Inside Social Games

The Christmas traffic decline has melted away, and a number of games saw significant growth in February — more so than January, anyway. However, for each significant gain, there were some loses as well, as roughly one-third of the list dropped in monthly active users, and a few of those drops are highly popular titles such as FishVille and Happy Aquarium.

On the lighter side of things, Zynga’s FarmVille continues to hold on to top honors with new records in monthly users once again, while competitor CrowdStar attempts to increase its popularity even further. Also, RockYou makes its move back to its former glory from the early days of Facebook with heavily increased MAUs for both Birthday Cards and Zoo World. Another game, Hero World, also made its debut this month.

February was a potentially big month for games, because Facebook introduced a home page redesign at the beginning of the month that moved applications from a bottom toolbar into the left-hand navigation column, and moved notifications from the toolbar to the top navigation bar. Facebook also added what it calls a Games Dashboard — basically, a home page filter that lets users see a page of the Facebook games they and their friends have been playing. So far, the impact does not look to be negative for social games overall. The full impact of the redesign will only be felt this month, though, as Facebook is removing application notifications from the new notifications bar.

Here are the highlights for the top 25 Facebook Games for February, 2010:

• Zynga’s FarmVille shatters its old records once again, gaining over 7.5 million new monthly active users, bringing the game’s total monthly players up to a whopping 83,004,461.
• At a distant second comes RockYou’s Birthday Cards with just over 47 million MAUs, having gained over 7 million new users as well — this gift-giving app isn’t really a game, although it contains a virtual currency. Rather, it has included a window for RockYou’s game Zoo World (more on that in a moment).
• Surprisingly, the virtual aquarium games did not do too well through February as Happy Aquarium from CrowdStar lost over 1.5 million users, with Texas Hold’Em Poker moving past it to #4. Zynga’s FishVille also dropped from #5 to #7 with roughly a 850,000 MAU loss. Furthermore, Fish World, from Tall Tree Games, has completely fallen off the charts.
• Though aquariums aren’t doing too well, zoo keeping seems to be growing as RockYou’s Zoo World gains an impressive 4.1 million monthly active users, showing that simple mechanics and cute animals — and however else the app is growing — can go quite far. It comes in at #8, up from #10.
• After a long game of cat and mouse, Playfish’s Pet Society finally loses out to PetVille by a difference of less than 300,000 users. They come in at #10 and #9 respectively.
• While CrowdStar’s long popular fish game dropped, the cold winter nights have proven lucrative for its tropical Happy Island app, as this warming title moves up from  #17 to #14 with almost a 2 million MAU gain. Unfortunately, Happy Pets still staggered slightly, losing 566,909 users, and dropping one ranking, to #17.
• In regards to tropical games, Island Paradise, from Meteor Games also sees minor growth, moving up one rank to #19, with just over 7.6 million monthly active users, and just behind it comes RockYou’s Hero World. The super hero RPG earns 7,033,749 MAUs for the month of February.
• Little farming app (Lil) Farm Life reappears on the list, coming in with about 5.9 million MAUs and landing at #22.
• Lastly, the boom that was Shikha’s Pillow Fight seems to have died out, as the app has lost more than 8.4 million users, dropping from #14 to #25.

While drastic fluctuations in users have never been the mark of MySpace applications, the coming core changes to the social network – including analytics – might provide some better insight into the site. MySpace applications may not be as big as Facebook’s, but developers have often reported higher revenue from them.

Nevertheless, the current method of tracking still showed some minor changes over January’s charts, with almost no games earning a negative monthly change. Of course, that doesn’t mean that a handful of titles didn’t shift about in February. In fact, even a newcomer appeared at the tail end of this month’s list.

On another note, many games on the MySpace list can often be classified as merely fun applications as opposed to “games” by traditional definitions. We track some of these applications because they have significant social game-like features.

Here are the highlights for the Top 25 MySpace Games for February, 2010:

• Unsurprisingly, the two mafia role playing games of Playdom’s Mobsters and Zynga’s Mafia Wars appear at #1 and #2 respectively. The two titles earn over 14.4 and 13.1 million installations.
• The simple concepts of Bumper Stickers and Own Your Friends from Playdom, continue to show that simplicity is the predominant preference for users on MySpace as each earn over 12.5 and 10.2 million installs.
• Another simple app, Tag Me from BitRhymes moves up from #9 to #8 to pass RockYou’s Super Pets (now dubbed RockYou Pets in the app gallery), with almost a 500,00 installation gain.
• BitRhymes app, Cheers!! also moves up one ranking to #10 to beat out the Zynga RPG, Vampires. It earns just shy of 5 million installs, but again, does not appear in the app gallery. More likely than not, this issue, that we have noted numerous times, is almost certainly hindering its growth.
• Same as January, Playdom controls ranks #13-#16 with Kiss Me (4,059,001), Sorority Life (3,566,896), Poker Palace (3,386,269), and Overdrive (2,626,783).
• Another simple app from Oxylabs Networks, PhotoBuzz sees an impressive jump, moving up from #23 to #21 with a gain of 152,316 new users. It now totals over 1.9 million installations.
• In fact, newly added to the list is another app from Oxylabs, What is your Street Reputation, which garners over 1.7 million installs. The game appears at #24 ousting Green Spot form the Top 25 and was added due to its similarity to What’s my Impression on friends from BitRhymes.

Winter Olympic fans who may not be able to hit the streets of Vancouver to observe the games can at least play the official video game on Facebook.

Sega’s Vancouver 2010 Official Minigame on Facebook allows the user to “compete” in sports played during the winter games by using the arrow buttons on their keyboard. The four sports — snowboard cross, giant slalom, ski jumping and short track speed skating — allow you to compete with your friends, others in your country and players all over the world. Winners in the game may be awarded gold, silver or bronze medals.

The app is constantly asking users to invite their friends to play, as well. Once you’ve completed a game the app asks you to publish the results to your Wall so all the friends in your network can see you played the game. The ever-present faces of your friends follow you through your game trials, too.

The game on Facebook has grown steadily recently and currently has just over 14,500 monthly active users. The game is the Facebook version of games made for Xbox 360, PCs and PlayStation 3 and when played at olympicvideogames.com allows the winners of gold medals to enter into a contest for prizes.

When a user begins playing the game you’re asked to select a country and invite your friends to play; the game also shows your individual world ranking, country ranking and any medals you have won in the game.

To the sound of alternative-style video game music you’re asked to select a difficulty level — normal, hard or expert — and may elect to see a tutorial before playing. Once you finish navigating the course of your sport and arrive at the finish line, the crowd cheers you (no matter how badly you play).

Last week, we took a look at a social sports web site called NFL Canada Social Games, powered by Playaction. Making use of Facebook Connect, its collection of social, prediction-style games created a friendly competition, of sorts, complete with the opportunity to win prizes. Playaction now has a Canadian sports sequel of sorts, a gaming app for 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics!

With the Opening Ceremonies beginning just this weekend, our NFL Canada friends have released, in tandem with the Vancouver Olympics, an official, social, and bilingual prediction game called Race for the Gold or Visez L’or.

Empowered through Facebook Connect, players are able to seamlessly sign in to the site and make predictions on upcoming events. Each list is based on the games scheduled for that day (though you can view previous days), and users can see a basic gauge next to their votes representing how others are voting. And, of course, all of this can be published to your Facebook feed.

Unfortunately, unlike NFL Canada, there are no prizes to be won here. However, based on your Facebook profile when you connect, the site assigns you to your home country, and your profile picture is accompanied with the corresponding flag. As one might expect, the game has leaderboards (which can be sorted by overall, Facebook friends, or just by country), and the inclusion of flag icons creates a small sense of national pride. Considering it a virtual Olympics for those of us that can’t ski… or just hate the cold.

In line with this digital competition, the site also awards the top three pickers each day with interactive medals – obviously gold, silver, and bronze – that is displayed in a separate, leaderboard-like section aptly named “Medals.”

The social implications for Race for the Gold are simple, but as with the NFL Canada website, it does create a sort of environment reminiscent of friends making predictions in a living room. Only this time, it’s international.

To that end, that international prowess is what is most important. Again, Race for the Gold was created directly with the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics. Not only does this mean that the overall site has information about the events themselves, but it represents the most recent social, international, and official use of Facebook to connect people.

Though the big game is over, international usage of Facebook and its features are always something to keep an eye on. The latest find is a compilation of four simplistic titles called NFL Canada Social Games. Powered by Playaction and integrated with Facebook Connect, this football oriented portal brings everything from pools, to memory, to free cars to the table.

Despite what many seem to think, NFL popularity is hardly limited to just the United States, and NFL Canada is just the site to help sate that international thirst. Of course, that doesn’t mean one has to be Canadian to make use of the portal, but it couldn’t hurt considering that the registration to win a Nissan Pathfinder asks for your province. To be clear, this site is not for the Canadian Football League, which is a variation of American football.

For the record, this registration is just for the car, as the primary login is through Facebook Connect. Nonetheless, it is worth mentioning, as the more players play the collection of applicationss on the site, the more times they are entered to win (though there are limited entries per game per day or week).

The first two games featured on the site are fairly similar and are dubbed NFL Confidence Pool Playoffs Edition and NFL Live. Each game is about predictions as you and a slew of other Facebook users try to predict what will happen in a game. What is interesting, however, is while Confidence poses questions before a game (i.e. “Which team will register more passing yards in the game?”), Live actually updates in real time with questions such as “What will the next play be?” In fact, you can even be notified via email before a game starts.

The other two games are more game-like – Quiznos Trivia and NFL Concentration – and are your basic quiz and memory type of games. In the former, players test their NFL knowledge with quirky football puns appearing based on your answer, while the latter is merely matching up team logos.

All the games are amusing, but what makes them better than their descriptions is the Facebook integration. Through Facebook, players can not only publish results to their feed, but view weekly and overall leaderboards as well. More than this, however, one has to consider the social nature of the two prediction games.

Through Connect, Confidence is more reminiscent of an office pool (which may or may not be very social, depending on the people involved), and Live feels more like a bunch of buddies at a bar or in the living room guessing what will happen next. Granted, it’s not the same without the din of noise or 50 hot wings, but the prizes players can win from either of these games (beyond the Pathfinder), more than makes up for that (i.e. an NFL prize pack for Confidence).

Yes, the NFL season has come to a close, but the world is still turning as more and more international sites, apps, and developers empower, socially, themselves through Facebook. Unfortunately, it will be some time before NFL Canada sees heavy usage again, but until then perhaps it would be wise to brush up on your NFL trivia knowledge. After all, who knows what prizes they’ll be offering next season.

Over the last year or so, we’ve seen many mainstream game developers begin experimenting with social gaming. The most recent of these was a Facebook app for Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft, but while it made use of the social graph, and by extension, the networks 400 million users, it was only a small sliver of the gargantuan MMO — mostly a way to post about your activities on the main WoW site. That move looks like it will soon be followed by Electronic Arts’ #1 console game, Madden NFL.

For those returning to Earth, Madden NFL is a long-running game, licensed by the NFL and developed by EA Tiburon in Orlando, Florida. Each year, the game is improved with a new rendition and, according to statistics reported by NPD Group Inc., has sold 63 million copies total in the United States alone. In an interview with Bloomberg Television on Friday, EA Sports President, Peter Moore said that “we have to make ‘Madden’ more accessible. You’ll see us on Facebook going forward.”

Considering the acquisition of social developer Playfish for up to $400 million last year, this is likely to be the EA brand Playfish President and General Manager Kristian Segerstrale talked about recently with the Wall Street Journal (and what company executives have been hinting publicly for months prior). He said that the social gaming space ought to mature in the next 12 to 24 months, making established brands a more important way to get users attention.

As for a Facebook rendition of Madden NFL itself, no official announcement has been made, but according to Moore, the adaptation will be a “simpler experience.”

This is not EA’s first dance with Facebook versions of its console titles. Already the console developer has released social versions of other titles, including Need for Speed Nitro, and new console game Dante’s Inferno — not to mention the apps built by Pogo, the company’s casual gaming group. Madden looks to be the biggest social effort yet, and we will be sure to let you know more when we do.

In the latest effort by big game developer Electronic Arts to become more social, the beta rendition of its Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online has just added Facebook Connect. Already containing the social elements seen in many free online games, this latest addition has taken what community it contained prior and paired it to Facebook’s.

For an online game Tiger Woods Online is surprising good looking and has a fairly quick load time, with a quality you might have seen towards the end of the PlayStation 2’s lifespan. Of course, this is all only surface value, so upon diving deeper, we discovered that the game play wasn’t too shabby either.

Basic play is simple enough: Players choose from single player, multiplayer, or tournament modes, pick a course (which are all real golf courses), and choose which character they wish to use. The controls are fairly intuitive too, using the position of the mouse and three clicks – one to start the shot, a second to choose power, and a third for precision – on a small power meter at the bottom of the screen. All three are based on timing, and the better it is, the better the shot. Rinse and repeat until you make a hole.

It’s best to practice in single player, but once you’ve gotten a pretty good feel for your digital clubs, you may want to try multiplayer and tournament play. The former is interesting, because it has a very massively multiplayer feel — you watch other golfers shots (live) in the form of multicolored arches while you chat with them. Tournaments, on the other hand, can be daily or weekly with one and four rounds respectively. It is all done asynchronously with scores posted on a leaderboard and in-game cash prizes for the winners.

If you’re not too good at the game yet though, don’t worry, as playing matches earns users experience, which, in turn, determines their skill level in the game. This means that tournaments offered will always be limited to the player’s experience level.

Assuming the player does win some digital coin (as a side note, this can be earned through normal play as well), they can visit the Pro Shop to and purchase virtual goods that augment their avatar’s ability as well as provide a little social expression. Unfortunately, the beta version does not currently have this feature available. However, the player can at least visit a separate “Swing Trainer” to learn new skills and swing types.

This feature is noted under the “My Golfer” section of the game’s site, and conveniently, the home of the Facebook Connect link-up. Without doing more than a simple button press, users sync their EA and Facebook accounts, thus granting players the ability to not only post achievements earned to their Facebook stream, but also invite Facebook friends to join them.

This actually leads to a pretty cool social feature, in its own right, called “Fans.” It comes off as, basically, a friends list, but rather than just a location to show who’s online and where they are playing, more fans also equals more experience earned when you play. Moreover, you can even “Favorite” them to become a fan of theirs. Once done, you can sponsor them for a chance to earn extra cash, thus truly creating a social two-way street.

For a beta version, Tiger Woods Online makes for a pretty fun and relaxing experience. Its simple and intuitive controls don’t need much in the ways of instruction, and for an online game, it was surprisingly high quality in the visual department. Frankly, if you like golfing, and you like free games, then Tiger Woods Online is worth a try.

Galacticos Football, from Fantasy Moguls, might appear to have a lot in common with a long string of struggling sports gaming apps, but some of its features — and its traffic — suggest it is on a winning path.

What is beautiful about Galacticos Football is its simplicity. Early on, players wonder “what do I do next in this game?” because compared to other fantasy sports Facebook apps there is significantly less to actually do. However, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as most sports titles we’ve come across have not fared very well. They all have users managing a team of players; adjusting stats, playing matches, fixing salaries, and so on. But is this level of micromanagement what the average Facebook user really wants? Fantasy Moguls seems to think not.

In this app, players start out with only one key decision – to select a defensive roster or offensive roster. Immediately afterwards, they are prompted to play a match, with 11 random players chosen from the previously chosen roster of 18. Taking only a few seconds, users watch as the game plays out, highlighting which players are scoring and determining who wins based on various factors (to be mentioned later).

This is the core of game play, and a limited number of matches, dubbed “fixtures,” can be played each day. As this pool is used up, players have the opportunity to earn match spots back by playing a limited number of training matches with their Facebook friends to recharge them. As an added social element, friends that play Galacticos Football with you add to the number of friendly fixtures you can play — you pit your star team against theirs.

Obviously, all of these different matches must have a more enduring point, and that is funds and reputation. For each match won, players will not only level (as with just about every Facebook game), but also earn both “Funds” and “Reputation Points.” Funds are fairly self explanatory but they allow the user to pay for the addition of new players for their roster, while reputation attracts them. What new players, you ask?

This is where one of the cooler elements of this soccer app comes into play. The players on one’s roster aren’t Facebook friends, but goalkeepers, defensemen, midfielders, and forwards from four of Europe’s football leagues including Bundesliga, Serie A, La Liga, and the English Premier League. Reputation attracts these players, so the more you play, and the more you win, the better players from these leagues will appear and want to join your team.

In order to progress, players are tasked with dropping their older, and generally weaker, players for these stronger ones. In fact, this is one of the key elements that plays into how the game determines which team wins a match. Granted, it’s not as social as having your friends play for you, but as a fantasy soccer game, it is a bit more gratifying.

Socially, however, friends do still play a role in how often a user wins. Not only can you show off to them what trophies you’ve won from digital version of European tournaments (i.e. The Bayer Cup from Germany), but they also can provide “fan support” that looks to be based on how many people play the game with you. This is combined with the quality of players, whether or not your match is dubbed a home game, how you set up your team’s formation (i.e. four forwards, three midfielders, and three defenders), and a little bit of randomness to formulate the previously mentioned factors that determine the victor in any match-up.

Despite how simple Galacticos Football seems at the surface, there certainly is a great deal going on behind the scenes. It doesn’t have the level of management that other fantasy manager sports games have had in the past, but considering that they have never really taken off, some new approaches are probably warranted. That said, this game certainly takes the more fantastic approach of emulating the, well, fantasy of coaching “real” soccer stars and playing them in “real” European tournaments. The app is shy of 200,000 monthly active users, but its quality — and its steady growth rate — suggest that we’ll see higher numbers soon.

Now, we have seen basketball games. We have seen basketball games on social networks. We have even seen coaching and management games on social networks. But now we’ve just seen a basketball management game that is a social network (well, a quasi one, at least). Okay, so perhaps Irondomain.com isn’t as robust as something like Facebook, MySpace, or hi5 but it does a highly focused niche for basketball fans that comes with many of the social features we have come to know and love.

Players can create profiles, add friends, create clubs (groups essentially), bookmark, view ladders, share what they are doing, and a myriad of other things. The game differentiates itself by offering a very full list of features for team management.

When the player signs up they are granted an arena, a budget, and a starting team. Conveniently, there is a fairly non-intrusive help window that takes you through what you should do step by step.

Players start by upgrading their home arena for more seats and thus larger spending budgets. Afterward, it’s on to adjusting team lineups, training, and individual player stats.

The help window is both a blessing and a curse. It tells the user how to increase their players’ statistics, but the problem is that it never goes away until you have done so with all players. Why is this a big deal? Because the game asks you to confirm every… single… point. Then it has to refresh the page, leaving the user to wait an obnoxious amount of time before moving on. After one player, it became a task in clicking around the site and figuring out what else there was to do (since the help still continues to say “upgrade a second player”).

As it turns out, the matches are where all these upgrade points come from, and by the looks of things, they run in a fairly realistic fashion. Each team is part of a league. As such, league matches are only played twice a week. If you are looking for further action, however, you can also play weekly friendly matches, regional matches, and international cups (some of which will have prizes).

Since Irondomain is a manager type of game, players are only able to set up various tactics on how their team should play (up to eight) in each match, and cannot play themselves. Some tactical examples include man-to-man defense, zone defense, and pick-and-roll.

Another interesting feature was the ability to find and recruit new players and coaches by sending out scouts. Frankly, it is really just a glorified search engine in which the user puts in the criteria they are looking for and a scout goes out for, literally, a few days to “search” for such NPC players. However, when compounded with the ability to buy and trade players, such a feature could prove a prudent virtual business method.

Overall, Irondomain is an interesting idea and currently garners over 100,000 users with an average daily of over 2000. Curiously, the developer states that they are getting a dramatic number of users from Southeast Asia and South America; over 50,000 to be more exact. Perhaps, this is due, in part, to a second soccer manager game that is offered to the best basketball managers. Soccer is, after all, the most popular international sport. Regardless of the reason, these numbers aren‘t too shabby, and based on them, Irondomain predicts that they will reach 1 million users within the next year.

Social developer Challenge Games is known for producing relatively deep yet uncomplicated games. Ranging from medieval politics sto satirical corporations, it has been able to make something interesting out of genres one might otherwise see as oversaturated. The same is true for an older Facebook game of the company’s, GridIron Live. This football game is one not akin to sports titles like Madden Football, but instead puts the player on the sidelines as the head coach.

As more big gaming companies look to make existing titles social, here’s our review of what this game does well — and not so well — in trying to pair social gaming with a more traditional genre.

Players start out by creating their own unique team, its home town, logo, and colors. Immediately after, the user is able to jump in and start playing a game against the computer (with the option to play live opponents afterwards). Surprisingly, the game turned out easy to pick up on. Once it’s time for kickoff, players will be presented with a screen displaying the current formations their team can make and the subsequent plays that may follow. After selecting a play, its just a matter of observation, as your team executes the play until the down is complete. This process repeats itself until the game is finished.

Thankfully, if you do have to go, or get bored, you can always automatically simulate the remainder of the game. Moreover, the success of your team is directly dependant on the strategies being used (though this is lost if you simulate the whole game) as well as the skills of the virtual athletes involved.

To be clear, the game does not always take place on the field. Once out of the stadium, users can view stats, complete challenges (specific games), or visit the marketplace. Using the tokens they earn with each game, players can then purchase new plays, more energy, or new players. Of course, if they don’t have enough tokens, they can always opt to buy more using real cash.

Suffice to say, GridIron Live is a most interesting premise, but has not exactly been growing very quickly over the past 30 days. Currently, it is reported at having, just shy, of 150,000 monthly active users. There are a number of reasons that could attribute to the slow growth, but there three in particular that come to mind.

The fact that the game is 3D within Flash is a good idea, but the visuals are reminiscent of the original PlayStation. Quite frankly, it doesn’t look too good. Another notable issue is that the difference between plays didn’t feel very noticeable. Perhaps it was just a lack of playbook knowledge, but often times random selection of plays would work just as well as intelligible choices. It felt like the players’ individual skill sets played more of a role than anything else.

Another reason that the growth could be low ties in slightly with the visuals as well as the app’s concept as well. GridIron Live looks and feels like a real game. A PlayStation game, yes, but a game all the same, which is often intimidating to a large portion of social players because they do not see themselves as “gamers.” By that same token, what portion of social players are avid football fans? Traditionally, there have not been very many social football games that have done very well in the past, or at least no where near the degree of the Top 25 Facebook Games. Honestly, that leads to a conclusion that users that would play such a game are either (a) an extreme minority or (b) just not interested.