Social Games

Candy Crush Saga and Empires & Allies this week’s gainer and loser among May’s Top 25 Facebook games

by M. Dorn on May 11, 2012 · 0 comments

Now that we’ve published our May Top 25 Facebook list and given it a week to breathe, it’s time to take a closer look at the traffic patterns of each game mentioned.

Counting down from No. 25 we’ll examine the behavior of six or seven of the games on the list each week, based on their daily active user history (the best way to gauge an app’s core audience), and predict how this traffic will affect a game’s position on next month’s list. For the first week of May, we’ll examine No. 25 through No. 19.

25. Marvel: Avengers Alliance

Disney Playdom’s Marvel: Avengers Alliance is reaping the benefits of the massive marketing campaign for the record-breaking film “The Avengers.” The movie came out last Friday, so the Avengers IP is still in the public eye, meaning Avengers Alliance is continuing to bring in new players. Since May 1, Avengers Alliance gained 300,000 DAU, bringing its total to 1.5 million. If traffic continues to increase like this, then the game may very well place somewhere around No. 15 next month. Whether or not Avengers Alliance can maintain this user acquisition remains to be seen, though, especially when the movie leaves theaters in a few weeks. “The Amazing Spider-Man” is due out in theaters on July 3, but it remains to be seen whether or not the inevitable cross-promotion with that film will be enough to keep users coming in at this pace.

T21. DoubleDown Casino

DoubleDown Interactive’s DoubleDown Casino is holding steady at 1.3 million DAU, the point the game has continuously returned to since December 2011. DoubleDown Casino managed to spike up a few times to 1.4 million DAU over the past ten days, though, so it could return to that point again soon. The game showed high growth during the second half of 2011, but this has slowed since DoubleDown Interactive was acquired by International Game Technology in January. Since DoubleDown Casino doesn’t seem to be gaining or losing significant traffic, it will probably appear on our June Top 25 list, but stay on the tail end of the chart.

T21. Hoop De Loop Saga

King.com’s Hoop De Loop Saga is up to 1.4 million DAU, a gain of 100,000 since it debuted on the Top 25 list. The game hasn’t been climbing the charts as quickly as other “Saga” games, but it has showed steady gains since it launched in January. Hoop De Loop Saga’s total traffic is up by nearly 500,000 DAU since April 1, so it seems likely that the game will continue to grow and move up a couple of places for June’s Top 25 list.

T21. Candy Crush Saga

King.com’s newest “Saga” game continues its traffic sugar rush. The game has already gained 500,000 DAU since the May Top 25 list was published, bringing its total up to 1.8 million. Since the game launched in April, it’s proven a hit on Facebook and has regularly topped our weekly lists of fastest-growing games. If Candy Crush Saga manages to keep accumulating users, then it may very well add another million or so DAU to its total, which would easily move it up to the top half of June’s Top 25 list.

T21. Top Eleven – Be a Football Manager

Nordeus’s Top Eleven – Be a Football Manager continues to hover at 1.3 million DAU. This is another title that’s showed slow, but regular, gains since it launched in May 2010. The past few months show Top Eleven will generally hold steady at a traffic point for about six weeks before it moves up by 100,000 DAU. It’s been almost four weeks since the last increase, so the game will probably show a noticeable gain towards the end of May. The game may not move on June’s Top 25 chart even if this happens, since it took 1.2 million DAU this month to just to get onto the list. If minimum DAU increases, the game might wind up even closer to No. 25.

20. ?????

Happy Elements’s Chinese language aquarium sim ????? (“Aquarium Open Heart Box”) is still bobbing along at the 1.5 million DAU waterline. Even though it launched in 2009, this is a title with impressive staying power, even though its DAU figures aren’t anywhere near its peak of almost 2.4 million DAU. Since May 1, the game’s traffic bounced up and down, but it’s returned to 1.5 million. ?????’s traffic regularly moves in waves, and April marked a valley with 1.4 million DAU.  The game’s numbers are starting to improve again and it may very well gain another 100,000 DAU by the end of the month, possibly moving it up another spot or two in June.

19. Empires & Allies

Zynga’s Empires & Allies continues to lose users at a steady pace, down by 200,000 DAU since May 1. Zynga designed this to appeal to mid-core strategy fans, but it hasn’t had the lasting appeal of its “Ville” titles. The game launched and peaked in June 2011, hitting a high point of 7.7 million DAU before starting to noticeably shrink that August. Empires & Allies is currently at 1.5 million DAU, meaning it’s dropped by 700,000 since February alone. If Empires & Allies continues to decline at this rate, it may not even be on the Top 25 for June.

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for next week’s continuation of our Top 25 gainers and losers, when we look at No. 18 through No. 12 on the list.


Source: Inside Social Games

Japanese developers abandon kompu gacha mechanics in social games

by M. Dorn on May 10, 2012 · 0 comments

Developers GREE, DeNA, Mixi, CyberAgent, Dwango and NHN Japan have announced they are removing a controversial monetization mechanic called “kompu gacha” from all their mobile-social games by the end of the month.

Kompu gacha (“complete gacha”) is akin to a virtual toy machine where players pay real world money to receive an in-game item at random. Players have the opportunity to win grand prizes, but only if they can acquire complete sets of specific items. Although an extremely lucrative income stream for Japanese developers, kompu gacha has drawn harsh critisism both for how close it is to real-world gambling and for the easy access children have to it. Over the weekend the mechanic was found to be in violation of Japanese law and a ban is widely anticipated.

Although the news will mainly affects Japanese developers, several western companies also make use of the mechanic in their Japanese mobile-social games. Zynga, for example includes kompu gacha in its Android role-playing game Montopia. For a more detailed explanation of kompu gacha and how its elimination will affect developers outside of Japan, read our feature investigation at our sister site Inside Mobile Apps.


Source: Inside Social Games

Facebook replaces Apps and Games Dashboard with App Center, introduces paid app model

by M. Dorn on May 10, 2012 · 0 comments

Facebook is replacing the current Apps and Games Dashboard with a new App Center feature that sorts Facebook apps by category and user ratings.

Detailed on Facebook’s developer blog, App Center will be viewable from Facebook.com, mobile web and Facebook’s iOS and Android apps when it rolls out over the next few weeks. Clicking on an app from within App Center directs a user to that app’s native platform, where the user can install the app. The new feature also introduces app detail pages, which is where users will land when typing an app name into Facebook’s search function. Apps are also filtered into additional categories for “top grossing,” “recommended” and “trending,” as well as module that displays friends’ apps.

Read the rest on our sister site, Inside Facebook.


Source: Inside Social Games

Get by with a little help from your Tribe in Spellbound City 2

by M. Dorn on May 9, 2012 · 0 comments

Spellbound City 2 is a new citybuilding game from Oxylabs Networks. While mostly fairly predictable in its execution, the game offers an innovative approach to requests and help from friends, and it’s through this that the developer hopes to attract a healthy audience for the title.

The premise of Spellbound City 2 is nothing new: beginning with an overgrown, untamed plot of land festooned with crumbling buildings, it’s up to the player to restore this magical kingdom to its former glory. This is accomplished through restoring the existing buildings, constructing new ones and then setting up various simple supply chains in order to keep the income rolling and the people happy.

Spellbound City 2 features a stronger focus on resource management than some other titles of its ilk, with several steps required to construct various materials and structures. Crops produce food, which is used to feed houses, which produce life energy, which is used to power material-producing structures such as mines and lumbermills. These raw materials can then be used to cast various spells in order to create special items. These, in turn, are often required in the construction of new buildings.

Progression in Spellbound City 2 is directed through quests, which introduce these various production flows to players gradually. As always, players may choose to ignore these if they wish, though the generous energy and soft currency rewards on their completion make them worth pursuing. There are also several on offer at any one time, making the game feel less like a linear slog through a series of objectives.

The most noteworthy feature in Spellbound City 2, however, is its “Tribe” mechanic. By joining a Tribe, players gain access to a large number of other Facebook players to whom they may send requests and gifts without having to add them as friends. The only limitation on this functionality is that players are unable to visit Tribe players and earn the game’s social “Karma” currency — only Facebook friends may be directly visited.

The ability for players to get up and running with a predefined bank of friends from the very beginning helps the game feel much more social than the lonely experiences that other titles can be shortly after starting to play — though there is still no means of directly communicating between players in-game. The disadvantage to the system, however, is that the player is then constantly bombarded with Facebook notifications from members of their Tribe at all hours of the day, though this issue is somewhat mitigated by the social network’s collection of all similar notifications into a single item. The player may also choose to “opt out” of their Tribe at any time.

While the rest of Spellbound City 2 doesn’t do anything especially new or innovative, the Tribe mechanic alone makes it worthy of attention. It’s a system that makes the game very friendly to social game newcomers, those who do not wish to bother their friends with requests and notifications, or those who do not have many friends willing to join in on a new game. It’s a feature that future titles on the social network would surely be able to benefit from, and one that it would be very pleasing to see more of in the future.

Spellbound City 2 currently has 20,000 monthly active users and 3,000 daily active users. Follow its progress with AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

Play

While the game is merely “good” rather than “great,” the Tribe mechanic sets an interesting, laudable precedent for new ways in which social game players may work together.


Source: Inside Social Games

Zynga sues over PyramidVille’s name 15 months after launch

by M. Dorn on May 9, 2012 · 0 comments

Despite being available on Facebook for over a year without incident, Zynga has filed suit against French developer Kobojo, alleging the name of Kobojo’s game PyramidVille infringes on Zynga’s intellectual property rights.

Zynga has a history of pursuing legal action against developers who add “Ville” to their games’ titles, but what makes this case surprising is the delay. PyramidVille launched in January 2011, and Zynga filed suit on May 7, 2012. Zynga tells us it felt legal action was necessary after Kojobo refused to change PyramidVille’s name.

Zynga may also feel the need to sue now because of how rapidly Kobojo has managed to expand the PyramidVille brand. The game was a modest hit when it first launched on Facebook, but Kobojo has since gotten the game onto smartphones and into Arabic-speaking regions. Published via Peak Games,  ????? ????????? (“City of the Pyramids”) is the No. 2 Arabic game on Facebook, currently boasting 2.4 million monthly active users and 470,000 daily active users. The localized version is very close to passing the peak numbers posted by the original English language version of PyramidVille, which saw 2.9 million MAU and 610,000 DAU in June of last year. Zynga doesn’t have an Arabic language presence on the Facebook canvas.

While expanding PyramidVille, Kobojo has also expanded its business, securing $ 7.5 million round of funding last year that the developer used to open new studios in Berlin and Madrid. Kobojo also told us at that time that it would push out a slew of new titles for Facebook and mobile during 2012, with some light investment in developing HTML5 games.

Zynga’s main obstacle is that it doesn’t hold the trademark for the word “Ville.” The company is currently trying to secure the trademark, but the process is still working through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Zynga filed for a trademark of the phrase “With Friends” in 2011, with similar results.

Historically, trademark lawsuits over words or phrases in a name have been difficult to win. Case are typically settled out of court or languish for years after being filed. For example, Zenimax recently settled its suit against Minecraft developer Mojang, which claimed the upcoming title Scrolls infringed on the trademark of The Elder Scrolls games. Active Network sued Electronic Arts over the latter’s Wii game Active 2.0, but no results were ever announced afterwards. Tim Langdell of Edge Games was notorious for suing anyone who used the word “Edge” in a title, but this strategy eventually backfired and several of his trademarks were canceled in 2010 after he sued Electronic Arts over Mirror’s Edge.

We’ve reached out to Kobojo for a comment, but haven’t received a reply at the time of writing.


Source: Inside Social Games

Zynga sues over PyramidVille’s name 15 months after launch

by M. Dorn on May 9, 2012 · 0 comments

Despite being available on Facebook for over a year without incident, Zynga has filed suit against French developer Kobojo, alleging the name of Kobojo’s game PyramidVille infringes on Zynga’s intellectual property rights.

Zynga has a history of pursuing legal action against developers who add “Ville” to their games’ titles, but what makes this case surprising is the delay. PyramidVille launched in January 2011, and Zynga filed suit on May 7, 2012. Zynga tells us it felt legal action was necessary after Kojobo refused to change PyramidVille’s name.

Zynga may also feel the need to sue now because of how rapidly Kobojo has managed to expand the PyramidVille brand. The game was a modest hit when it first launched on Facebook, but Kobojo has since gotten the game onto smartphones and into Arabic-speaking regions. Published via Peak Games,  ????? ????????? (“City of the Pyramids”) is the No. 2 Arabic game on Facebook, currently boasting 2.4 million monthly active users and 470,000 daily active users. The localized version is very close to passing the peak numbers posted by the original English language version of PyramidVille, which saw 2.9 million MAU and 610,000 DAU in June of last year. Zynga doesn’t have an Arabic language presence on the Facebook canvas.

While expanding PyramidVille, Kobojo has also expanded its business, securing $ 7.5 million round of funding last year that the developer used to open new studios in Berlin and Madrid. Kobojo also told us at that time that it would push out a slew of new titles for Facebook and mobile during 2012, with some light investment in developing HTML5 games.

Zynga’s main obstacle is that it doesn’t hold the trademark for the word “Ville.” The company is currently trying to secure the trademark, but the process is still working through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Zynga filed for a trademark of the phrase “With Friends” in 2011, with similar results.

Historically, trademark lawsuits over words or phrases in a name have been difficult to win. Case are typically settled out of court or languish for years after being filed. For example, Zenimax recently settled its suit against Minecraft developer Mojang, which claimed the upcoming title Scrolls infringed on the trademark of The Elder Scrolls games. Active Network sued Electronic Arts over the latter’s Wii game Active 2.0, but no results were ever announced afterwards. Tim Langdell of Edge Games was notorious for suing anyone who used the word “Edge” in a title, but this strategy eventually backfired and several of his trademarks were canceled in 2010 after he sued Electronic Arts over Mirror’s Edge.

We’ve reached out to Kobojo for a comment, but haven’t received a reply at the time of writing.


Source: Inside Social Games

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