Social Networking Games: Expands

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Thursday, February 28, 2013

King.com expands into Asia with localized 'Saga' games

by Brandy Shaul, Posted Feb 23rd 2013 1:00PM

Proving that "fun games" are fun regardless of your language, King.com has further expanded its global outreach by announcing that both Candy Crush Saga and Bubble Witch Saga are being localized for the Japanese and Korean markets. These localized games will be released first on Facebook, and will then be launched on iOS and Android devices at a later date.

This move makes sense for King.com, as the company has also announced that over one million daily active players in Hong Kong alone play Candy Crush Saga, even before that region has received its own localized version. Candy Crush Saga itself became the top Facebook game last month, with around 45 million monthly active users.

"We have been looking towards Asian markets for some time now and feel this is the perfect time to offer localized versions of our games in Japan and Korea," said Riccardo Zacconi, co-founder and CEO of King.com, via a company release. "We are delighted to see our hit game Candy Crush Saga being played by one out of every seven residents of Hong Kong. People have been literally asking strangers on the street to friend them and give them lives so they can continue playing the game without waiting."

Candy Crush Saga obviously isn't the company's only successful game, as the King.com catalog now sees over nine billion "plays" per month. Could King.com eventually rise up and overtake Zynga as the top Facebook game developer? Only time will tell.

Do you think King.com has what it takes to top Zynga on the monthly active user leaderboard? Which King.com game is your favorite? Sound off in the comments!

Tags: bubble witch saga, BubbleWitchSaga, candy crush saga, candy crush saga hong kong, CandyCrushSaga, CandyCrushSagaHongKong, hong kong, HongKong, japan, king.com, korea, localized games, LocalizedGames

View the original article here

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Facebook Exchange expands with IgnitionOne and growth outside U.S.

Marketing technology company IgnitionOne has added support for the Facebook Exchange in its Digital Marketing Suite this week, in time to take advantage of new access to audiences outside the U.S.

The Facebook Exchange allows approved third-party platforms to place retargeting ads on Facebook after users visit external websites marked with cookies.

AdExchanger reports that FBX is now open in the Asia-Pacific region and in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. A Facebook spokesperson told AdExchanger, “The initial beta was U.S. only. As we scale we’re now actively in the market in EMEA, doing training and education sessions with agency trading desks and DSPs. We are seeing strong initial results out of the EU… Early doors are opening in APAC as well.”

[Update: Christina Park from Triggit points out that some partners have had the ability to target users internationally on FBX for weeks, so international expansion is not exactly new, though this week was the first time Facebook spoke about this publicly.]

IgnitionOne, which has offices in the U.S., Europe, Asia and South America, announced Wednesday that it would begin offering real-time bidding on the Facebook Exchange. The company is already a Preferred Marketing Developer with an ads badge, making it one of the few PMDs to also offer FBX buying.

See our directory of other FBX providers here.

View the original article here

Saturday, November 17, 2012

Fan Appz expands social CRM functionality, offers more insights about brand audience

Social marketing software company Fan Appz today launches a version of its platform with an emphasis on helping businesses understand the audience that engages with their apps and putting those insights to use in other channels.

The Personalized Marketing Platform builds upon the social CRM functionality that Fan Appz introduced earlier this year and offers new ways to view and analyze consumer segments. Fan Appz has also created new ways to bring first-party data to its platform as well as apply social data to email marketing, advertising and other sales efforts.

Fan Appz VP of Marketing Krista Thomas says the company’s goal is to help businesses use social data to improve all marketing and understand fans at an individual level. By doing this, Fan Appz can help brands convert fans into customers and “turn good customers into great ones.”

It starts with “social experience apps.” These are the page tab, web and mobile apps that Fan Appz got its start helping marketers build. The company continues to build out features and improve the creation and customization flow for these. For instance, today Fan Appz released an Open Graph-enabled prediction and trivia game app, a new refer-a-friend feature and additional integration for Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr and Google+.

When fans interact with a brand through these apps, the information they’ve authorized to share gets collected and organized in Fan Appz’ system — now built on the SAP HANA platform for speed and scalability. Thomas says this is one of the distinguishing factors of the Consumer Marketing Hub.

The product then allows marketers to sort through the social graph data, behavioral data and direct inputs provided by users, for example, product preferences entered into a ranking app or answers to a poll question. Businesses can also add in purchase data or other information from an existing CRM. They can view and export audience segments to run an email marketing campaign or Sponsored Stories using custom audience targeting.

As we talked about with CEO Jon Siegal when the company launched its Social Database, Fan Appz is looking to serve businesses during the next step of social marketing. If 2009 and 2010 were about establishing a presence on Facebook and building a following, and 2011 and 2012 were focused on the abstract goal of “engagement,” then Siegal sees the next phase being when businesses learn how to truly use social to drive sales. With social CRM solutions like what Fan Appz and others are starting to build, brands are going to be able to personalize messages at scale, making marketing more effective and improving the overall customer experience.

View the original article here

Thursday, March 29, 2012

Facebook expands Sponsored Stories in News Feed with image, more social context

Facebook has significantly expanded the prominence of Sponsored Stories in News Feed with a new “Page Like” unit that includes the page’s profile image and thumbnails of more friends who are connected to the page.

Previously, “Page Like” Sponsored Stories were very subtle in News Feed and many users were likely to skip over them. The new version is larger and shows additional context that might make users more likely to click the ad, such as a description of the business and more friends who Like the page. The social network also changed the wording on these posts from “Featured” to “Promoted” so that it is more explicit that companies are paying for this content to appear in the feed.

This is a “Page Like” Sponsored Story from February:

Here is a full size image of the ”Page Like” Sponsored Story we saw today:

Even though Sponsored Stories are now eligible to be displayed on mobile devices, we did not see the Target ad on the mobile site or the iOS app. It is worth noting that the item was the top story in News Feed even though it was an hour old when we accessed the site. As of press time, dozens of stories appear above it, but we can scroll down and find it in the feed. This is different from traditional Facebook ads that change with each page load.

The main image included in the story is the page’s profile photo. Advertisers cannot select another image to appear here.

Interestingly, Facebook added a “Find More Pages” link to Sponsored Stories. This takes users to the page discovery browser, which presents other pages users might be interested in. It seems adding this link to the Sponsored Story is Facebook’s attempt to make the story more useful and less ad-like.

Unpaid “Page Like” stories continue to appear in the feed, though perhaps less frequently than in past years as the number of other stories (check-ins, song listens, etc.) increases. See an example of an organic “Page Like” story below:

[Update 3/27/12 2:27 p.m. PT - A Facebook spokesperson says the change is not only in effect for Sponsored Stories. All "Page Like" stories, whether sponsored or organic, will now look like the Target story above, she says. We have not yet seen any live examples in our feed.]

View the original article here

Saturday, January 28, 2012

Facebook expands Questions API

Facebook added the option to write structured question posts through the Graph API on Friday.

Applications can now ask Facebook Questions on behalf of users or pages that authorize them to do so. This is particularly useful for page management applications like those from Involver, Buddy Media or Vitrue, which allow admins to write and schedule posts from another platform. Page owners can use these apps to share links or photos, but they have not been able to use them to ask Facebook Questions. With the new write API, developers can now make this an option.

The social network’s Questions product is unique in that it allows users to create polls that other users can add options to. Asking or answering a question generates a story in News Feed. Pages use Questions to promote interaction among fans, but the feature hasn’t caught on among users as Facebook seemed to envision — a company blog post in March 2011 positioned Questions as a way to get recommendations from friends.

The addition of the write API follows the read permissions that Facebook introduced last fall. Questions has not otherwise seen any significant design or functional improvements and is still not supported on mobile devices. When it launched, Questions seemed like it could be a useful plugin for blogs and news sites as a way to get feedback and engagement from readers, but the company has not yet offered this option.

View the original article here

Saturday, October 1, 2011

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.

View the original article here

Thursday, July 28, 2011

FarmVille Craftshop expands (again), work on six recipes at once

In a last ditch attempt to get players to care about the Craftshop in FarmVille, Zynga has introduced yet another update to the building. (As if a building to compliment the building wasn't enough.)

However, the new feature is certainly worth considering, as it allows players to craft up to six items at once in the Craftshop. Just click on your Craftshop and then "Look Inside."

Then, you'll immediately be greeted a new-and-improved Craftshop interface with six "Work Stations" sitting above the list of available recipes. The interface appears with an overlay, allowing you to ask your friends for more Wrenches, Pipes and Clamps.

It takes five of each to unlock each additional Work Station, totaling six. Now, all you need are more Bushels ... and a helluva lot more Manure.
FarmVille Craftshop expansion
Are you enjoying the added utility to the Craftshop? Are you a fan of the feature overall, or could you do without? Share with us in the comments. Add Comment.

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View the original article here

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Game Advertising Online Expands To 60 Million Monthly Uniques

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Monday, February 21, 2011 Game Advertising Online Expands To 60 Million Monthly Uniques

GSW and Gamasutra sister company Game Advertising Online has capped its recent expansion by reaching 60 million monthly unique viewers for its online game advertising -- including over 14 million uniques in the U.S. and 3.3 million in the U.K.

The business, which was acquired by this site's parent division the UBM Techweb Game Network in February 2010, is now a top 70 Quantcast ad network in the U.S., with a recent high of 66.8 million worldwide monthly uniques, 14.5 million of those in the United States.

Game Advertising Online is particularly popular with free-to-play online game companies looking to rapidly acquire users with specific CPC and CPA targets. Its advertising network now includes over 200 websites, spanning video game, anime, and other game-friendly themes.

Other traffic highs for the network include February 2011 figures of 3 million monthly uniques in Canada, 3.3 million in the United Kingdom, and 7.6 million in Turkey, with a number of other sought-after countries also trending up.

Current advertisers on Game Advertising Online's network of sites include major firms like Bigpoint (Battlestar Galactica Online), Turbine (Lord Of The Rings Online), Outspark (Fiesta), Gameforge (Nostale) and many more.

Recent innovations for the network have included the Game Box format, which provides a miniature 'store' of F2P games to choose from, within a small widget on publisher sites. This high-performing unit has been added to traditional banner advertising and site skin options for the network.

Personnel from Game Advertising Online, which is seeking both new advertisers and websites to add to its network, will be at Game Developers Conference 2011 in San Francisco next week.

Interested parties wishing to meet with them can either visit the Game Advertising Online booth (#2139) on the GDC show floor from Wednesday, March 2nd to Friday, March 4th, or pre-arrange a meeting via the site's contact form.

Posted by Simon Carless on February 21, 2011 8:00 AM | Permalink