Inside Social Games

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.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to speak on “The State of the Social Gaming Industry” at GDC in San Francisco. It was awesome to see the level of excitement in social gaming from developers and entrepreneurs across the gaming industry – much more than last year. Lots of people are now working on “social” projects, and larger players are preparing to throw a lot more weight in this direction over the coming year.

For those interested in checking out the slides, they are embedded below.

Topics covered: Social games, Virtual goods, Facebook, Zynga, Playfish, Playdom, PayPal, MySpace, Twitter, Social networks, Gaming portals, Payments, Monetization, Mobile, Offers

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.

April 20 | San Francisco

As we recently announced, Inside Social Apps 2010, our first conference on the future of monetization on social platforms, is happening April 20th in San Francisco, one day before Facebook’s official “f8″ event. We’re excited to see all of the developers and entrepreneurs from around the world that are planning to attend!

In addition to the 24 confirmed speakers at Inside Social Apps 2010, including executives from all the largest developers on the Facebook Platform, we’re very excited to announce three more speakers today: Season Xu, Co-founder and COO at Five Minutes (makers of Happy Farm), Dave Etling, VP Product Development at InComm, and Jeremy Liew, Managing Director at Lightspeed Venture Partners. They will be joining our full list of speakers listed below.

• Atul Bagga, VP Equity Research, Games, ThinkEquity
• Adam Caplan, VP Virtual Currency, Super Rewards / Adknowledge
  
• Renata Dionello, Chief of Staff to the CEO, eBay, and former Director of Consumer Business Development, PayPal
• Eric Eldon, Editor, Inside Facebook & Inside Social Games
• Dave Etling, VP Product Development, InComm
  
• George Garrick, CEO, Offerpal Media
• Vikas Gupta, CEO, Jambool
• Sebastien de Halleux, Founder and COO, Playfish, and VP Business Development & Strategic Partnerships, EA Interactive
• Ron Hirson, Co-founder and SVP Product, Boku
• Nick Lawler, Managing Director, Maverick Capital
• Keith Lee, Co-founder and CEO, Booyah
• Jeremy Liew, Managing Director, Lightspeed Venture Partners
  
• Vish Makhijani, COO, Zynga
• David Marcus, CEO, Zong
• Lisa Marino, CRO, RockYou
  
• Dave McClure, Investor, Founders Fund Angel and fbFund Incubator
• Rex Ng, Co-founder and CEO, 6waves
• Jason Oberfest, VP Social Applications, ngmoco
• Mark Pincus, Founder and CEO, Zynga
• Shervin Pishevar, Founder and Executive Chairman, SGN
• John Pleasants, CEO, Playdom
• Keith Rabois, VP Strategy and Business Development, Slide
• Peter Relan, Executive Chairman, CrowdStar
• Justin Smith, Founder, Inside Network
• Kavin Stewart, CEO, Lolapps
• Jay Weintraub, Founder, LeadsCon
• Season Xu, Co-founder and COO, Five Minutes

More speakers and a full agenda will be announced shortly.

Finally, a limited set of “early admission” tickets is now available through Friday at a special price of $299. This price will change after Friday, and space will be limited, so we encourage you to register now.

Inside Social Apps 2010 – April 20th in San Francisco

Three years after the Facebook Platform launched in 2007, what started out as sheep throwing and vampire biting has quickly become a profitable billion-dollar industry. Today, social games monetizing through virtual goods have quickly become one of the hottest sectors of technology and entertainment, both in the US and around the world. Where are social apps going, and who is leading the way?

Inside Network is proud to announce our first conference on the future of monetization on social platforms: Inside Social Apps 2010, happening April 20th in San Francisco, is bringing together the world’s leading entrepreneurs all in one place to discuss the future of social applications and games monetizing through virtual goods.

This will be an in-depth one day event geared toward developers on Facebook, MySpace, and the iPhone, senior executives, and investors. At Inside Social Apps 2010, founders and CEOs of the top social gaming, mobile social gaming, payments, and virtual goods infrastructure companies will be tackling the key issues facing the industry. We’re hosting it one day before Facebook’s “f8″ event in San Francisco, so this will be an excellent opportunity to learn about the key issues facing the future of the Facebook Platform and beyond before Facebook’s official event.

Register Now

A limited set of “early admission” tickets is available through Friday at a special price of $299. This price will change after Friday, and space will be very limited, so we encourage you to register early.

From all of us at Inside Network, we hope to see you on April 20th in San Francisco!

FarmVille simply cannot be stopped. That’s the conclusion we draw in this week’s AppData list of the top 20 fastest-growing games on Facebook by growth in monthly average users, in which FarmVille takes the top spot with 1,794,772 new players.

We speculated about FarmVille’s (repeatedly) rising star last week, when the game muscled its way into the number two spot. You see, FarmVille is so large that it can very easily appear on our top 20 lists by accident. But the game has appeared week after week of late, and slowly crept up the rankings. Last week we thought it might have started growing again; this week we’re sure.

Read our post from last Monday for more speculation, but the basic idea is that FarmVille has become a cultural juggernaut that’s drawing users to Facebook — rather than vice versa. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Zynga has a stable of hits that allow for some serious cross-advertising — also see Texas HoldEm Poker, Mafia Wars and Café World below:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	FarmVille	81,125,786	+1,794,772	+2.21
2.	SuperPoke! Pets	2,369,851	+922,187	+38.91
3.	My City Life	2,544,065	+910,267	+35.78
4.	SPP Ranch!	1,330,603	+729,983	+54.86
5.	Zoo World	20,158,073	+658,863	+3.27
6.	MindJolt Games	17,800,661	+651,107	+3.66
7.	Gangster City	2,151,345	+505,453	+23.49
8.	Texas HoldEm Poker	26,264,995	+431,374	+1.64
9.	Send Glitter!	688,223	+382,124	+55.52
10.	Ninja Saga	3,010,808	+380,118	+12.63
11.	Top Fish	982,586	+376,059	+38.27
12.	Restaurant City	14,726,955	+340,361	+2.31
13.	My Town	2,760,436	+308,735	+11.18
14.	PetVille	18,980,338	+297,809	+1.57
15.	Bejeweled Blitz	9,998,905	+291,483	+2.92
16.	開心農場 2	935,441	+254,698	+27.23
17.	UNO™	3,388,939	+245,120	+7.23
18.	Mafia Wars	25,303,930	+221,888	+0.88
19.	Capitales del mundo!	220,731	+220,690	+99.98
20.	Café World	30,592,937	+219,383	+0.72

Slide has been appearing on yet another of our lists, Friday’s top emerging games, with several of its titles. Now they’ve broken out to some serious growth: SuperPoke! Pets, SPP Ranch! and Top Fish are all by Slide, and have collectively claimed over two million new players in the past week.

Not listed here, Slide FunSpace also got a big boost this week to end up at number one on our Inside Facebook list. You can see the effect of all this growth on the company’s overall MAU below.

At number three, we’ve got My City Life, a city builder similar to My Town, at number thirteen. We wrote about both last week and particularly pointed out My Town, but now it seems that its rival is pulling ahead in growth.

Zoo World, the RockYou! game that was dominating every week along with its partner app Birthday Cards, has dropped down in the rankings with slowing growth. You can’t see it above, but Birthday Cards is now number 23 with a marginal gain of 0.37 percent.

The last game to take a close look at here is Gangster City. This Playfish game (now Electronic Arts) was released as a prettier competitor to Mafia Wars. Its growth has been steady, but not mind-blowing — if this game is going to have a breakout moment, it’s yet to come.

FarmVille Wins Major Award – In only a few years, social games have changed the video game industry as a whole. However, now that change has been officially recognized as this past week hosted the Interactive Achievement Awards in Las Vegas. At the event, the first-ever award for excellence in social gaming was given out by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences. The winner was Zynga’s ever popular FarmVille who was granted the title of social game of the year. Currently, the social game has over 80 million monthly active users.

Vegas, the Dating Market, and Making Serious Business a Success — Siqi Chen talks about founding and growing his social gaming company, coming up with the idea behind its formative social game, “Friends for Sale,” moving to Silicon Valley, and much more in this in-depth interview with Kim Ngo of Intimate Math. Chen’s company sold to Zynga for an undisclosed amount in a deal announced last week — his story includes a lot of good advice for entrepreneurs building Facebook games. Check out the video below for more:

World of Warcraft Partially Resumes in China – Having been in censorship battles for over a year, NetEase has obtained a license to operate World of Warcraft in China; the last expansion, anyway. While The Burning Crusade is now reactivated in the country, word on the most recent expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, has yet to be heard.

Pandaren Pet Sales Raise $1.1 Million for the Make-A-Wish Foundation – In other Warcraft related news, Blizzard’s first major use of virtual goods, a pair of digital pets for World of Warcraft, raised a nice bit of money for a good cause. Of the two pets, the Pandaren Monk, had 50% of its sales donated to the Make-A-Wish Foundation between November and December of last year. The benevolent little critter’s sales led to a donation of over $1.1 million to the charity.

Apple Gets Strict on Sexual Content – While sex does sell, it would seem like it’s going to sell a little bit less often in the App Store. According to reports from TechCrunch earlier this week, a number of sexually oriented applications have been removed from iTunes completely. Based on an email to Jon Atherton, the developer of Wobble iBoobs, his app (and, likely, many others) was removed due to “overtly sexual content.” Oddly enough, some similar apps, such as Sexy Girls Uncovered, still work, leaving the that “overtly sexual” line a bit obscure.

Rixty Announces 13 & Under Payment Service – Payment service provider Rixty says it can now safely and anonymously provide payment services for children under the age of 13. In adherence to the Children’s Online Privacy and Protection Act (COPPA) and with the help of Coinstar, Rixty users under 13 can sign up without having to give out any personally identifiable information. All that is required is a username, password, birth date, gender, zip code, and a parent’s email address. Upon the latter’s entering, the parent will receive immediate notification with the options to delete the account or to be notified whenever the child tries to make a purchase.

Ultimate Game Card Expands – Popular prepaid card, the Ultimate Game Card (UGC), from PlaySpan is expanding. Earlier in the week, the card was made available in the regions of Taiwan, South Africa, Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. With the expansion, the UGC is now available in over 70,000 retail locations around the world and can be used to purchase virtual goods and premium services in over 300 online games, and over 700 social, Facebook and MySpace games.

Topps Forgives Mom With One Major League Virtual Good (But Don’t Keep This One Virtual) - With the slogan, “We’re giving you back the cards your mom threw out,” trading card company Topps announced its Million Card Giveaway. For every sixth pack of Topps trading cards, there will be special cards with a nine-digit code redeemable at toppsmillion.com. The digital code will then reveal either an ordinary card from last year, or a vintage 1952 card that can be delivered, kept in online Topps accounts to trade, or used in sweepstakes.

Of course, of all the possible cards to get, the company states there are at least three Mickey Mantle rookie cards up for grabs.

Android Gets Flash Support - The Android has, unfortunately, taken a back seat to the iPhone in times past; especially in the realm of gaming. However, expect some changes in the future in how developers create their mobile Android games and apps as Adobe officially announced at the Mobile World Congress that both Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR are now supported on Android.

Richard Garriot Launches Portalarium – Creator of the Ultima game series, game designer Richard Garriot has launched a new social games company by the name of Portalarium. By the looks of things, the company will be creating a social games platform that will support games of higher quality than the current Flash standard and will make use of a plugin called the “Portalarium Player.” Already, the company is getting under way with the development of a social suite of casino games, starting with Sweet @$! Poker.

Gas Powered Games Gives Behind-the-Scenes Looks – Game designer Chris Taylor announced the latest game coming out of studio Gas Powered Games this week. The new real time strategy game will be dubbed Kings and Castles will be coming out on the PC and “next-gen consoles,” but the real treat for fans is that Taylor will be making use of kingsandcastles.com, Twitter @DeathBot9, and Facebook let show the development of the title until its release.

Although it has millions of users around the world, social gaming leader Zynga has so far only had independent contractors abroad, and they’ve been doing customer service. But now the first international Zynga office is opening, and in Bangalore, India.

The company says one reason is to try to establish more of a presence with Indian internet users. There are only 6.3 million monthly active users on Facebook in the country, according to our latest Global Monitor report; although tens of millions more of India’s 81 million internet users are on Google’s Orkut, Zynga does not have games on it, that we know of. Still, enough Indians are playing Zynga games on Facebook that, anecdotally, some quite vocally convinced Zynga to offer the Indian national flag as a virtual good in Facebook hit game FarmVille.

The other reason for the office is obviously to recruit talented software engineers. “Zynga India is looking to recruit computer scientists and engineers who are experienced in building scalable infrastructure,” the announcement press release says.

Zynga has been trying to aggressively hire in the US for many months, snatching people out of other Silicon Valley companies. Some of the $180 million it raised last fall is going towards paying employees Beyond its sprawling San Francisco headquarters, it has offices in Los Angeles, Baltimore and further down in the valley, in Los Gatos and Sunnyvale.

On the one hand, this could be a sign that Zynga is looking to hire out of India’s skilled but less expensive labor pool. However, the US labor market for high-end software engineers is extremely tight, despite the economy, as most any technology company will tell you. Many of the best engineers are in countries like China and India, not the US; they either don’t want to move here or they can’t, because the US’s overly restrictive skilled labor immigration rules prevent them.

Other social gaming companies have offices around the world and we expect Zynga to continue expanding abroad, as well.

World of Warcraft Used to Protest Chinese Game Censorship – While it is not unusual for popular games to have fan made movies made using their in-game resources (dubbed machinima), a recent video called “War of Internet Addition” has come about that is both entertaining and a bit political. Using visuals and avatars from World of Warcraft, the 64 minute video almost directly represents the ever increasing Chinese restrictions of the web in a very satirical fashion.

The Chinese version can be found at Youku’s Buzz blog. English subtitles can be found in seven parts on YouTube: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

MyTown Hits 1 Million Users – Though it was one of the most recent of the location-based titles to appear on the iPhone, the social title, Booyah’s MyTown has passed 1 million registered users before competing location games Foursquare and Gowalla. Playing the game means checking in at real world locals, but while Foursquare and Gowalla encourage check-ins with achievements and badges, MyTown focuses on a more Monopoly-like approach, allowing people to actually “buy” locations” and earn money based on who checks in there.

Gavin Newsom Claims Social Gaming Companies Will Help Economy – San Fransisco Mayor, Gavin Newsom says, in a report from ABC, that the city is on its way to recovery, with the creation of more jobs and better economic conditions coming from a more diversified collection of industries — especially social gaming. In fact, Newsom specifically mentions social gaming companies with offices in San Francisco, including Zynga, Playdom, and Playfish.

City of Eternals Sees Strong Starting Metrics – Ohai’s Facebook empowered MMO, City of Eternals looked impressive from the start, but initial metrics are showing just how many are agreeing with that assessment. Within the first 30 days, players that spend money on virtual goods have spent an average of $16.50, and that, of all players, an average of 65 minutes is spent, a day, playing the blood-sucking title with the 10,000 most active playing for 87 minutes.

Although the company hasn’t released overall user traffic numbers, it says 1% of active users play for seven hours a day (note that the game logs you off after 20 minutes of inactivity) and 42% play for multiple sessions a day. 60% of active users returning to play within seven days. Furthermore, of all these users, 60% are male and 40% female with 70% of the games most active members being women.

[via VentureBeat]

Bejeweled Turns 10 – PopCap’s ever popular casual game, Bejeweled has sold over 50 million units, making it one of the top selling video games of all time. In fact, the company states that a copy is sold ever 4.3 seconds. In order to celebrate, PopCap will be hosting its first-ever community-wide competition for it’s one minute, Facebook version, Bejeweled Bitz. The contest is called “Show Your Bejeweled Love” and will feature a myriad of promotional activities and, more importantly, rewards for the best Bejeweled Blitz players. The contest and details will launch next month at Bejeweled.com.

Apple Getting Nicer? - Anyone following or dealing with the Apple submission process for apps, knows how unhappy a great many developers became with the company last year. However, that was 2009 and in the new decade, it looks like Apple is trying to make amends with new and improved services for its application developers. Not only did submissions become faster earlier this year, but the company is now issuing surveys asking a myriad of questions in the hopes of improving their services before the next big boom for the Apple’s mobile platforms comes again (iPad anyone?).

[via TechCrunch]

Mochi Media Partners with USA Network- Earlier in the week, Mochi Media announced its new partnership with USA Networks. Along with the announcement came a week of Valentine’s Day promotions as a celebratory event. Obviously, this team up also means USA’s Character Arcade will integrate all of Mochi’s titles, and to that end, players that play the featured game, Mochi’s “Twin Shots 2: Good and Evil” will be registered to win a Wii Starter Bundle or $25 Best Buy gift cards. The winners will be announced Sunday at 11:59 pm.

Apple Patents a 3D Virtual Apple Store – In other Apple news, the company recently made a big win as it was approved the patent for a 3D virtual store. The concept is to create the more personalized and living feel of shopping at a brick and mortar location, but still have all the benefits that come from everyday online shopping (searches, always open, etc.). The store would be a virtual world with icons representing time of day and color schemes/decor representing the seasons indoors. Curiously, the patent also covers details such as outdoor lighting and settings to reflect time and seasons as well.

[image via Patently Apple]

Electronic Arts Says Digital Business Will Reach $750 Million in Revenue – Earlier this week, Electronic Arts proclaimed that the gaming giant’s digital business was “growing” and is “profitable.” It projected its digital business to reach around $750 million in revenue by next year; a substantial growth over the $575 million this year. Executives say that this is currently the most profitable portion of the company, and they do not expect much growth in regards to their traditional games (i.e. console box sales). Beyond its own online games, it is one of the top mobile developers, holding seven of the top iPhone apps), and big on Facebook via the acquisition of Playfish last fall (granting two top 10 Facebook games). Expect more to come online games to come from the company soon, like Madden Football for Facebook.

Mixpanel Raises Funding – Analytics company Mixpanel is active on and off Facebook, with clients including Kiva, HotorNot, Slide and UserVoice. It has now raised $500,000 in angel funding from PayPal cofounder and Slide founder Max Levchin and Bebo cofounder Michael Birch. For more on the company, check out the recent Inside Facebook guest post on social gaming metrics from cofounder Suhail Doshi.

It’s that time again. No, no, not Valentine’s Day… well, sort of. It’s another holiday, so time to see what social gaming companies are doing for occasion. In the past, we have covered some themed virtual goods offered by developers such as Playfish and Zynga — here’s what they’re doing, plus many others.

Having recently made use of the Super Bowl to sell some digital items, Zynga has gone all out for Valentine’s with significant amounts of items found in almost all of their titles.

To name just a few, the top apps of FarmVille, FishVille, PetVille, Café World, and even Mafia Wars (you can hire a hit squad of cupids – don’t ask) offer a myriad of loving items for its players. For the #1 Facebook app, FarmVille, Valentine’s goods are limited and consist of a decent mix of items costing virtual currency (versus in-game currency), with significant functionality included. The best example would be an “Unwither Ring” which would protect your crops from ever dying. Ever. Evidently, diamonds aren’t the only things that are forever.

The other Zynga apps were all fairly standard, as each of the mentioned titles offered goods that merely went with the holiday them. However, two elements worth noting came from Café World and PetVille respectively. The simpler one is a Valentine’s mystery box for the cost of 10 Café Cash (Café World’s virtual currency) that contains random, discounted Valentine’s items. More interesting, however, came with a social emphasis in PetVille.

If anyone remembers getting valentines in grade school all those years ago, this might seem familiar. PetVille actually has a sort of contest called “How Loveable Are You?” In a nutshell, the contest emphasizes gifting as players increase a “Love-O-Meter” from “Cold Fish” to “Ultimate Valentine” by receiving Valentine gifts such as smooches, candy hearts, and live roses in game. Come February 14th, players will win a “Deluxe Mystery Prize” based on their meter.

Playfish is also incorporating virtual goods into some of its applications as well, including Restaurant City, Country Story, and Pet Society. For the most part, these are merely virtual goods meant for decorative purposes, and most items only cost in-game currency. In fact, the only notable items that cost the buyable virtual currency are the stoves and refrigerators from Restaurant City that increase cooking and drink serving speed by 8%.

Another interesting use comes from Country Story where players can find and send each other hearts in a promotion called “Spread the Love.” For each heart they gift, they get one in return, and it is actually used as a temporary currency to buy valentine’s items instead of using in-game coins or the virtual currency, Playfish Cash. As an example, a porcupine cupid costs 500 coins or seven hearts. Furthermore, players are also able to acquire a limited edition Valentine’s tree that requires limited edition heart spirits (that can randomly drop from trees until the 24th) and other random tree spirits, that are not limited, to buy (all spirits are purchasable through virtual currency).

So who else is feeling the love this month? Well, we can’t cover everyone, but a few others that we came across also comes from CrowdStar, RockYou!, Tall Tree Games, and even a whole other network, hi5.

In the case of the games, it is mostly just themed items, but both Happy Aquarium and Fish World offer very amusing holiday fish most players will get a kick out of (i.e. kissing fish). However, most of the CrowdStar fish cost virtual currency, while Tall Tree’s fish mostly only cost in-game coins. Nonetheless, Happy Aquarium does have an amusing extra, as its Valentine’s fish can randomly appear, asking the player to find it a valentine via publishing it to your feed.

Notable from RockYou is the first couple seconds after loading up Zoo World. Almost immediately, players are prompted with an interesting special that allows them to purchase, for $1.00, a “Pair of Lovebirds.” For those that play the game, these are dubbed “Ultra Rare” animals and for each purchase, the buyer earns two Wildlife Points – the game’s virtual currency.

In regards the social entertainment site, hi5, the network is offering “Valentines-themed Super Gifs” for its users. According to hi5 they come in 10 different designs and include a “special skinning of the recipient’s home page in Valentines colors,” and cost between 320 and 400 hi5 Coins (the site’s virtual currency). Furthermore, the site is allowing its members to send customizable (and personalized, via photos) e-cards called BlastCards to their digital valentines and will cost anywhere from 37 to 75 hi5 Coins.

Anecdotally, it seems like Valentine’s Day has prompted even more themed virtual goods than Christmas did a couple months ago. Developers appear to be capitalizing on holidays more and more, because they can provide unique items to further engage users — and get them buying virtual goods.