view short films (“webisodes”) based on the game.