Konami partners with GREE, launches Dragon Collection in North America

Konami today announced it was partnering with GREE to launch Dragon Collection exclusively on GREE’s new platform for iOS.

Dragon Collection is Konami’s social mobile card battling game that originally came out in Japan. Since launching, the game’s racked up 7 million domestic registered users and won awards including Japan Game Awards: 2011 Future Division from the Computer Entertainment Supplier’s Association.

The game is a card-battling game where players travel through a fantasy world on a search for legendary “Dragon Cards.” The North American version will feature all new monsters designed for this build of the game, but will also include all the gameplay modes from the original game. There are a total of four gameplay modes: Quest (where players openly explore the game world), Battle (players battle both villains and rival players), Card Pack (players compete amongst each other for random in-game prizes) and Enhance (where players merge monsters to create stronger ones).

Dragon Collection also contains a number of social features: Aside from being able to forge alliances with friends and/or battle against rivals,  players will also benefit from having more friends in the game. Players can earn points by “cheering” other players on and helping them defeat powerful enemies.

Card-battling games are immensely popular in Japan and are proving incredibly lucrative here in North America, too. Titles like DeNA’s Rage of Bahamut (as of right now, the No. 4 top grossing app in iTunes) and Blood Brothers are regularly topping the top-grossing app and top-grossing free app lists on both both iTunes and Google Play. Based on GREE’s massive user audience (thanks in large part to its acquisition of OpenFeint in April 2011), it’s not surprising that Konami would publish a card-battling game on that platform.

Dragon Collection is currently available on the iTunes App Store and will come to Android later this year.

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Hidden Chronicles: Zynga joins Good Morning America in national coat drive

For the past week, Josh Elliott of ABC's Good Morning America has been bouncing around ABC talk shows and visiting celebs in an effort to bring in one million coats for the Warm Coats, Warm Hearts national donation drive. So far, exactly 963,583 coats have been collected.

In an effort to bring their numbers over the edge, GMA, who has been running this drive with Burlington Coat Factory since 2007, has partnered with Zynga's Hidden Chronicles to provide a special, in-game offer. Players who donate $5 USD to the Warm Coats, Warm Hearts drive through the game will receive the following four rewards: 40 Energy, a Warm Coats Heart decoration piece, a Jewelry Store level scene, and 20 Estate Cash (the game's premium currency). Normally, paying for the game's $5 package gets you the choice of 34 Estate Cash or 5,000 Coins.

This isn't the first time Zynga has reached out to GMA. Josh Elliot, along with ABC anchorwoman Lara Spencer, earned themselves an official CastleVille makeover when they visited the Zynga HQ last November.

Will you be donating to the national coat drive by using Zynga's game? Sound off in the comments. Add Comment

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Peak Games Raises $11.5M in Funding, Acquires Two Studios and Expands Into South America and Mexico

Social game developer and publisher Peak Games announced a second round of funding today from Earlybird Venture Capital to the tune of $11.5 million. The company has also acquired two developers and expanded operations into South America and Mexico.

When we last spoke with Peak Games, the company was experiencing a wave of growth on Facebook in Turkey, the Middle East, and North Africa. The secret to its success in this case was a mix of in-house developed games that met the specific needs of the regions’ audiences and publishing-localization agreements with developers like TheBroth for top-performing titles. Today, Peak Games’ Chief Strategy Officer Rina Onur tells us that the company will keep up more of the same, with support from new games, new partners, and new regional offices in the Middle East and North Africa.

“We’ve done two strategy core studio acquisitions,” Onur says, explaining how the latest round of funding is being spent. “We want to reach 100 people in our [new] Oman office. The rest is going to be talent and studio acquisitions in Turkey and the Middle East.”

The two studios acquired by Peak Games, Umaykut and Erikhan, are both based out of Turkey. Umaykut is a strategy game for the open web rooted in Turkish history while Erlikhan is a fantasy-themed strategy game for Facebook. Onur tells us that with the acquisition of these two studios, Peak Games moves beyond its current in-house portfolio of card and board games into the rapidly expanding strategy genre currently dominated by Kabam, Kixeye, and more casual strategy titles from Zynga and Digital Chocolate.

As for expanding its Facebook game offerings through partnerships, Peak Games and RockYou recently announced an agreement to publish Zoo World 2 in Turkey, the Middle East and North Africa. Onur says that Peak Game users have been wanting a game similar in theme to Zoo World franchise for a long time, which contributed to the recent success of ??????? ???????, an Arabic-language farming sim developed by Halfquest and published by Peak Games.

The key, explains Onur, is localizing the game for the region in the most natural way possible. “Peak Games has been so successful in this region because international companies have been pushing games in English or in poorly localized versions in Arabic and Turkish,” she says. “Our focus is these emerging markets, so our [games] are highly polished. I think that’s one of the secret sauces to our success. We have aspirations of developing Arabic-specific games for the region as well.”

Over the past six months, we’ve seen companies concentrate on hyper-localized versions of social games for both emerging and established markets. A major barrier these companies face is establishing regional branches in countries that have vastly different business cultures from their own. As an example, it took PopCap Games years to build its offices in Asia and still more time on top of that for the studio to begin producing PopCap content for its market. The content that studio produces is so vastly different from what the Western audience expects that PopCap doesn’t bother to localize its Asian-developed titles for North America or Europe.

On Facebook, Peak Games current enjoys a cumulative 16 million monthly active users and 3.7 million daily active users across all its published and developed games (including figures from the recently-acquired Erlikhan). Its largest game by traffic in MAU is the in-house developed Okey while DAU is dominated by Komsu Çiftlik, which Peak Games publishes in the region on behalf of TheBroth. You can follow the developer-publisher’s progress on AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

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Amy Winehouse, Jesus, Dior, Domo, “Captain America,” and More on This Week’s Top 20 Growing Facebook Pages

Popular musicians composed about half of our list of the fastest growing Facebook Pages by Likes this week. Topping the list was the recently departed Amy Winehouse, although other pop musicians also made the list. Then there was a bunch of movie and TV show Pages, a few big brands, Jesus, Snapfish and cereal.

Most of the Pages are list regulars in categories like music and media, requiring between 190,300 and 649,400 Likes to make the list this week. We compile these lists with our PageData tool, which counts the number of fans added to a Page each week.

As mentioned Amy Winehouse’s Page grew the most this week with 649,400 Likes in light of her death. Nicki Minaj’s Page grew by 416,400 Likes; she’s currently on tour with Britney Spears, whose Page grew by about 191,000 Likes. Kesha’s Page grew by 303,900 Likes, as she’s giving out free tickets to her concerts. Bruno Mars saw 244,400 new Likes, while Chris Brown’s award of free Spotify invites for fans attracted 221,300 Likes for his Page. Pitbull’s new single, combined with his tour and media posts, generated 281,600 Likes while Trey Songz’s new song gathered 197,300 and Wiz Khalifa added 190,300.

There were brands and other Pages on the list. Special K breakfast cereal has been providing users with a free diet app on Facebook, generating about 463,000 Likes in the past week. The Jesus Daily Page grabbed 414,800 likes, Dior’s Page saw 405,500, Turkish Besiktas saw 341,400 likes and the Japanese character Domo’s Page grew by 338,400, perhaps in part due to ComiCon or new merch. Snapfish photo service saw 201,300 likes this week, and the Page is currently running a free stuff promotion.

Movie and TV Pages also made the list in force this week. The “Titanic” Community Page grew by 382,600 Likes. Reality TV show “The Bad Girls Club” grew by 359,700 Likes, the “Captain America” movie saw 297,600 new Likes, a Turkish music Page,  Sagopa Kajmer, En Anlamlı Söz Yazan Rap’ci Diyenler … grew by 246,600 Likes and the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie Page grew by 206,000 Likes.

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the top weekly gainers by daily active users on Wednesday, and the top emerging apps on Friday.

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Nival North America to Bring Russian Strategy PC Series King’s Bounty to Facebook

Russia has a long history with PC strategy games that includes the King’s Bounty series, a forerunner to the long-lived Heroes of Might & Magic PC strategy saga. Russian developer Nival hopes to bring the King’s Bounty franchise to Facebook both in Russia and in the United States by finding hardcore gamers on the site.

The ideal of the untapped “hardcore” gamer on Facebook is not new, with developer Kabam specifically targeting this demographic of dedicated male gamers as far back as 2008. With King’s Bounty and additional social game strategies for other intellectual properties, however, Nival is in a unique position to tap an emerging market for social games in a region Facebook hasn’t be able to penetrate well. The key, Nival North America General Manger David D Christensen tells us, is making chess appeal to checkers players with King’s Bounty: Legions for Facebook (pictured below).

“The [typical]  way you monetize on Facebook is by having a lot of users,” Christensen says. “I think a lot of these 150 million gamers that other companies have attracted on Facebook are checkers players. King’s Bounty is more like chess. You can’t do something else while you’re playing chess and [still] be good at chess.”

The King’s Bounty series puts players in the role of a leader with a class restriction such as mage, paladin, etc. and allows them to recruit squadrons of troops to order into battle as the player explores the world. The series has never before featured a competitive multiplayer component, and this is where Nival knows it can innovate with King’s Bounty on Facebook in a way that’s consistent with the platform features. The idea is that players can participate in traditional turn-based combat in live matches with other players’ armies in sessions that last up to 15 minutes.

“[A game isn’t] innovative just because it’s on a new platform,” Christensen says. “If you’re going to bring a game [franchise] to a platform, you have to use the features of that platform otherwise it’s not a new game. King’s Bounty is a fairly deep and fun game when you play on PC and we’re going to build that into the game, but the core of it is going to be [player versus player combat]. Because what we think King’s Bounty players really want is the chance to kick each others’ asses, which they’ve never been able to do before.”

King’s Bounty will be Nival’s first experiment with a purely social game that exists only on a social network, however, Facebook fits into the developer’s long-term strategy of developing “social strategy games” that build on multiple levels of skill and genre preferences of players into team-based multiplayer games. Christensen illustrates the concept of the game type with Nival’s other game in development, Prime World, for which Nival reportedly raised $5 million in funding.

Prime World is for the most part a browser-based multiplayer game where teams of five players battle in an arena. Christensen says that game will straddle multiple platforms such as Android and iOS by building components with the Unity 3D engine, which features a plugin for a possible Facebook component. The game will also use Facebook Connect to identify players’ friends as potential team members, and to determine which gender the player takes within the game, which will contribute to the skill set the player has available.

“The question is how do we make the social games more social,” Christensen explains. He says that people in real life experience much of their social interaction in how they relate to the opposite sex, which is what Nival wants to tap into with Prime World’s game system. “So this is still being tweaked, but [the concept is] there are advantages in-game from having mixed gender teams. So like male characters in the party can only heal female characters. Your gender defaults to what you have on Facebook profile.”

Nival may also break out components of the game onto Facebook. For example, Prime World’s arena combat is supplemented by a castle-building meta-game and by an in-combat puzzle mini-game, both of which generate consumables that give players of the browser game advantages in combat. By straddling the different platforms and the different game types, Nival hopes to create a game experience that’s truly social in the way players create these dependent relationships to harvest and use resources.

The danger with attempting to incorporate so many different genres and platforms into a single game experience is becoming “nothing to no one,” as Christensen says he once experienced when working on a game that tried to be both a massively multiplayer game and a first-person shooter. But with Prime World and also with King’s Bounty: Legions, he says that Nival is mindful of creating a strong core game around which all other components — including social network elements like gifting and invites — fall into place to create a cohesive experience.

Again, the key is finding both the hardcore players and potential new players from the existing casual Facebook gamer audience.

“Finding King’s Bounty players [is easy],” Christensen says. “There are a bunch of King’s Bounty pages [for the various PC games]. We can find those gamers. Figuring out what it was [they] liked and bringing that Facebook — we’ve got a blueprint, so that’s not hard. The challenge is making that appealing to more than just hardcore gamers. It’s taking chess and making it appeal to checkers players.”

Nival hopes to have King’s Bounty: Legions live in beta on Facebook this summer. Prime World is slated to enter beta before the end of the year. North American players will have the chance to experience both games at the Electronics Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles early next month.

[Editor's Note: Nival is the result of a merger between Nival Interactive and Nival Network, which runs Russian social games network Zzima.com. It is not to be confused with Nival Online, which Nival CEO and founder Sergey Orlovskiy previously sold to Mail.ru.]

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Zynga Game Cards available in Latin America; no siestas for FarmVille

by Joe Osborne, Posted Feb 21st 2011 5:45PM

After CityVille was stealthily made available in Portuguese by Zynga, the company decided it was time to make that transition complete. With the help of Mentez, a Brazilian social games publisher based in Miami, Fla., Zynga Game Cards are now available in Brazil, according to VentureBeat. Later, Zynga Game Cards will expand across Latin America and into Mexico with its new Brazilian friends. This was made possible through Paymentez, Mentez's social games payment platform represented by kiosks scattered throughout retail stores and Internet cafes in Brazil. But, why weren't credit cards enough?

According to Mentez CEO Juan Franco, the Brazilian people do not own or use credit cards like Americans do (i.e. poorly). In fact, Franco claims that there is fewer than one credit card to every Brazilian resident, which pales in comparison to our love for the plastic. However, pre-paid cards are popular in the country, which Zynga is well aware of. Social gamers in Brazil can go to a Mentez kiosk, pay up in cash, bank transfers or local online credit cards, and be on their way with a Zynga Game Card.

The Mentez payment system provides its service to millions of Brazilian social gamers, and now Zynga is in on the fun. It seems Zynga is looking to do everything it can to nab that coveted title of "Most Valuable Game Company in the World." But if anything, this shows Zynga's increasing international savvy in localization in several forms. It's one thing to get foreign audiences to play your game, but it's another entirely to get them to pay.

[Image Credit: FarmVille Post]

Where will Zynga head to next? How else do you think Zynga will localize its games for foreign audiences? Sound off in the comments. Add Comment. Bookmark this site!

Tags: brazil, brazilian, cityville, FarmVille, game cards, GameCards, Latin America, LatinAmerica, mentez, prepaid, Zynga, zynga game cards, ZyngaGameCards

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