Disney will soon be publishing the Facebook version of Triple Town. According to Spry Fox’s CEO David Edery, the Seattle-based developer began reaching out to publishers about Triple Town several months ago, and Disney owned Playdom was one of the companies it approached.

Beginning next week, Disney will be responsible for operational and marketing responsibilities for the game, which will include cross promotion in other Disney titles, advertising and user acquisition campaigns. While the arrangement is a one-time deal for now, Edery tells us that the two companies may decide to collaborate on future games.

“Playdom’s in-house development studios are still hard at work developing some of the most popular games for Facebook, but we also recognize that there are a lot of independent social game developers creating amazing new experiences too,” Disney’s senior vice president of social games John Spinale said in a blog post on the Playdom website. “We don’t have to develop every great social game, but we want to bring as many of them as possible to our users. And that’s why you can expect us to partner with independent developers like Spry Fox.”

This is not Disney Playdom’s first foray into publishing, but a Disney rep tells us that the move does signal that Disney is open to working with independent developers. Spry Fox will maintain complete creative control of the game.

For more information on Triple Town and the recent changes Spry Fox introduced to the game, read our full interview with David Edery here.

Disney has finally revealed what its first Disney branded Facebook game will be and its not what many expected — Marvel: Avengers Alliance, a combat RPG set in the Marvel superhero universe.

While it’s well known Disney Playdom is currently working games based on Disney’s core brands, Marvel: Avengers Alliance has been in development for more than a year. According to USA Today, Playdom and Marvel were already at work on the game before Disney’s 2010 acquisition of Playdom for $563 million put both companies under the same umbrella. Disney acquired Marvel in 2009 for more than $4.24 billion dollars.

Disney Interactive’s director of communications, Brian Nelson tells us the game isn’t the branded game Disney Playdom’s San Francisco-based Dream Castle began staffing for in November either, as Marvel: Avengers Alliance was developed by another Disney Playdom studio, Seattle-based Offbeat Creations.

The game will be a combat RPG set in the wake of “the Pulse”, a galaxy-wide disaster that has made New York the target of almost everyone in the entire pantheon of Marvel villains. Players will take on the role of a junior S.H.I.E.L.D agent, tasked with gathering the world’s superheroes together into teams to protect the city. Disney is hoping the game will balance between a casual audience and serious Marvel fans, so despite its source material, the game will not be a hardcore-player focused title. Nelson did not reveal if there would be any connection between the game and the upcoming Avengers movie.

Disney has not announced a release date for Marvel: Avengers Alliance yet, but the game will launch sometime in the first quarter. According to Nelson, there are several more Disney-branded social games on the way in 2012 and Disney Playdom’s Dream Castle is still working on what Nelson refers to as a more traditional Disney IP.

2011 saw a growing diversity in social games with new genre and gameplay types emerging on Facebook, such as hidden object games, racing games, and strategy combat titles with real time multiplayer modes. Based on data collected from AppData, our data tracking service, here are the most popular genres for successful Facebook games this year.

Note: For the purposes of this report, “successful” is defined by games with over 100,000 monthly active users and current retention rates (daily active users as a percent of monthly active users) of 20% or higher. Because many Facebook games (especially those from top publishers) enjoy artificially high usage rates in their first three months, this list only includes games that were launched and reviewed by Inside Social Games between January and September 2011.

1) Arcade — 14.2 million MAU
Three games with the fast casual action of the arcade genre gained strong traffic in 2011: Wooga’s Diamond Dash (11,600,000 MAU), PlayQ’s HotShot (1.4 Million MAU), and GameHouse’s Collapse! Blast (1.2 million MAU). Notably, all three have similar gameplay of matching (or destroying) three like objects for points.

2) Word — 13.8 million MAU
Since launching in July, Words With Friends, Zynga’s Scrabble-like board game, has enjoyed consistently strong growth and engagement rates. It’s the only 2011 game in this genre to reach extremely large user numbers.

Words With Friends’ success is probably due both to its heavy resemblance to Scrabble and its cross-platform feature, which allows Facebook users to play with others both on desktop and mobile. Because Scrabble-type games typically focus on asynchronous play with simple graphics, they’re well-suited to the Facebook platform. Indeed, Electronic Arts’ official Scrabble game for Facebook attracts heavy engagement (if less users, with just 1 million MAU), as does Lexulous, an independently-produced Facebook game once called “Scrabulous” before Scrabble rights owners demanded a name change.

3) Casino — 13.24 million MAU
Led by Playtika’s Slotomania (5.5 million MAU), DoubleDown Interactive’s DoubleDown Casino (4.5 million MAU), and Buffalo Studios’ Bingo Blitz (2.8 million MAU), the gambling-themed casino genre games of 2011 attracted high traffic and heavy engagement. Notably, each of these games currently has very high DAU/MAU rates of over 30%. While the top spot in this genre remains Zynga’s Texas HoldEm Poker, Slotomania and DoubleDown now hold the second and third positions, supplanting other slot machine and card games with a gambling aspect.

4) Hidden Object — 10 million MAU
Disney Playdom’s time travel-themed Gardens of Time (8.3 million MAU) leads this genre, in which players must find valuable game objects cleverly hidden within a graphically dense image. Also gaining heavy traffic is Mystery Manor (1.7 million MAU), developed by Game Insight and published by 6waves Lolapps. Both were launched during March/April, reached a peak of users in September (17 million MAU and 3.75 million MAU, respectively), and have shed users since then, while still maintaining strong DAU/MAU rates. Gardens of Time and Mystery Manor both arrived on iPad this month, but it appears as thoughonly Gardens of Time features Facebook Connect — which could lead to an increase in traffic for the parent game as mobile logins are counted toward its MAU and DAU. Despite the early success of these two games, it’s notable that these were the only 2011 entries in the genre tracked by Inside Social Games throughout this year.

5) City-Building — 4.3 million MAU
A genre in which players get to customize, develop, and manage the economy, infrastructure, and social aspects of their own unique city, 2011 saw the successful launch of Wooga’s Magic Land (2.7 million MAU) followed by Disney Playdom’s Gnome Town 1.6 million MAU). It’s interesting that both games merge city building with a fantasy theme, as do two games launched after September — Zynga’s CastleVille and 6waves Lolapps’ Ravenskye City. This represents a new trend in city-building games, as compared to market leader Zynga’s CityVille (launched in 2010), which has a realistic, modern day city theme.

6) Role-Playing Games — 2.5 million MAU
In a role-playing game (RPG), players customize and enhance their own unique game character, and use it to progress through a series of game challenges and objectives, in a variety of environments and themes. Led by Digital Chocolate’s undead-themed Zombie Lane, the RPG genre added a number of new entries in 2011. The Vampire Diaries: Get Sucked In — based on the TV show of the same name — has 300,000 MAU, while the dungeon crawler-type Hello Adventure has about 100,000 MAU. This year saw the launch of over three dozen RPG games, most of which have lower traffic or engagement rates than these three. For instance, Zygna’s Mafia Wars 2 still has 6.1 million MAU, but less than 10% DAU/MAU, and EA Playfish’s The Sims Social, has 27.2 million MAU but less than 20% DAU/MAU (and trending downward), as does Coco Girl, a fashion-themed RPG (3 million MAU) launched in October. Zynga’s CastleVille, which launched late in 2011, has both strong city building elements (see above) and RPG features.

7) Strategy & Combat — 1.86 million MAU
Three entries in the military and battle-themed genre of strategy & combat maintain high engagement rates: Kixeye’s Battle Pirates (720,000 MAU) and War Commander (530,000 MAU), with Kabam’s Edgeworld between both with 610,000 MAU. Zynga’s Empires & Allies still maintains a large base of players (15.6 million MAU), as does Social Point’s Social Empires (4.9 million MAU), but have seen engagement rates fall below 20% DAU/MAU in December. Their overall size should also be considered as an indicator of the genre’s popularity, however, and we anticipate seeing more entries in strategy & combat throughout the end of the year and into 2012.

8) Game Show — 1.06 million MAU
Led by Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader (650,000 MAU) and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (410,000 MAU), game show-themed trivia games have over a million players on Facebook. Both are licensed from popular TV game show franchises. New entries in 2011 like Jeopardy! have gained smaller, but very engaged audiences. Three other 2011 game show games — Deal or No Deal, $100,000 Pyramid, and 1 vs 100 — have not done as well, however, which leads us to question just how easily a game show’s TV audience is translated to Facebook.

Going into 2012, we expect to see more entries in the casino, arcade, and strategy-combat categories as new developers experiment with the genres. Hidden object games may also see some growth in the new year as Zynga attempts to replicate the success of Garndes of Time with its own entry, Hidden Chronicles. In contrast, the city-building and RPG genres seem to be saturated, though it’s possible that a hybrid of the two genres — say, Zynga’s CastleVille — may still have room to grow.

Here’s a look at where AppData‘s top 10 games of January 2011 are now in December 2011, as the calendar year draws to a close.

A year is typically the better part of a social game’s life cycle for titles launched on Facebook after 2009. During those first 12 months, a game will grow rapidly in first three months, peak in overall traffic, then begin to shrink over the following six months. During this shrinking period, the percent of daily active users as a percent of monthly active users (or DAU/MAU) will often decline toward 10%. Generally, we find that if engagement rates fall below 10% DAU/MAU, a game has a very strong chance of being sunsetted, as its developers seek to cut their losses.

By December 2011, almost all of January’s top 10 games have lost much of the traffic they had at the start of 2011. However, this does not necessarily mean they’re candidates for sunset in 2012. Many of these games maintain high levels of engagement, and probably continue to earn decent revenue for their developers. At least one game, EA PopCap’s Bejeweled Blitz, retained most of its traffic while increasing engagement levels through 2011.

At the start of 2011, these were the top 10 Facebook games by MAU, according to AppData:

In January 2011, top entry CityVille had the advantage of being the newest game among the first 10, having launched the month before. Still, several top games which launched in 2008 — Pet Society, Texas HoldEm, and Mafia Wars — also maintained ranks in the top 10. (The others in the January’s top 10 launched in mid 2010, with the exception of FarmVille, which launched in mid 2009.)

By the end of the year, Facebook’s top 10 had changed dramatically, with just three games in the January 2011 list ranking in the top 10 for December 2011:

The three January 2011 holdovers — CityVille, FarmVille, and Texas HoldEm Poker — are from Zynga, reflecting the company’s continued dominance in the market, and its strategy of maintaining the lead by releasing numerous new games and cross-promoting across its titles. However, several competing developers managed to grow their own audiences to attain top 10 status since then.

Here is where January 2011′s top 10 games stand now, according to AppData:

CityVille – Zynga: 48.9 million MAU, 10.4 million DAU
December rank, by MAU: 1

Launched at the end of 2010, Zynga’s city management sim enjoyed stratospheric growth in January 2011, when it reached over 100 million MAU. In February and March, the game attained a peak of daily active users (or DAU) of about 21 million. Since then, however, CityVille has experienced a slow but steady decline in both MAU and DAU. While it retains the number one position in December, its MAU and DAU have fallen by over 50% from its peak. At the same time, CityVille’s DAU as a percent of MAU has remained strong, at about 20%, throughout the year.

FarmVille – Zynga: 31.7 million MAU, 7.3 million DAU
December rank, by MAU: 2

Popular since its launch in 2009, Zynga’s farming sim steadily lost MAU and DAU through 2011, beginning the year with nearly 60 million MAU and 16 million DAU. As with CityVille, it lost about half of those users by year’s end. DAU/MAU for FarmVille has fluctuated throughout 2011, falling and rising between about 20 to 30%. It now stands at nearly 24%, retaining strong engagement rates (if many less total users.)

Texas HoldEm Poker – Zynga: 28.9 million MAU and 6.3 million DAU
December rank, by MAU: 4

At the close of 2011, Zynga’s online poker game maintains its place in the top 10, and even grew during the first few months. (The game had about 35 million MAU and 7 million DAU in January, then grew to a peak of about 38 million MAU and 7.75 million DAU in February.) After some eight months of relatively stable user rates, the game began losing traffic. However, compared to Zynga’s CityVille and FarmVille, which both lost about half their maximum number of users over the year, the HoldEm Poker game has retained about 85% of the total players it had at the start of 2011. The game even managed to increase DAU/MAU engagement rates over the year, at first fluctuating between 16 to 20% through 2011, but from late October to now, fluctuating between 21 to 23%.

FrontierVille – Zynga: 1.2 million MAU, 230 thousand DAU
December rank, by MAU: 83

The 2011 performance of Zynga’s adventure/RPG game is somewhat complicated, due to the launch of Pioneer Trail, a standalone expansion to the game released in August. At the start of 2011, FrontierVille had about 30 million MAU and 6 million DAU. By the time Pioneer Trail launched, the original game had dropped to about 12 million MAU and 3 million DAU. At first, Zynga encouraged FrontierVille players to install the new Pioneer Trail app, then eventually made redirection automatic, so that users attempting to search or access FrontierVille would instead be taken directly to Pioneer Trail. FrontierVille now has just 1.2 million MAU and 240,000 DAU, with a 18% in DAU/MAU. By contrast, Pioneer Trail maintains 5.3 million MAU and 1.7 million DAU, for an impressive DAU/MAU rate of about 30% and claimed a place on the top 25 Facebook games for December. So while FrontierVille has fallen far from its high usage rates at the beginning of 2011, its successor has inherited a relatively large and very committed base of players.

Mafia Wars – Zynga: 2.7 million MAU, 590,000 DAU
December rank, by MAU: 37

Zynga’s crime-theme role-playing game also had an interesting performance in 2011. Mafia Wars enjoyed a peak of about 20 million MAU and 3.5 million DAU at the beginning of the 2011, but steadily lost traffic through the year, down by 85% from its January totals. At the same time, the game enjoyed a modest increase of DAU/MAU in 2011, going from about 15% in January to between 20 and 25% from October to November. This increase in engagement occurred despite Zynga’s heavily promoted launch of Mafia Wars 2 in October. While the sequel still enjoys higher traffic (now 7.4 million MAU and 670,000 DAU), its DAU/MAU has fluctuated between 7.5% and 8.5% over the last couple months. Given Mafia Wars 2′s steady decline of players compared to Mafia Wars’ relative stability, it’s quite possible the original game will eclipse its sequel in 2012.

Café World – Zynga: 6.6 million MAU, 1.5 million DAU
December rank, by MAU: 17

Zynga’s restaurant sim has lost over 60% of the audience it had at the beginning of the year. However, as with Zynga’s Mafia Wars, Café World’s loss of total players was coupled to a gain in engagement. The game climbed from a DAU/MAU rate of about 18% in January, to between 22 and 30% in the last three months of 2011. This high engagement suggests the 2009 game has managed to maintain a large group of dedicated players.

Treasure Isle – Zynga: 2.1 million MAU, 410,000 DAU
December rank, by MAU: 55

Dropping from a peak of 15 million MAU and 3 million DAU in January, Zynga’s treasure hunting game lost some 83% of its audience in 2011. Despite this loss, Treasure Isle’s DAU/MAU ratio has remained relatively consistent and healthy through the year, fluctuating between between 20 and 25% for most of 2011.

Millionaire City – Digital Chocolate: 2.4 million MAU, 410,000 DAU
December rank, by MAU: 44

Digital Chocolate’s city sim lost some 80% of its traffic through 2011, and saw a decline of DAU/MAU from 22% in January, to between 16 and 18% from October to December.

Pet Society – EA-Playfish: 6.2 million MAU, 1 million DAU
December rank, by MAU: 19

EA Playfish’s pet care sim lost over 50% of the players it had in January (when it enjoyed 12 million MAU and 2.25 DAU). Engagement rates have remained relatively low through the year, fluctuating between 12 and 16% for most of 2011.

Bejeweled Blitz, EA/Popcap: 8.7 million MAU, 2.9 million DAU
December rank, by MAU: 14

Of all the games in the top 10 for January 2011, EA PopCap’s casual arcade game has seen the strongest performance this year, maintaining 70% of the players it had 12 months ago. It also enjoyed extremely high engagement rates throughout the year, fluctuating between 26 and 36% DAU/MAU through 2011.

It’s interesting to note that most of these games still maintain healthy DAU/MAU rates above 20%, even one to three years after their launch. Only three, FrontierVille, Millionaire City, and Pet Society, currently have a DAU/MAU rate closer to 15%. However, this rate, while not optimal, is still suggestive of relatively strong engagement rates. It’s therefore likely that most of January 2011′s top 10 will continue to generate revenue for their developers well into 2012.

Disney Playdom will sunset its long-running social game, Social City, this December just three months shy of the game’s second birthday on the Facebook platform.

As the approximate life cycle of a social game on Facebook seems to be roughly 12 to 18 months, the move comes as no surprise. It’s even less of a surprise, considering Disney Playdom’s recent success with Gardens of Time and its efforts to release new social games based on Disney properties in 2012. Effective resource management dictates that developers need to spend more on the games that are making money, and shut down ones that aren’t in order to allocate resources to new games.

It is rare, however, to see one of Facebook’s big five social game developers taking an older game offline even if it is more than 18 months old. Many of those games (particularly Zynga’s) still enjoy large audiences that, in theory, monetize at a higher rate than those who are playing a new game in its first three months of life. Image also keeps older games online, as many developers are defined by the success of their original games.

In the case of Social City (review here), it was one of several hit games Playdom offered in its pre-Disney acquisition days. Sorority Life and Mobsters were also “big name” games that attracted millions of users back in the early days of the Facebook and MySpace games platforms. Social City, however, got a larger amount of media attention than other pre-Disney Playdom games because it launched just before the Disney acquisition and went on to win a Game Developer Choice Award at GDC Online in October 2010. Due to its success, the game survived the initial upheaval after the acquisition (which saw the sunsetting of Playdom’s Big City Life, Treetopia, and Fanglies in October 2010) and even made it onto Android where some of Playdom’s competitors were experimenting with cross-platform social game experiences.

Social City’s Facebook traffic was in decline even then, however, down over 50% in monthly active users and over 80% in daily active users from its peak point of traffic at 12 .6million MAU and 3.1 million DAU seen in spring of 2010. In the last six months, MAU and DAU have continued to fall, eventually putting its DAU as a percentage of MAU — a metric that helps us see what kind of retention a social game enjoys — below 10%, which is where most developers usually shut down or abandon a game. It’s a similar story to Playdom’s Market Street, which launched in 2010 and was sunsetted in August 2011.

The Walt Disney Corporation is ready to release social games based on its core intellectual properties through Sorority Life developer Playdom, more than a year after the $563.2 million acquisition.

Ever since the buy, it’s been a question of “when” Playdom would release Disney branded games more so than “if.” At the time of the acquisition, brands hadn’t seen much success on Facebook in the form of social games, but in the last six months they’ve come onto the platform from almost every direction — film, TV, music, core video game franchises, etc. During this time, Playdom was active on Facebook with big releases like Gardens of Time and ESPN Sports Bar & Grill, plus under-the-radar games like Deep Realms and Gnome Town. It didn’t, however, release any social games based on original Disney IP.

“As you can imagine, The Walt Disney Company is very protective of certain assets,” Playdom CFO Christa Quarles tells us. “There are things that have to have the right artists and art direction that can actually fit within [preset] standards. There’s an appreciation of that particular IP that’s required.”

Quarles explains that Playdom’s current development structure is what she calls a “federation of startups” that contains almost a dozen different studios, each working on different projects — not all of which are Disney-branded. Of this group, the San Francisco-based Dream Castle is likely the first that will make it to Facebook with traditional Disney IP. The studio already has ESPN Sports Bar & Grill under its belt and is now staffing up to tackle an unnamed social game that will leverage a familiar Disney brand.

“We’re not talking about specifics yet,” DreamCastle Vice President & Executive Producer Kenny Dinkin says. “We’re trying to get the word out there, though, that if you love Disney and you want to work on social games and you’re in San Francisco, there’s a team doing some really cool stuff here.”

Dinkin comes to Playdom from PlayFirst, where he worked on the Diner Dash casual games franchise. Through that IP, he developed a passion for storytelling in the casual games space — which is something he brings to Dream Castle’s unnamed Disney project. Currently, about half of his team at the studio is made up of existing Playdom employees and he tells us that the company is structured in a way where he can reach out to other Playdom producers at other studios for guidance on social game development.

“For me this is a really seductive opportunity to work with Disney, the mother lode of intellectual properties,” Dinkin says, “and to learn from Playdom, the experts in business analytics and social gaming.”

The appeal of working on a Disney video game has attracted several developers in the industry, most recently Deus Ex creator Warren Spector with Wii game Epic Mickey. Despite the draw of the brand, however, it’s difficult to create a product that both leverages Disney’s IP while still standing on its own as an enjoyable gameplay experience that consumers want to pay for. Brands are a stigma in the traditional video games industry where consumers have come to expect poor performance from games based on movies and comic books — which is why the success of games like Batman: Arkham Asylum or the original Kingdom Hearts comes as something of a shock. In the social games space, the marriage of branded IP and games is only barely consummated as brands based in film, TV, and even other video game franchises are just now finding success on Facebook with titles like The Smurfs & Co., The Sims Social, and the slew of newly-launched TV-based social games.

“You can’t just slap any [game] mechanic on any IP and think it’s going to work,” Dinkin tells us. “The IP is a leg up that gives you that emotional engagement [with the player], but at the end of the day, it’s all about the gameplay. You often see these inauthentic mash-ups of some character IP and some game mechanic. [Like] Sleeping Beauty and Aurora — I love my first person shooters, but that’s probably not a good match for that property. You have to think about what fits from the consumer’s perspective, but if what you picked isn’t fun, you’re broken. The gameplay has to drive it.”

Working with Disney brands is a double-edged sword for Playdom. On the one hand, user acquisition is cheaper and easier because everyone presumably recognizes at least 10 Disney brands on sight, so there’s no need to spend as much on advertising. On the other, these brands are so old and spread across such a wide range of mediums that developers have to collaborate with many branches of The Walt Disney Company to satisfy standards set for that brand. On top of that — almost as a third edge — Playdom is still actively learning best practices in social game development even as the Facebook platform continues to evolve.

“A lot of this is about how you de-risk projects,” Quarles says. “This is a hits-driven business and there’s tons of risk every time you embark on a new project. [A brand] increases the likelihood that more people are going to be exposed to that game, [so] it’s an opportunity in the sense that you can reach a much wider audience often for less money. [But] it’s a risk in the sense that you’ve got to get it right.”

Take, for example, the sale of Mickey Mouse ears. In real life, this head ornament is something you can only find at official Disney retail stores in major cities or at the theme park gift shops. It’s easy enough to recreate a set of Mickey Mouse ears to sell in a social game — perhaps as a premium item for Facebook Credits — but the presence of Mickey Mouse ears in a Disney-branded social game could actually wreck the authenticity of that game. It could also unbalance the economy of virtual goods, depending on the scarcity of Disney-branded items in general.

“Virtual goods like limited edition items is a big component of the game we’re building,” Dinkin admits. “I think it goes beyond Mickey Mouse ears. You can imagine buying different movies, rides… there’s so many different things in the world of Disney IP that you can imagine collecting, buying, unlocking. You want to take care that things that become common don’t lose their allure in real life.”

That’s about as much as Dinkin was willing to reveal about the mystery Disney game at Dream Castle, though he did say it wasn’t DuckTales. Based on those clues and on Facebook’s current demographics (with its lack of a 13-and-under audience), our best guesses are Pirates of the Caribbean, Toy Story, a “Disney Town” city-building style of game with various Disney characters, or something completely off-the-wall like Fantasia. You can find job listing for positions at Dream Castle here.

New Social Game Focused PlayStation Home Debuts – Sony has unveiled the new look for its proprietary gaming service PlayStation Home. Formerly a virtual social destination for PS3 owners, the service never quite captured the interest of the gaming community. The new version of Home switches the focus from social to social gaming, and now lets users explore an environment filled with quests, shopping and more than 230 games, some of which are free-to-play social games, supported by advertising and microtransactions.

Nexon America Q3 Revenues Up 29% - Nexon America is reporting its third quarter revenues were up 29% year-over-year, partially to the due to the success of its microtransaction business model. This is the ninth consecutive quarter of year-over-year revenue growth, according to the developer. In the last year, Nexon has entered the social games market with MapleStory Adventures and Zombie Misfits, as well as with investments in social game developers A Bit Lucky and 6waves Lolapps.

DeNA’s Baseball Team Won’t Sport Mobage Name - Andriasang is reporting that DeNA has reached an agreement to purchase the Yokohama BayStars. Unfortunately for the company, Nippon Professional Baseball, the organization that manages the league quashed DeNA’s plans to add Mobage branding to the name of the team.

Call of Duty Elite Features Deep Facebook Integration - Activision’s Call of Duty Elite, a multiplayer subscription service for first person shooter Call of Duty will integrate Facebook directly into the game, allowing players to log in with their Facebook profiles and play with their friends from the social network according to a developer video posted on Destructoid.

More Details Emerge for DeNA/Grasshopper Manufacture Partnership - In September we reported that Japanese developer Grasshopper Manufacture would be teaming with DeNA to create games for social and mobile networks. This week DeNA revealed that the two companies are forming a spin-off venture which will be tentatively called Grasshopper Social Network Service Inc. The new company will be headed by Grasshopper CEO and auteur designer Goichi “Suda 51″ Suda.

Social Games Profitable for Konami – Japanese gaming giant Konami’s video game segment brought in 58.1 billion yen between April and September of this year, up five billion yen from the same period in 2010. The company was helped by a 12 billion yen increase in social game revenue from games on the Mobage and GREE networks. According to the company, it had 11.5 million registered users on social game networks in September, but only 2.5 million at the beginning of the year. Its latest social game, Frogger Pinball, is now live on Facebook.

Funzio is the Most Innovative Social Game Company - Crime City developer Funzio has been named to this year’s Dow Jones VentureWire FASTech 50, a list of the most investment worthy startups as selected by the VentureWire and a board of venture capitalists. Funzio was the only gaming company who made this year’s list.

Hilleman: HTML5 Will Need to Improve to Survive - EA’s creative director Richard Hilleman has revealed that HTML5’s performance issues have proven to be major hurdle for game developers. According to Gamasutra, who attended the presentation at the New Game Conference in San Francisco, Hilleman said it was difficult to predict how an app would run different hardware specifications, and that HTML5’s audio issues will need to be addressed. Hilleman encouraged the industry to set technical standards for the platform and improve how games using HTML5 are distributed and monetized if the platform is to ultimately be successful.

Playdom Files for Trademark on City of Warfare - Fusible has discovered that Playdom has filed four trademark applications for the name City of Warfare. At this point its unknown if City of Warfare is a new IP or if the trademarks are for rebranding City of Might, a Playdom game currently in closed beta.

Gameforge Laying off 100, Cancels Games – Gameforge is significantly realigning its business structure to better integrate with Frogster in a move that will see the company scrap at least two upcoming games and lay off 100 staff. Gameforge is eliminating its client based games and web games divisions and replacing them with development and publishing divisions. Gameforge and Frogster merged in August.

Beach Cooler Games Rises from Ashes of Blue Fang - Gamasutra is reporting the former CEO and lead designer of now defunct studio Blue Fang Games have formed Beach Cooler Games, a Boston based startup that will focus on the mobile and social markets. Blue Fang was best known for the Zoo Tycoon series and the Facebook games The Oregon Trail and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego.

Social Games Evolving Faster Than Any Other Entertainment Medium: Insomniac CEO - Insomniac Games’ CEO Ted Price has given a candid interview to Gamespot explaining why a AAA console developer is getting into the social games market with its new division Insomniac Click. According to Price, social games are an exciting new frontier that is  “evolving faster than any other entertainment medium in the past 50 years,” which makes it difficult for developers who are “trying to figure out exactly where we want to focus in terms of making our mark in social games, because… there is no right way to do it.” The full interview can be read here.

Zynga: Developing in HTML5 Painful, But Worth It - Zynga’s Paul Bakaus had some interesting comments to make about HTML5 at the New Game Conference in San Francisco. According to Gamasutra, Bakaus explained that the lack of gaming support in the emerging platform makes developing for the platform feel like the dark ages of gaming, but it offers great opportunities to make the web a better platform for games.

Twiitz Blends Real and Virtual Goods in Online Store -  Twiitz is hoping to crack into the online shopping market with a store exclusively targeted towards social gamers. Featured items in the online retailer’s store come with $15 dollars worth of Facebook credits, delivered via pre-paid cards included with the items.

TheBroth Hires Claritics to Improve Barn Buddy - Australian social game developer TheBroth is implementing social analytics make its flagship Facebook game Barn Buddy even more popular. The developer has selected Claritics, who make a line of cloud-based SaaS analytics apps that provide real-time information and feedback on engagement and monetization efforts. According to AppData, Barn buddy currently has 1.6 million MAU and 370,000 DAU.

[Launch] Tight Lines Fishing Brings Social Fishing to Facebook - Independent Austrian studio Socialspiel released its first Facebook game this week, social fishing game Tight Lines Fishing. The game challenges players to compete against their friends to catch the biggest fish. Socialspiel was formed in 2010 by former employees of Deep Silver and Rockstar Vienna.

Unity Technologies Partners with GREE — Unity Technologies has made its way to Japan through a partnership with mobile-social games platform, GREE. Through the partnership, GREE will be allowed to distribute a limited number of licenses for the development platform at no cost to its Japanese development partners, thus aiding Unity in its expansion into the Japanese gaming market. Unity has also announced the opening of Unity Technologies Japan in Tokyo where it will serve as a sales, localization, and support center.

Tagged Unveils New Social Game — Tagged has announced the launch of its new social game, Elections. A social management type of game, players invest into projects that will hopefully return them votes, hiring other players and friends to perform jobs for that project. The game is Tagged’s first social game since it launched its in-house game development studio under Tagged General Manager of Social Games Andrew Pedersen.

6waves Publishes Wild Card Football — 6waves is publishing a new Facebook game from developer Bat Bridge Interactive. Wild Card Football is a fantasy-style sports game that allows users to collect players, manage their positions, create leagues with friends, and even improve player performances with a few well placed power-ups.

Nickelodeon Launches First Facebook Game — Nickelodeon’s Virtual Worlds Group has launched its first app on Facebook, Neopets: Treasure Keepers. Based on the Neopets virtual world, the game allows players to build and manage their own online shop, venture out on up to 60 quests and collect and sell over 500 items.

TeePee Games Raises Funds with Freddie for a Day Campaign — Discovery platform TeePee Games has announced its Freddie for a Day campaign to raise money for Aids charity, The Mercury Phoenix Trust. During Monday of this week, the company donated 20% of all profits earned through either TeePeeGames.com or its Facebook application.

More Social Games Go Green With Trash Tycoon — VentureBeat has highlighted yet another new Facebook game title called Trash Tycoon from Guerillapps. The game seeks to teach the concepts of “upcycling” as users clean up trash around a virtual community and try to transform it into a bustling and successful town. The app is sponsored by recycling company TerraCycle.

Amazon Seeks Social Game Developers — According to Reuters, Amazon is looking to enter the social media space, having already hired John Yurcisin for developing the company’s social strategies. Now, it is building a Social Games Group, as Reuters cites a poster from Amazon’s new Seattle campus. The poster notes a seeking of software development engineers and Flash developers. Moreover, Amazon has posted social games jobs on both LinkedIn and Dice.com. Amazon was looking for a social game designer as early as last spring.

Sulake Hires Former Playdom Executive, Paul LaFontaine — Sulake, the developer behind Habbo Hotel has announced the hiring of former Playdom vice president of global distribution, Paul LaFontaine, as its new CEO. According to Reuters, the hire is intended to help Sulake push into the realm of social gaming.

Playfish Shuts Down Restaurant City on Mixi — Gamebiz has reported that another successful U.S. company isn’t doing too well in Japan. Playfish has announced that it will be shutting down its Japanese version of Restaurant City on Mixi come October 7th.

Mayfield Fund snags game investor Tim Chang as managing director — Prominent social game investor Tim Chang has left Norwest Venture Partners to become a managing director at the Mayfield Fund, VentureBeat reports. He’s now the sixth managing director at Mayfield.

Nexon America publishes Wonder Cruise for Facebook — MapleStory developer Nexon wasn’t quite ready to debut its second Facebook game so soon after launching MapleStory Adventures — but a Korean Gaming Industry blog caught wind of it.

Zynga Killing 4 Underperforming Facebook Games — Games.com reports that Zynga is sunsetting Warstorm, Scramble, Pathwords, and Word Twist as of September 30th due to poor performance. Warstorm players will be able to transfer their balance plus 10% to any other Zynga game of their choice, players can receive additional bonuses for migrating to CityVille or Empires & Allies. Zynga’s newest game, Adventure World, just launched yesterday right after it’s next game in development, Kingdoms & Quests, was outed by a support page.

Unity Technologies Announces Unity Award Finalists — Unity Technologies has announced the finalists for its annual Unity Awards for games on the web, iOS, Android, and consoles. For games in the social space, Cmune Games’ UberStrike is nominated for Best Cross-Platform title and a Community Choice award while Nival Interactive is up for Best Gameplay with King’s Bounty: Legions.

Zynga IPO Delayed — According to Reuters, Zynga may be delaying its initial public offering. The delay is partially due to questions the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has regarding the company’s means of measuring daily and monthly active users and its bookings. Another reason behind the delay is poor market conditions.

Playdom Seeks Armor Designers — Playdom is issuing a virtual call to arms for Deep Realms. Designers and illustrators of all kinds are invited to design a suit of armor for the social game. The winning design will become part of the game and its artists will receive $1,000. Additionally, the 10 highest voted submissions and five runner-ups will be featured in an online gallery.

Woozworld Raises $6 Million — Children’s virtual world Woozworld has announced a $6 million round of funding, reports VentureBeat. The company is looking to use the money to expand Woozworld onto mobile platforms.

Whale Wars Captain Paul Watson Endorses Social Game — Captain Paul Watson of Sea Shepard Conservation Society and the TLC show Whale Wars officially endorsed the social game, MyConservationPark. Through a partnership with Sea Shepard, developer Good World Games will donate 15% of earnings to the Sea Shepard Conservation Society.

Night Owl Games Displays New Social Game at PAX – At the Penny Arcade Expo last weekend, Night Owl Games debuted a new social strategy game by the name of Dungeon Overlord. The game tasks users with the management of an army of orcs, keeping them happy and equipped (with the construction of buildings and paths) so that they can battle through dungeons automatically. Players can work with friends to boost aspects of their army as they attempt to expand their dominion across the game world.

[Announcement] Bearville.com Passes 20 Million Avatars — The social virtual world for children that utilizes the Build-A-Bear-Workshop brand, Bearville, has reached a new milestone this week. Developer Frima Studios announced that the game has surpassed 20 million avatars.

[Announcement] NetDragon Websoft Announces Completely Free iPad & Facebook MMOG — Chinese online games developer and operator, NetDragon Websoft has announced that it will be bringing Conquer Online to iPad and Facebook as a free-to-play MMOG. The company states that the game will host no download fee, no subscriptions, and no in-game “Shopping Mall.”

Though there were still a decent number of new hires this week within the social space, based on LinkedIn and other sources, the number of hires did decline ever so slightly since last week. Even so, this week had two rather large hires from both Zynga and King.com. The former brings on a new chief marketing and revenue officer, Jeff Karp, and the latter hires Gilles Storme as its new vice president of ad sales for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

As always, if your company is hiring new people or making a notable promotion, please let us know. Email editor (at) insidesocialgames (dot) com, and we’ll get it into this or next week’s post. Also, please note that the information about most new hires, below, comes directly from company updates from LinkedIn, and is only as current as each person’s profile.

Looking for new opportunities? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies

Here’s this week’s full list:

6waves LOLapps

• David Wong, Product Manager — The LOLapps side of the recently merged 6waves LOLapps brings on a single hire with David Wong. Wong was previously a consultant and acting VP of product at thruSocial.

CrowdStar

• Christine Nguyen, Associate Artist — Joining CrowdStar, Nguyen was previously a “green ninja” at House of Chai.
• Chad Wilson, Lead Game Designer — In an internal shift at CrowdStar, Wilson moves up from his prior role as a game designer.

Digital Chocolate

• Earl Dos Santos, Senior Product Manager — Digital Chocolate makes an internal change, moving Dos Santos up from his prior role as a product manager.

GREE

• Audrey Nakao, Business Development Manager — GREE starts of its list of new hires with Nakao. Before this, Nakao was a sales account manager for EA Mobile.
• Winson Wong, Strategy Manager — Also joining Gree is Wong, a former strategy consultant for Oliver Wyman.
• E.J. Fournier, General Counsel — Fournier was most recently a managing counsel at Oracle.
• Alex Sung, Product Manager, Analytics — Sung was previously a software engineer for eBay.

iWin

• Ayinde Benn, QA Specialist — iWin makes a single hire this week. Benn was previously an employee of Zynga.

King.com

• Gilles Storme, Vice President of Ad Sales, EMEA — As noted prior, King.com brings on Gilles Storme as its new vice president of ad sales. Most recently, Storme was head of RockYou’s advertising sales initiatives for EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa).

Peak Games

• Baran Sakallıoğlu, PHP Developer — Now at Peak Games, Sakallıoğlu was formerly a PHP developer at Nano DRM.

Playdom

• Michael Jones, Contract Sound Designer — Joining Playdom this week is Jones. Jones was most recently an audio designer for Pipeworks Software.
• Mark Pitman, Senior Software Engineer — Pitman also joins Playdom this week. He was previously a senior Java developer at the Geneva Foundation/NHRC.

RockYou!

• Gabriel Aussant, Customer Support Team Leader — RockYou! makes a single hire with Aussant, a former subject matter expert for GOA Games.

Zynga

• Jeff Karp, Chief Marketing & Revenue Officer — As stated already, Jeff Karp joins Zynga as its new chief marketing and revenue officer. Prior to joining Zynga, Karp was the executive vice president at EA Play.
• Nelson Hernandez, Associate Artist — Also joining Zynga this week is Hernandez, a former art lecturer at San Jose State University.
• Priyanka Amravati, Intern — Now at Zynga, Amravati was previously a student at MSRIT, Bangalore.
• Jason Ku, Software Engineer — In an internal change, Ku moves up from his role as a software engineering intern at Zynga.
• Ashli Tingle, QA Engineer II — Tingle was previously a video game tester at PsiNapse Staffing Technology (on behalf of Sega of America).
• Therese Tan, Graphic Artist — Tan was most recently a game artist under the recently acquired Astro Ape Studios.
• Karly Yohe, 3D Contract Artist — Joining Zynga, Yohe was previously a tutor at The Art Institute of California – San Francisco.
• Jose Cardenas, Senior Software Engineer — Also now at Zynga, Cardenas was formerly a supervisor of software development at Travelocity.
• Anthony Dallaryan, Art Director — Dallaryan was previously a senior artist at Astro Ape Studios.