Of all the sports games on Facebook, soccer-themed games reign supreme, accounting for more than half of the 40 most popular sports games on the platform.

The leader of the pack is Nordeus — a bootstrapped Serbian developer founded by three former Microsoft employees. Its game, Top Eleven – Be a Football Manager is a detailed football management sim, and despite its complexity, has 3.6 million monthly active users and 1.2 million daily active users, far above its closest competitor, the officially licensed title EA’s FIFA Superstars, which currently has 1.9 million MAU and 300,000 DAU according to AppData.

However, what may be most interesting about Top Eleven is the game’s slow burn. Unlike the average Facebook game, which typically sees most of its growth in the first six months, Top Eleven is still adding players 21 months in and is the most popular its ever been. Since the game’s launch in May 2010, Nordeus has taken Top Eleven cross-platform to iOS and to Android and introduced a raft of new features and updates, but has so far been silent about upcoming projects.

Inside Social Games had a chance to interview Nordeus’ co-founder and CEO Branko Milutinović and ask him about the success of Top Eleven, and what’s next for Nordeus.

Inside Social Games: Top Eleven is the most popular sports game on Facebook right now. Why do you think the game has been so successful despite the fact that its competing against officially licensed games like FIFA Superstars?

Branko Milutinović, Nordeus co-founder and CEO (pictured right): As well as double the MAUs, Top Eleven also has over four times more DAUs. That’s really important for us because it means our users are engaged and coming back to play regularly!

But to answer your question, we took the risk of developing a technically very advanced platform that enables rich gameplay, synchronous multiplayer experience and truly cross platform gaming (i.e. it’s exactly the same game on Facebook, Top Eleven.com, iPhone and Android). This gave us the opportunity to offer our users a game they find challenging and exciting to play with their friends.

Another thing we’ve focused on and think is crucial is the level of realism. We’ve tried to be as close to the real world of football management as possible, including a complex match simulation engine based on English Premier League stats. Actually, the only thing missing to bring us to the absolute realism is licensed brands, everything else we’ve covered.

ISG: When you released Top Eleven in 2010, Facebook was a very different platform. Since then user acquisition costs have risen quite dramatically — what are the challenges you’re facing now and how has Facebook changed as a platform?

Milutinović: The platform has changed a lot in the previous two years. We know the Facebook team is working hard to improve the platform for everyone, both users and app developers and most of the changes we find really positive.

From a developer point of view it is true that user acquisition has changed dramatically with viral growth channels narrowed, but I can understand that Facebook had to do that to preserve user experience on the platform. User acquisition is becoming a big obstacle for newcomers and companies that cannot rely on cross promotion from their other games, which is why we think publishing other studio’s games is going to become more common. At Nordeus we look at the changes as challenges we need to overcome. It’s evolution. We improve ourselves every day and try to adapt to the new conditions.

ISG: In September you revealed your relationship with Facebook was “very close” – can you reveal more about how Nordeus and Facebook work together?

Milutinović: Some time ago Facebook launched an initiative to strengthen the collaboration between platform and the developers. We were recognized as one of the brightest examples of how to leverage the platform, build a great product as well as a successful company around it. Since then we’ve been working with Facebook to implement new updates the platform, building the best possible experience for our users. That probably helped Top Eleven to be voted as The Best Sports Game of 2011 by Facebook based on user satisfaction.

The Facebook team is also doing great job in fixing bugs we report and we’re proud that we’ve helped the platform to become better, especially when it comes to Android and iOS support.

ISG: Are you interested in taking on partners for any reason such as publishing, acquisitions, etc?

Milutinović: We’re always open to new opportunities, but on the other hand have full belief in our own capabilities. When it comes to publishing I can say that we are considering the idea of publishing others’ games, but given that developing games is in our DNA we will probably focus all our effort on getting our titles that are under development right now to the market as soon as possible.

ISG: You’ve said before you want to be “the Zynga of Europe” and that you wanted to consolidate the talent in Southeast Europe. What is Nordeus’ long term strategy around this?

Milutinović: When it comes to hiring our long term strategy is actually to continue doing what we’ve been doing in the previous two years, especially in the last few months. We want to combine best young talent of the region with the most experienced experts from the industry. Examples of that effort include our new Head of Business Development who joined us after over 5 years of running sales and user acquisition for Eve Online, as well as a college hire from Caltech, both relocated to Belgrade. (If you’ve ever been to Belgrade you’d understand why ;)).

We’ve also organized initiatives to attract the best talent, like the game development hackathon we held two months ago. Over 200 of the brightest computer engineering students and graphical designers from the region applied. We’ve already hired ten of the students that took part, with more interviews ongoing. We strongly believe our people and company culture are our strongest assets and we will continue to nurture that.

ISG: What’s next for Nordeus? You’ve released iOS and Android versions of Top Eleven. Are you developing a new game or games? Will they be sports strategy games? Will they be on Facebook?

Milutinović: Unfortunately I can’t share as many details about specifics as I’d like to, but we are working full speed ahead on the next generation of games, which will introduce a lot of new concepts. They will continue to carry on our philosophy of unified gaming experience throughout devices, so they will definitely be available on Facebook, Android, iOS, and other platforms as well.

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.

Google continues to take a slow and steady approach to gaming on Google+, announcing today the social network’s newest game is Digital Chocolate’s Western themed Gangs of Boomtown. The game will be exclusive to Google+ and Digital Chocolate’s gaming portal for the next 30 days.

The game is Digital Chocolate’s third for Google+, following the developer’s previous titles Zombie Lane and Millionaire City, but Gangs of Boomtown is the company’s first exclusive Google+ launch.

“Many of the metrics in our games on Google+ have been positive and so it’s our desire to test different gameplay and genres,” explains Mark Dooley, Digital Chocolate’s vice president of marketing. “In general, we want to learn from the diverse set of people on Google, but also the avid game players on Google+, and this information will be valuable to us as we not only refine this game, but also develop others for the platform.”

Dooley also tells us that so far Digital Chocolate has been pleased with Google+ as a platform. “There have been game metrics in some of our Google+ games that have exceeded those of other platforms, but by the same token, different platforms have other strengths as well so it can be a tradeoff,” he says. “Primarily this is a great opportunity to get Gangs of Boomtown in front of a desirable pool of users and the hope is they’ll enjoy both the player-versus-environment and player-versus-player aspects, as well as the strategic challenges of the game.”

Based on our initial playthrough of the game, Gangs of Boomtown’s blend of quests, multiplayer quickdraw contests and citybuilding mechanics are likely to appeal to the same “core” demographic of players that would have enjoyed Google+’s previous exclusive titles like Kabam’s The Godfather: Five Families and Plarium’s Pirates: Tides of Fortune.

While Google+’s platform team does select which games will launch on the social network, and recent figures indicate the social network’s userbase could be as much as two thirds male, a Google spokesperson tells us that the goal is to appeal to a variety of gamers, and the network’s recent run of “core focused” games is incidental.

With Gangs of Boomtown there are now 39 games available on the network. The platform had 30 games available in early December.

According to Google+’s engineering director David Glazer, the company is still working on how games are integrated into the growing social network, “finding the balance so that people who are interested in being more engaged in games [can make] conversations work without creating spam.” Although games are still confined to a separate tab on Google+, Glazer did not rule out greater integration in the future. In January, Google announced its social network had passed 90 million registered users.

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.

Electronic Arts is bringing the Sims Social to China on Tencent’s QZone network. The Chinese version of the game, which will be called Mo Ni Shi Guang, is being localized by Playfish’s Beijing studio and is currently in closed beta. EA did not reveal when the game would be going live, but did say the open beta will begin in the next few months.

The Sims Social is EA’s largest social game on Facebook, with 20.9 million monthly active users and 3.7 million daily active users, but the game has been shedding users after hitting its peak of 66.5 million MAU in October. Since Jan. 1 alone, the title has lost 4.9 million MAU according to our traffic tracking service AppData.

Turning a hit western game into a hit game in China can be extremely challenging, even with a well known IP like The Sims — something EA has already experienced first hand. Despite being localized by a Chinese studio and being rebuilt from the ground up, EA Popcap’s  version of Plants vs. Zombies on Renren has so far failed to find traction in the country.

Zynga launched a Chinese version of CityVille called Zynga City on Tencent last July, but Zynga has not revealed any information on how the title is doing so far. QZone is the largest part of the Tencent platform — the virtual identity avatar network had 530 million MAU as of September 2011.

We’re at the San Francisco Design center, blogging Inside Network’s third annual Inside Social Apps conference.

We’re at the San Francisco Design center, blogging Inside Network’s third annual Inside Social Apps conference.

The event kicks off with “Facebook, Apple, Google: Which Platform(s) Hold the Most Opportunity in 2012?” Joining moderator Eric Eldon on stage are wooga founder and CEO Jens Begemann, Kabam founder and CEO Kevin Chou, Funzio and Storm 8 co-founder Anil Dharni and Disney Interactive Senior VP of Social Games John Spinale.

What follows is a paraphrased transcript of the panel.

Eric: Let’s talk about what’s going on with Facebook. Jens, let’s start with you — you’re still focused on Facebook.

Jens: We’re very happy with Facebook. If I look at our four largest games, we had our all time highs last week and some of these games are two years old. We have three times as many users as we had a year ago. If you really focus on the platform and you really focus on having a great user experience. For us, it’s really most organic. Advertising is roughly 5% of new users for us. 40% is viral and 55% is through cross promotion.

Kevin: I think Jens’ experience is a unique. I think looking at the platform for the past few months, advertising costs have gone up 18% and virality is kind of a black box to developers in general. We’re still very excited about Facebook and we continue to work with them, but they’re just starting to learn — they’re really two quarters in with learning how Facebook Credits factors into the developer’s experience. When we implemented Credits, we though conversion would go up 15 to 20%, but I think FB Credits has helped maybe 5%.

John: It is pretty similar for us. At the end of the day, having a unified currency that’s easy for people to understand — I think they made a good choice, but it was a drag on the system. For us it’s less about DAUs and MAUs, it’s more about monetization. While we have a different experience than Jens here where we have to incent our user base to grow, we’ve gotten very good at figuring out how to get people to pay and how to use existing channels.

Anil: There is no clear roadmap on how Facebook is thinking about the viral channels. It’s not clear what channels will exist tomorrow and how they will change today. That’s a growing challenge for us and I’m actually hoping there’s more solidificaiton that they talk about here at ISA. As far as FB Credits, I think it’s a wash out. We saw increased conversion rates, but a gradual decrease in average revenue per paying users. It’s hard to know why, but for games with whales, we see that people just like credit cards and PayPal better than these 99 cent purchases. The percentage of users that are paying are increasing, but total volume has decline.

Jens: We’ve been with Credits since day one, so we can’t really compare. We don’t see negative trends because we can’t compare the pre-Credits revenue to post. I think we should appreciate that the Facebook platform is completely free and only if you make revenue will you do a 30% revenue share and I’ve not heard anybody complain about Apple for their revenue share. It’s apples to apples with Facebook. You get distribution and other things — and only if you’re successful do you give to FB.

Kevin: We’re really excited about mobile. On the web, we have converted more users to paying. On mobile, we’re getting well above the conversion that we see on Facebook. More people have historic credit cards on file, so there’s less friction. But Apple provides less than Facebook.

Eric: Walk us through the transition to mobile. Anil, do you have any regrets?

Anil: The Funzio team has a unique background, we’ve done Facebook and mobile gaming before Funzio. I think our experience depends on what existed at that time. When we were doing Storm 8 our team came mostly from Zynga and we had to look at our DAUs and they were mostly a joke. We had a large portfolio of games to manage. When we launched Funzio, Facebook was the obvious choice. Looking back Facebook was an obvious platform for scale and we can take a game to mobile and google plus. Overall it’s been a good experience. The Funzio team has a unique background, we’ve done Facebook and mobile gaming before Funzio. I think our experience depends on what existed at that time. When we were doing Storm 8, our team came mostly from Zynga and we had to look at our DAUs and they were mostly a joke. We had a large portfolio of games to manage. When we launched Funzio, Facebook was the obvious choice. Looking back Facebook was an obvious platform for scale and we can take a game to mobile and google plus. Overall it’s been a good experience.

Jens: For 2012, we’re very focused on FB, but we’re very interested in mobile. We’ve kicked off as many projects for mobile as we have for social. We’ve brought our IP to iOS like Diamond Dash and we see that this works very well. We see many new users on mobile. We see more new users that have never seen the game before. It really helped when we launched that we had the core fan base download everything because that brought us to the charts and then we attracted many many new users.

Eric: John, you have a bunch of mobile games through Disney and some Playdom games you’re moving to mobile. How do you prioritize?

John: On the social game side of things, we’ve seen social game networks go mobile. We move where the puck is, we’re making sure our existing social games extend to mobile — like on iOS, but we’re also seeing revenue growth on Android meaningful enough that it’s worth doing. It’s more unwieldy and has more overhead, but it’s worth it. It’s not an either or game for us. We take some strategic bets and we love that the vast majority of revenue is still iOS and Facebook but nobody wants a one horse race.

Eric: You’ve been at OnLive so you’ve seen platforms shifting. What do you think is shifting?

John: Back in the PC days when there were a variety of operating systems and a huge variety of consoles fighting it out, this is pretty natural. We started off making games for MySpace and it wasn’t obvious that Facebook would be THE social network and I don’t think they realized they’d be a games platform. Games drive usage and purchases and engagement. Apple came reluctantly to the games space and Facebook came accidentally. A lot of the user engagement and adoption of the platform is driven by gaming and now they’re beginning to stabilize their business around gaming. Now we’re seeing people come in from the outside to make gaming ecosystems. I think mobile is going to take the lead over a several year time frame. I don’t know how long that will take.

Eric: How is HTML5 going for you guys? Any meaningful results from some of the apps you’ve launched? Are we years out?

John: It’s going to be a while. There are a lot of people making incredible prototypes to show it’s real and it’s going to be great. But I don’t think there’s enough feature completeness or momentum where people are going to turn a business on it.

Kevin: We have two mobile games in beta. One is in Unity, the other is in HTML5. Some of our games have less animation, so it’s a lot easier in HTML5. Obviously you can’t access the accelerometer and other things that make mobile great. I’d say it’s probably 2013 or 2014.

Jens: We launched our first mobile game in October. We’re satisfied overall, but many details were not optimal. It was hard to start a game online and finish offline. All of these small things combined to make HTML5 less attractive. It will take some time. It depends on the game — but in the long term, we’re very bullish. Until the user experience is identical — I would say three years from now.

Kevin: It’s not necessarily that there should be parity. We operate on over half a dozen platforms and it’s a single game universe where all our players play against each other. We’re excited about Google+ and several other platforms and we have to think about operational efficiency.

Anil: One of the big trends we’re seeing from a player’s perspective is that they’re demanding better quality games. HTML5 would be a regression for us. We’re interested in new technology, but we’d rather go 3D than HTML5.

Eric: Let’s talk about iOS a bit more — what are the main ways to solve the viral channels issue?

Jens: We see a decent number of users coming from the Facebook to iOS games if they’re connected. IT’s a healthy amount of users. We see much higher engagement from those using Facebook Connect. I think it’s a little bit underrated. I think making mobile games social will increase engagement a lot.

John: For our mobile games that we’ve added social components to like Where’s My Water, which has been a huge success, the level of engagement by adding Facebook has been pretty low, but adding game centric features like leaderboards has been better. I think there are better pure gaming platforms available on iOS now. I think OpenFeint, Gree, ngmoco, there’s a lot of cool stuff going on and I think Game Center could do more. On the flip side of things we’re bring our social games into the mobile platforms. We’re definitely viewing it through two lenses right now but it’s getting better over time.

Eric: What about iPad? We’ve heard that that’s a very big part of how people are playing your games?

Anil: We’re less on the casual side right now, we’re more on the midcore hardcore side. And we’re seeing massive uptake on the iPad. Apple has a massive edge over Android because of the iPad. We’re hoping Google figures out tablet soon because that’ll be a market for us. The ARPU is even higher than what you see on iOS users.

Eric: What are the monetization differences you’re seeing on iOS and Android?

John: It’s a smaller amount of users that get through the funnel. We’re finding that users are more engaged for equivalent games — like Gardens of Time. It’s a meaningful percentage that’s more engaged. That’s were we see the large growth in the market is mobile. To some degree, we take a platform agnostic view as Disney. We’ve been through 20 platform transitions from black and white to radio and so on — that’s how the company at large views platform transitions. For us it’s about story and character connections and crafting them to be appropriate for the right platforms. We need to think about it in the short term and in the long term. When you have a success like Swampy the Alligator, you need to think about how to branch that out.

Eric: Are you shifting more resources to Android this year?

Anil: We’re definitely focused on building out the team.

Eric: But it’s the third place to go after Facebook and Apple?

Jens: We have no team on Android. Going from Facebook to mobile is a big challenge and we want to get it right. Android is an issue because we’re a small company and we don’t have a QA team. The team is responsible for delivering high quality. On iOS that’s possible because there’s a limited number of devices that the team can test. Android needs a large QA team that goes through all the specifics for the devices — and that’s an issue. In time it will happen.

Eric: Does the Google+ platform matter at all to you guys?

Kevin: We’re very happy with Google+. We’re seeing retention similar to what we see on other networks. Monetization is a little worse. Google+ takes a different approach to acquiring users. Putting content on the exclusively gets better featured placement. It’s not an open platform, it’s more of a curated approach. But we’re probably one of the more successful developers on the platform and we’re opening up our catalog of games to the platform. On the unit economic side, we look at how much it costs to get a user and we look at how much planned monetization we get per user and those are similar. On Google, the issue is scale. And the payments cost – which is obviously very favorable. It’s been growing, so it’s hard to ignore. Google+ has been in the news for a lot of things, but the most important news is that it’s growing.

John: Did you get money from Google? [Laughs]

Kevin: Yeah.

John: I see the potential, that they’re very serious about what they’re doing and they have an opportunity to approach it differently. To be able to weave games and building a community on that platform is very different and it’s not head to head any longer. What’s interesting is how we can approach people from a different angle. We have a few games on there with smaller user numbers, but they monetize well.

Eric: Any other platforms we should talk about?

John: We just published Spry Fox’s Triple Town — which came form Kindle. There’s not much there yet, but it’s a great game to come from that platform.

Eric: How about the international networks? Aren’t they declining?

Kevin: I don’t track the platforms, I look at the growth in the games. The large majority of our new users are not on Facebook. It’s Google+ and 600 other social networks — we just launched on Yahoo and we’re launching on games portals. There’s a lot of opportunity around the web.

John: We’ve launched on loads of social networks over the course of Playdom’s life cycle and we’ve narrowed it back down to Facebook and Google+ and a couple in Russia like Mail.ru that are still pretty vibrant. But the number keeps shrinking. It gets down to true development efficiency.

Eric: Windows Phone? You guys ready?

Jens: I’m from Europe, so I’m bullish on what Nokia can do with Windows Phone. Here in the U.S. it’s not a big brand but in Europe and Asia it’s still huge. I think it will be a third platform that will be relevant. We’re focused today on Facebook and iOS and we’re trying to create the best games possible.

Now into the Question & Answer segment…

Q: With regards to monetization, we’ve heard that 95 percent of users don’t monetize, but advertisers are coming in and getting interested in the space. What’s the difference between pissing off users with advertising and monetizing those users who haven’t monetized yet?

John: I think users recognize that programming needs to be paid for in some way. Having contextual, relevant advertising typically isn’t a problem. We haven’t embraced advertising in its fullest form. We see it as a pretty big revenue stream overall and we’re leaning into it. We’re not at the bleeding edge.

Jens: We don’t have advertising in our games because we’re focused on selling and monetizing though virtual goods. The large majority of people who never pay, so there should be a meaningful revenue stream. Everything we’re hearing though says its not yet there. One of the big issues is standardization. I don’t know what this issue is, but if we could could get a standardized format I think it could become big.

Kevin: When we do the math for ourselves we see we can make $10,000 – $20,000 a day through advertising with a lot of work, but we can make the same by monetizing with our users better.

Anil: I don’t think the ad products are there yet. They can actually hurt the user experience. If you have products that are more innovative and don’t impede a user experience we’ll look at them.

Q: From a global user acquisition point of view, which platform has been the most valuable – HTML5, Android etc?

Jens: For us, the focus is on Facebook and iOS. Facebook is blocked in China, and the parts of Asia where Facebook is big monetization is very low, so our focus is mainly on Europe and North America.

Kevin: On mobile you’re going to get global coverage, but on the web it’s different. Facebook has low penetration in Japan and it’s blocked in China, but for a casual audience, you pretty much want to be on Facebook. If you’re looking to go after a niche market, you can get into smaller markets and networks.  In China you want to be on Tencent and Sina. Japan is very interesting with GREE and DeNA, in South Korea you’ve got Nexon and a number of others.

Q: How do users discover new games on Facebook?

Jens: On Facebook it’s really through requests and news feeds. Our users come because their friends are playing.

John: Paid advertising on Facebook is a well-oiled machine on Facebook. You can also pull in from outside channels — we’re seeing a massive influx of people from outside the Facebook platform through more traditional channels like PR and marketing that I think we do well as a company.

Q: Eric Eldon: What can Facebook do to become a successful mobile platform?

Jens: Facebook is already huge on mobile. They’re doing the right things to make the platform right to develop for on mobile. We want to make mobile games that are really social and I think Facebook is doing the right things with Facebook connect to make it more social and use the social graph.

Anil: We’ve found that gamers don’t care about their friends, they want to find other gamers. They need to have a game graph and I think that would be a lot more relevant on mobile. It would be the secret sauce.

Kevin: I think what Facebook needs to do is figure out how to get around the 30 percent tax that mobile platforms charge them. I think that’s why they’re betting heavily on HTML5 so they can bypass the app stores and go from a mobile browser to a game. I think it would be very difficult for any developer to pay two 30 percent taxes. They need to go HTML5 and push the entire ecosystem to HTML5 to make it successful.

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.

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

What It Looks Like

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

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

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

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

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

How It Works

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

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

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

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

Why We’re Doing It

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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