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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zynga to get into publishing — Bloomberg is reporting Zynga will soon unveil a publishing program that will allow other developers to advertise their games within Zynga’s games and on a Zynga games portal.

Former LucasArts devs launch social game platform – Game industry veterans Randy Farmer, Chip Morningstar, Noah Falstein and Gary Winnick have teamed to create a new cloud application platform for social games called Suddenly Social.

Bossa Studios, We R Interactive get BAFTA nods — Bossa Studios’ debut game Monstermind has received two BAFTA Video Game Award nominations for best online browser game and best debut game. In other BAFTA news, We R Interactive’s soccer game I AM PLAYR has also been nominated for best online browser game. The awards ceremony will be held on March 16.

Large Animal Games partners with King Features for comic strip tie-in — New York-based Large Animal Games has struck a deal with King Features Syndicate to use King comic characters in its Facebook game Picturiffic. The first premium pack with King Features content will feature Popeye.

Vostu named a most innovative Brazilian company — Fast Company has named Vostu as one of its 10 most innovative companies in Brazil for incorporating in-game radio into its social games. For more information, read our full article on the in-game radio feature here.

Nexon revamps Wonder Cruise – Nexon America has rolled out an extensive series of updates to its Facebook game Wonder Cruise, adding daily bonuses, wildcard events and updating the game’s citybuilding Tycoon System. The game is currently in open beta.

Zynga legal roundup — SocialApps is suing Zynga for breaching an implied contract with MyFarm developer SocialApps. The company is claiming Zynga used the source code for MyFarm to create FarmVille, despite a 2009 letter of agreement between the parties, according to Develop. In other Zynga legal news, Personalized Media Communications (PMC) is suing Zynga for infringing four of its patents covering “the use of control and information signals embedded in electronic media content to generate output for display that is personalized and relevant to a user,” according to a Gamasutra report. PMC is suing Zynga in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, a district known for its favorable treatment of patent plaintiffs.

Former THQ devs go mobile, social with Twiitch — Australian game industry veterans Shane Stevens and Steven Spagnolo, formerly of THQ and Blue Tongue Entertainment, have launched a new independent studio called Twiitch. The company’s first game is iOS physics puzzler Coco Loco, which will be published by EA’s Chillingo. Twiitch is also working on a Facebook game.

Words With Friends can lead to Romance – Zynga has released some interesting Words With Friends statistics. According to the company, 44 percent of players have admitted to flirting with an online opponent and one in 10 players admitted the game has led to a in-person meeting.

The Sims Social adds “friends with benefits” social interaction – EA updates The Sims Social this week with a new social interaction that allows players to engage other players’ Sims in sexual activity without first entering into a monogamous relationship. We’ve heard sexual activity is one of the core revenue drivers for The Sims Social; it’ll be interesting to see what, if any, impact this update has on the game’s performance.

PopCap podcast addresses Pig Up! failings – EA PopCap’s Jeff Green and Joey Trimmer interview game producer Isaac Aubrey and writer Stephen Notley on what went wrong with the experimental social game. PopCap’s next Facebook title, Solitaire Blitz, officially launches next month.

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

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

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

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

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

Zynga’s shares endured a brutal day today, dropping almost 18 percent to $11.80, after the company’s first earnings report as a publicly-traded entity. That wiped out more than $1.7 billion from the company’s market capitalization.

Yesterday, Zynga did beat analysts estimates, with earnings of 5 cents a share excluding a massive, one-time $510 million charge related to the initial public offering. Analysts on average had estimated Zynga would earn 3 cents a share, according to a Bloomberg survey.

But it looks like traders — who had bid the stock up more than 35 percent since the day before Facebook filed for an initial public offering — were hoping for more.

In Facebook’s IPO filing at the beginning of the month, the company said it had a 20 percent quarter-over-quarter increase in payments revenue, suggesting that developers like Zynga might see a comparable boost. But Zynga’s bookings grew about 7 percent quarter-over-quarter to $306.5 million from the previous quarter’s bookings of $287.7 million.

It suggests that Facebook, which Zynga is dependent on for 93 percent of its revenue, is diversifying its payment revenue sources while Zynga has yet to prove that it can truly live off the social network’s platform.

At the same time, research and development costs are rising as Zynga aims to produce another CastleVille-class hit on Facebook, mobile and more. Costs popped this quarter in part because of a $510 million one-time charge related to stock-based compensation around the initial public offering plus infrastructure investment to move server and hosting expenses off Amazon. Just today, the company point to how much it had invested in its own cloud hosting services, saying that nearly 80 percent of its games are self-hosted.

Zynga is also looking to break away from Facebook this year with its own games network, titled Z-Live or Zynga Direct. Though no launch date is set for the service, Zynga confirmed during its earnings call yesterday that it was in closed beta — and we’ve heard rumors that the service may publish third-party games too.

Zynga also did not break out any new mobile statistics beyond daily active usage for its emerging iOS and Android business the way that comparable publicly traded companies like Electronic Arts do. It said only that it had 15 million daily active users on mobile, up five-fold from a year before. Zynga’s mobile gaming business is likely to be more dependent on advertising than virtual goods compared to many other mobile-social gaming companies because of the huge footprint that Words With Friends has.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Look for our review of Hidden Haunts later this week.

Slingo, a popular slots-and-bingo hybrid from the developer of the same name, is coming to Facebook today by way of Zynga in a licensed game called Zynga Slingo.

Slingo may be familiar to web game connoisseurs, given the game’s 15-year history on its own site and portals like Yahoo Games. Players spend balls on individual spins of a number-generating slot machine attached to a bingo card above. Once the numbers appear, the player must select as many of their tiles as correspond to the numbers, hoping to complete rows, columns or specific patterns to score points. Special joker cards and other powerups alter the dynamic of the game, allowing players to select corresponding numbers faster or gain better odds each spin. More advanced players have access to larger cards with more numbers.

Where Slingo becomes a Zynga experience is in the energy mechanic and the social features. The game is organized into five worlds with nine levels in each world. Players must spend different increments of energy to access different levels, with higher difficultly levels costing more. At launch, social features will be limited to friends-only leaderboards, gifting energy or powerups. Zynga tells us, however, that it is testing a multiplayer feature where players can challenge one another to beat their high score on individual levels. Primary monetization comes from the sale of powerups and energy refills.

As to why Zynga and Slingo partnered on this game when Zynga already developed its own games for the Zynga Casino franchise, both companies say the move made sense given Zynga’s experience in social games and Slingo’s experience in i-gaming — internet gambling. Though Zynga hasn’t entered the i-gaming word quite yet, it’s well-positioned to do so with Zynga Poker on Facebook and mobile and potentially with its other casino franchise games. Last month, the developer told AllThingsD it was looking for partners in i-gaming — this month, COO John Schappert told investors on its Q4 earnings call that Zynga saw i-gaming as a “very interesting opportunity.”

The licensing partnership with Slingo moves Zynga that much closer to seizing the opportunity. Slingo already has strong ties to real casinos via gaming machine supplier IGT — which acquired social game developer DoubleDown Interactive earlier this year — and it has a firm grasp on how i-gaming revenue compares to what social games are seeing.

“It’s 10-times plus, how much people will spend on some of the games out there,” Slingo CEO Rich Roberts tells Inside Social Games. “Remember you’re not buying items, you’re at a slot game online. There are numbers on one operator where certain operators are driving seven figures in profit on one game in one operator. When these numbers start coming out, once [i-gaming] becomes legal in the U.S., you’ll see more and more developers seeing this as the next opportunity.”

As to why Slingo went with Zynga, Roberts explains that it was the strongest possible partnership opportunity to make the classic game social. As a company, Slingo has developed along two paths for the past decade and a half: its online presence and its for wager presence in real life bingo games and slot machines at casinos. “For online, it’s our website, our past history with AOL and our future social game with Zynga,” Roberts says. “We look at i-gaming as a mix of both worlds of us — that’s our future, down the road. Today, it’s how we’re going to build our brand overall with our partners — including our new partner, Zynga.”

Update: A Zynga spokesperson says Zynga Slingo will not be a part of the Zynga Casino franchise. This contradicts what Rich Roberts told ISG.

Zynga posted its Q4 and full year 2011 results today, citing its oldest games as the biggest moneymakers.

Average bookings per user (ABPU) rose 11 percent to $0.061 up from $0.055 in Q4 2010.  Zynga COO John Schappert called out five of Zynga’s older Facebook game franchises on the company earnings call as key bookings drivers. Expansions launched in Cafe World, FarmVille, FrontierVille and CityVille all increased bookings — and Texas HoldEm Poker continues to deliver record bookings even after four years on the platform. Advertising growth and pair conversion rates on social and mobile platforms also drove ABPU growth.

Younger games typically don’t contribute as much to bookings because they have a higher percentage of non-paying players in the mix. Zynga did claim one notable exception with CastleVille, however, despite the game’s late launch in Q4. Based on Zynga’s expectation of slower sequential growth in the first half of 2012, it sounds like Zynga expects its newer games — like Empires & Allies and Hidden Chronicles — to show stronger bookings as they age.

Some of Zynga’s newer games failed to perform as well. Mafia Wars 2 bombed in Q4, dropping more than 70 percent in monthly active users and more than 80 percent in daily active users during Q4. Other Zynga titles also saw traffic declines as a result of age, but Zynga reports that growth in CastleVille, Empires & Allies and other recently launched games off-set the losses.

Dream Heights, Zynga’s newest mobile game, has made plenty of pre-launch headlines in the last month given its similarities to NimbleBit’s Tiny Tower. Inside Mobile Apps takes an exclusive hands-on tour of the version that arrives in the U.S. App Store tomorrow.

We’ve covered cloning at length on both Inside Mobile Apps and Inside Social Games. The purpose of this article isn’t to rehash the cloning debate. Rather, we present to you the differences between the two games — and leave the rest to your own judgement.

Both games are “tower” titles where the player is tasked with building individual floors of a skyscraper, designating some as commercial spaces and some as residential spaces. As virtual residents move into the tower, the player must staff the commercial spaces, trying to balance each resident’s natural skills to the skills needed to run specific storefronts. The storefronts go on to earn the player virtual currency, which is primarily spent on building more floors. That’s what’s the same about Dream Heights and Tiny Tower.

Here are the subtle and not-so-subtle differences:

Presentation: Dream Heights goes for a cartoonish, 3D look that’s intended to appeal to a mass market. The game puts players in the role of a customizable avatar that hangs out in the lower level of the tower. Players are encouraged to build more floors to their tower by a set of visual landmarks like the Big Ben that they try to “outgrow.” In contrast, Tiny Tower uses an 8-bit art style that appeals to retro video game fans and progress is encouraged mostly by running out of jobs to offer residents or not having enough residents to fully staff all stores.

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

There is a $100 million discrepancy between what Facebook earned in payments revenue and what it paid out to developers, according to revenue figures in its IPO filing last week.

In the filing it says, “In 2011, our Platform developers received more than $1.4 billion from transactions enabled by our Payments infrastructure.”

But based on the company’s $557 million in payments revenue last year and its 30 percent share of transactions on the platform, Facebook should have paid out $1.3 billion at most. There is at least a $100 million discrepancy here. A company spokesperson declined to comment.

There are a number of possibilities:

Facebook may have comped free Credits for some developers: When Facebook began rolling out its virtual currency Credits, it would give them away for free to entice users to sign-up. Developers would have to eat the extra costs if  players bearing these free Credits showed up to play their games. They complained — loudly. But it’s possible Facebook comped some of this free Credits usage for certain developers.

(Sidenote: This only happened to gaming companies that used Credits as their in-game currency. Some developers like EA and Zynga didn’t change their in-game currency but still used Facebook to manage their payments.)

There may have been initial problems with fraud in the early months of Credits, which the company may have also comped for developers: One other developer told us that there were early issues with fraud and completion in Facebook Credits purchases (as you would expect with a nascent payments platform). So perhaps Facebook covered developers for these problems too.

Certain developers may have gotten a more favorable revenue share: It would be surprising if Facebook discounted its revenue share for favored partners. Facebook has always been adamant about taking a flat 30 percent cut across the board for all developers. Even Facebook’s special multi-year agreement with Zynga explicitly mentions the 30 percent payments share (although there are parts right around that number that are redacted in the contract, which was attached to Facebook’s IPO filing).

From the filing. (Anything marked [*] is a redaction):

“The amount of the service fee described in the Facebook Credits Terms that we charge to you at any given time to redeem Facebook Credits shall be [*] 30% per each Facebook Credit redeemed [*].”

Facebook started doing promotions on Credits with 80 percent discounts last November: One likely explanation might be promotions on Credits that ran from November to January. They gave certain players 80 percent discounts on the virtual currency, but still paid developers as if the virtual currency was priced normally, according to our conversations with gaming companies in the ecosystem.

There are a couple of ways to think about this. On the one hand, when we see individual developers engage in aggressive virtual currency sales, it can be a red flag. It’s a sign that they are sacrificing long-term revenue for short-term gains. They might be trying to boost financial performance to look better in an acquisition or funding round.

But Facebook isn’t a company that culturally operates for the short-term like that. By discounting Credits, the company is potentially getting more users to hand over their credit card data — which will make it more frictionless for them to pay for things down the road with Credits.

Right now, Facebook likely has payments data on just a small fraction of its users. If you consider that 50 percent of Facebook’s 845 million monthly active users play games, and then 2 to 6 percent of them monetize by paying for virtual currency, then a back-of-the-envelope calculation would suggest that they have payments data on around 30 million users. By comparison, Apple has more than 250 million iTunes accounts. Facebook needs more credit card data on more users if it wants to power payments for more interesting areas down the road.

So if the sales were successful in getting more users to hand over their credit card details, that’s a good thing in the long run. But if they just encouraged users who already pay with Credits to gorge on the virtual currency, then it could mean softness in payments revenue going into the first or second quarter of this year.