Loot Drop COO and game designer Brenda Garno Brathwaite calls cloning “disgusting,” revealing her company’s first-hand experience with the practice.

“We had a meeting with a publisher and a game designer discussed an idea for a game,” Brathwaite said during the Trends in Social Gaming panel at Inside Social Apps conference. “The publisher came back next week and said they’d be making the game and they might need us to consult on it. That game had been cloned before a line of code had even been written.”

Brathwaite spoke frankly, calling out the social games industry for its “fast-follow” mentality. ”In the traditional space, a great game would come out and you would say ‘how can we make a game that good and improve on that?’ What we have now is ‘how can we change the narrative and make the same game?’ That’s like putting out the Peaches of Wrath rather than the Grapes of Wrath. In any other medium it would be considered a tremendous fail and I think it’s because the space is about monetization and not about creativity,” she said.

The issue of cloning in the social and mobile games space has come up numerous times in the news recently. Triple Town developer Spry Fox is suing 6waves Lolapps over the similarities between its game and 6waves’ Yeti Town, and San Diego-based NimbleBit criticized Zynga for its upcoming game Dream Heights, pointing out numerous similarities between the two titles. During EA’s third quarter earnings call the company was reluctant to reveal details about its upcoming slate of social games, citing the need to protect its intellectual property.

You can read our recap of the Trends in Social Gaming panel here.

The Inside Network Job Board is dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities across social and mobile application platforms.

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We’re at the San Francisco Design center, blogging Inside Network’s third annual Inside Social Apps conference.

The second panel of the day is “Trends in Social Gaming”. Joining moderator AJ Glasser on stage is Loot Drop’s COO and game designer Brenda Garno Brathwaite, Zynga Dallas’ creative director Bill Jackson, Gaia Interactive’s CEO Mike Sego and King.com’s co-founder and chief creative officer Sebastian Knutsson. The following is a paraphrased transcript of the discussion.

AJ: I wanted to talk about the evolution of social games. Are they going to mimic the path of traditional games?

Bill: I come from that sector — for me it’s not a separate path, it’s the same path and one continuum. Atari, Nintendo and PCs all brought in larger audiences. I think the mission in my mind is to make the audience larger and make room for play.

Mike: I think the evolution of social games has been in an interesting path. It’s been very different from the evolution of console games. Games that evolve with better graphics are missing the point, I think the point of social and mobile is to expand the audience and bring in new players. I think it there is room for a wider variety of games. Three developers working out of a garage can open up a new segment on social and mobile and invent a new genre of game.

Brenda: I do see a trend that the social space is actually following the development path of the traditional games industry. The traditional games industry got very “genre-fied” and the social game space is following that. We’re getting a culture of fast-follow where we take things and copy it and there’s a lack of innovation.

AJ:  King.com has been very good at innovating on older games like Snood and Puzzle Bobble and making it into a totally different game. Can you tell us about your development process?

Sebastian: Our focus as has been to stay with our core demographic and make games that are easy to play and get into. Even though people are asking for more advanced graphics, the strength is social. People want to play with their friends.

AJ: What do you see as the future use of friends in social games? Will it just be leader boards?

Sebastian: I think the focus will be on cooperative and collaborative gaming, allowing people to hook up with other players, not just their friends.

Brenda: I think playing with your friends is just a bribery function right now. In the game I’m working on I very deliberately didn’t want to do that. I wanted to make sure that having it there felt like a natural and intrinsic part of gameplay for both casual and hardcore players. That was probably one of the most important features in the design.

AJ: One of the trends that we’ve seen is combat – what impact do you think real-time competitive play will have on social games?

Bill: I think that’s a tool and the game needs to demand that tool to use it well. I think there’s an opportunity in the space for synchronous play. So far we haven’t had a giant hit but I don’t think there’s a reason there couldn’t be. I’m excited to expand on asynchronous play because I think that’s one space where social games have innovated.

Mike: I think Facebook and the web is very successful as an asynchronous platform. It’s a platform where I can update what I did three hours ago and get feedback on it. I think the success of Words With Friends is based off how well it fits with Facebook’s usage habits. That said there’s a lot of people playing games on Facebook and people are interested in playing synchronous combat games. Facebook does compete with other platforms, and when you play a game on Facebook you’re not playing on another a platform. For synchronous play to be a hit, there needs to be a game were you can bring in players that wouldn’t play a real-time combat game and bring them into that experience, even if they’re not the type to play a game for two hours on a console.

AJ: When we talk about branching out the different genres of social games, where do you see the opportunities to go into new territory and bring in new users?

Brenda: I see Facebook as one part of a whole. My game may be on Facebook, iOS and PC, but it needs to work together for the greatest monetization. If the game is fun you’ll get money. If you have to bribe or use tricks you’ll break the game. The most social game I’ve ever played is Minecraft. That game doesn’t have a marketing budget but it’s a wonderfully social game and I’m happy to give that guy money regularly.

Bill: As a game developer I think that fun is something you need to aspire to, but it’s not everything — for example some players have limited time and you need to give players a way to keep up with their friends if they’re limited on time. That means there are other items like accelerators that people will covet, but fun is the core.

Brenda: You can have fun or pay to have fun faster.

Mike: I think what monetizes is what people feel strongly about — creating an emotional experience. Size is also what monetizes. There’s a much wider variety of what monetizes on Facebook now. If you looked at the top three games last year it was CityVille, FarmVille and maybe poker and the other games were following along those lines and trying to make the same kinds of game. Today there’s a much broader variety of games that can all monetize in different ways and monetize thorough different audiences.

AJ: When you’re testing your games, how do you know when you’ve hit that sweet spot of “fun?”

Bill: I follow a combination of design and metrics. When we’re designing a game we start with design and then you start collaborating with players to improve the game. It’s a combination of feedback, the data that backs up that feedback and working from that feedback.

Sebastian: We find the real issue is hitting the sweet spot in the difficulty curve. If it’s too easy or too hard they won’t come back or they’ll get frustrated. Users tend to prefer shorter playtimes so we err on that side.

AJ: Bill — was there anythigng that you changed or fixed in the first 14 days of CastleVille being live?

Bill: There’s definitely issues with difficulty curves. In Castleville we had issues with balance and crafting and getting that right. In this discussion we talked about fun, but these are social games and so it’s not just a conversation, but that it will scale when it gets to be truly social and how players will interact together. How is it that you’re engaged as a single player and how are you engaged as a community? I think people will love a game world and the environment when they’re engaged in a larger community.

Mike: I think that goes back to user feedback and that’s not just user feedback that comes to you but that users share with each other and the meta community that springs up. I think if people both love your game and hate your game it means you tapped into an emotional response.

Brenda: I don’t think we’ve tapped into feeling that users get from games like World of Warcraft where you will feel bad if you don’t log in and do something at 10 pm every night because you’ll be letting your guild down. Social games haven’t done that yet.

AJ: How do you feel about mobile? How do you approach bringing a game to mobile?

Sebastian: We’ve focused on keeping the game the same on each platform. Our games are simple and it fits us very well to create cross platform games.

Bill: I also think it depends on the type of game and what’s right for the platform. I do see mobile as a way to keep in touch with a comfort zone of what you’ve established. Our express apps have been very popular.

AJ: My last question is a difficult one that Brenda has agreed to take. What about what could harm the social game space? What about cloning?

Brenda: Cloning is a disgusting subject. The technology isn’t a challenge. You can license an engine and outsource the art and develop a game in two months. What matters now is the idea. Inside of Loot Drop we had a meeting with a publisher and a game designer discussed an idea for a game and the publisher came back next week and said they’d be making the game and they might need us to consult on it. That game had been cloned before a line of code had even been written. I’d never heard the term fast-follow until I came into the social games industry. We as game developers need to be phenomenally protective of our games — in the traditional space, a great game would come out and you would say “how can we make a game that good and improve on that?” What we have now is “how can we change the narrative and make the same game?” That’s like putting out the Peaches of Wrath rather than the Grapes of Wrath. In any other medium it would be considered a tremendous fail and I think its because the space is about monetization and not about creativity. I think that could hurt innovation because developers may not come into this space and may choose to stay in console development. I think its very unfortunate. As we see bigger companies come in, they’ll have money to fight the clone wars that smaller developers may not be able to do.

Facebook’s top developers say the company’s payments infrastructure and virtual currency Credits are converting fewer paying users than they had hoped a year ago.

Facebook made it mandatory for developers to use its payments platform in canvas games in July. That meant developers on the platform had to start handing over a 30 percent revenue share to the company, mirroring a similar split on Apple’s iOS. The hope was that a single, universal currency would make it more frictionless for users to start paying for virtual goods.

“We thought that conversions would go up and be around 15 or 20 percent,” said Kevin Chou, the chief executive of Kabam, a social gaming company that targets a more hardcore demographic, at the Inside Social Apps conference in San Francisco. “But it turned out to be around 5 to 10 percent, meaning that we’re taking a 20 percent net tax.”

For comparison, Facebook’s biggest developer, Zynga, revealed in its prospectus that it had 3.4 million unique payers during the third quarter of last year. That’s out of 152 monthly unique users in the same time period, suggesting a 2.2 percent conversion rate. Zynga attracts a much larger, more casual audience, so we’d expect to see a lower conversion rate compared to Kabam.

Anil Dharni, who co-founded Funzio, which has had hits on iOS and Facebook like Crime City, said the move to Credits ended up being roughly even for the company.

“Facebook credits is a wash for us,” he said. “It increased the conversion rate but we actually saw a gradual decrease in average revenue per paying user. It’s hard to know why.” Funzio has since moved its focus to iOS, where it has launched Crime City and Modern War, both titles that reached the top of the grossing charts.

Facebook’s payments revenue increased 20 percent quarter-over-quarter going into the end of last year to $188 million, suggesting that the platform may be improving at getting users to pay. However, the company also ran promotions during that time, giving some users an 80 percent discount on Credits. So it’s hard to tell whether those are genuine increases.

If Facebook can’t improve at converting more paying users, it risks losing developer talent to competing platforms like Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. That in turn could mean growth in its payments business will slow or stagnate over the next year. Facebook diversified its business last year to make payments 17 percent of its revenues in the fourth quarter, up from 10 percent the year before. The rest is advertising.

Developers earned $1.4 billion in revenue from transactions on the platform last year, according to Facebook’s filing for an IPO. Apple’s iOS was able to pay developers about half of that or $700 million in a single quarter during the holiday season, according to their most recent earnings call.

“Mobile users are more engaged and they produce higher revenue than our tethered titles on PCs,” said John Spinale, the senior vice president of social games at Disney. He added, “We’re also seeing incredible revenue growth on Android. Android is a little bit unwieldy, but the revenue is meaningful enough that it’s worth the pain of doing.”

One developer, Wooga, which is the biggest social game developer in Europe and trails only Zynga in daily active users, defended Credits. The company’s chief executive Jens Begemann suggested that Facebook takes more flack because it instituted a 30 percent revenue share after several years of not charging developers for earning revenue off its platform. Apple had a split from the beginning.

“We have been on Facebook Credits since Day One. So for us, we don’t see really negative trends,” he said. “I’ve also not heard anyone complain about Apple for their 30 percent revenue share.”

We’re at the San Francisco Design center, blogging Inside Network’s third annual Inside Social Apps conference.

The event kicks off with “Facebook, Apple, Google: Which Platform(s) Hold the Most Opportunity in 2012?” Joining moderator Eric Eldon on stage are wooga founder and CEO Jens Begemann, Kabam founder and CEO Kevin Chou, Funzio and Storm 8 co-founder Anil Dharni and Disney Interactive Senior VP of Social Games John Spinale.

What follows is a paraphrased transcript of the panel.

Eric: Let’s talk about what’s going on with Facebook. Jens, let’s start with you — you’re still focused on Facebook.

Jens: We’re very happy with Facebook. If I look at our four largest games, we had our all time highs last week and some of these games are two years old. We have three times as many users as we had a year ago. If you really focus on the platform and you really focus on having a great user experience. For us, it’s really most organic. Advertising is roughly 5% of new users for us. 40% is viral and 55% is through cross promotion.

Kevin: I think Jens’ experience is a unique. I think looking at the platform for the past few months, advertising costs have gone up 18% and virality is kind of a black box to developers in general. We’re still very excited about Facebook and we continue to work with them, but they’re just starting to learn — they’re really two quarters in with learning how Facebook Credits factors into the developer’s experience. When we implemented Credits, we though conversion would go up 15 to 20%, but I think FB Credits has helped maybe 5%.

John: It is pretty similar for us. At the end of the day, having a unified currency that’s easy for people to understand — I think they made a good choice, but it was a drag on the system. For us it’s less about DAUs and MAUs, it’s more about monetization. While we have a different experience than Jens here where we have to incent our user base to grow, we’ve gotten very good at figuring out how to get people to pay and how to use existing channels.

Anil: There is no clear roadmap on how Facebook is thinking about the viral channels. It’s not clear what channels will exist tomorrow and how they will change today. That’s a growing challenge for us and I’m actually hoping there’s more solidificaiton that they talk about here at ISA. As far as FB Credits, I think it’s a wash out. We saw increased conversion rates, but a gradual decrease in average revenue per paying users. It’s hard to know why, but for games with whales, we see that people just like credit cards and PayPal better than these 99 cent purchases. The percentage of users that are paying are increasing, but total volume has decline.

Jens: We’ve been with Credits since day one, so we can’t really compare. We don’t see negative trends because we can’t compare the pre-Credits revenue to post. I think we should appreciate that the Facebook platform is completely free and only if you make revenue will you do a 30% revenue share and I’ve not heard anybody complain about Apple for their revenue share. It’s apples to apples with Facebook. You get distribution and other things — and only if you’re successful do you give to FB.

Kevin: We’re really excited about mobile. On the web, we have converted more users to paying. On mobile, we’re getting well above the conversion that we see on Facebook. More people have historic credit cards on file, so there’s less friction. But Apple provides less than Facebook.

Eric: Walk us through the transition to mobile. Anil, do you have any regrets?

Anil: The Funzio team has a unique background, we’ve done Facebook and mobile gaming before Funzio. I think our experience depends on what existed at that time. When we were doing Storm 8 our team came mostly from Zynga and we had to look at our DAUs and they were mostly a joke. We had a large portfolio of games to manage. When we launched Funzio, Facebook was the obvious choice. Looking back Facebook was an obvious platform for scale and we can take a game to mobile and google plus. Overall it’s been a good experience. The Funzio team has a unique background, we’ve done Facebook and mobile gaming before Funzio. I think our experience depends on what existed at that time. When we were doing Storm 8, our team came mostly from Zynga and we had to look at our DAUs and they were mostly a joke. We had a large portfolio of games to manage. When we launched Funzio, Facebook was the obvious choice. Looking back Facebook was an obvious platform for scale and we can take a game to mobile and google plus. Overall it’s been a good experience.

Jens: For 2012, we’re very focused on FB, but we’re very interested in mobile. We’ve kicked off as many projects for mobile as we have for social. We’ve brought our IP to iOS like Diamond Dash and we see that this works very well. We see many new users on mobile. We see more new users that have never seen the game before. It really helped when we launched that we had the core fan base download everything because that brought us to the charts and then we attracted many many new users.

Eric: John, you have a bunch of mobile games through Disney and some Playdom games you’re moving to mobile. How do you prioritize?

John: On the social game side of things, we’ve seen social game networks go mobile. We move where the puck is, we’re making sure our existing social games extend to mobile — like on iOS, but we’re also seeing revenue growth on Android meaningful enough that it’s worth doing. It’s more unwieldy and has more overhead, but it’s worth it. It’s not an either or game for us. We take some strategic bets and we love that the vast majority of revenue is still iOS and Facebook but nobody wants a one horse race.

Eric: You’ve been at OnLive so you’ve seen platforms shifting. What do you think is shifting?

John: Back in the PC days when there were a variety of operating systems and a huge variety of consoles fighting it out, this is pretty natural. We started off making games for MySpace and it wasn’t obvious that Facebook would be THE social network and I don’t think they realized they’d be a games platform. Games drive usage and purchases and engagement. Apple came reluctantly to the games space and Facebook came accidentally. A lot of the user engagement and adoption of the platform is driven by gaming and now they’re beginning to stabilize their business around gaming. Now we’re seeing people come in from the outside to make gaming ecosystems. I think mobile is going to take the lead over a several year time frame. I don’t know how long that will take.

Eric: How is HTML5 going for you guys? Any meaningful results from some of the apps you’ve launched? Are we years out?

John: It’s going to be a while. There are a lot of people making incredible prototypes to show it’s real and it’s going to be great. But I don’t think there’s enough feature completeness or momentum where people are going to turn a business on it.

Kevin: We have two mobile games in beta. One is in Unity, the other is in HTML5. Some of our games have less animation, so it’s a lot easier in HTML5. Obviously you can’t access the accelerometer and other things that make mobile great. I’d say it’s probably 2013 or 2014.

Jens: We launched our first mobile game in October. We’re satisfied overall, but many details were not optimal. It was hard to start a game online and finish offline. All of these small things combined to make HTML5 less attractive. It will take some time. It depends on the game — but in the long term, we’re very bullish. Until the user experience is identical — I would say three years from now.

Kevin: It’s not necessarily that there should be parity. We operate on over half a dozen platforms and it’s a single game universe where all our players play against each other. We’re excited about Google+ and several other platforms and we have to think about operational efficiency.

Anil: One of the big trends we’re seeing from a player’s perspective is that they’re demanding better quality games. HTML5 would be a regression for us. We’re interested in new technology, but we’d rather go 3D than HTML5.

Eric: Let’s talk about iOS a bit more — what are the main ways to solve the viral channels issue?

Jens: We see a decent number of users coming from the Facebook to iOS games if they’re connected. IT’s a healthy amount of users. We see much higher engagement from those using Facebook Connect. I think it’s a little bit underrated. I think making mobile games social will increase engagement a lot.

John: For our mobile games that we’ve added social components to like Where’s My Water, which has been a huge success, the level of engagement by adding Facebook has been pretty low, but adding game centric features like leaderboards has been better. I think there are better pure gaming platforms available on iOS now. I think OpenFeint, Gree, ngmoco, there’s a lot of cool stuff going on and I think Game Center could do more. On the flip side of things we’re bring our social games into the mobile platforms. We’re definitely viewing it through two lenses right now but it’s getting better over time.

Eric: What about iPad? We’ve heard that that’s a very big part of how people are playing your games?

Anil: We’re less on the casual side right now, we’re more on the midcore hardcore side. And we’re seeing massive uptake on the iPad. Apple has a massive edge over Android because of the iPad. We’re hoping Google figures out tablet soon because that’ll be a market for us. The ARPU is even higher than what you see on iOS users.

Eric: What are the monetization differences you’re seeing on iOS and Android?

John: It’s a smaller amount of users that get through the funnel. We’re finding that users are more engaged for equivalent games — like Gardens of Time. It’s a meaningful percentage that’s more engaged. That’s were we see the large growth in the market is mobile. To some degree, we take a platform agnostic view as Disney. We’ve been through 20 platform transitions from black and white to radio and so on — that’s how the company at large views platform transitions. For us it’s about story and character connections and crafting them to be appropriate for the right platforms. We need to think about it in the short term and in the long term. When you have a success like Swampy the Alligator, you need to think about how to branch that out.

Eric: Are you shifting more resources to Android this year?

Anil: We’re definitely focused on building out the team.

Eric: But it’s the third place to go after Facebook and Apple?

Jens: We have no team on Android. Going from Facebook to mobile is a big challenge and we want to get it right. Android is an issue because we’re a small company and we don’t have a QA team. The team is responsible for delivering high quality. On iOS that’s possible because there’s a limited number of devices that the team can test. Android needs a large QA team that goes through all the specifics for the devices — and that’s an issue. In time it will happen.

Eric: Does the Google+ platform matter at all to you guys?

Kevin: We’re very happy with Google+. We’re seeing retention similar to what we see on other networks. Monetization is a little worse. Google+ takes a different approach to acquiring users. Putting content on the exclusively gets better featured placement. It’s not an open platform, it’s more of a curated approach. But we’re probably one of the more successful developers on the platform and we’re opening up our catalog of games to the platform. On the unit economic side, we look at how much it costs to get a user and we look at how much planned monetization we get per user and those are similar. On Google, the issue is scale. And the payments cost – which is obviously very favorable. It’s been growing, so it’s hard to ignore. Google+ has been in the news for a lot of things, but the most important news is that it’s growing.

John: Did you get money from Google? [Laughs]

Kevin: Yeah.

John: I see the potential, that they’re very serious about what they’re doing and they have an opportunity to approach it differently. To be able to weave games and building a community on that platform is very different and it’s not head to head any longer. What’s interesting is how we can approach people from a different angle. We have a few games on there with smaller user numbers, but they monetize well.

Eric: Any other platforms we should talk about?

John: We just published Spry Fox’s Triple Town — which came form Kindle. There’s not much there yet, but it’s a great game to come from that platform.

Eric: How about the international networks? Aren’t they declining?

Kevin: I don’t track the platforms, I look at the growth in the games. The large majority of our new users are not on Facebook. It’s Google+ and 600 other social networks — we just launched on Yahoo and we’re launching on games portals. There’s a lot of opportunity around the web.

John: We’ve launched on loads of social networks over the course of Playdom’s life cycle and we’ve narrowed it back down to Facebook and Google+ and a couple in Russia like Mail.ru that are still pretty vibrant. But the number keeps shrinking. It gets down to true development efficiency.

Eric: Windows Phone? You guys ready?

Jens: I’m from Europe, so I’m bullish on what Nokia can do with Windows Phone. Here in the U.S. it’s not a big brand but in Europe and Asia it’s still huge. I think it will be a third platform that will be relevant. We’re focused today on Facebook and iOS and we’re trying to create the best games possible.

Now into the Question & Answer segment…

Q: With regards to monetization, we’ve heard that 95 percent of users don’t monetize, but advertisers are coming in and getting interested in the space. What’s the difference between pissing off users with advertising and monetizing those users who haven’t monetized yet?

John: I think users recognize that programming needs to be paid for in some way. Having contextual, relevant advertising typically isn’t a problem. We haven’t embraced advertising in its fullest form. We see it as a pretty big revenue stream overall and we’re leaning into it. We’re not at the bleeding edge.

Jens: We don’t have advertising in our games because we’re focused on selling and monetizing though virtual goods. The large majority of people who never pay, so there should be a meaningful revenue stream. Everything we’re hearing though says its not yet there. One of the big issues is standardization. I don’t know what this issue is, but if we could could get a standardized format I think it could become big.

Kevin: When we do the math for ourselves we see we can make $10,000 – $20,000 a day through advertising with a lot of work, but we can make the same by monetizing with our users better.

Anil: I don’t think the ad products are there yet. They can actually hurt the user experience. If you have products that are more innovative and don’t impede a user experience we’ll look at them.

Q: From a global user acquisition point of view, which platform has been the most valuable – HTML5, Android etc?

Jens: For us, the focus is on Facebook and iOS. Facebook is blocked in China, and the parts of Asia where Facebook is big monetization is very low, so our focus is mainly on Europe and North America.

Kevin: On mobile you’re going to get global coverage, but on the web it’s different. Facebook has low penetration in Japan and it’s blocked in China, but for a casual audience, you pretty much want to be on Facebook. If you’re looking to go after a niche market, you can get into smaller markets and networks.  In China you want to be on Tencent and Sina. Japan is very interesting with GREE and DeNA, in South Korea you’ve got Nexon and a number of others.

Q: How do users discover new games on Facebook?

Jens: On Facebook it’s really through requests and news feeds. Our users come because their friends are playing.

John: Paid advertising on Facebook is a well-oiled machine on Facebook. You can also pull in from outside channels — we’re seeing a massive influx of people from outside the Facebook platform through more traditional channels like PR and marketing that I think we do well as a company.

Q: Eric Eldon: What can Facebook do to become a successful mobile platform?

Jens: Facebook is already huge on mobile. They’re doing the right things to make the platform right to develop for on mobile. We want to make mobile games that are really social and I think Facebook is doing the right things with Facebook connect to make it more social and use the social graph.

Anil: We’ve found that gamers don’t care about their friends, they want to find other gamers. They need to have a game graph and I think that would be a lot more relevant on mobile. It would be the secret sauce.

Kevin: I think what Facebook needs to do is figure out how to get around the 30 percent tax that mobile platforms charge them. I think that’s why they’re betting heavily on HTML5 so they can bypass the app stores and go from a mobile browser to a game. I think it would be very difficult for any developer to pay two 30 percent taxes. They need to go HTML5 and push the entire ecosystem to HTML5 to make it successful.

February 8 – 9, 2012 | San Francisco

Inside Social Apps 2012 is coming tomorrow!

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Who’s Speaking?

We’re excited to present the following 44 confirmed speakers at Inside Social Apps 2012:

	Jens Begemann Founder and CEO, wooga		John Earner GM European Studios, EA / Playfish
	Paul Bettner GM, Zynga With Friends		Kevin Chou Co-founder and CEO, Kabam
	John Spinale Senior Vice President, Social Games, Disney Interactive Media Group		Barry Cottle Executive Vice President, EA Interactive
	Dennis Ryan EVP Worldwide Publishing, PopCap		Will Harbin Chairman and CEO, Kixeye
	Carl Sjogreen Director of Product Management, Facebook		Cory Ondrejka Director of Engineering, Facebook
	Russ Heddleston Product Manager, Facebook		David Glazer Engineering Director, Google+
	Arjun Sethi CEO, 6waves Lolapps		Brenda Garno COO & Game Designer, Loot Drop
	Mario Schlosser Chief Scientist, Vostu		Jeff Tseng CEO and Co-Founder, Kontagent
	Anil Dharni Co-founder, Funzio; Founder, Storm8		Mike Sego CEO, Gaia Interactive
	Tim Chang Managing Director, Mayfield Fund		Bill Jackson Creative Director, CastleVille, Zynga
	Haining Wang CEO, Happy Elements		Sho Masuda VP Marketing, Social Games, GREE
	Clara Shih Founder and CEO, Hearsay Labs		Mike Ouye Founder and CEO, Red Robot Labs
	Daniel Terry Co-founder & CEO, Pocket Gems		Perry Tam CEO, Storm8
	Rick Thompson Co-Founder, Playdom, and Investor		Riz Virk Co-founder and CEO, Gameview Studios
	Charles Hudson Co-founder and CEO, Bionic Panda Games		Lee Linden Founder, Karma Science
	Suleman Ali Co-founder and CEO, TinyCo		Eric Goldberg Managing Director, Crossover Technologies
	Clay Kellogg Head of App Dev. Sales, AdMob		Terry Angelos Co-Founder and CPO, TrialPay
	David Katz VP of Digital Media, Starz		Suchit Dash Co-founder and VP of Product, Ifeelgoods
	Atul Bagga Senior Analyst – Video Games & China Internet, Lazard Capital Markets		Peter Farago VP Marketing, Flurry
	Hussein Fazal CEO & Co-founder, AdParlor		Micah Adler Founder & CEO, Fiksu
	Mihir Shah President & CEO, TapJoy		Lisa Marino CEO, RockYou
	Carla Bourque SVP, Buddy Media		Simon Mansell CEO, TBG Digital

About Inside Social Apps

Inside Social Apps 2012 will explore new opportunities, as well as emerging risks, in the development, distribution and monetization of social and mobile applications. Inside Social Apps 2012 will span February 8 – 9, and will bring together the world’s leading social and mobile developers and investors for critical discussion and analysis.

Registration

Pre-registration passes are $599 through tonight, and will be $799 at the door. Past events have sold out in advance, so we strongly encourage you to register now.

From all of us at Inside Network, we look forward to seeing you on February 8 and 9 in San Francisco!

With all the talk of “cloning” recently, it’s easy to think that original ideas in the social gaming sector are getting increasingly hard to come by. And while there may be a finite number of ways you can represent particular styles of gameplay, that doesn’t stop some developers thinking of an interesting, original twist on an established formula. Such is the case with Team Slots from Product Madness, a new video slot machine game for Facebook. Unlike most other Facebook-based slots titles that focus either on personal gain or competition against friends, Team Slots adds a cooperative element to the format.

When starting the game, players are randomly assigned to the Red, Green, Blue or Yellow team. The assigned team is persistent for the player’s entire Team Slotting career, with no facility to change at this time. Wording on the official FAQ suggests this may be under consideration for the future and indeed it may provide an additional monetization opportunity for Product Madness — however, it also opens up the possibility of unbalancing the game if a large proportion of the player base suddenly decides that it wants to be on, say, the Blue team.

When playing any of the game’s virtual slot machines, the player’s individual accumulated winnings are tallied up and added to that of the rest of their team. Whichever team has the highest cumulative winnings between them at the end of a 30 minute round wins a gold trophy, with second and third place achieving silver and bronze ones respectively. At the end of a day, the team with the most trophies wins the daily competition, providing them with a shower of coins to spend on the next competition. The teams also compete for dominance over the course of a month, with bigger prizes on offer.

As players compete on the machines, they earn experience points and level up. Each level up provides a small coin bonus and, after certain milestones, unlocks additional machines for play. The higher-level machines have fewer players playing them, so individual winnings tend to have a greater impact on the team’s results as a whole. Potential winnings are also higher, so it’s often in a player’s best interests to play the highest level machine they can. Most machines work in the same way through the use of various-shaped “win lines” which players can turn off and on by increasing or decreasing their bet, so once players have the hang of one they can move to the others easily. However, those new to playing slots may find it initially confusing, since the in-game explanations of how the machines work are not presented very clearly.

A few technical flaws prevent the experience from being as polished as it could be, not least of which is the fact that the game runs very slowly even on a powerful computer. This doesn’t appear to be the fault of the game itself, which is presented in Flash like most other social games. Rather, it appears to be the fault of the real-time social feed under the game — each team has its own fan page on which both players and team administrators can post comments, and the feed from this page is continually updated beneath the main game window during play, allowing players to interact with one another. The way this feature is currently implemented leads to that part of the game page almost constantly refreshing itself, which creates constant loading, a flickering mouser cursor and poor frame rates. The issue could perhaps be avoided by refreshing only once every few minutes, when a player actually posts a comment or through a manual “Refresh” button.

Aside from this issue, Team Slots provides an original take on a simplistic game genre. The addictive nature of slot machines provides plenty of monetization opportunities from among those players who enjoy protracted play sessions and/or runs of bad luck. The slow income of coins from competitions, leveling up, individual winnings and a regularly-provided bonus will likely be enough for casual players, but those serious about their virtual gambling or contributions to the daily and monthly competitions have the potential to make the game very profitable. It’s a shame to see the game spoiled by the issues mentioned above, however.

Team Slots currently has 460,000 monthly active users and 60,000 daily active users and is still on an upwards trend after its launch in mid-December last year. To track it’s progress, check out AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

Wait

An original, social and cooperative take on the slot machine genre with a user experience marred by technical issues and unclear explanations for new players.

After a tentative start on Facebook that includes MapleStory Adventures, Zombie Misfits and Wonder Cruise, Korean free-to-play giant Nexon is ready to launch its popular KartRider franchise on the platform.

KartRider is an online multiplayer racing game that has racked up over 270 million registered since its 2004 launch. Players control a single kart and can race against human and computer controlled opponents in various gameplay modes. Nexon Mobile released an iOS version last year that topped 1 million downloads in a little over a week; the company reports that the game is now at over 6.7 million downloads. The Facebook version, KartRider Dash, is due out in March.

Nexon has taken its time finding footing on Facebook. Aside from launching MapleStory Adventures in 2011, the Korean publisher experimented with different ways to engage with the platform throughout the last year — including investing in developers A Bit Lucky and 6waves Lolapps and co-developing or publishing new IP for the platform. Results have been mixed with MapleStory Adventures performing well while Zombie Misfits struggled to find an audience and Wonder Cruise has yet to really set sail. Speaking to Inside Social Games, Nexon EVP of Social Games Aron Koh acknowledges the learning curve — but says “we can do better than what we’re doing now.”

“We’re still learning how to approach players on Facebook and [other] platforms besides our core PC business,” Koh says. “It’s been challenging. It’s not easy to push out multiple updates to get the metrics up. But we’re very conservative when it comes to acquiring new users. We spent very, very little on [MapleStory Adventures] and we could see that the IP was popular and that was the main factor in acquiring users. It was a very good experience and we’re very happy with how our original IP translated to the platform.”

Aside from the appeal of the franchise itself, KartRider has a shot at defining the racing genre on Facebook. Leading car game Car Town only has a nominal, asynchronous racing game; Title Town Racing never made it big; and BMW xDrive Challenge is an advergame first and a racing game second. At one point, it looked like EA might bring its Need for Speed franchise back to Facebook (in fact, it still might); but so far, there isn’t one racing game that’s made it big on the platform. Meanwhile, over on Google+, mobile developer Gameloft proves that a rich 3D racing experience is not only possible on a social network, it’s probably a good way for a developer to distinguish itself from all the citybuilders and the puzzle games.

“One thing I’m very interested to see from our own [studio] and from other companies is more synchronous games on Facebook,” Koh says. “There a couple of synchronous games out there, but it’s very limited. As a company we’re interested to see more players jumping into that arena.”

Nexon raised $1.17 billion in its initial public offering late last year.

Closed beta tests and “sneak preview” open beta tests are getting more popular with social game developers on Facebook. Tetris Online Inc. and EA PopCap provide two recent examples with Tetris Stars and Solitaire Blitz.

Betas on Facebook are tricky. Open betas run the risk of “losing” users that have no patience for unfinished games; several developers have told us releasing a game on Facebook before it’s optimized is a death sentence compared to other social networks where you can get away with less-than-perfect. Closed or limited betas, meanwhile, usually can’t be monetized and sometimes aggravate potential users when friends in the beta bombard them with invites that won’t actually get them into the game. Past examples include MetroGames’ Auto Hustle (launched before it was ready), EA2D’s Dragon Age Legends (unstable invite-only beta lost player data) and EA PopCap’s Pig Up! (which doesn’t seem to be going anywhere).

Despite the risks, betas are crucial for social games because they provide early feedback on core gameplay, presentation, monetization and retention. It’s easier for developers to make changes or roll out fixes with a smaller user pool than it is to redo an entire early user experience while serving 100,000+ daily active users. Even without monetization implemented, a beta can buy the developer the time it needs to take a game from mediocre to successful.

Take, for example, Tetris Stars. Developed by Blue Planet Software and published by Tetris Online, the game entered an open “Sneak Peek” beta sometime in winter 2011.The game updates the classic puzzle game with a “digging” feature where each line of the puzzle cleared removes a layer of dirt or rock. The goal is to unearth as many buried Stars and power-up items in 60 seconds with Stars freed and special moves earning the player points. The entire game is controlled via the mouse rather than keyboard buttons.

“We’re doing a fairly quiet release at first so we can work with [Blue Planet Software] to optimize the code and balance the gameplay,” Tetris Online VP of Marketing Casey Pelkey tells us. “We’re also anxious to see how users respond to the mouse controls.”

From what we can see, the mouse controls haven’t changed much in the past two months. We have seen, however, the number and price of power-ups have been adjusted, the flow of gameplay tweaked and bonus time has been added for each Star freed. The overall impact is the game went from being too easy in December to too hard in January. As of now, the game is somewhere between the two points and Tetris Online still isn’t ready to officially launch the game.

EA PopCap’s Solitaire Blitz, meanwhile, is off to a stronger start than Pig Up! Neither title has ever been officially announced by the developer — PopCap only owned up to Pig Up! after it was reviewed by Games.com — although Solitaire Blitz at least has a cross-promotion bar with other EA games on Facebook. It seems like the developer learned from the lack of response to Pig Up!’s bare bones beta, however, as Solitaire Blitz had monetization and viral sharing features up and running when the game entered open beta late last month. We actually found the game entirely through invites.

Solitaire Blitz is a variation on solitaire where players are racing the clock to clear as many columns of cards as possible to uncover treasures hidden underneath each column. An EA PopCap spokesperson declined to comment on the game, but it seems as though gameplay tweaks are still being made.

Digital Chocolate has unveiled its newest Facebook game, New In Town. The game is a life simulation game that allows players to customize an avatar and take another shot at life after high school, choosing a career and establishing themselves in a fictional city.

Unlike Digital Chocolate’s most recent title, the space strategy game Galaxy Life, New In Town is likely to appeal to a more casual, female demographic, which could help the developer regain many of the monthly and daily active users it has lost over the past six months.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, Digital Chocolate had 18.9 million MAU and 2.5 million DAU back in August. Since then, however, the company has steadily lost users on Facebook, dropping to 7 million MAU and 1.2 million DAU.

While Galaxy Life has hit its stride with 1.5 million MAU, 320,000 DAU and a retention rate above 20 percent, many of Digital Chocolate’s other titles on Facebook have gone into decline. Its hit Zombie Lane shrank from 5.7 million MAU to 1.9 million; Army Attack dropped from 4.5 million MAU to 990,000; and Millionaire Boss — which struggled to find an audience after its July 2011 launch — peaked at just over 690,000 MAU before sinking to 9,000 MAU and 400 DAU.

Rough patch on Facebook aside, Digital Chocolate has been diversifying its product offerings, launching its own games portal and taking Zombie Lane and Millionaire City to Google+. The company also launched Zombie Lane on iOS and announced it would be bringing Zombie Lane and Army Attack to Android and other browser-based channels. If New In Town finds its footing on Facebook, we may see it spread to other platforms.