Real-money gaming platform Betable today announced the newest partner in its private beta program: casual game developer Frima Studio’s new real-money game division 3OAK.

3OAK is a new development studio formed to create casual and social games built featuring real-money gameplay.  Like other developers who have partnered with Betable since the company came out of stealth last summer, 3OAK will be targeting international audiences with the games featuring Betable’s API.

Although real-money gaming has only been seen in social casino games so far, 3OAK isn’t working on these kinds of titles right now. 3OAK director Mikael Lefebvre tells us the studio is working to bring real-money mechanics to genres they haven’t really appeared in so far. As a result, the company has a slate of five game concepts it’s working on, based on the most popular social game types. While he can’t share too many details right now, Lefebvre says the company’s first title will be a humorous/light social RPG which is already in the early testing phase and is expected for an early Q2 launch.

Lefebvre says 3OAK tested out real-money gaming by creating a social game prototype with a cash out mechanic. The prototype showed the retention and engagement were significantly higher than the norm in social games, as well as converting users to paying players. He thinks implementing elements like this will is the way of the future because, “all this makes sense because in the current market the cost of acquiring users is getting higher and higher, so we need higher revenue per user and revenue per paying user.”

While 3OAK’s titles will feature real-money gaming in the territories where such mechanics are legal, Lefebvre tells us they’ll also be available as standard social games in other countries with soft and hard currencies.

Betable CEO Christopher Griffin tells us he’s excited about how 3OAK’s implementing his company’s API; according to Griffin, this is one of the first examples of Betable’s technology in social games outside of the casino genre. He tells us there are other developers working with Betable on non-social casino games, but none of them have been officially unveiled yet.

Griffin believes this is just the start of a larger movement in the social/mobile gaming industries to incorporate real-money elements. “I think this is more than a trend and will be more than a trend,” he says. “This has something that will be very core for how these games monetize and will be essential for them to have some element of real money in them if they want to be competitive.”

Although this is the first time we’ve heard of companies making casual games with real-money mechanics, we’ve known this was a possibility since Betable first came out of stealth. When we initially chatted with Griffin back in July, he provided a mock-up graphic showing how his company’s API would look in mobile titles like Words With Friends and Hero Academy.

Betable’s proven a popular partner in the social/mobile games sector ever since it publicly debuted. Griffin reveals the demand to work with the company has been so great that its team has doubled in size. Before this latest announcement, Betable’s announced partnerships with some major casual gaming companies like Big Fish Games, Digital Chocolate, SGN and Slingo.

3OAK’s first games will be launched for mobile platforms, but the plan is to make them cross-platform sooner rather than later. “Everything has to be cross-platform,” Lefebvre notes.

Former Crowdstar CEO and OpenFeint Co-Founder Peter Relan today announced OpenKit, a new open API service designed for mobile developers that guarantees no lock-in of developer data. The platform will also include cloud-based features like leaderboards and achievements.

As opposed to OpenFeint, OpenKit isn’t designed to be a user network. Instead, developers can implement user data with the platform’s source code in order to host their own service. OpenKit will also allow include authorization services for user networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Apple’s GameCenter. Should a developer decide to host the service as a convenience, there is also a freemium pricing model with basic services offered for free; Relan says this is modeled more like GitHub instead of OpenFeint.

In a statement, Relan said he created OpenKit to appeal to independent developers because of the “extreme uncertainty” they face in regards to what happens to their data and users when platforms are acquired (as is what happened with OpenFeint) and terms of service see dramatic changes (á la Twitter). As a result, Relan maintains there needs to be an open source cloud service for developers that lets them take both code and user data with them should they ever move off the cloud service.

Relan’s reveal of OpenKit is perfectly timed because many developers are now looking for a new alternative API, now that GREE is shutting down its OpenFeint network. However, he is adamant that OpenKit isn’t a statement about GREE’s decision to force developers away from OpenFeint and onto the GREE platform. Instead, he says OpenKit is meant to help developers “control their destiny.”

The launch day version will include the aforementioned features, as well as a cloud service account for developers, data export utility for developers to download and instructions about how one can host their own back-end services on any cloud provider.

OpenKit will be available soon — provided enough groups sign up for the program within the first week or so — as early as sometime in January. Developers interested in signing up can do so at the official site, starting today.

KingsRoad developer Rumble Entertainment activates on its multiplatform strategy with a second game, Nightmare Guardians, launching on tablets in early 2013.

The company has an aggressive growth strategy aimed at being both developer and publisher right from the point of launch. Rumble secured a $15 million first round of funding nearly a year ago before any of its games had been released. But, as CEO Greg Richardson tells Inside Social Games, Rumble was already hard at work on developing a suite of titles to straddle mobile, social and open web platforms. By covering all the rapidly growing bases, the company is better set up to act as a publisher of third-party titles on any or all of these platforms.

“We [wanted] to be a publisher from day one,” Richardson says. “We needed a platform that could reach multiple devices and [support] multiple genres. KingsRoad and Nightmare Guardians work on the same backend, which shows the strength of our [publishing] platform.” (more…)

Cloud gaming service Agawi announced today its new Windows 8 GameZen app that offers developers and publishers the ability to bring their social games, web-based games and more to Windows 8 computers and x86 tablets. GameZen will allow developers to bring their games to Microsoft’s new Surface devices “soon.”

“What GameZen allows publishers and developers to do is literally take their existing games such as Facebook social games, web-based MMOs, pretty much all categories of games, and instantly make them available in a market that comprises potentially of hundreds of millions of users,” Agawi CEO and co-founder Rajat Gupta told Inside Mobile Apps.

He added that “Practically any Facebook game for example, should be available on GameZen. Think about even larger titles like Empires and Allies to small titles that are more niche.”

There’s no cost for developers and publishers to get their games on Agawi. Also, developers and publishers don’t need to do anything at all in regards to adding touch controls to their games for GameZen on mobile, it’s all handled by Agawi’s automated real-time gesture virtualization, which ads multi-touch gestures to games where it wasn’t present.

Started in February 2010 as a YouWeb incubated company called iSwifter that streamed flash-based social games to the iPad, the company renamed itself to Agawi in August 2012 and pivoted its business to focus on mid-core and hardcore games.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced Tuesday at its Build conference that Windows 8 sold four million copies since launch and that there are currently 670 million PCs running Windows 7. Using Ballmer’s figures to make his point, Gupta says the potential for Windows 8 is huge and believes consumers will eventually convert over from Windows 7 to Windows 8. He adds that GameZen is an effective way for game developers and publishers to reach the large Windows audience.

“For a publisher to take their existing web-based game, and instantly without having to invest any incremental dollars into it, make it available on a new platform is huge value add.”

The Menlo Park, Calif,-based game streaming startup announced back in September its partnership with Microsoft to bring its game streaming service to Windows 8 devices, which will utilize Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud platform to stream games to Windows 8 devices including computers, tablets and eventually smartphones. Some of Agawi’s cloud gaming service competitors include OnLive and Sony’s Gaikai.

In an effort to attract more mid-core and massively multiplayer online (MMO) developers to bring their games to Windows 8, the company set up the Agawi Game Partner (AGP Gold) Program. Agawi rewarded developers who signed up early by featuring their games in GameZen. Gupta couldn’t mention any games, developers or publishers for GameZen at this time.

GameZen is available for free in the Windows 8 Store starting today. As of right now, the app doesn’t monetize, but Gupta says Agawi will work with their development and publishing partners to figure out the appropriate way to monetize.

Agawi has only received a “very small” seed round of funding from unnamed Silicon Valley angel investors and funding from YouWeb Incubator, according to Gupta. The rest of Agawi’s funding has come from its own revenue to finance itself up to this point.

Developer Toylogic’s Happy Wars, which quietly hit Xbox 360’s digital store Xbox Live Arcade Oct. 12, is the home console’s first free-to-play game.

Happy Wars is multiplayer action game with a cartoon style in which two teams battle across variety of combat arenas. As many as 30 players can play the same match and choose from three character types — Warrior, Mage and Cleric, each with unique set of abilities.

As is the norm with many of the free-to-play games we cover here at Inside Social Games, Happy Wars monetizes by selling vanity items (outfits, skins and gear) and a special in-game currency (Happy Tickets) that can only be obtained by spending Microsoft Points, which cost real money.

At the moment it seems as if there is no way to spend real money to directly purchase items that will give users an advantage in the game, but players can spend Happy Tickets to enter raffles in order to have a chance at winning items with improved stats.

Inside Social Games usually doesn’t cover home console titles because those are traditionally closed platforms, but we will cover free-to-play games that employ the same monetization methods that are the standard on Facebook and other social, open platforms. With free-to-play games like DC Universe already up and running on Sony’s PlayStation 3 and more free-to-play titles like Ascend: New Gods coming to 360 in the future, we think releases like Happy Wars is part of an upcoming trend that is worth keeping an eye on.

You can look forward to our review of Happy Wars later in the week.

Developer GameDuell believes developers looking to break into the mobile and social game market are more likely to find success if they make their games cross-platform releases. Armed with 12 months of data, GameDuell says cross-platform players not only monetize better than single-platform players, but they have a significantly higher retention rate.

Using its popular Fluffy Birds series as a case study, the developer reports the past 12 months have seen a 125 percent growth of monthly cross-platform players. Users can play variations of Fluffy Birds on Facebook, iOS and Android devices and on GameDuell’s official site. Social networks accounted for 44 percent of Fluffy Birds installs, 48 percent came from GameDuell.com and 8 percent came from mobile devices.

Aside from providing developers multiple audiences to tap into, GameDuell also says that making a title cross-platform can have serious financial benefits. By launching Fluffy Birds across social networks, mobile devices and the company’s own website, it was revealed that cross-platform players monetize 25 percent more and tend to stay with a game 35 percent longer than single-platform players.

When asked how user spending on iOS compares to that of Google Play, Kalkowski tells us monetization is in keeping with the platform averages, with iOS users spending four times as much on in-app purchases than on Android.  When asked why this is the case, he says, “I think [the higher spending] comes from the frictionless pay system. But Amazon is also good in terms of monetization. We’re seeing Android become better and better for most companies. We like the Amazon store and the tablets there; it fits very well with our audience. The platform has a broader reach, but iOS is more of a gaming platform while Android is used more for other types of apps.”

Kalkowski also says tablets are especially useful mobile devices to build games for. Aside from the GameDuell’s data revealing that roughly 70 percent of apps installed on tablets are games, he tells us adults are more likely to play games on tablets than children or teenagers.

Creating games solely for social networks is a much more risky venture than it used to be because of how crowded the market’s become. In the case of Facebook, Kalkowski says only large companies with larger user bases can really thrive. However, developers like Zynga can migrate their users from one platform to another because there’s such a large pool to draw from. Developers targeting Google+ are in for an even more more difficult challenge because, “Google+ isn’t a games platform and won’t ever become a games platform.”

Kalkowski admits, though, that if a developer wants to pursue a single platform for its games, success is still possible. “I know there are some companies that are only one platform and are profitable and doing well. But it’s become much more difficult.”

To view GameDuell’s infographic, which contains this and other data, click here.

Wooga is removing its games from the Google+ platform. Diamond Dash, Monster World and Bubble Island will no longer be available to G+ players as of July 1.

Social Games Observer first reported the closures, pinning them on a lack of G+ users to sustain the game. We had heard some developers claim the “numbers aren’t there” to support a social games ecosystem, but some were optimistic that Google’s more focused approach to curating social games would yield healthy retention if not large audiences. On Facebook, Diamond Dash ranks as wooga’s largest title at 17.7 million monthly active users and 3.6 million daily active users, according to our AppData traffic tracking services. Note that Diamond Dash alone is cross-compatible with an iOS version, which gave the game a bump in traffic after launching in December 2011.

Wooga served as one of the launch partners for G+’s games service along with Zynga, Playdom, PopCap Games and Kabam. The German developer stood out from these partners’ early offerings by focusing on two arcade titles and a farming role-playing game. According to what some developers have told us, Google+ doesn’t populate its game genres with too-similar titles. The platform also offers very few social features, currently limited to invites, a games-only activity feed viewed from the Games tab and more recently a site-wide chat feature that offers no games-specific activity (e.g. sending game items via chat message).

The developer did not respond to request for comment as of press time.

Facebook seems like the last platform on which a small, independent games developer would want to get started. Cost per acquisition is rising, competition is fierce and when someone does come up with a unique game concept, the clones aren’t far behind. It is where 5th Planet Games got started, however, and its story is proof that indies can make it on Facebook despite the odds. At three years old and with just 300,000 monthly active users, the developer is on track to make over $10 million in annual revenue this year.

Here’s what the odds on Facebook look like going into 2012. Zynga dominates the market, projecting up to $1.5 billion in annual bookings for 2012. As of its first quarter earnings report, Zynga makes 5 and a half cents average revenue per daily active user, with 65 million daily active users across social and mobile platforms. Farther down the developer leaderboard, the picture is less clear as private companies avoid disclosing revenue and ARPDAU. Mid-market developer Kixeye, however, recently told TechCrunch it’s expecting $100 million in 2012 revenue at something like 80 cents ARPDAU. Cost per acquisition is lower for Zynga than for Kixeye by virtue of its massive cross-promotion network; but we’ve heard the average CPA on Facebook is around one dollar.

This picture was very different when 5th Planet launched its first game, Dawn of the Dragons, on Facebook in 2009. For one thing, Facebook Credits were not mandated for game developers back then. The social network had also clamped down on virality, cutting off social games from posting stories in News Feed. To get its hardcore collectible card game off the ground with no funding to its name and no actual marketing budget, the 5th Planet had to get creative.

“The only choice we had was guerilla marketing,” CEO Rob Winkler tells us. “We set up our official forums and started talking to people, then we started talking to them on their walls, then in Facebook groups they had for other games and so on.  What began touching as many message boards as possible, which grew into over 1,000 posts and messages across hundreds of forums and walls to drive that initial traffic surge.”

Dawn of the Dragons peaked on Facebook at over 300,000 MAU and 54,000 DAU in August of 2010, as tracked by our AppData traffic monitoring service. Those are not big numbers compared to other games of the day, but they were enough to keep retention north of 15 percent (which indicates a reasonably healthy social game). A second game, Legacy of a Thousand Suns, launched later that year and managed to climb to over 500,000 MAU and 60,000 DAU at peak traffic — but retention slipped below 10 percent. Its third game, Clash of the Dragons, launched on Facebook in July of 2011 and didn’t even break 100,000 MAU. The platform had changed so much that 5th Planet was forced to change the way it did business.

“Facebook Credits and rising CPAs certainly changed the way we viewed the platform,” Chief Business Officer Braden Moulton says. “Our CPA [in 2011 was] in the $.50 range, so we were better than most. Today that same user would be well over $1.”

This led the developer to look at expanding to new platforms and games networks. For its first expansion, 5th Planet settled on Kongregate, a games portal purchased by brick-and-mortar video game retailer GameStop in 2010.

“The integration was very easy,” Moulton explains. “One of the main differences (and attractions) for working with Kongregate is that they handle promotion themselves. So while they take their cut of revenue, we aren’t burdened with driving users to our games. When we launched Clash of the Dragons there in December 2011, Kongregate poured a ton of traffic into our game — 300,000 installs in just 30 days. We had never seen numbers like that.”

At the 2012 Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, Kongregate broke some of those metrics out for the audience — highlight an average spend per paying user of $120 per month and 90 percent of revenue from players spending over $100. Moulton updated us to say that spend per paying user is now closer to $160. Even so, average revenue per monthly active user is still higher on Facebook than Kongregate for Dawn of the Dragons — a little over $3 compared to $2. Across Facebook, Kongregate and its destination site, 5th Planet sees around 70,000 daily active users and calculates ARPDAU at about 40 cents.

5th Planet Games is planning to debut its fourth game exclusively on Kongregate in June before expanding it to Facebook and European platforms. It also plans to release mobile versions of its game sometime this year. Beyond games, 5th Planet recently acquired collectible card game developer To Be Continued and will likely look for other indie studios to acquire as it expands. The developer is still proudly boostrapped, but Moulton says 5th Planet would explore funding if the right opportunity to accelerate growth came along.

As for other small studios looking to get onto Facebook, Moulton advises, “Make something completely unique or make a good slots game. Facebook can still be profitable, but it’s going to be tough.”

Developers GREE, DeNA, Mixi, CyberAgent, Dwango and NHN Japan have announced they are removing a controversial monetization mechanic called “kompu gacha” from all their mobile-social games by the end of the month.

Kompu gacha (“complete gacha”) is akin to a virtual toy machine where players pay real world money to receive an in-game item at random. Players have the opportunity to win grand prizes, but only if they can acquire complete sets of specific items. Although an extremely lucrative income stream for Japanese developers, kompu gacha has drawn harsh critisism both for how close it is to real-world gambling and for the easy access children have to it. Over the weekend the mechanic was found to be in violation of Japanese law and a ban is widely anticipated.

Although the news will mainly affects Japanese developers, several western companies also make use of the mechanic in their Japanese mobile-social games. Zynga, for example includes kompu gacha in its Android role-playing game Montopia. For a more detailed explanation of kompu gacha and how its elimination will affect developers outside of Japan, read our feature investigation at our sister site Inside Mobile Apps.

Zynga’s newest social game, Bubble Safari, targets the casual arcade genre recently cornered on Facebook by King.com with its hit game Bubble Witch Saga. The casual arcade shooter launches on Facebook and Zynga.com simultaneously tomorrow.

The bubble shooter genre predates Facebook by more than 25 years. The goal of these games is to match like-colored bubbles by firing a single bullet upward into a cluster of connected bubbles. A level is cleared when all rows, or a certain number of bubbles have been cleared. Like match-3 puzzle games such as Bejeweled, scoring bonuses are usually applied based on speed, matching bubbles in quick succession or by hitting special bonus items placed within the puzzle. These games have found a high degree of success on Facebook because users can learn and play the games quickly, and because they’re easy for developers to program and monetize. Like other Facebook-based arcade games, bubble shooters monetize through the sale of power-up items that increase scoring bonuses or through an energy mechanic that limits the number of sessions a user can play in a day.

King.com shot to the top three Facebook game developers by daily and monthly active users in the last six months on the strength of its bubble shooter, Bubble Witch Saga, which launched last September. That game was predated by King.com’s Bubble Saga, GameDuell’s Bubble Speed, wooga’s Bubble Island and several other variations on bubble shooters. Zynga hopes to make a splash with its bubble shooter by building on features that each of these games has introduced, adding a few of their own and introducing a new Flash engine that can run the game at 60 frames per second and produce high-gloss visual effects.

In Bubble Safari, players take the role of Bubbles, a wild monkey whose animal companions are kidnapped by poachers. Through a series of levels, Bubbles tracks the poachers and frees different animals from crates. The levels themselves are typical bubble shooters, with Bubbles himself manning the cannon at the bottom of a screen. As Bubbles matches color types in the puzzle, bubbles are cleared from the puzzle — but if bubbles are dislodged from the puzzle by clearing rows or clusters of connecting bubbles, these strays turn into fruit that fall toward the bottom of the screen and may land in one of three baskets just below Bubbles’ cannon stand, increasing the player’s score. The puzzle is completed when 10 of the bubbles in the the top-most row of the puzzle have been cleared, which converts all remaining bubbles to falling fruit. Each level requires a minimum score to progress to the next level.

As the player enters new regions on the world map, the challenges in the bubble shooter puzzles become increasingly difficult, with hazards blocking the user from making straight shots into the puzzle. For example, shooting beehives attached to bubbles will send a swarm of bees into Bubbles, causing him to random-fire the bubble cannon several times before the bees disperse. To overcome these challenges, players earn “Boost Bubble” items that that allow the user to complete the puzzle more easily — like a fire bubble that burns up any bubbles or hazards in its path. Players also earn animal helpers as they free animals from the poachers, such as humming birds, that bounce dropped fruit from the puzzle into one of the three baskets. The animal helpers level up as the player makes more matches and leave when the player fails to complete matches.

The use of Boost Bubbles and other scoring bonuses is where Bubble Safari becomes complex. Within a level, a player can only use a Boost Bubble once they’ve filled a boost meter by making successful color matches in succession. Filling the meter allows players to spin a prize wheel and whatever Boost Bubble it lands on is the one the player gets. Players can also increase their score by successfully dropping fruit into baskets. Three successful drops causes the level to catch fire, which indicates a score multiplier. Lastly, players have access to two extra normal bubbles in the form of friends that appear on a sidebar in the level, each representing a different color. By clicking a friend’s bubble, the player swaps whatever bubble they currently have in the cannon for the friends’ bubble — say, purple for red. On the other end of that exchange, the player will appear in their friend’s game representing whatever bubble they traded with (in this example, purple). A relationship meter increases the more friends use each other’s extra bubbles. When the meter is filled completely, the friend’s extra bubble can be converted to a Boost Bubble for one level. A powerup item allows players to bring in two extra friends so that all four possible bubble colors are available.

Aside from the bubble-swapping social feature, Zynga also plans to introduce an asynchronous two player competitive mode and weekly tournaments at some point after launch. Bubble Safari monetizes through the sale of powerups, energy refills and could potentially monetize tourney entry fees, though that remains to be seen. Interestingly, Zynga offers roughly half its power-ups for soft currency that can be earned through normal gameplay, while the rest can only be bought with premium currency purchased via Facebook Credits.

The similarities between Bubble Safari and other Facebook bubble shooters are obvious, while the differences are more subtle. For those not familiar with reigning bubble shooter Bubble Witch Saga, here are some key differences between it and Bubble Safari:

• Social features: Bubble Witch Saga enables friends to send currency, lives or “spell breaks” that allow players to progress to new areas on the map. This the extent of the social interaction between friends.
• Visual effects: Bubble Witch Saga is light on flashy visuals, like things catching fire.
• Adaptive gameplay: If a player repeatedly fails a level in Bubble Witch Saga, the puzzle will adjust to become easier. It does not appear that Bubble Safari’s puzzles will do the same — but this is something Zynga could introduce post-launch if players ask for it.*
• Monetization: Powerups (called “charms”) and life refill items in Bubble Witch Saga can only be bought with Facebook Credits. Special bubble types can be bought with soft currency. Zynga makes some powerups available for soft currency and allows players to earn Boost Bubble items through gameplay without spending soft currency.

It will be interesting to see if Bubble Safari picks up high-level Bubble Witch Saga players who have run out of things to do in King.com’s game. We’re also curious to see if Zynga’s simultaneous release on Zynga.com and Facebook reveals any value add to playing Bubble Safari on one platform instead of another.

Bubble Safari was developed by Zynga’s San Diego studio with some help on the Flash engine from a team in San Francisco. Senior Creative Director Mark Turmell — famous for his work on arcade games and franchises going all the way back to the Apple II and the Atari 2600 — oversaw the project, his first for Zynga and Zynga’s first arcade game.

“The industry has come full circle,” Turmell tells Inside Social Games. “The bubble genre’s been around for years — there’s something magical about match-3. The magic of that is maintained [in Bubble Safari], but with fire, the strategy, the map and presentation… this game innovates. And nobody’s going to out-Zynga Zynga at the cadence of new content. Coming [here] was like coming home.”

*ETA: As of launch, the puzzles in Bubble Safari will change if a user fails a level.