Disney brings ‘The Little Mermaid’ and ‘Brave’ to Disney Hidden Worlds

Disney Interactive has delivered on its promise to update its hidden object game Disney Hidden Worlds with new content, as the worlds of The Little Mermaid and Pixar’s Brave have been added as playable locations.

Players can unlock these kingdoms by continuing to progress through the game’s original storyline, which includes content from Beauty & the Beast, Tangled and Aladdin, or they can purchase access to these worlds with premium currency / real money.

As with other areas in Disney Hidden Worlds, both “The Little Mermaid” and “Brave” realms will see players hunting for objects in a variety of hidden object scenes, based on areas in the films.

These scenes may see players hunting for items on text lists, or spotting the fine details of a scene by matching small images to their location in the larger picture (a small image of a foot, for instance, can be found somewhere in the main picture).

Each world allows players to experience a light version of the movie’s storyline, with creative liberty taken to include the citizens of the land of Inkspire, the game’s overall setting. Inkspire has been covered in shadow by an evil creature seeking power, so players must complete quests and scenes to stop him.

Disney Hidden Worlds was released on iOS, Android and Facebook last month. The game has over 1.3 million monthly active players and climbing, according to our app tracking service AppData.

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Disney launches Pirates of the Caribbean: Isles of War on Facebook

Image via Disney

Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean franchise has been given its own Facebook game in Pirates of the Caribbean: Isles of War. The game is based in the world of Johnny Depp / Jack Sparrow’s Pirates of the Caribbean, and is set in 1740, before the events of the Curse of the Black Pearl film.

Isles of War sees players creating their own fleet, conquering the Caribbean as they encounter various characters from the Pirates lore, including Captain Barbossa and Davy Jones, as well as Jack Sparrow himself.

The game’s story see Captain Jack stealing the player’s ship, and leaving them stranded on a small island. The locals promise to aid our hero in finding Jack, but of course, they want something in return. This begins the game’s city-building, or in this case island-building, gameplay, as players are encouraged to construct new mines, blacksmiths shops, docks and more, all with the goal of growing the island’s power and wealth and freeing the locals from a group of local pirates.

A quest system leads players through the majority of the game’s story, which often deals with the use of a few main resources, including Iron and Lumber. Players can take to the high seas to battle enemy ships to earn more of these resources, or they can wait for them to be produced in buildings on the island.

Image via Disney

Naval combat has a simple design, asking players to tap on the screen to send their ship(s) off in that direction. When enemy ships enter the vision cones on either side of these ships, they fire their cannons automatically, without any need for aiming. The player is left to focus on maneuvering their ships to always have the enemies in these vision areas, rather than focusing on actually aiming and firing their shots.

Aside from the game’s quest system and naval combat, players will also spend quite a bit of time actually constructing and upgrading ships, using resources and weapons earned as they play. While the game’s building and production timers can slow down a player’s progress, all tasks can be finished instantly when they’ve dropped under the two-minute mark.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Isles of War is now available to play for free on Facebook. Check back soon to follow the game on AppData, our tracking service for mobile and social apps and developers.

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Disney announces 8-bit mobile game Star Wars: Tiny Death Star

While the Disney takeover of Lucasfilm, Lucasarts and their total body of work hasn't been the smoothest of transitions or one that pleased every fan out there, you can't deny there's a certain bit of charm with this upcoming mobile title from Disney Interactive and NimbleBit, called: Tiny Death Star.

Coming from the people that made Tiny Tower and using the nostalgic and beautiful 8bit pixel art style, the Tiny Death Star has you joining the Dark Side and helping Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vadar build an all new Death Star. To do so though, you'll need money, which (of course) requires running intergalactic businesses in order to attract iconic characters from the series and other customers.

There's no word on the specifics of the game as of yet, beyond the above paraphrased synopsis, but the title screen art has some real class to it, which makes me a least a little intrigued by what Tiny Death Star might hold.

Being a mobile title from Nimblebit, we know the sort of game it's likely to be, but building up a giant space station, designed to dominate entire civilizations at a time, is a little more of an exciting setting than building a hotel or managing a fleet of airplanes.

While this isn't going to be a Star Wars 1313 replacement, it's got to be better than the Star Wars Holiday Special, even if it that isn't saying much.

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Philips, T-Mobile, Disney and others among this week’s top PTAT gainers for company pages

Philips is this week’s top gainer in the People Talking About This metric for company pages. The company page category includes a wide array of company types including, but not limited to electronics, clothing, food and telecommunications.

Of the top 10 pages this week, seven are US based pages, with three in different languages. Philips saw over a million page engagements, but this is likely do to a recent transition to global pages. The next placing company page which translates to Platinum in English, is a Thai-based clothing company.

This list of top gaining company pages is compiled with PageData, which tracks page growth and engagement across Facebook.

To improve their pages discovery, company pages should offer more detail on their page category. For example, Philips can classify themselves as an energy/utility page. A more precise category will make it easier to find via Graph Search. It will also be helpful for using PageData to track against competitors on leader boards.

Of the top ten, T-Mobile would be better fit under the category “product/service,” Skinny Cow would be better suited for “Food/Beverage” and Color Vibe could be classified as an “organization.”

Visit PageData to see more about the top talked about games and toys pages as well as other categories. Now only $19.95 a month.

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Holidays prove big success for Disney Mobile and Storm8

The Holiday season proved to be a major success for both Disney Mobile and Storm8, as both developers revealed they saw a huge surge in mobile downloads and installations.

Disney Mobile revealed that downloads during the holiday period (Dec. 22 through Dec. 28) of 2012 were up 98 percent from 2011. During the five-day period, Disney mobile reports it had more than 15 million downloads. The developer also reported its peak level of daily active users saw a year-over-year increase of almost 400 percent, reaching more than 7.5 million daily active users (DAU). As we noted back in December, Disney Mobile was providing some major updates to its flagship games and also rolled out new titles like Monster, Inc. Run, Where’s My Holiday? and Nemo’s Reef.

Meanwhile, as Inside Mobile Apps notes, Storm8 saw huge growth on Christmas Day. The company tells us that it saw downloads increase fourfold on that day compared to the numbers it usually sees on Tuesdays. Storm8 also says it had 2.5 million hours of gameplay and its average revenue per daily active user was approximately 4.5 times above the normal level. The week before Christmas, Storm8 launched its newest social casino title, Bingo!, under its Shark Party brand.

Success stories like these aren’t uncommon during the holidays, albeit not always as dramatic. Mobile app monetization firm Flurry reports that the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day was the biggest week in terms of new device activations and app downloads across iOS and Android.

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E3 2012: Disney feels generous in Disney Animal Kingdom Explorers

by Brandy Shaul, Posted Jun 6th 2012 11:43PM

While Disney and Playdom may have announced a lineup of new games in the works for Facebook, none of them were on display at the Disney booth at this year's E3. What we did receive however, was a free item to share with all of you in Disney Animal Kingdom Explorers on Facebook.

For a limited time, you'll be able to head to a special URL to receive a free Baby Chimp Tree for your preserve in the game. If you've just started playing the game on Facebook, or didn't manage to heal your free Chimp during the limited time Chimpanzee movie event, you're now guaranteed to have one regardless - just click on this link!

Are you excited to receive a free Chimpanzee in Disney Animal Kingdom Explorers? Add Comment.

Tags: animal kingdom explorers, animal kingdom explorers facebook, chimpanzee, disney, e3 2012, hidden object, hidden object facebook, playdom

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Disney Animal Kingdom Explorers Maasai Village: Our guide to finding every item

by Brandy Shaul, Posted Apr 11th 2012 7:50PM

Tags: animal kingdom explorers, animal kingdom explorers cheats, animal kingdom explorers facebook, animal kingdom explorers maasai village, animal kingdom explorers tips, animal kingdom explorers tricks, disney, disney animal kingdom explorers, disney animal kingdom explorers item location guide, hidden object facebook, hidden object game, maasai village, maasai village item locations, playdom

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Disney Animal Kingdom Explorers Elephant Plains: Our guide to finding every item

by Brandy Shaul, Posted Apr 12th 2012 7:15PM

Tags: animal kingdom explorers, animal kingdom explorers cheats, animal kingdom explorers tips, animal kingdom explorers tricks, disney, disney animal kingdom explorers, dsney animal kingdom explorers elephant plains, elephant plains, elephant plains item locations, hidden object, hidden object facebook, playdom

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Disney Animal Kingdom Explorers mixes hidden object gameplay and wildlife education on Facebook

Disney Playdom looks for a second Gardens of Time-style success in the next few weeks with Disney Animal Kingdom Explorers, a Facebook hidden object game based on the Florida theme park of the same name.

Eric Todd, VP of product and creative director, and Lead Producer Patrick Hsieh walked Inside Social Games through a demo of the game. Developed by Disney’s Studio 24, Animal Kingdom Explorers is billed as a spiritual successor to Gardens of Time (which Studio 24 also created), though it very obviously has little in common with Gardens of Time spin-off Blackwood & Bell. The new game’s story will follow players as they join the Global Wildlife Research Team, visit locations around the globe and work with different nature specialists. Each nature scene contains animals to sort through and identify, as opposed to random items. Todd explained that players enjoyed learning about history in Gardens of Time, and so Disney Animal Kingdom Explorers will use the same kinds of techniques — like lists of animals’ names and pop-up facts —  to teach nature trivia.

Playing the demo for ourselves on Facebook reveals additional animal lessons hidden within Animal Kingdom Explorers. Players are given a list of animals to identify at the bottom of the screen, ranging from well-known creatures like chimpanzees to obscure critters like okapi. Puzzle tools include the usual magnifying glass and goggles, plus a a thermometer that indicates how “hot” or “cold” the mouse is to listed animals — which comes in handy if the player doesn’t know what an animal looks like.

Disney Animal Kingdom Explorers also includes a version of the garden decoration feature from Gardens of Time. Players build a nature preserve around the Tree of Life, the iconic centerpiece of the real world Animal Kingdom park. The screens that Todd and Hsieh presented included a wide variety of plants, animals and structures to place, though there was also a nod to Disney animation with Pride Rock from the Lion King on display. The preserve also generates bonuses when players put animals in environments they would normally be in, such as giraffes appearing next to the acacia trees from which they eat.

Although the Disney Animal Kingdom Explorers loading screen logo includes a dragon and a triceratops, Hsieh stated that only real world animals will appear in the game for the time being. He noted that fantastical elements and creatures may be included later on, citing how Tibetan yetis were known to be “real” for hundreds of years before becoming a part of modern day cryptozoological lore.

Hsieh also pointed out that players might occasionally see characters such as Mickey and Minnie Mouse wandering through their preserves from time to time. We’ve seen Playdom implementing Disney branding to great effect in GnomeTown and ESPN Facebook games, but this is the first Facebook game that we know of to feature Disney’s most sacred mascot.

Even without the Disney name at launch, however, Gardens of Time sets the bar high for Animal Kingdom Explorers. The game hit peaks of 17 million monthly active users and 4 million daily active users since its April 2011 launch, it currently brings in 6.4 million MAU and 1.4 million DAU. Whether or not Animal Kingdom Explorers is able to see similar success remains to be seen, but the game certainly looks like it’s got the potential thanks to the elements that made its predecessor so popular.

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New hires in social gaming: Disney Playdom, Kabam and Plumbee

Hiring in the social games industry was up slightly this week, with eight companies reporting 14 recent hires. According to data from LinkedIn and other sources, Zynga reported the most activity. The week’s most notable hire went to Peak Games, which brought on Ahmed Alsafar as its director of MMO Games in the Middle East and North Africa.

In related news, former EA Playfish vice president John Earner has joined Plumbee’s advisory board. Earner left EA in January to take a position as an entrepreneur in residence at Accel Partners. Earner is the second Playfish alumni to join Plumbee’s board, following Dan Fiden, Playfish’s former U.S. general manager.

If your company is hiring new people or making a notable promotion, please get in touch with us. Email us at: mail (at) insidesocialgames (dot) com, and we’ll get your news into an upcoming post.

If you want to know who else is hiring, the Inside Network Job Board showcases current openings with the industry’s leading companies.

Disney Playdom

Travis Marshall, Associate Producer – Marshall was previously a technical analyst at Diamond Game.

EA PopCap

Miriam Shen, Project Coordinator – Shen join’s PopCap’s Chinese office. She was formerly a production coordinator at Xinhua Sports & Entertainment Ltd.

Kabam

Vivian Han, Analyst Intern – Kabam reports two hires this week. Han was previously the retail marketing supervisor at Nike Sports.Marielle Piccolo, Player Experience France – Italy - Piccolo joins Kabam’s customer service team.

Kixeye

James Bellenger, Server Engineer - Bellenger was previously a  senior software engineer at Redux.

Newtracks

Johannes Zint, Game Designer - Zint starts his career at Newtracks as a game designer.

Peak Games

Ahmed Alsafar, Director of MMO Games – MENA - Peak reports a high profile hire this week with Alsafar, who was formerly the business development manager (MENA & Asia) at Looki Publishing GmbH.Barkin Basaran, Product Specialist – Basaran is fresh from a position as the marketing and communications intern at Mercedes-Benz Turkey.

Plumbee

Ian Morrison, Automated Infrastructure Engineer – Morrison comes to Plumbee after a 10 year stint running IT service company Darq Ltd.

Zynga

Christopher Fortier, Product Manager – Fortier was formerly the chief operating officer at Agora Health Networks.Souvik Mukherjee, Test Lead-QA - Mukherjee was previously a senior QA specialist at K2 Network.Gemma Kelly, Senior CS Manager Zynga Player Advocacy & Service - Kelly comes from a position as the operations delivery manager at Sportingbet.Jagan Mohan, Software QA Engineer - Mohan was previously the senior authoring engineer at Technicolor India Pvt Ltd.Frank Benedetto, Super Moderator - Benedetto joins Zynga’s community management team as a Super Moderator.

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Adele, PlayStation, Mercedes-Benz, Disney, Guitar Hero, more on this week’s top 20 growing Facebook pages

Singer Adele topped our list of the fastest growing Facebook pages by Likes this week, although there were plenty of media, tech, game, movie and brand pages that kept her in good company.

Pages on our list this week grew from between 535,400 to 1.5 million Likes. We compile this list with our PageData tool, which tracks page growth across Facebook.

Adele and Rihanna were the only musicians on our list, which was unusual since musicians typically dominated this list each week. Brands and tech-related pages replaced them this week.

The Brazilian page Instituto Ayrton Senna – Ayrton Senna Institute is an unexpected No. 2 on our list. The page supporting a foundation created in the name of the late Formula One champion gained more than 1.3 million Likes this week, up from only about 33,000 Likes last week. It’s unclear whether the page had some sort of paid media push, but the racer’s nephew Bruno Senna has been in the news as he prepares for his debut in the Australian Grand Prix.

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Disney Playdom to publish Spry Fox’s Triple Town

Disney will soon be publishing the Facebook version of Triple Town. According to Spry Fox’s CEO David Edery, the Seattle-based developer began reaching out to publishers about Triple Town several months ago, and Disney owned Playdom was one of the companies it approached.

Beginning next week, Disney will be responsible for operational and marketing responsibilities for the game, which will include cross promotion in other Disney titles, advertising and user acquisition campaigns. While the arrangement is a one-time deal for now, Edery tells us that the two companies may decide to collaborate on future games.

“Playdom’s in-house development studios are still hard at work developing some of the most popular games for Facebook, but we also recognize that there are a lot of independent social game developers creating amazing new experiences too,” Disney’s senior vice president of social games John Spinale said in a blog post on the Playdom website. “We don’t have to develop every great social game, but we want to bring as many of them as possible to our users. And that’s why you can expect us to partner with independent developers like Spry Fox.”

This is not Disney Playdom’s first foray into publishing, but a Disney rep tells us that the move does signal that Disney is open to working with independent developers. Spry Fox will maintain complete creative control of the game.

For more information on Triple Town and the recent changes Spry Fox introduced to the game, read our full interview with David Edery here.

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Disney Playdom Sunsetting Social City After 21 Months and 12 Million MAU

Disney Playdom will sunset its long-running social game, Social City, this December just three months shy of the game’s second birthday on the Facebook platform.

As the approximate life cycle of a social game on Facebook seems to be roughly 12 to 18 months, the move comes as no surprise. It’s even less of a surprise, considering Disney Playdom’s recent success with Gardens of Time and its efforts to release new social games based on Disney properties in 2012. Effective resource management dictates that developers need to spend more on the games that are making money, and shut down ones that aren’t in order to allocate resources to new games.

It is rare, however, to see one of Facebook’s big five social game developers taking an older game offline even if it is more than 18 months old. Many of those games (particularly Zynga’s) still enjoy large audiences that, in theory, monetize at a higher rate than those who are playing a new game in its first three months of life. Image also keeps older games online, as many developers are defined by the success of their original games.

In the case of Social City (review here), it was one of several hit games Playdom offered in its pre-Disney acquisition days. Sorority Life and Mobsters were also “big name” games that attracted millions of users back in the early days of the Facebook and MySpace games platforms. Social City, however, got a larger amount of media attention than other pre-Disney Playdom games because it launched just before the Disney acquisition and went on to win a Game Developer Choice Award at GDC Online in October 2010. Due to its success, the game survived the initial upheaval after the acquisition (which saw the sunsetting of Playdom’s Big City Life, Treetopia, and Fanglies in October 2010) and even made it onto Android where some of Playdom’s competitors were experimenting with cross-platform social game experiences.

Social City’s Facebook traffic was in decline even then, however, down over 50% in monthly active users and over 80% in daily active users from its peak point of traffic at 12 .6million MAU and 3.1 million DAU seen in spring of 2010. In the last six months, MAU and DAU have continued to fall, eventually putting its DAU as a percentage of MAU — a metric that helps us see what kind of retention a social game enjoys — below 10%, which is where most developers usually shut down or abandon a game. It’s a similar story to Playdom’s Market Street, which launched in 2010 and was sunsetted in August 2011.

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Bruno Mars, Subway, Turkey, Disney, Vin Diesel and Converse on This Week’s Top 20 Growing Facebook Pages

Facebook’s top Pages continued to be dominated mostly by musicians, but food, celebrity, Turkish apps and various media companies made an appearance this week, too. Musicians like Rihanna and Lady Gaga are regulars on the list, but musician Bruno Mars made an appearance this week, as did Aerosmith. Food was on the list, too, with Subway and Pringles, in addition to several media companies like Disney and the Converse shoe company. The Pages on our list grew from between 535,700 and 2.6 million Likes, we measure the growth of Pages with our PageData tool.

Top Gainers This Week

Bruno Mars topped the list with 2.6 million new Likes to his 7.7 million total; the landing tab for his Page features tour and music video information and the Wall contains news of recent awards and charity work. Rihanna, with 774,600 new Likes to add to her 33.5 million, also won some awards. Lady Gaga drew 722,500 new Likes to her 34.8 million this week with the launch of her new album.

Shakira’s 690,200 Likes pushed her Page’s total to 29.8 million, she’s been posting videos to her Wall. Eminem’s Page features music videos on the landing tab, drawing 670,100 Likes to his 36.6 million total. Bob Marley’s Page grew by 627,600 Likes to pass 25 million by featuring music, story and video posts. Finally, Aerosmith’s Page grew by 567,800 Likes to reach 3.5 million; the Page also promoted a recent appearance on the TV show “The Simpsons.”

Food featured this week included Subway with 2.2 million Likes to grow the Page to 6.6 million, partly due to a Commit to Fit sweepstakes featuring up to $25,000 in prizes. Also, Pringles with 535,700 Likes grew the Page to 13.8 million, featured a Share Your Way Sweepstakes with 181 prizes.

Two Turkish Pages were as usual big on the list this week. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk grew to 846,800 Likes this week; he was the first president of Turkey and a prominent historical figure. Secondly, another Turkish flag Page, Amerikan Bayraginin 1 Milyon Hayrani Varsa Türk Bayraginin 70 Milyonu Geçer, grew this week to 828,800 Likes.

There were media properties on the list. Disney with 721,200 Likes to grew to just about 23.7 million by posting photos and animated film stills. Facebook with 708,500 Likes to pass 41.4 million. YouTube with 601,900 Likes to almost make it to 34 million. Then, “Harry Potter,” which added 618,600 Likes to almost make 24 million by promoting the final installment of the series.

Celebrities made an appearance, too. Will Smith with 629,500 Likes to his 18.5 million updated with a visit to Oprah. Vin Diesel with 617,000 Likes to grow the Page to 24.1 million added a landing tab that asks users to invite friends to his Page. Finally, Cristiano Ronaldo’s Page grew by 537,900 Likes to its 26.3 million with updates about his professional matches. The remaining Pages, Converse with 551,500 Likes and a 16.9 million total and Nh?t ký (Diary in Vietnamese) added 548,800 Likes this week.

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Disney Interactive Reports Q2 Losses, Including $34 Million Charge for Playdom Acquisition

The Walt Disney Corporation reported an operating loss of $115 million in its Interactive Media segment, which includes social game developer Playdom, for its second quarter ended on April 2, 2011.

That figure includes a $34 million accounting charge for the Playdom acquisition, which Disney says will continue to impact the Interactive Media segment’s results for the rest of the year. Disney acquired Playdom in late July of 2010 for $563.2 million with a $200 million earn-out.

Despite the losses for the segment, Disney said that it wasn’t expecting to break even on Interactive until 2013 and that its decision to suspend social game releases for five months also impacted the segment overall. Disney CEO Bob Iger said the company feels good about the direction Playdom is taking, particularly in light of Gardens of Time‘s success in daily active users and monthly active users. He claimed that the game has been monetizing “very well” and mentioned that the Interactive Media segment had a number of games “in the pipeline” for 2011 and 2012 that spans original intellectual property and branded IP through ESPN, Marvel, and Disney.

Nothing at all was said of Playdom’s other newly-released game, Deep Realms.

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Highlights This Week From the Inside Network Job Board: 6waves, Disney, Digital Chocolate & More

The Inside Network Job Board is dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities in the Facebook Platform and social gaming ecosystem.

Here are this week’s highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at 6waves, Disney, Digital Chocolate, Nextive, Bulbstorm,NaturalMotion, and Ubisoft.

Listings on the Inside Network Job Board are distributed to readers of Inside Facebook and Inside Social Games through regular posts and widgets on the sites. Your open positions are being seen by the leading developers, product managers, marketers, designers, and executives in the Facebook Platform and social gaming industry today.

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