Zynga’s new senior vice president of mobile Travis Boatman has seen the mobile gaming industry go through one seismic shift after another. He saw JAMDAT through its landmark $680 million acquisition to Electronic Arts back in 2005, then built up EA’s mobile business and oversaw its studios worldwide. Raised in Silicon Valley where he grew up on games like Bard’s Tale, he switched to gaming from earlier career ambitions in sports medicine.

Right now under Zynga, there are three main lines of mobile games. The “With Friends” brand grew out of Newtoy’s smash hit Words With Friends and then expanded to include Scramble With Friends and Hanging With Friends. “These are usually asynchronous and directly social,” Boatman said. Then there is a cohort of games that are more or less extensions of Zynga’s core Facebook franchises like Cityville Hometown.

Lastly, there’s the “Dream” line-up, which is new given the recent debuts of Dream Zoo and Dream PetHouse. Boatman says the “Dream” brand is more aspirational. “We like to say they’re about ‘vest’ and ‘express.’ They’re about growing and customizing, which is in line with our core tenants. All of these games have a similar look and feel.”

Like Pincus, Boatman brushed off recent criticism that Zynga’s titles are too similar to ones existing in the market. NimbleBit recently blasted Zynga for an unreleased title called Dream Heights because it was too similar to its app Tiny Tower, which won Apple’s game of the year. Dream Zoo and Dream PetHouse also seem reminiscent of Pocket Gems’ Tap Zoo and Tap Pet Hotel.

“These games are free and our players have the choice to play what they want to play,” he said. “If games were too similar to consumers and there was no clear value add, why would a consumer play it?”

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

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.

Electronic Art’s digital revenues — which includes those from social games — came in at $274 million for Q3 FY12, up over 40 percent from the same quarter last year. Non-GAAP digital revenue grew by 79 percent year-over-year, breaking $1 billion before the end of 2011.

EA attributes growth in digital revenues to increased subscriptions, microtransactions and advertising. GAAP net revenue from wireless, advertising, digital distribution and other internet sources was $103 million, up from $16 million at the same time last year.

Mobile revenues, meanwhile, increased to $70 million dollars in company’s third quarter, up from $59 million in the same quarter a year earlier. Though up 19 percent year-over-year, the company’s handheld revenues dropped significantly. Revenue from Nintendo’s DS platform were $15 million, a 69 percent drop from $49 million year-on-year and revenues from Sony’s PSP were $14 million, a 36 percent drop over the same quarter a year earlier. Overall, the company’s total revenue from mobile and handhelds was down 24 percent year-on-year, dropping to $99 million.

Though not broken out on the balance sheet, EA reports that its PopCap Games studio posted 30 percent growth in revenues on a trailing-twelve-month basis. EA bought the Zuma Blitz developer in the summer; its newest Facebook title, Solitaire Blitz, is currently in open beta.

During its earnings call, EA mentioned that a planned social game release would be moved from Q4 FY12 to Q1 FY13. It looks like EA is experimenting with optimal launch windows for social games, as most games earn their best money not at launch but after the first 30 days on the Facebook platform. EA CFO Eric Brown confirmed the strategy behind the move, saying the release would shore up expected performance from the 2013 lineup of social games. The latest game from its Playfish studio, Risk: Factions, went live earlier this month and is still on a growth trend. Note that the publisher doesn’t detail social or mobile game releases in its earnings releases in the same way it does with console and PC game releases due the risk of being beaten to market by a copycat game.

Brown went on to say that FY 2012 digital revenue growth the hit $1.2 billion and that calendar 2013 would have a lighter game release schedule overall. Detailed guidance for FY 2013 will be provided in EA’s next earnings report.

More details on EA’s social games calendar came out during the Q&A portion of the call: Five new games based on established IP are currently in development. A big social game launch is planned for May. Aside from the strategic decision behind moving the mystery 2013 social game back, the publisher also says that there are issues with the game’s social and monetization features. EA also says that a significant majority of digital revenue comes from EA’s own IP, not from PopCap and Playfish. The FIFA game launched with Gree for social and mobile networks in Japan was a particularly inspiring launch for EA and they’re exploring similar game launches on global networks. No mention was made of a Mass Effect 3 social game.

Twice in the last month, we’ve seen studios come forward to criticize Zynga for being too inspired by their work.

Nimblebit, which recently won Game of the Year from Apple, said a forthcoming Zynga title called Dream Heights unfairly cribs from their hit Tiny Tower. Then this week Buffalo Studios said Zynga copied some user interface and design details from their bingo game.

Frustrating as it may be to indie studios, this has always been part of Zynga’s strategy. It’s almost silly to address it. As long as games from proven genres earn outsized returns compared to ones from unproven categories and the cost of losing or settling lawsuits remains low, developers will keep doing copycat games.

Zynga’s chief executive Mark Pincus even euphemistically referred to the practice in December’s IPO roadshow by saying: “We have a rule of thumb inside Zynga. For any category we launch a game in, we expect it to be three to five times the size of the then category leader.”

He reiterated again in an internal memo this week that:

Google didn’t create the first search engine. Apple didn’t create the first mp3 player or tablet. And, Facebook didn’t create the first social network. But these companies have evolved products and categories in revolutionary ways. They are all internet treasures because they all have specific and broad missions to change the world.

We don’t need to be first to market. We need to be the best in market. There are genres that we’re going to enter because we know our players are interested in them and because we want and need to be where players are. We evolve genres by making games free, social, accessible and highest quality.

Zynga does market research by looking at leading titles, designs similar games that don’t require a learning curve, optimizes them for monetization with its data prowess and then spends and cross-promotes relentlessly.

If Zynga’s titles appear too close to other games, it’s hard to take the company to task because of its deep pockets and fearsomely litigious history. Few small studios have the resources to pay for lawyers, especially against a company that has been so historically eager to sue others for theft of trade secrets and copyright infringement.

It also helps that the intellectual property system is quite fragmented for protecting games. Copyright covers the art and potentially the underlying source code while trademarks covers the brand and logo. Patents, the weakest form of protection for game developers, can cover code and mechanics.

Another factor is that as the gaming industry has moved away from a packaged goods model toward a highly iterative and serviced-based one, it makes less sense to pursue protection like patents. Like in the broader consumer Internet industry, waiting at least two to four years for a patent is absurd considering that a hit game can flame out in months.

The more interesting question to ask here is whether Zynga’s approach can do as well on mobile platforms as it has on Facebook. Zynga does not have an outsized lead on either Android or iOS. It has 13 million daily active users, which is very respectable. But it’s not enough to produce network effects that would shut out rival games from the top 10. Unlike Facebook, which signed a five-year agreement with Zynga, Apple does not have a vested interest in seeing Zynga achieve user growth targets. Smartphones also support more diversity than Facebook. The past month has proved that indie developers like Imangi Studios can nail freemium in more than casual sim or mafia games too.

Here we take a look back at various Zynga social and mobile titles, and whether they worked or not according to AppData statistics and ranking history from App Annie:

Mafia Wars and Mob Wars: Launched in August of 2008, Mafia Wars triggered one of the several lawsuits Zynga went on to become ensnared with. Creator David Maestri and his company Psycho Monkey LLC went onto sue Zynga for infringing on his creation Mob Wars and settled for a reported $7 to 9 million. (But it’s also worth noting that Maestri had to settle with his former employer SGN because he launched the game while working for them when they were called FreeWebs.)

After Zynga launched Mafia Wars, it went on to reach around 10 million monthly active users in about half a year, while Maestri’s game stalled at about 2.5 to 3 million MAU.

PetVille, Happy Pets and Pet Society: Launched in December 2009, PetVille riffed on a long history of casual, animal care-taking games that have existed long before the Facebook platform even launched. It followed Playfish’s Pet Society, which came out more than a year before in the fall of 2008, and Crowdstar’s Happy Pets, which launched the previous month. Both PetVille and Happy Pets saw decent starts but then leveled off while Pet Society kept on growing.

Cafe World and Restaurant City: Zynga’s restaurant sim game Cafe World came out in September 2009 after Playfish’s Restaurant City had accumulated 16 million monthly actives. It added steps by making players chop up or dice ingredients before cooking dishes and requiring users to add friends as neighbors if they wanted to expand their restaurants. Restaurant City actually hit its peak usage two months after Zynga launched its game before it began a slow and steady decline. Cafe World also peaked shortly after at around 32 million monthly actives.

Gardens of Time and Hidden Chronicles: It’s not surprising that Zynga would want to get into the hidden object genre after Disney Playdom’s Gardens of Time topped growth charts for nearly five months in a row. It is a little surprising that it took Zynga so long to do it, however. Hidden object game designer Cara Ely was brought on at Zynga in July — three months after Gardens of Time’s launch — and it wasn’t until January 2012 that Hidden Chronicles saw the light of day. In addition to similar presentation of story elements, Hidden Chronicles also cribs Gardens of Time’s decoration-based progression system.

Mobile has been a more interesting story this past year because Zynga actually started out as the underdog on iOS. Several games like Playforge’s Zombie Farm and Storm8′s Restaurant Story were taking genres that social gaming companies had nailed on Facebook and were executing them well on the iPhone. Nevertheless, Zynga managed to accumulate 13 million daily active users by year-end, largely because of its acquisition of Words With Friends maker Newtoy, but also because it started getting its core franchises right on mobile.

Zynga Poker and Texas Poker:

Poker is a more than 150-year-old game, so it’s hard to say that any company could own it. However, Russian developer Kamagames said Zynga copied user interface details from its hit Texas Poker early last year.

Zynga started fading out non-active players on the board and added a vertical bar to raise and lower bets. Before last year, Texas Poker was trouncing Zynga’s Poker game on the iOS grossing charts and consistently had a top 10 ranking. But in the spring, Zynga Poker began a steady climb and now outranks Kamagames’ title.

Tap Zoo, Tiny Zoo Friends and Dream Zoo: Pocket Gems had an undisputed run as one of the highest-earning developers last year after Tap Zoo held on to a top 10 grossing spot for about a year. Unsurprisingly, Zynga took note and launched Dream Zoo just ahead of Thanksgiving. It took the same zoo concept but added some complexity with feeding and washing games along with more levels for each of the animals. In anticipation of such a move, Pocket Gems phased out its old game Tap Zoo and launched a new version called Tap Zoo 2: World Tour.

None of the games have managed to hold onto a top 10 ranking. In fact, a different zoo game from developer TinyCo is actually the highest ranked one in the genre right now at #17. Dream Zoo remains at #44 and Tap Zoo 2 holds at #77. It looks like all of these companies effectively split the market.

Pocket Gems hasn’t complained, with chief operating officer Ben Liu telling us, “Look. Our games have copied extensively by many, many companies.” He added, “The way we can stay ahead of Zynga is by listening to our users and putting the best features in our game. Consumers are going to judge what’s the best product.” Pocket Gems has been busy launching a number of new games in the last few weeks like Tappily Ever After and Zombie Takeover.

This story originally appeared on our sister site, Inside Mobile Apps.

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.

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.

Cross-platform games are a new frontier for many social and mobile game developers, but some companies have more than a years’ worth of a head start. Meet Germany’s GameDuell, one of the first developers to cash in on cross-platform games for Facebook, mobile and open web.

Founded in 2003 when bandwidth was still expensive by three people with no video games industry experience, GameDuell got its start as a web games portal that offered real cash prizes in skill-based games. Competition became a huge draw for the company and over the years, a strong online community formed around the GameDuell brand.

The developer branched out to Facebook and mobile in 2010 and succeeded in launching its first cross -latform game that summer. According to co-founder and CEO Kai Bolik (pictured), the company now has 70 million registered users in total; our AppData traffic tracking service records 3.4 million monthly active users and over 500,000 daily active users among its Facebook audience alone.

Speaking to Inside Social Games and Inside Mobile Apps, Bolik explains GameDuell’s strategy toward cross-platform releases going into 2012.

Inside Social Games: How did cash prizes guide GameDuell’s early development?

Kai Bolik, GameDuell co-founder & CEO: It was part of our concept from the beginning. People got a thrill from getting prizes and it made it exciting for players, so it was part of our strategy. When we started, there were sites where you would go play mini flash games like Yahoo Games where you play a simple flash game by yourself. What I liked is that we had this pure platform where people could interact and meet new friends and share their specific passion for the games.

That was something that we worked on very early on and we’ve grown very strong. A lot of the people that have been with us after one year, [even from] five years ago — 80 percent are still there. Once people like these games, they stay with the platform.

ISG: Walk us through your expansion onto Facebook and mobile.

Bolik: We started early on Facebook because we saw a strong need from the consumer side. With mobile, our first truly cross-platform game was in summer 2010. Users were actually asking where the mobile games where, so this was the trigger [to launch on mobile]. On mobile, there’s huge potential by itself. Android is growing quite quickly. Around Christmas, we saw 100,000 installs on one game because people bought the new Android and downloaded our games. When they know our games, they like to have them on mobile devices.

ISG: You told us you have 70 million registered users across Facebook, mobile and your own site. It doesn’t seem like Facebook makes up a huge chunk of that audience.

Bolik: We don’t necessarily focus on the growth of monthly and daily active users. It’s much more important to us that we offer a [cross-platform] experience for our users. That’s our strength. On the web, they come and play tournaments. On Facebook, people that know each other already, and mobile it’s having your games anywhere anytime.

ISG: How are your cross-platform games built?

Bolik: On Facebook and our own platform, it’s Flash, and then we use native code on mobile. We have some HTML5 test games running. But right now, we have the feeling that it’s hard to give the best user experience with that. You can do a really good game, but it’ll be inferior to the natively coded game. It’s sound integration, it’s stability — a lot of things that have nothing to do with the gameplay.

For us, “truly cross platform” is a philosophical question. The gameplay should be the same and it should have it the same feeling. But for the [type of] data that’s [moved across] all the different platforms, it really depends on the game. It doesn’t make sense to stop a Fluffy Birds game in the middle on mobile and then pick it up on Facebook. But for games with the same currency, [that makes sense] to have it be persistent on both Facebook and mobile. We really look at what we can do in the different areas to do the best by the user.

ISG: What kinds of promotions or user acquisition do you do for cross-platform games?

Bolik: We track and manage the game graph of our users — when they are on which platforms — and then we do smart cross-promotion on each platform. We have about 16 games on mobile and eight of them are truly cross platform. We’ve been doing that for about a year.

What we use is the concepts you see on Facebook — cross promotion bars and pages. I don’t believe too strongly in giving users something else, so if you play Fluffy Birds on Facebook, we will present it to you [on mobile] as Fluffy Birds. Users will download our games on iOS because they can find them easily and they go and play them on Facebook as well. Sometimes on iOS, we have games that are still [paid downloads] and sometimes users aren’t ready to pay — but they go and play on Facebook and then come back and download the game.

ISG: What’s the plan to grow in 2012? Will you shift to more of a freemium model for mobile and add cash prizes to your Facebook and mobile titles?

Bolik: On iPhone, everyone says future is in [the] freemium model, but we still see a lot of [paid] downloads. We have a portfolio of both and we sometimes offer two versions — a lite version and a paid version. I think it will move to a freemium version like on Facebook, but people are still willing to pay, so I think both approaches are right. We’ve seen different behavior in different areas — like in Asia, they prefer freemium and in other places, they are more willing to pay.

We haven’t implemented [prizes] on Facebook and mobile yet because you need a really reliable platform and that’s a challenge. [Instead], we’re looking at smaller prizes that don’t use real money.

We see the quality on Facebook increasing, but we see room to grow in the genre that we are serving. We are a company of 170 people which isn’t really small, but because we have our own platform, we still have opportunity for growth. We think now is the time to grow the cross platform offering for customers.

6Waves-Lolapps is going more aggressively into mobile gaming by acquiring Escalation Studios, the gaming company it worked with to publish its two very first iOS games.

Escalation is a bootstrapped, five-year-old company out of Dallas that created Yeti Town and Splode, which 6Waves-Lolapps published last month. Splode Free is a music-and-color puzzle that challenges players’ sense of timing while Yeti Town is a game that’s essentially identical to Spry Fox’s Triple Town. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

“We started negotiating a publishing relationship, and we then realized we wanted to make them part of the family,” says Arjun Sethi, who is now the company’s chief product officer. (He was previously Lolapps’ chief executive before the company merged with 6Waves.)

Sethi tells us even though Escalation had a video gaming pedigree, the studio operated more like a highly iterative mobile-social gaming one.

“They looked like a web services-oriented company,” he says. “They’re not very much like a traditional studio. They get games out from a quality perspective, but they also leverage the data as fast as possible, which is pretty rare.”

At the same time, Escalation was looking for greater distribution and reach. The company had a previous publishing relationship with DeNA’s ngmoco, which released its game Dr. Awesome.

“We realized the 6L guys had most of what we wanted. They had a platform, worldwide distribution and so the conversation got steered away from publishing toward acquisition,” says Escalation’s Marc Tardif. The acquisition brings 6Waves-Lolapps’ headcount to 230 around U.S., Hong Kong, Japan and China.

6Waves-Lolapps is one of the last larger venture-backed social gaming companies to make the leap from Facebook to iOS. Zynga has Dream Zoo, Poker and more, while Crowdstar has Top Girl and Funzio has Crime City and Modern War. Germany’s Wooga also brought Diamond Dash to iOS last year.

This story originally appeared on our sister site, Inside Mobile Apps.

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.”

Indie developer Spry Fox has rolled out a number of changes to Triple Town, its critically acclaimed first foray into social games, and is preparing a cross-platform mobile version.

Originally a Kindle title, the match three puzzle game has built up a small, but dedicated fan base on Facebook, where it has 160,000 MAU according to our AppData traffic tracking service. The game is also available on Google+, where it has about half as many users as it does on Facebook according to Spry Fox’s CEO and co-founder David Edery.

When Inside Social Games reviewed Triple Town in October, Spry Fox told us more features were coming and last week the company made good on the promise, introducing a major update that changed the game’s UI, expanded the gameplay with a world map, introduced daily bonuses and added new premium currency called Diamonds that can only be purchased with Facebook Credits.

Inside Social Games reconnected with Edery over the weekend to ask him about the development process behind the changes and to see what else the Seattle-based company has planned for the franchise.

Inside Social Games: We know that Triple Town is still in beta, but this is a very big update. How did Spry Fox approach designing it? 

David Edery: The difference between us and many other game companies is we consider the design process an ongoing thing. Our decision to release a game to the user isn’t dictated when we think it’s done — a successful game is never done — just if it’s fun and it meets certain internal benchmarks. If it does, great, let’s put it out there.

If you look at Realm of the Mad God [Ed. Note: A massively multiplayer game Spry Fox co-developed with Wild Shadow Studios] its been live and in the public for quite a long time now and we’ve made fairly massive changes to it. Of course there’s inevitably some people who will get upset when you change something that they really like. In general we try to be careful and only release big changes that we think will appeal to people significantly more. We’re perfectly willing to make big changes to our games if we think its in the game’s best interest and people will appreciate it over time.

ISG: One of the things you didn’t change much were the social features. You now get a daily in-game currency bonus based on how many friends you have playing the game, but Triple Town is still mainly relying on “word of mouth” viral mechanics. Are you trying to focus on slow, long term growth rather than a fast viral spread? How feasible is that considering the lifespan of an average social game is between eight to 12 months?

Edery: Our goal for all favorite franchises is to try to turn it into a hobby — something that people will indulge in for years and years, and obviously that’s not going to happen unless a game evolves. Not that I’m comparing Triple Town to World of Warcraft, but if you look at World of Warcraft today, the game has changed in every way since it launched — the design has fundamentally changed and it has many, many times the amount of content it had when it launched. There’s really no difference to our minds between Triple Town and World of Warcraft in the sense that we want people to be playing Triple Town in 10 years too and we think that there’s lots of things we can do to make that happen and you’re starting to see a taste of that. This is really just the tip of the iceberg. We have plenty more stuff planned.

ISG: Triple Town made a few year-end “Best Facebook games of 2011” lists. Were you concerned about introducing changes to a game that had been well received critically?

Edery: No. We’ve been doing this long enough that it doesn’t scare us. We’re not reckless about it and we test things pretty carefully, and we’ve learned over time that if you’re careful about it, this kind of evolution is better for the game. We feel that despite the inevitable hiccups that will happen when you make big changes we can deal with the repercussions.

ISG: Speaking of the critics, Triple Town had been praised earlier for only having one type of currency in the game, but the update introduced a new premium currency. Why the change?

Edery: We want to be as generous as possible with coins, which are the most important currency in the game because the stuff in the game that really matters can only be bought with coins. We didn’t want to find ourselves feeling pressure to start to be skimpy on them, [but] we were looking farther out into the future and thinking if we wanted to keep adding ways to get more coins we were going to start coming under some pretty serious business pressure to be less giving. Our solution was to put in a premium currency and not go crazy with it.  That will help us continue to be as generous as we want to be with the regular currency.

ISG: Were you finding the game wasn’t monetizing as well as you wanted it to?

Edery:  It’s actually been doing better than we expected to be honest with you. We’ve actually been pretty happy with our revenue on Facebook and Google+ and we’ve been very happy with our retention. In general, we’re very happy. We hoped Triple Town would be a big hit, so we’re just grateful to have a game people like.

ISG: Have you noticed that there seems to be a more active Triple Town community on Google+ than on Facebook? 

Edery: There’s no question that there seems to be very visible chatter and really interesting conversations on Google+ right now. I don’t know if it means the community is more active or if there’s just one or two people on Google+ that have been more proactive about rallying other users. We’ve definitely noticed it and we like it. We’d love to see that kind of thing happening more on Facebook and we blame ourselves for that. We’re going to be setting up forums [on Facebook] soon. There’s a lot of things we haven’t done that a decent game should do to let players make their voices heard.

ISG: Spry Fox has mentioned an iOS app is on the way. When is the mobile version of Triple Town coming out? Will it be cross-platform at launch?

Edery:  All we can say is really soon. We haven’t submitted to Apple yet, but we’re close. We have every intention of making it cross platform, timeline T.B.D. [Ed. Note: Edery clarified this with us and explained the first version of the app will be standalone, but future versions will eventually be cross-platform.]

ISG: How do you feel about Yeti Town? Many people have pointed out it is very similar to Triple Town.

Edery: I wish I had a canned answer for you. I think the press has spoken for us. When we saw it we thought it was very similar and I’ve seen many articles that say things like “swap bears with yetis and ice cubes with gravestones and you’ve got Triple Town.” We were disappointed to see that. We felt it was not something that another game company should do to an indie like us, but what can you do?

We’re hoping that our fans will support us and go and download [the Triple Town app when it comes out] and give us good reviews. We’re hoping that people in the press will speak out on our behalf. I think everyone realizes that Triple Town was the innovator here. I also think this is an issue for people in the industry.  Innovation in the social games platform is something that’s relatively rare and its threatened by activities like this. At the end of the day we’re going to keep plugging away and keep making games, but every time someone comes in with something that’s very similar it obviously makes it very difficult because they’re eating into our market and decreasing the profits from our successful titles. All we can do is reach out to the community and ask them to help us if they want us to keep doing what we’re doing.