Social Games

Bubble Safari takes players on a bubble-popping jungle adventure

by M. Dorn on May 16, 2012 · 0 comments

The bubble-popping genre is an immensely popular offshoot of puzzle and match-3 games, and now Zynga has entered the fray with its own offering Bubble Safari. As is often the case with Zynga, the company has taken already well-established game mechanics and put its own brand of polish atop them to create a title likely to enjoy considerable success on Facebook.

Bubble Safari’s basic mechanics are identical to similar titles such as King.com’s Bubble Witch Saga, CookApps’ Buggle and numerous other titles. Taking control of a mouse-controlled cannon at the bottom of the screen, players fire colored bubbles at a predefined arrangement above them. Should the player’s fired bubble cause three or more bubbles of the same color to be touching, they will all pop. Any bubbles which are no longer attached to the top of the level once this happens will fall — in Bubble Safari’s case, they turn into fruit and fall into one of three pots at the base of the screen, scoring points in the process. The various bubble-popping games use different victory mechanics to determine when a level is complete — in the case of Bubble Safari, players must clear ten bubbles from the top row of the level.

Bubble Safari adds a number of mechanics on top of these basics. Firstly, continually popping groups of bubbles causes hummingbirds to appear, who offer score multipliers if they are present in sufficient quantities. Firing a bubble and not causing a “pop” causes one of the hummingbirds to depart, however, so the player is encouraged to find the best “routes” through the various bubble arrangements.

Secondly, if the player causes bubbles to fall after three successive shots, they enter “On Fire” mode, which allows them to fire three special exploding shots that clear the bubble they hit and those around them.

Thirdly, popping bubbles causes a meter in the corner of the screen to rise, offering a free “bonus bubble” determined by random chance when it fills. These vary from “paint bubbles,” which change the color of a large swathe of bubbles, to “lightning bubbles,” which clear out a line directly to the top of the level.

Playing with friends is encouraged. Certain level boundaries are friend-gated, and players also have the ability to bring up to four “friend bubbles” into a level with them. These allow the player to get out of a difficult situation by picking a specific color to fire next, but each of the friend bubbles may only be used once. Alongside these mechanics, the usual level leaderboards help encourage friendly competition. The game is a little pushy about adding friends — after every few levels, the usual “continue” button on the score summary screen is replaced by an “Invite Friends” button which may not be bypassed. Once the invite dialog appears, it may be simply cancelled, but this behavior may be a little too pushy for players who simply wish to play solo — that said, these players will eventually run afoul of the friend gates without other players, anyhow.

Bubble Safari is a well-presented game that is fun to play and is paced well enough that free players feel like they can have a satisfying experience, while paying players will be able to make faster progress. While the title is not particularly original in execution, it follows Zynga’s frequently-used pattern of adding a good degree of audio-visual polish and user-friendliness to the mix. Coupled with Zynga’s considerable talent for user acquisition and the popularity of the bubble shooter genre generally, this makes Bubble Safari likely to enjoy strong success on Facebook in the long term.

Bubble Safari currently has 2,000 monthly active users and 600 daily active users. Follow its progress with AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

Play

A solid take on the bubble-popping genre with that recognizable layer of Zynga polish.


Source: Inside Social Games

KartRider Dash gives Nexon a new shot at Facebook

by M. Dorn on May 16, 2012 · 0 comments

Nexon’s popular online racing franchise KartRider has finally crossed the Facebook starting line with KartRider Dash, which launches in open beta today.

KartRider Dash puts players in the driver’s seat of a go-kart racing against computer-controlled components and live players on a 3D map. Gameplay is based on the original KartRider game, which allows players to acquire power-ups on the track which are then used to sabotage others. As of press time the Unity-engine KartRider Dash seems to be having problems running on Google Chrome, but we had no issues running it in Firefox.

The game’s main strength is that its races are synchronous, something other racing games on Facebook don’t currently offer. Cie Games’ Car Town is currently the leading title in the genre and it only features asynchronous racing.  There are two race modes in KartRider Dash: Quick, which randomly matches players with other opponents, and Buddy, which allows players to join or create private rooms and race exclusively with their friends. Each time a race is entered, a piece of fuel is used up. The game monetizes through virtual goods like extra fuel, costumes and Kart equipment but the option to buy hard currency isn’t turned on yet.

KartRider is the second time Nexon has tried to bring one of its most popular franchises to Facebook. The company’s first attempt was MapleStory Adventures, which peaked last Fall with 473,000 daily active users and 3.2 million monthly active users, but is now down to 40,000 DAU and 320,000 MAU.

Nexon’s other Facebook efforts, developed by other studios, have fared even worse. Zombie Misfits launched in October 2011, and quickly climbing up to 20,000 DAU and 150,000 MAU before traffic quickly bled away to the game’s current 2,000 DAU and 30,000 MAU. Wonder Cruise launched in December 2011 and still hasn’t taken caught on with Facebook players — the game’s traffic currently floats at 1,000 DAU and 20,000 MAU.

Overall Nexon has 340,000 MAU and 140,000 DAU on Facebook according to AppData. Outside of Facebook, Nexon currently has 82.8 million MAU. As Nexon’s EVP of Social Games Aron Koh told us in February, Facebook has a steep learning curve, but he believes the company “can do better than what we’re doing now.”

Nexon’s mobile game KartRider Rush proved an enormous hit for the company; in its most recent earnings call Nexon revealed the game has been downloaded over 8.2 million times since it’s launch on iOS and Android last year.

 


Source: Inside Social Games

Play cards the Egyptian way with Pyramid Solitaire Saga

by M. Dorn on May 15, 2012 · 0 comments

King.com’s “Saga” series of games makes up some of the most consistently popular titles on Facebook, and between them they have covered a wide variety of puzzle genres so far. Pyramid Solitaire Saga is the latest addition to the collection, following the popular solitaire format seen in titles such as Subsoap’s Faerie Solitaire, Big Fish Games’ Fairway Solitaire and PopCap’s Solitaire Blitz.

Pyramid Solitaire Saga’s take on Solitaire involves a predefined arrangement of cards stacked in a Mahjong-style arrangement, with some or all of them face-up. Players must remove cards by playing a card from their deck that is one higher or lower than the card they are trying to remove, but may only play onto cards which are not partially or completely covered. If no cards can be played, the player draws cards from the deck one at a time until they can play.

The ultimate goal of each level is to remove all of the specially-marked “scarab” cards from the board while scoring enough points to get at least a one-star rating. Some levels also have additional objectives such as finishing the round with at least a certain number of cards remaining in the deck, or removing a chain of a certain number of cards without drawing. Failing to remove all the scarabs, attain a one-star rating or complete an objective causes the player to lose a life. They must then retry the level if they have lives available, or wait to recover if they do not. Players can also ask friends for additional lives or purchase a full set — they cannot, at this time, purchase lives that will take them over the upper limit.

As the game progresses, players gain access to various “charms” which make levels a little easier. Some of these must be crafted using gems that the player acquires through play, while others are permanent and must be unlocked using Facebook Credits. The functions of these charms vary from having additional cards in the draw deck at the start of play to being able to shuffle all visible cards on the screen.

It would be easy to dismiss Pyramid Solitaire Saga as a simple clone of Solitaire Blitz (which, in turn, some might accuse of being a clone of Faerie and Fairway Solitaires) but in practice the level-based structure gives the game a very different feel to the more frantic “time attack” gameplay of PopCap’s title. Players can take their time over levels rather than rushing to clear as many cards as possible as fast as they can. It also gives a sense of progression in gameplay beyond simply competing with friends, which is good for those players who prefer to concentrate on their own performance rather than how they shape up against their rivals.

Coupled with the pleasant (if unremarkable) graphics and sound along with King.com’s solid but unobtrusive monetization strategy, Pyramid Solitaire Saga looks set to be another strong title for the publisher. With 820,000 MAU and 380,000 DAU already, the game is off to a good start — it will be interesting to see if it matches its stablemates over the coming months.

Follow Pyramid Solitaire Saga’s progress with AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

Play

King.com’s skills at user acquisition will likely make this fun (if relatively unoriginal) solitaire title a big success.


Source: Inside Social Games

Nexon’s Q1 net income hits $154 million, up 60% year-on-year

by M. Dorn on May 15, 2012 · 0 comments

Free-to-play game giant Nexon posted better than expected results in its Q1 2012 earnings report last week, reporting revenues of 30.3 billion yen ($ 379.5 million), up 46 percent year-on-year and 37 percent quarter-over-quarter. Net income climbed 60 percent year-on-year to 12.3 billion yen ($ 154 million).

Nexon credited its earnings to strong performance in China, where revenue increased 89 percent year-on-year to 15.1 billion yen ($ 189.1 million) and accounted for 49.8 percent of Nexon’s total revenue for the quarter. The company’s North American revenue was the only anomaly among the report, declining 19 percent year-on-year to 1.3 billion yen ($ 16.2 million). Nexon blamed the decline on a hacking attack and ongoing stability issues.

The company highlighted the strong performance of several new titles, including Cyphers, Mabinogi Heros and the mobile version of its classic Kartrider Franchise, Kartrider Rush. According to Nexon’s earnings report the free-to-play racing game has been downloaded more than 8.2 million times to date between iOS and Android.

Nexon’s monthly active users declined 3.9 percent year-on-year to 82.8 million, but were up 3.5 percent over the company’s Q4 2011 total of 80 million MAU. Nexon also reported 10.9 percent of users paid in Q1 2012, up from the 8.3 percent of paying users the company reported in Q1 2011. Average revenue per paying user (ARPPU) increased to 1,761 yen ($ 22.05) in Q1 2012, up from 1,427 yen ($ 17.87) ARPPU in the same period a year ago.

Based on its strong performance during the quarter, Nexon is raising its guidance for the 2012 fiscal year. The company is predicting full-year revenues of 108.3 billion yen ($ 1.35 billion) up 24 percent year-on-year. Net income is expected to hit 37.8 billion yen ($ 473.4 million) for the full fiscal year.

Originally a Korean company, Nexon raised $ 1.17 billion when it made its initial public offering on the Tokyo Stock Exchange last year.  The company’s market cap is currently $ 7.8 billion — higher than both EA’s ($ 4.77 billion) and Zynga’s ($ 5.86 billion). The free-to-play giant is the latest publicly traded Japanese game company to report record revenues, following bumper earnings reports from DeNA and GREE, both of which reported net sales in excess of $ 500 million for the most recent quarter.



Source: Inside Social Games

Get buff with Self Magazine’s Workout in the Park social game

by M. Dorn on May 14, 2012 · 0 comments

Self Workout in the Park for Facebook is a new social game based around Self Magazine’s fitness events of the same name. The game challenges players to get their avatar fit and healthy, and hopefully inspire their real-life self to do the same.

The game commences with the creation of a custom avatar. This is accomplished through the purchasing of clothes, haircuts and other body features with soft currency, a short lifestyle questionnaire and the selection of the avatar’s “body type.” Since Self Magazine is primarily aimed at women, players may only create a female avatar regardless of their own gender.

Once the game begins, the player’s experience is directed by a series of quests from three different female “coach” characters. Through these quests, the player is encouraged to purchase fitness equipment and refreshment stands for their park, engage in workouts and invite their friends to join them. By doing so, players earn various types of “points” and level up their character.

Workout in the Park makes use of a fairly complex system of statistics and rewards in order to encourage players to think about all aspects of their fitness. Visiting a refreshment stand, for example, can provide players with water, protein and vitamin points, which can then be spent on participating in workout activities. These, in turn, provide players with experience points in Fitness, Nutrition and Wellness categories, and in order to level up all three of these point banks must be filled up to 100. On top of all this, the player has an Energy bar, though unlike many social games this may be simply restored by visiting a coffee stand. Gameplay becomes a matter of balancing workout and refreshment activities in order to earn points at a good rate.

All activities may be undertaken at one of three “intensity” levels. In each case, the costs increase with each level of intensity, but the rewards are greater. Higher-intensity activities also take longer periods of real time to complete, though it’s possible to spend the game’s hard currency to immediately finish an activity if the player desires.

Alternatively, players may play the “Zen Match” minigame — two more games are also coming “soon” — while they wait for time to pass. This is a rather poorly-executed Diamond Dash clone in which players must clear groups of three or more connected gems by clicking and dragging to draw lines over them, as opposed to simply clicking as in Wooga’s title. The game does not explain its rules to players upon first playing it, and upon clicking the “help” option, players are provided with a page of information written entirely in placeholder “Lorem Ipsum” text. It also features numerous errors in its game logic: when the board has no more moves available, players must simply either quit the game or wait for time to expire, and sometimes valid moves register as illegal. The game also supposedly features the facility to compete against friends for score, though exactly how the player compares their score against their opponent isn’t made very clear.

The main gameplay features a number of flaws that spoil the experience, too. Despite a lengthy loading screen upon first starting the game, performing any action or purchasing any object seems to result in a noticeable pause while the requested animation or item loads. The game doesn’t remember the player’s preference to turn off the sounds and music — indeed it’s impossible to turn off the music independently of the sound effects. The Zen Match minigame does not respect the player’s choice of whether or not to have the sound on, instead featuring its own option button. When building items, the screen automatically scrolls when the item is moved towards its edge, but must be dragged during normal play. And certain convenient social game conventions, such as the inclusion of a button to jump straight to the appropriate store page from a “build this item” quest, are conspicuously absent.

Also worthy of note is the fact that while Workout in the Park’s core values — eat well, get fit, preferably with friends — is admirable, the heavily-stylized art used in the game is both disconcerting and completely at odds with this message. The three “coach” characters are each depicted with tiny waists, huge breasts and abnormally-long necks. The player character looks more realistically proportioned, but when picking their body type upon character creation, even the “plus size” option couldn’t reasonably be described as “overweight.” This could potentially alienate some players who could stand to gain a great deal from the game’s core message — as could the fact it’s not possible to play as a male avatar. While Self Magazine is aimed at women, the tips and advice the game gives apply just as much to men.

These issues aside, Self Workout in the Park has the potential to be a decent fitness-themed game with a good core message. At this time, the title’s flaws prevent this from being worthy of an unreserved recommendation, but it’s perhaps one to check on after a little more active development has taken place.

As a new title, Self Workout in the Park is not yet listed on our traffic tracking service AppData. Check back shortly for a detailed breakdown of the game’s figures, including MAU, DAU and retention statistics.

Wait

An unusual social game with an admirable message, but one which needs a bit of work before being recommended wholeheartedly.


Source: Inside Social Games

5th Planet Games making $10M in revenue between Facebook, Kongregate

by M. Dorn on May 14, 2012 · 0 comments

Facebook seems like the last platform on which a small, independent games developer would want to get started. Cost per acquisition is rising, competition is fierce and when someone does come up with a unique game concept, the clones aren’t far behind. It is where 5th Planet Games got started, however, and its story is proof that indies can make it on Facebook despite the odds. At three years old and with just 300,000 monthly active users, the developer is on track to make over $ 10 million in annual revenue this year.

Here’s what the odds on Facebook look like going into 2012. Zynga dominates the market, projecting up to $ 1.5 billion in annual bookings for 2012. As of its first quarter earnings report, Zynga makes 5 and a half cents average revenue per daily active user, with 65 million daily active users across social and mobile platforms. Farther down the developer leaderboard, the picture is less clear as private companies avoid disclosing revenue and ARPDAU. Mid-market developer Kixeye, however, recently told TechCrunch it’s expecting $ 100 million in 2012 revenue at something like 80 cents ARPDAU. Cost per acquisition is lower for Zynga than for Kixeye by virtue of its massive cross-promotion network; but we’ve heard the average CPA on Facebook is around one dollar.

This picture was very different when 5th Planet launched its first game, Dawn of the Dragons, on Facebook in 2009. For one thing, Facebook Credits were not mandated for game developers back then. The social network had also clamped down on virality, cutting off social games from posting stories in News Feed. To get its hardcore collectible card game off the ground with no funding to its name and no actual marketing budget, the 5th Planet had to get creative.

“The only choice we had was guerilla marketing,” CEO Rob Winkler tells us. “We set up our official forums and started talking to people, then we started talking to them on their walls, then in Facebook groups they had for other games and so on.  What began touching as many message boards as possible, which grew into over 1,000 posts and messages across hundreds of forums and walls to drive that initial traffic surge.”

Dawn of the Dragons peaked on Facebook at over 300,000 MAU and 54,000 DAU in August of 2010, as tracked by our AppData traffic monitoring service. Those are not big numbers compared to other games of the day, but they were enough to keep retention north of 15 percent (which indicates a reasonably healthy social game). A second game, Legacy of a Thousand Suns, launched later that year and managed to climb to over 500,000 MAU and 60,000 DAU at peak traffic — but retention slipped below 10 percent. Its third game, Clash of the Dragons, launched on Facebook in July of 2011 and didn’t even break 100,000 MAU. The platform had changed so much that 5th Planet was forced to change the way it did business.

“Facebook Credits and rising CPAs certainly changed the way we viewed the platform,” Chief Business Officer Braden Moulton says. “Our CPA [in 2011 was] in the $ .50 range, so we were better than most. Today that same user would be well over $ 1.”

This led the developer to look at expanding to new platforms and games networks. For its first expansion, 5th Planet settled on Kongregate, a games portal purchased by brick-and-mortar video game retailer GameStop in 2010.

“The integration was very easy,” Moulton explains. “One of the main differences (and attractions) for working with Kongregate is that they handle promotion themselves. So while they take their cut of revenue, we aren’t burdened with driving users to our games. When we launched Clash of the Dragons there in December 2011, Kongregate poured a ton of traffic into our game — 300,000 installs in just 30 days. We had never seen numbers like that.”

At the 2012 Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, Kongregate broke some of those metrics out for the audience — highlight an average spend per paying user of $ 120 per month and 90 percent of revenue from players spending over $ 100. Moulton updated us to say that spend per paying user is now closer to $ 160. Even so, average revenue per monthly active user is still higher on Facebook than Kongregate for Dawn of the Dragons — a little over $ 3 compared to $ 2. Across Facebook, Kongregate and its destination site, 5th Planet sees around 70,000 daily active users and calculates ARPDAU at about 40 cents.

5th Planet Games is planning to debut its fourth game exclusively on Kongregate in June before expanding it to Facebook and European platforms. It also plans to release mobile versions of its game sometime this year. Beyond games, 5th Planet recently acquired collectible card game developer To Be Continued and will likely look for other indie studios to acquire as it expands. The developer is still proudly boostrapped, but Moulton says 5th Planet would explore funding if the right opportunity to accelerate growth came along.

As for other small studios looking to get onto Facebook, Moulton advises, “Make something completely unique or make a good slots game. Facebook can still be profitable, but it’s going to be tough.”


Source: Inside Social Games

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