Playspan: virtual goods consumption up 28 percent since 2009 — According to a study conducted by digital monetization company Playspan, U.S. consumers bought $2.3 billion dollars worth of virtual goods in 2011, spending an average of $64 dollars per person. Playspan included purchases within a game or app, purchases from a console like the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, prepaid cards and purchases from online stores and publisher’s websites in its study.

Adobe unveils AIR 3.2 — Adobe has announced the latest updates to Adobe AIR. Version 3.2 of the tool includes both 2D and 3D hardware acceleration, which will allow games to run at 60 frames per second.

87 percent of US gamers play on Facebook or casual gaming websites — According to the latest study from Newzoo, 87 percent of the 145 million gamers between the ages of 10 and 65 in the U.S. either play games on Facebook or through casual portals like King.com. Newzoo also found that 87 percent of Facebook gamers also play games on casual games websites.

Kabam games now available on Download.com — Four of Kabam’s social games, The Godfather: Five Families, Edgeworld, Thirst of Night and Dragons of Atlantis are now available as full-screen, downloadable apps at Download.com. The desktop apps are made by SweetLabs, and were previously available on the company’s Pokki platform.

FarmVille and CityVille go tropical — Zynga has announced the newest expansion for FarmVille will be FarmVille Hawaiian Paradise. The update, which includes a tropical landscape, buried treasure, aquaculture and a new special coconut currency, goes live on Monday. The newest CityVille expansion, CityVille Islands, launched on Feb. 29.

Fiveonenine Games signs with GamesAnalytics — Durham-based social and mobile startup Fiveonenine Games is the latest company to sign a deal with GamesAnalytics. Fiveonenine will incorporate the company’s analysis tools in its upcoming games.

Dungeon Overlord expanding, going mobile — Night Owl Games has added the first expansion to its Facebook game Dungeon Overlord, titled The Succubus Stories. The developer will also be unveiling a companion mobile app for iPhone and Android at PAX East in April.

[Release] Rounds releases Facebook game based on interactive music video — Israeli-based Facebook video chat app maker Rounds has released a game using its technology to promote the rock band We the Kings. The game, based on the video for the band’s single Say You Like Me, was developed by Interlude.

[Release] Marvel: Avengers Alliance launches — After a lengthy preview period, Disney has finally launched Marvel: Avengers Alliance on Facebook. Our full review of the game can be found here.

[Release] Syfy releases Syfy Monster Island — Cable network Syfy has released a social game based on its over-the-top original movies. Called Syfy Monster Island, the game allows players to hunt prey like the Sharktopus. Syfy Monster Island is available on Facebook and the Syfy Games website.

[Announcement] Mindjolt SGN now just SGN – As of Feb. 28, Mindjolt SGN is now officially just Social Gaming Network, or SGN.

Zynga today reveals its very own social game platform, Zynga.com, which was previously called Z-Live and Zynga Direct. The service launches today with five of Zynga’s best-performing games: CastleVille, CityVille, Words with Friends, Hidden Chronicles and Zynga Poker.

Here’s what Zynga.com is: a platform on which social games can run synchronously and relatively seamlessly between it and Facebook. A CityVille player logging into Zynga.com today will find their city exactly as it appears on the Facebook canvas, with the same amount of virtual goods in their inventory and same amount of virtual currency in their e-wallet. Thanks to a deeper-than-anything-we’ve-seen integration with Facebook Connect, all in-game activity that takes place on one platform happens on the other. That CityVille player can buy a new park decoration on Zynga.com and it will appear in Facebook if they player were to jump back to the social network and play CityVille there. A Facebook player can used Credits to buy 20 Crowns in CastleVille and those 20 Crowns will be in the virtual bank if the player jumps to Zynga.com.

Here’s what Zynga.com is not: an alternative to Facebook. The service is focused on the games experience to the exclusion of almost all other social networking tools. Players can’t post pictures, can’t create events and can only group themselves by Facebook friends and players that play the same games. The only social network features Zynga.com cribbed from Facebook are the chat function, social discovery of new friend connections and a live app ticker for games activity (which is something Facebook recently disabled on canvas apps).

So why play games on Zynga.com and not Facebook? The hook is in the promise of faster progression. Zynga games rely almost completely on social interactions — a friend gifts you a virtual good you need to finish constructing something in CityVille, a friend needs to join your poker table to get the game started, a friend plays “Qi” in Words With Friends for a cheap shot triple-letter score, etc. On the asynchronous Facebook platform, it’s a gamble just how long a player has to wait before a friend gets back to their own game to send a gift, respond to a request or play their next move. With Zynga.com, the developer creates an environment where players can easily access their own friends — and an entire network of other players willing to help them out at any time.

Zynga calls this network the “Active Social Network” — the group of friends (or sometimes strangers) that can be counted on to participate in games. To these players, Requests are not “spam” and unfulfilled Requests represent someone that’s not a very good friend. By tapping into a player’s ASN and comparing it to others’, Zynga.com is able to create social discovery of new friends — which in turn broadens the reach of the individual ASN and quickly ramps up players new to the platform.

Let’s walk through a CastleVille example. Say we’re trying to get together six crystal shards to craft an exploration crystal. If playing on Facebook, we send out Requests to all the players listed in our friends list and wait maybe four hours to hear back from half of them. Within roughly three play sessions over 24 hours, we might have all six shards and can craft the exploration crystal. We can also exit the game to go read our friends’ Timelines to see if they have any CastleVille activity posts from which we could collect shards for clicking on the post. If playing CastleVille on Zynga.com, however, we can send the Request to the live app feed where it can be viewed and responded to by our friends, or by any other CastleVille player also playing the game at the same time. Because the activity is live — and because responding to Requests nets both players virtual goods — we’re more likely to get all six of our shards within minutes as opposed to hours, and within the same play session. We can also use the chat feature on our Zynga.com friends to alert them to our request, if they’re not already in CastleVille (“Hey, when you’re done in Zynga Poker, can you send me some crystal shards in CastleVille?”). We can also send and receive energy directly from the chat window. All of this activity can be completed on Zynga.com without ever leaving the game to fulfill requests, accept gifts or troll friends’ profiles for posts that generate rewards.

By speeding up the gameplay experience, Zynga.com introduces a new type of social graph tailored specifically to games players — something Facebook has avoided creating. You can read the difference in approach just from how a user profile appears on the sites. On Facebook, you see a person’s profile picture, their Timeline, their friends and and stuff they Liked. On Zynga.com (pictured), you see a profile picture, a list of games they play and how many times they’ve helped someone in a particular game. Friends on Facebook are suggested based on how many friends you have in common; friends on Zynga.com are suggested based on how many games you have in common, how often you help people in games and on friends in common. On Facebook, there is almost no way to interact with strangers intimately without first sending a Friend Request. On Zynga.com, any stranger can respond to any request at any time without first being your friend — and if you decide to make them your friend on Zynga.com, they do not become your Facebook friend. On Facebook, there is no concept of rank; on Zynga.com, friends are positioned as competing for who is more helpful in more games because their profiles are more likely to be surfaced to power players that will help them progress through games faster.

The core concept of the Zynga.com platform is strong — a destination gaming site that marries the best of the social graph to the actual goal of gameplay. The platform, however, is infancy and there are some features that raise questions about which direction Zynga.com will take as it grows. Here are some examples: the platform currently conducts payments only in Facebook Credits; there are no game balancing measures in place to keep the playing field equal between Facebook CityVille players and Zynga.com CityVille players; cross-platform play for mobile devices in theory will work for Words With Friends — but we’re not sure if Zynga.com can or will support a mobile version for Zynga’s mobile games; Zynga.com player profiles use real names instead of aliases; there are no display ads on the site, but there is plenty of room for them if Zynga wants to run ads. Zynga.com is also offering its platform in 16 languages — including Chinese — but unless a player has access to Facebook, they cannot access games on Zynga.com (which means mainland China, where Facebook is still banned and yet CityVille is available on Tencent).

Some future features are clear, however. Though only launching with its own games, Zynga.com plans to publish third party games on its platform in the very near future — announcing developers MobScience (inFamous Anarchy), Row Sham Bow (Woodland Heroes) and Sava Transmedia as early platform partners. Details on partner publishing are scarce — Zynga declined to discuss the revenue share model — but we do know that Zynga is planning to open its APIs to all developers later this year.

As for what Zynga.com does for Zynga and Facebook’s publicly traded stock, that will depend on investors understanding of the social games business model. Many people previously viewed Zynga’s games platform as a split from Facebook — something that could jeopardize the stability of both companies. Others believed that without Facebook, Zynga couldn’t possibly support its own games ecosystem with so many other competing open web games portals already out there. As we see it, however, Zynga.com is a value add for both Zynga and Facebook. Zynga gets the freedom to try games features that Facebook forbids or doesn’t have an interesting in supporting; Facebook gets to hold Zynga up to investors as a shining example of the business opportunities to be had on the platform. The deep Facebook Connect integration on Zynga.com still creates the dynamic interdependence that makes investors wary, but Zynga now has its own platform to call home.

Zynga.com is due to go live this month. COO John Schappert will talk more about the platform in his Game Developers Conference keynote speech, “Why ‘Free’ and Cross-Platform Is The Future of Gaming” next week at Moscone Center in San Francisco.

PapayaMobile is looking to bolster the Android side of its social-mobile gaming network with a new development tool called Social Splash.

The free tool will allow developers with Flash or HTML5-based games to port their titles to Android using Social Splash as wrapper that renders the game into an Android friendly format, essentially converting it into a native app. It sounds similar to what streaming game service iSwifter does to Flash apps. According to the company’s press release, developers won’t need any specialized Android knowledge to use the product. PapayaMobile’s product is aimed at developers who are currently working on Facebook and Google+.

The move is an interesting one for PapayaMobile for a couple of reasons:

First, while its becoming more common for social game developers like Zynga, Wooga and Playdom to bring out iOS versions of popular Facebook games, not many social game companies have made the jump to Android yet due to the platform’s trickier monetization. Even fairly successful mobile developers working on iOS like the U.K.-based Hogrocket have been slow to bring their games to Android, telling Inside Mobile Apps that Android ports can be a risk in terms of time and effort when compared to the potential payoff.

If Social Splash allows developers to create Android experiences that rival the ones found online, it could be a good tool for companies looking to branch out from Facebook and get into mobile.

“This tool is for every developer that has felt abandoned by Flash and crowded out by Zynga,” PapayaMobile’s co-founder Si Shen said in a statement. “We believe in helping HTML5 and Flash developers make the transition to mobile a seamless experience. Not only does this new tool decrease development time, but it also allows developers to launch their entire games catalog onto mobile without having to learn a new coding language.”

Second, Social Splash could also help PapayaMobile, which no longer develops its own games, shore up relationships with third party developers as competition from better-funded competitors like GREE, DeNA and Facebook intensifies in the social-mobile gaming space.

GREE has been aggressively courting developers for its upcoming global platform and recently announced it was partnering with 11 high profile Chinese and Korean developers to bring their games to the English-speaking market. It is also working with with Ubisoft and Gameloft on platform exclusive titles. DeNA has been busy building out the Mobage network, signing deals with developers like Glu Mobile and TinyCo. The company also just announced it would be opening a subsidiary studio in Vancouver, BC headed by Gameview co-founder Irfan Virk.  Facebook is also investing heavily in its HTML5 based mobile platform, bringing its viral channels to the service and absorbing the costs of carrier-powered payments in order to entice developers.

PapayaMobile’s mobile-social gaming network  more than 50 million users on Android and iOS, up from the 38 million users it reported in December.

Social gaming market to be worth $5 billion by 2015 — BI Intelligence is predicting the US social gaming market will be worth more than $5 billion by 2015, and will be propelled the the strength of tablet computers. The US social gaming market is currently worth about $3 billion by BI’s estimates.

Mail.ru revenues up 59 percent year-on-year, reports $207.6 million in net profit – Russian social network Mail.ru has reported its total revenues increased 59 percent year-on-year in 2011 to $515 million. The company’s net profit was $207.6 million, up 157 percent year-on-year. According to Mail.ru, mobile usage is now a major growth driver, with 43 percent of monthly users accessing the site from mobile devices.

Pachter: social gaming “not a bubble” — Noted industry analyst Michael Pachter of Wedbush Securities has gone on record saying social games are an integral part of the gaming experience. “As for the social bubble, I don’t think it’s a bubble. I play Facebook games with my mother. This is not a bubble,” he said at the [A]List games marketing summit, according to VentureBeat’s report.

Nexon invests in Moyasoft — Nexon has acquired a 19.9 percent stake in South Korean social game maker Moyasoft, according to a report from Gamasutra. Nexon will working with Moyasoft to bring its games to international markets.

Social Vibe engaged users for almost 54 years in 2011 — Digital advertising company Social Vibe has reported several interesting milestones for 2011. During the year the company doubled the number of engagement ads served. The company also reported consumers watched the company’s ads for more than 1.7 billion seconds (54 years) during the year. Social Vibes reported that the average user spent 63 seconds with a Social Vibes ad.

Planet Cazmo secures funding, starts licensed content division – Entertainment portal Planet Cazmo has announced the formation of HappyGiant, a division of the company that will focus on creating licensed content for Facebook and smartphones. The company also announced it had received new funding from the Pritzker/Vlock Family Office Portfolio, but declined to specify the amount. The company is currently working on games for celebrities, films and comic books.

Viximo and Gaia Interactive Ink distribution Partnership — Global social game publisher Viximo has signed a deal with Gaia Interactive to bring several of its client games to Gaia Online and assist Gaia in launching its game Monster Galaxy on a variety of international social networks.

Advertising Agency BBH gets into the social games business — AdAge is reporting that advertising agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH) has opened its own social gaming studio. Named Chuck Studios, the company will make branded games for BBH client Perfetti Van Melle. The company’s first game is live on Facebook.

Bigpoint partners with GamesAnalytics for its free-to-play games – Bigpoint has signed a deal with monetization and analytics company GamesAnalytics to incorporate GamesAnalytics’ Predict platform into its games. Predict uses data-mining and predictive modeling to help developers target specific groups of players with customized messages and offers.

[Funding] HTML5 game maker Game Closure raises $12 million – HTML5 game development tool maker Game Closure has raised $12 million in Series A funding from Highland Capital Partners, Greylock, Benchmark, General Catalyst and CRV according to VentureBeat. The company’s JavaScript game SDK allows developers to create game that will run natively on mobile, tablet and browser devices.

[Launch] Pirates: Tides of Fortune moves to Facebook – Plarium’s pirate-themed social game is now available on Facebook, following the expiration of its 30 day exclusivity period on Google+. The game was previously available on Vkontakte.

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.