Inside Social Games

Tencent Brings in $1.8 Billion in 2009 – When it comes to virtual goods transactions, China’s Tencent is one of the company’s making the most money: the internet media company reports an impressive $1.8 billion in revenue for 2009, a 74% increase over last year. Kai Lukoff has a good analysis over at Venturebeat. Comparively, we’ve reported that Facebook is between $600 and $700 million.

Composed of multiple services such as QQ Messenger, QQ Show, QQ Game, and so on, the network offers free and exclusive virtual goods for each one. However, these services require a “diamond membership” of different colors. Only by having that color membership, – $1.50 a month, for one – do users get the goods for its corresponding service. Currently, around 10% of Tencent’s active user base pays for them. Furthermore, over 75% of their revenue stems from such “internet value-added services.” Services with a noted 94% growth rate in 2009.

Zynga Recruits Steven Chiang - Yet another veteran from the colossal gaming studio, Electronic Arts, makes his way into social gaming. This time, it is veteran EA exectutive, Steven Chiang, as he joins social developer Zynga as president of the company’s social development studios. Among other changes, co-founder and Executive Vice President of Sales and Business, Andrew Trader, recently left the company.

PlaySpan Partners with Changyou – Monetization services company PlaySpan has a new partner, Changyou.com. Offering popular MMOs such as Dragon Oath, Changyou will provide its users in the United States, Europe, and Malaysia purchase options for virtual goods using PlaySpan’s UltimatePay method.

Nintendo Dabbles in Social Games – While Microsoft and Sony have been adding social elements to their consoles for some time now, Nintendo has rarely expressed any real interest in the space. However, their frequent boasts about an 93% bigger screen size on their upcoming portable device, DSi XL, has led to an amusing Facebook application, aptly dubbed “93%.”

Essentially, it is nothing more than a poll that lists funny objects and asks which ones users would like to see 93% larger. However, Nintendo has recently stated that it plans to “significantly boost the social fun of portable gaming.” Unfortunately, their definition of social gaming seems to merely be crowding around one screen, but perhaps that outlook will shift with the release of two “social games,” America’s Test Kitchen: Let’s Get Cooking and WariorWare: D.I.Y. which will allow multiple participants and the sharing of mini-games respectively.

Russian Company, Nival Network gets $7 Million in Investments – This past week, Nival Network raised a hefty $7 million in funding from DST (a former Facebook and Zynga investor), 1C Company, and Sergey Orlovskiy, Quintura reports. The company is the developer and operator behind Russia’s top online gaming and social networking portal, ZZima.com and provides both free-to-play online games (developed, published, and operated by Nival Network) and as well as massively multiplayer online games such as Dragonica, Shaiya: Light and Darkness, and Cabal Online. Such services are available throughout Russia and other former Soviet countries.

Live Gamer Partners with Kount – Payment solutions provider Live Gamer announced Friday that it has partnered with a company called Kount. The latter company specializes in “card-not-present” fraud control. Though details are not completely clear, the two companies have stated that Kount’’s fraud protection tools, such as device fingerprinting and proxy piercing, will be integrated into Live Gamer’s element platform.

Free Realms & 7-11 Promote Virtual Currency with Dinosaurs – Sony Online Entertainment, creator of MMOs such as Everquest and Everquest II, is offering a free virtual dinosaur (a T-rex, to be exact) mount for players in its title, Free Realms. The catch? They will need to purchase $10 worth of the developer’s universal virtual currency, Station Cash, at brick and mortar 7-11 locations. The special promotion will last until April 19th, and membership is not a requirement.

As a lesser note, customers will also receive a free green hat for their virtual pet dog in Free Realms as well. Of course, if they don’t have one, they’ll still have the $10 in Station Cash to buy one.

Chinese Consumers Spend $5 Billion on Virtual Goods – Last week, Gamasutra outlined consumer spending in the MMO market. Long story short, U.S. consumers spent 15 times more than Europeans, tallying in at $3.8 billion in total for 2009. However, this total is for all MMO spending, not merely virtual goods, which we had estimated to be just over $1 billion last year. However, that number is dwarfed as CNN reports that Chinese consumers have spent well over $5 billion in virtual goods for 2009.

Considering that many Chinese citizens are reported to have “limited disposable income,” the total may be a bit of a shock. However, the business model for virtual goods transactions is primarily centered around $1 to $2 transactions, further proving how lucrative these small, impulsive purchases can be.

Apple Now Accepting iPad Developer Applications – The company is looking for developers to build early applications on its soon-to-launch iPad device. Applications due on March 27. TechCrunch has more.

Earlier in the week, we caught wind of Playfish’s coming title, Hotel City. At the time, the game was not actually available — just the beta stages, with little really known. However, we just got access. Here’s our review.

The game turns out to be very similar to our assumptions from a few days ago. Players are presented with a vertical cut-away of a budding hotel. Using a 2D interface, users are able to add new rooms of varying size to the overall structure, decorate them, and hire friends, as they attempt to build a growing hotel business. Obviously, there is a lot more to Hotel City than these generalities, and frankly, each element contains a fair amount of depth; affecting various parts of the game.

With any business-oriented title, income is always the most important. As expected, money is earned by having guests stay for a period of time within one of your guest rooms. Like any hotel, the amount earned is directly dependant on the size of the room being occupied. So, should a guest stay in, for example, the smallest “Budget Room,” they’ll pay one coin upon leaving. If they stay in the larger “Small Room,” they will pay three coins. Curiously, guests will stay in larger rooms for longer, so while they pay more money to stay in them, you go through more customers, faster, with smaller ones.

This actually makes for an interesting player choice that goes beyond larger rooms simply taking up more physical space. Does one try to use many small rooms and rely on high numbers of guests? Or do players attempt to go with quality over quantity? Either business model is viable, which is nice, but likely, most players will choose to build a fair number of the larger rooms due to the greater screen real estate available for decorations.

Like an older hotel game, Chinese title, Happy Hotel, décor is for more than just visual expression. In Happy Hotel, decorating a room leads to a higher cost of renting it for guests. However, in Hotel City, the level of quality your room is at directly affects the star rating your overall hotel receives (just like in real life).

Each room has an experience bar of sorts. As players add new items such as wallpaper, shelves, lamps, and so on, the bar fills up. As you completely fill up these bars, the star rating of the entire hotel gradually increases. Since hotels are only rated from one to five stars, the leveling of this rating appears to be invisible most of the time. Likely, the increase in star rating is exponential, and will require many fully decorated rooms to earn the maximum star rating. Currently, we are stuck at three.

As one might expect, the rating is directly linked to the number of guests that come to visit your hotel, so earning a high one is prudent. Unfortunately, building a hotel is a most expensive endeavor, and you only earn money from patrons so quickly. Thankfully, there are a few ways to increase profits.

Hiring your friends is the most effective long-term method to save on cash. However, in order to hire a friend, they must currently play Hotel City – a surprising change from Restaurant City which did not require them to. Luckily, if you don’t have friends who play as well, the game hires temporary staff computer players to work for a fee. It’s not a tremendous amount, but you must specify just how long they will work and pay all their wages in advance. Once the shift ends (which you can set to be anywhere from two to 48 hours), the hotel will close and a new shift will have to be started.

Another curious means of earning some extra money is by actually poking sleeping guests. You can only do it once per guest; try not to think about how weird that actually is. Nonetheless, sometimes nothing will happen; other times, they will get up, pay, and leave early; and other times, they will leave you a couple hundred coins.

Apparently, the game will also allow for the virtual currency Playfish Cash in addition to the ability to sell back items you bought. Unfortunately, as the game has just gone live and is in early beta, the virtual currency is currently unused and the sell back feature unavailable.

Now, in regards to the elements that are active, one of the best ones has to be the attempt to satisfy the customers. As each guest comes into the hotel, they will tell you what they want, and as the player increases in level (done passively as guests visit your hotel), they will demand more and more niceties. Some will ask for more décor, others will want a gym, and still others may want a night club or bar. These rooms are usually quite large, but will offer areas for multiple guests to enter and pay for.

Beyond the social element of hiring friends, players are also able to keep track of each other’s progress via the standard leaderboard system. As you’d expect, these can also be used to visit your friend’s hotels and earn a little bit of extra cash, daily, by clicking on a money bag that happens to by lying around. Granted, this doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense, and doesn’t really seem justified, but extra income is still extra income.

Overall, the game play complaints for Hotel City are currently minor, with the only significant one being the awkward scrolling the player has to do to see more of where they can place buildings. Beyond this, most of the characters feel very robotic in their movements and the staff does absolutely nothing except stand there. Moreover, the general art style seems a bit too cartoony. While prior Playfish games have incorporated a cartoon style, Hotel City seems almost like something from a bad Saturday morning cartoon. You will either love it or hate it.

Of course, most of these complaints are merely early beta issues, and many of them will likely see new iterations and fixes later down the line. In fact, the only legitimate disappointment, beyond the overlaying visual style, lies in the 2D interface. The isometric views and aesthetic value in games like Restaurant City was phenomenal, and while 2D works for something like Pet Society, when the users has a building filled with dozens of tiny rooms, it just starts to feel a bit… cluttered.

Visual complaints aside, Hotel City still makes for a fun experience. Furthermore, with its concept of having multiple rooms, many players will probably rejoice in the ability to more easily create a variety of styles to suit their tastes. Granted, there are minor issues here and there, but knowing Playfish, these will be hashed out sooner rather than later. That said, if you’re looking to feed your inner interior decorator, than this is an app you should check out… err… check in….

With a recently-announced $5 million from Playdom, Argentina-based MetroGames is a healthy-looking smaller developer. And, despite a horde of other city-building games, including Playdom’s booming Social City, it has a strong city builder of its own, Towner.

This SimCity’esque application appeared at #12 on our most recent top DAU gainers list. It currently has around 190,000 daily active users, while its monthly active users currently tallies in at around 1.1 million. Growth seems to have taken off in late February — maybe it began spending some of its new funds on ads, at that point? In any case, here’s a closer look at the game.

It starts out about the same as any other city-builder. Users are presented with a grid of green space and are told to place House A into Spot B. Okay, fairly simple. As expected, part of the core play is to manage your income (earned passively via “rent” from structures) and create an aesthetically pleasing cityscape.

This is hardly ground-breaking, so Towners does add a few new elements to the game. This is where MetroGames takes a more farming-style game approach than some of its rivals. Players must periodically repair buildings every so often, as well as inaugurate them when their initial construction is complete. If you do not, rent is lost and the buildings “die” (are condemned).

This is an interesting concept, to say the least, but it does beg the question as to how well this will work outside farming applications. Granted, in the grand scheme of things, a digital house is no different than a digital crop. But they are certainly more expensive, which leads to a big repair cost should you, say, leave town for a week.

Perhaps it is mere doom-saying, but if it costs a ton of money to rebuild a city that looks like something out of The Road Warrior, many users may just as soon leave it and move on to a new game. At least with other city builders, the city can live without you.

Regardless, one element to Towners that is better than the competition is the prospect of resource management. Playdom’s Social City does well with players managing citizen happiness, money, and population, but that merely comes down to constructing leisure buildings, factories, and houses respectively.

While Social City resource management is very general, but it would seem the residents of Towners know a little bit more about what they want. Making them happy requires more than just random entertainment facilities and trees. Happiness is actually broken up into six categories: jobs, entertainment, security, fire stations, health, and education. In order for the population to be 100% happy, all six need to be at 100%, and the larger your city gets, the more of these categories’ corresponding structures (all of which are obvious; schools equals more education points, etc.) are needed.

Another interesting element to this app is that it actually makes use of a virtual currency called Towner Cash, as well as Facebook Credits. The Cash is used for expanding your city limits and a few decorations. In regards to the former, however, you can still expand for free based on the number of neighbors you have (friends that play too), but if you can’t get anyone to play with you, you will either need to spend some money, or slowly earn one Towner Cash at a time for every level up.

In regards to the decorations, these are obviously not required, so the need for Towner Cash is less prevalent. Not to be confused with decorations like trees – dubbed “Green Space” – this decorum consists of famous landmarks such as the Arc’De Triunf, a crashed UFO, or the Statue of Liberty. Curiously, some of these can also be purchased through Facebook Credits as well. Logically, this seems a bit odd, but perhaps it is a means to simply entice users that may have Credits lying about, to spend them, rather than buying a new virtual currency.

Another surprise to Towners, is that it doesn’t seem like the player can actually place their own roads. Maybe because the game is “Towners” – town, not city – this is justified, but the only road is one that circles the entire building space. The jury is still out on whether this is a good or bad design. It does alleviate some of the tediousness of placing and layout roads one grid space at a time, but being able to do so gives the player’s virtual space a little bit more uniqueness, and helps to make a city or town feel more complete.

Overall, Towners takes some interesting paths in constructing its city-builder. While it incorporates all of the standards, it does enough differently to stand out. That said, it’s not clear whether or not some of the features will have the effect the developer is hoping for. But so far, so good.

Playfish has been quiet in recent months, but it’s now working on a new title called Hotel City. The game is live, but in the early beta stages, so we’ll be saving a full review for later. Here’s what we see, now.

The game is a cross between Restaurant City and the Chinese title, Happy Hotel. That said, the emphasis will most likely be on the former, as the Restaurant City elements will probably pertain to the concept of streets full of hotels, hiring friends, and decorating isometric interiors. In regards to Happy Hotel similarities, it likely includes the concept of increasing the value of rooms through decor and letting your non-employee friends (as well as non-player characters) check in and pay you fees to stay.

Happy Hotel has a bit more to its guest recruitment than just this. There’s a whole spiel about recruiting better paying guests, critics, and celebrities to increase your hotel’s rating and popularity. Playfish could incorporate something similar, but the company has, in the past, always tried to be more original with its concepts, than others. Expect features that are similar, in essence, to other Facebook hotel games but done in a much more different way. Nevertheless, in the end, all we know for sure is that the game will grant “more customization offers than ever before” and that you “will employ some of your friends,” with the goal of becoming a 5-Star hotel.

On a different note, it is somewhat surprising that Playfish is not taking the city-building route — especially because its parent company, Electronic Arts, owns the formative Sim City franchise. Already we have seen a number of city games from small developers as well as NanoTowns from Digital Chocolate and Social City from Playdom. Meanwhile, other competitor, CrowdStar is going with tycoon games, having released Zoo Paradise.

Still, while the SimCity-esque games seem to be the bigger boom at the moment, Zynga has also trademarked the names HotelVille and Hotel World, so we could be seeing more hotel games soon.

Most of our readers gladly take the time to look when big developers like Playdom, Zynga, Playfish (Electronic Arts) and CrowdStar launch new games in a popular genre. But sometimes smaller late-comers do a great job out-innovating the big guys — here’s a look at two thematically contrasting titles.

The first game is World at War, a modern warfare-style take on the classic mafia role playing game. That said, the game has all the standards: Money, missions, energy to complete the missions, stamina to battle other players (dubbed “ammo”), and so on.

Really, it’s the style that’s most interesting. Everything is based on modern military technology, with the goal being to build up the largest military force in the world. Of course, to do so, users must complete missions in order to level up, unlock more powerful weapons of war, and use the money earned to build up their forces of land, sea, and air.

This actually is where World at War stands out a bit: when you choose your country, you don’t get bonuses such as “faster energy regeneration” or “faster health regeneration.” On the contrary, the perks go towards branches of your military. As an example, if you choose the United States, your air force is stronger than others. If you are the United Kingdom, your navy is stronger. This obviously plays a fairly significant role in choosing what units to build when.

As far as the units themselves go, these are more or less the equivalent of items in something like Mafia Wars. They add attack and defense stats to your profile, and are required for certain missions, and in the end, a squad of riflemen is still, essentially, the same thing as an uzi or what-not in another RPGs (though it is a bit more gratifying to have little minions rather than just a gun).

Additionally, players can also build up a base to earn periodic income, but what is different is that the user can convert outdated structures to new ones as they increase their level and unlock new buildings. In many other RPGs, you are forced to buy more land (which you can still do here). Furthermore, each building can be upgraded up to three times to improve efficiency, and some of them even grant bonuses to health, defense, attack, and so on.

Okay, granted, World at War isn’t wholly original, but then again, most Facebook RPGs aren’t. Do missions, level up, buy new stuff, invite friends to become stronger, and take over the world – in theory. That’s about every social RPG in a nutshell. However, if you like modern military technology, and you’re sick of mafias and gangsters, then this is an app worth checking out. Moreover, with over 1.1 million monthly active users, you certainly won’t be alone.

The next app is the exact opposite to World at War, in that it is about peace. Called Ocean World, much of the game’s user based appears to speak Chinese, judging from its page; the developer is little-known Stand Up Network. The app has around 255,000 monthly active users.

Ocean World is your standard virtual aquarium game. It is a bit behind the times, as that boom appeared to peak last fall, but the game is still a decent rendition of this common genre. The basics are all present: buy fish, feed fish, plant decorations, and make the world a happier place.

One thing that makes the game stand out, however, is the overall atmosphere that comes with it. The visuals are a cross between Zynga’s somewhat cartoonish FishVille and Tall Tree Games’ more realistic looking Fish World. It actually looks quite good, and there isn’t a bad selection of decorations to choose from either.

What makes Ocean World more interesting is that players are in the ocean, not a tank. That means all of the visuals are centered around reefs, beautiful shells, and actual sunken ships. There are still fun, random, items tailored to special holidays. At the moment, these are decorations themed for St. Patrick’s Day and the Chinese New Year. Unfortunately, these all cost the virtual currency, Sun Coins, or an exorbitant amount of the in-game Shell Coins.

Further adding to the atmosphere, the fish actually grow and change as they reach adulthood, rather than just get bigger. Of course, you sell them when this cycle completes (“release them”), and then buy some more. Standard aquarium game economics. As players continue to repeat this process of buying, feeding, and releasing, they earn new levels and, in turn, unlock new fish and decorations to purchase.

The music helps pull the game together, too. It’s not some bouncing rhythm like so many other virtual aquarium titles have, but rather it’s a very tranquil tune that fits with the mysteries of the ocean. Frankly, with the opening directions of the game talking about saving the sea, it sounds like something you might actually hear at a place like Sea World.

In the end, neither World at War nor Ocean World bring anything significantly new to the realm of social games — but they show that smaller developers can take a tired genre and make it interesting, even when the big developers are using their resources to get the most users.

Zen Bound 2 Revealed for the iPad – Despite the buzz circling Apple’s new iPad, little has been actually seen regarding games on the coming platform. However, via a post from Kotaku, we’ve been able to catch a glimpse of Secret Exit’s Zen Bound 2, a “sequel and a revision” of the original iPhone application. In a nutshell, the original rendition is about attempting to wrap a rope around an oddly shaped object, with the sequel’s concept being more of the same. However, as you can see, the bigger and more powerful iPad sure does make it look better. A full gallery can be found here.

Frosmo Expands to Asia – Frosmo has seen a good deal of success with its tournament and team-based platform of the same name, in terms for social gaming. Already the company has expanded its collection of titles across Europe and into Facebook, but now the Finnish company is expanding into the Asian game market as well. Currently, the company is slated to let 10 different Asian game companies use its tournament system, and be available through 51.com, China.com, Ren Ren, and Mixi.

Platogo Gets Casual Games Facebook Ready – Though third party firms helping developers socialize their titles is nothing new, a social games platform from Austria, Platogo is looking to socially enable casual games directly for Facebook. Dubbed “Platogo Wrapper” this tool allows developers to integrate their games into Facebook withonly a few lines of code. With this new tool,  apps will be able to take advantage of Facebook friend invitations, leaderboards, achievements, and player challenges.

Game Investments Dropped 29% in 2009 – It would seem like the video game industry has seen some hefty decline due to the recession as VentureBeat reports that of 115 game startups, only $663.1 million in funding was raised during 2009 (discounting those with undisclosed amounts). That is 29% lower than the $936.8 million raised in 2008. In fact, had it not been for Zynga’s acquisition of $180 million deal from Russia’s Digital Sky Technologies, the year would have been down a depressing 48%.

Tapulous Taps Into Kings of Leon – The popular rhythm-game company for the iPhone, Tapulous, has added another new title to its collection of Tap Tap games. The new app is dubbed Kings Of Leon Revenge, and if you hadn’t guessed already, features, well, the Kings Of Leon. In addition to hosting 10 of the band’s top songs, the new game will also include a curious ”Battle Mode” that will allow users to directly compete with each other using the iPhone’s bluetooth capabilities.

Unity Games Gain a Social Platform Through dimeRocker – More and more frequently, social games empowered with Unity3D are appearing around both Facebook and the web. To that end, Overinteractive Media Inc. has announced the launch of a new social platform, specifically tailored to support Unity enabled games, dubbed dimeRocker. Through the platform, games will be able to support microtransactions, achievements, leaderboards, friend invites, challenges, and be deployable on both the Facebook and MySpace networks. Already, around 150 developers have signed up for the service’s beta stages.

Facebook App Penny Drop Teams Up with Kiva – A simple Facebook application called Penny Drop – powered by CircusPop - is out to help the working poor. The quasi, game-like app consists of players using tokens (earnable through logins every few hours and inviting friends) to drop the price of featured items by one cent until someone purchases it. However, working with Kiva, from March 11th to March 22nd, for every token used in Penny Drop, a penny will be donated to Kiva in order to help poor entrepreneurial individuals and businesses grow.

Gowalla Adds New Platforms & Branded Goods – Location-based iPhone app Gowalla has launched its social game on two new platforms this past week: The Android and Palm’s webOS. In addition to this new support, the game is also bringing branded virtual goods to the table from the Travel Channel’s show, Food Wars. With the new deal, players will be able to earn special badges and virtual items by visiting locals featured during the show.

IMVU adds Voices as a Virtual Good – Popular teen-oriented virtual world IMVU announced a curious partnership with Vivox this Thursday. Now, the virtual world will be capable of integrating voice services, but beyond being just another feature, it will also add a new source of revenue. Currently, 25 different voice styles are being offered for the cost of 990 IMVU Credits.

Sometrics Launches GameCoins.com – Social analytics firm, Sometrics announced the launch of GameCoins.com this week - the company’s first direct-to-consumer play. Game Coins will serve as a community site for gamers, allowing them meet new people as well as participate in forums and blogs that revolve around various social games and virtual worlds. More than this, however, the site, per its name, will also be an online marketplace for virtual goods and currencies. From the portal, players can make use of the Sometrics Offer Solution to complete ad offers and earn goods and currency for their MMO, virtual world, or social game of choice. The company tells us it plans to help grow the community through users discovering relevant content in searches. The idea is that by helping people play these games better, its monetization services will get even more usage.

50% of Gamers Will Earn Virtual Currency – According to a survey performed by comScore for Offerpal Media, and released at the Game Developers Conference this week, alternative payment methods enable greater monetization capabilities that one would think. Derived from comScore and Offerpal’s own monetization analytics, 53.3% of players are “very likely” to complete a marketing actions (i.e. completing a survey, watching a video, or shopping online) in order to earn virtual currency for their favorite games. Conversely, only 22.8% of those surveyed stated they’d be willing and able to buy it.

In fact, 29.7% of social gamers actually don’t have the means to buy virtual currency in the first place; at least not with cash options. Curiously, even among those that could, 34.9% stated that they were “very unlikely” to do so.

With each passing month, more casual gaming companies turn their attention to Facebook, despite previous success running their own sites or licensing out games (we listed off 10 reasons why last year). One of the latest to join the exodus is Big Fish Games, a noted developer of downloadable casual games.

Big Fish launched its casual MMO Faunasphere on Facebook in February. Last week, it added a second game: My Tribe, which is something like a cross between Settlers and Gilligan’s Island. After picking a desert island to play on, you start off with a small band of tattered refugees, huddled around a single hut. Your job from there is to build a civilization.

The island premise isn’t unusual for Facebook. But Big Fish has gone beyond the usual fare with the functionality of My Tribe, which actually offers a large number of distinct actions. There are huts and buildings to erect, and later upgrade. Villagers have ages and different skills, and wear clothing, created with dyes and gems, that modify their abilities. There are items to pick up, resources to harvest, and new technologies to research.

My Tribe’s complexity stands out from the beginning, when the game’s tutorial — slyly disguised as “quests” — guides the new player through each action in turn. An hour into playing, when you’ve finally run through all the initial quests, there’s still no shortage of things to do: collecting seashells, managing villagers, planting new crops, visiting a friend’s island. The game also drops a random special item every few minutes that you can search for.

The endless to-do list makes My Tribe noticeably different from the time management games that are currently available on Facebook. Developers using the FarmVille mechanic usually intend for players to dip in and out of the game multiple times throughout the day. Players frustrated with running out of energy or crops to harvest are welcome to play for longer, but it’s only easy if they pay.

With My Tribe, a player could certainly dip in — although it might take more than a couple minutes to tidy up the island. But Big Fish meant to go against the grain with its game. “It was a conscious decision to build a more in-depth game and bring that to Facebook,” says Will O’Brien, the company’s VP of social gaming. “It’s the richest experience on Facebook.”

O’Brien was encouraged by Facebook platform manager Gareth Davis’ call yesterday for “iconic games” that can provide a defining experience for the social network. “I think he’s issuing a challenge and a mandate to the social gaming industry to raise the bar,” O’Brien says.

So that’s what Big Fish is trying to do with My Tribe, a game that it originally released in 2008 as a downloadable. For Facebook, the company added social features, but didn’t dumb down many of the other features. A hardcore gamer might not find the game either complex or engaging; a lot of time is spent scrolling around the screen, picking up seashells and setting your islanders to the same task over and over.

But most Facebook games have all the depth of a rain puddle; My Tribe tries to offer more. What remains to be seen is how far players will want to go with the game — after playing through far enough, it’s possible to build an ark and move to another island with different possibilities. Whether they’ll want to go that far is the only question.

As an open platform, Facebook sees a lot of curious uses. Occasionally, it is an international company looking for a little more freedom, other times it is used to advertise something bigger, like a game, and still other times it is just some bizarre idea. Okay, so what happens when you combine all three? You get a very… ahem… interesting Facebook game called Park Fight.

Created by Mccann Digital (part of marketing conglomerate McCann Worldroup), the application is an extension of an advertising campaign for Goldstar Beer. Apparently, the beer is targeted at men, so the entire campaign is centered around explaining why it’s a man’s beer through a classic battle-of-the sexes parody.

Of course, all of the ads are hyperbolic. Which is where Park Fight comes into play. It is a very simple app highlighting the supposed end-all-be-all difference between men and women: Parking a car.

Unfortunately, the game is all written in Hebrew, so it takes some clicking about to figure out how to pull out into the street, but once you do, the parking contest begins. Oh, and is it ever a tough challenge. This isn’t just any parking; it’s parallel parking, and it’s in traffic no less.

Using the arrow keys, you try to navigate their way into a tiny virtual space, while traffic stops around you with blaring horns grating user concentration and patience. This, of course, leads mistakes such as to hitting the sidewalk or other cars, and should you hit too many, you fail and the game prompts you to post something along the lines of “Man, you’re embarrassing the firm! You could not shop. The average male stands at 0:42 seconds.”

Why someone would post this to their feed is an enigma, but it does point out a key feature. The game actually averages all of the male and female users’ parking time and updates them within the game itself. Out of around 219,000 monthly active users, the average male parking time is 42 seconds, while women are currently at 53 seconds.

Of course, the times are not solely due to parking or video game playing skills. Actually, they feel pretty high for both sexes — and the primary culprit is extraordinarily backwards controls.

The game is actually an overhead view where the car drives right and left. However, the up and down arrows go forward and back, while the right and left arrows turn, well, right and left. It is logical when you think about it, but considering the orientation of the street and car on screen, it isn’t exactly intuitive, and a bit frustrating.

As far as the advertising goes, it is certainly a funny concept, but the game doesn’t offer much in its own right. There are a few logos, but nothing that looks like beer, and they are all in Hebrew anyway. Basically, that means that for anyone unfamiliar with the campaign itself, you won’t get the whole point.

Nonetheless, Park Fight is certainly an amusing concept and if you look up some of the other ads, you might get a kick out of those, too.

Japanese internet company CyberAgent is bringing its popular virtual world, Ameba Pigg, to the U.S. market, and to Facebook, as Ameba Pico.

Ameba Pigg has gained around 2 million users in the last 11 months, making CyberAgent one of the larger Japanese companies of its ilk. Here’s our look at the new app.

At first glance Ameba Pico does not look like much. It has a very simplistic art style, and a stiff, child-like, and limited set of animations for the avatar. But the variety and activity within this virtual world bring it to life.

Essentially, the world is broken up into various chat rooms. Each one has a distinctive theme, and since this is a western, U.S. version, they are all parts of New York City. Players are capable of visiting downtown NYC, the Statue of Liberty, Central Park, the New York Academy, and so on. These areas are more than just aesthetics as well, for players can actually shop at stores in these rooms that contain themed furniture and clothing based on the area. New York’s downtown, for example, sells fedoras while a more creative room, like the Stone Age (which you need to by a “Time Machine” to visit) sells… cave man stuff.

As with most virtual worlds, these purchases go into decorating your own virtual room and avatar. There’s actually a pretty hefty selection too. For the former, users select a base theme (we went with traditional Japanese), and build from there. From the room, players can order new, non-themed, items from a catalog and move, rotate, and remove items from their space. Unfortunately, placement is based on an invisible grid, that has a snapping mechanism similar to Adobe products like Photoshop or Flash. Trying to get a small, single grid-space, item into place is frustrating because it constantly snaps to where you don’t want it.

Clothes, however, work much better. It isn’t that they look better, by any means, but you obviously don’t have the snapping issue, and you can throw on as much clothing as you want. Basically, this allows users to create their own look, to a limited degree, with layers of their own choosing (i.e. a jacket on top of a scarf, on top of a shirt) rather then just have a single slot for one top item, or one bottom item.

As for the purchasing itself… this gets a little interesting. The earnable in-game currency, called Gummies, is not used at all. Purchases can only be done with the buyable virtual currency, Ameba Coins. Traditionally, this is a cardinal sin for a virtual world, but it is mitigated by a third currency called Tokens.

Now, tokens can be used to buy anything in the game, and it only takes one. When the user starts, they are given five, but more can be won in a game called Gacha. For 300 Gummies, users can press “Play,” and it will spit out a random prize, which could be a token, furniture, clothing, etc. And before anyone thinks 300 is a high price, you get Gummies constantly through daily logins, receiving “Pico Props” (a button players can press when they click on your avatar), or accomplishing achievements.

Of everything Ameba Pico offers, however, the best element is not in the game features at all. It’s that the game is global and linked between a stand-alone site, using Facebook Connect, and Facebook. So far, we have seen English, Japanese, and French in those seas of chat bubbles. Heck, there have even been people from Australia and the Philippians walking around. It is very cool to talk with them, if you can, or even play mini-games such as Match Card or Reversi.

Despite a rocky first impression, Ameba Pico turned out to be a wonderful little virtual world. Aesthetically, it certainly won’t appeal to everyone, but as soon as you log in, you can immediately immerse yourself within a highly populated and global realm. Quite frankly, however, it is the latter that makes this Japanese title stand out, and a little taste of other cultures is something we all can always benefit from.

Currently, Ameba Pico has already gained more than 104,000 monthly active users.

Startup game developer Gravity Bear has roots in traditional gaming and big ambitions on Facebook. Headed up by Phil Shenk, one of the former lead artists for Blizzard’s hit game Diablo II as well cofounder art director for Flagship Studios, it has fully released its first game, Battle Punks. The preview last fall showed promise and from our experience it did not disappoint.

The game is an automated avatar fighting app, and is similar to past reviewed titles such as King of KungFu and Killer Toon. However, whereas those were done in 2D, Battle Punks is completely three dimensional, and does it look good. Okay, granted, it’s not PlayStation 3 graphics, but would you really want to download that on Facebook anyway?

The name of the game is character progression. Players create a very basic avatar, and start in an area of the world called the “Training Grounds.” This is the area for all new players, and users cannot proceed to another area of the map (which is concealed anyway), until they have leveled up enough to enter it. Using a combination of mafia-style role-playing and automated fighting game rules, users battle one another in order to gain experience, earn money, and claim victory.

Players start with 10 of the familiar stat, energy. Each fight will take three, with one energy replenishing every five minutes or so. However, players are free to send each other food, as gifts that can get an exhausted punk back on his or her feet. Within the fight itself, the player has no control, and simply watches as the players trade blows back and forth in a turn-based style.

Though it is automated, the fights are actually very interesting. There is a good deal of animation and randomness to each fight that makes it entertaining. Each avatar will generally do an attack one by one, either a single big swing, a miss, or maybe a combo. Beyond this, the avatars can also dodge, parry, initiate quick surprise attacks, counterattack, and even disarm each other.

The last of these is extremely important. Pre-planning comes in a great deal before a fight. When visiting the store, players can purchase different types of gear and weapons (as well as cosmetic items, of course). These can add blocking capabilities (shields), do more damage, attack faster, or even have a better grip.

Yes, grip. The better the grip on an item, the less likely you will be disarmed. So, as an example, a two-handed mace (which is owning everyone right now, by the way) has a very strong grip, so it will not be disarmed easily. However, despite its high damage, it is very slow, and doesn’t seem to counter often. Nonetheless, should you lose your weapon, then your battle punk will pull out another from their inventory (or just fight bare handed).

This is actually where Diablo’s influence comes into play. The inventory interface is actually the same as the game. Basically, players have a grid, and items come in different shapes and sizes. If you can fit something within the grid, then you can carry it into battle. It’s that simple.

Eventually, this will lead to strategic choices, as after each fight you are rewarded with gold, experience, and random items (more if you win). Obviously, this will stock up your inventory with many different things, leading the user to decided on speed vs. strength, grip vs. defense, and so on.

Also, with each level, comes a small bit of virtual currency, called Newtons. Unfortunately, we haven’t found anything yet that requires them, but you can at least convert them to in-game currency (gold). That said, however, once you can travel to new areas, new items can be bought there – adding a sort of adventure element to the app – so likely there will be Newton-only goods at higher levels.

The one thing that does come off as obnoxious though, with Battle Punks, is that one can only use so many items in a battle, and as players level up, the weaker ones become useless. This leads to an excess of unwanted goods, but it doesn’t seem possible to sell them. Also, many items in the store are a bit pricy, and the amount of gold earned per fight is a bit low (at least early on).

Beyond these minor annoyances, the only other complaint is that some of the animations and battle sequences for a few weapons is very, very dull. The one that stands out the most is easily the hand-to-hand combat. Okay, okay, so later one, you’ll probably have so many weapons it doesn’t matter, but until then all you see is the avatar jump toward the target, throw one punch, then jump away. It really feels lacking compared to everything else.

Regardless, this is certainly one of the most enjoyable fighting applications for Facebook. It is small, and not well known yet – only about 1,100 monthly active users thus far – but it will almost certainly catch on as people discover it. Battle Punks looks great, it’s actually a lot of fun for an automating fighting game, and it has very little to complain about. This is an app that comes highly recommended.