Platform Update: Mobile Hack Day, International Payment Methods for Credits, Privacy Retrieval

Facebook has made several developer-focused announcements over the paste few days, including that it has released more free tickets to its Mobile Hack event at Facebook headquarters this Friday. This will give more developers the opportunity to learn about building Facebook-integrated native native and HTML5 mobile apps.

Nine new international Facebook Credits payment methods have been added to make it easier for those abroad to buy Credits. Additionally, developers now have the capability to programmatically check if an app is installed on a Page and what privacy setting a user has selected for an app.

Facebook recently launched a blog specifically for HTML5 developers, and there announced it would hold an all-day Mobile Hack event at the Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto on October 28th. The event will cover iOS, Android, and HTML5 mobile web development for the new Facebook mobile app Platform. It will feature: “technical deep-dives, a Q&A, partner presentations, and an opportunity for you and your team to hack on site with Facebook developer team assistance. At the end of the day, awards will be given to the best mobile social apps.”

Developers can register to attend Mobile Hack for free on Eventbrite, though tickets are limited and will likely sell out the same way the mini-f8 Open Graph Technology Days Facebook held around the country did. They may then begin working on their hack project, as apps don’t need to be built from scratch at the event. The schedule for Mobile Hack is as follows:

10:00am – Registration Open
11:00am – Facebook Platform on Mobile
11:45am - New Features: Social Discovery on Mobile
12:30pm - Lunch
1:30pm –   Partner Presentations and Best Practices
2:30pm -  Native Distribution for Web Apps
3:00pm -  Break
3:15pm -  Open Graph and Mobile
4:00pm -  Q&A
5:00pm -  Dinner
5:00pm -  Hack
11:00pm – App Presentation & Awards
11:30pm – Event Close

There hasn’t quite been a blitz of mobile app development since the new Platform opened earlier this month. The launch partner apps show some promise, but traffic has been slow. Creating a healthy mobile app platform is key to Facebook growing mobile engagement and making money through mobile Credits. Facebook is hoping the new HTML5 resource center and Mobile Hack will give developers the understanding necessary to explore the mobile platform’s viral channels.

Alongside the announcement of initial test of Facebook Credits for Websites, Facebook listed that Credits can now be bought with several new international payment methods. The news benefits developers, as users are more likely to become paying customers if it’s easy for them to acquire Credits.

Many of the new payment methods are online payment solutions for Southeast Asia and South America, which have become important secondary markets for developers. Facebook now supports over 80 payment methods in 50 countries. They new methods include:

Axeso5 (Brazil)Join Card (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand)Malaysia OBT (Malaysia)MEPS FPX (Malaysia)MEPSCASH (Malaysia)PayEasy (Philippines)PaysBuy (Thailand)SafetyPay (Mexico, Costa Rica, Peru, Spain, Austria, Brazil)WebCash (Malaysia)

The Graph API can now be used to determine if an app has been installed on a Page. An HTTP GET request to /PAGE_ID/tabs/APP_ID will return the IDs of any app installed on a Page when used with a Page admin access token, and whether a particular app is installed when used with that app’s access token. This will allow Page management apps to determine what tab apps have or haven’t been installed  on a Page they oversee.

The new app authentication flow allows users to set the widest possible audience for content shared through that app. Now developers can retrieve a user’s privacy selection via the privacy setting table. This way, when apps present users with subsequent privacy selectors, they can default to a user’s previously chosen privacy setting. This keeps users from thinking their existing privacy settings have been changed.

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Aquarium Games Fishing for Traffic in International Waters

Aquarium simulation games are another old hat genre for the Facebook game platform, much like the restaurant simulation genre we examined earlier this week. Even with its “been there, done that” status, however, developers seem to be finding traffic for new aquarium games in the international market.

Aquarium games are like pet simulations, but confined to the pet type of fish. Players are usually tasked with attracting fish to a virtual space by using food, cleaning up debris generated in the space, and by decorating the space to make it more alluring to different types of fish. This type of game lends itself to the asynchronous Facebook audience as it doesn’t require quite as much time-management as a farm or restaurant simulation and the ambiance of a virtual aquarium is more soothing, much like the classic screen savers from Microsoft Windows.

Games By Genre: Fish (Aquarium)

The largest aquarium games by monthly active users — CrowdStar’s Happy Aquarium, Happy Elements Ltd’s Chinese language version of My Fishbowl, Zynga’s FishVille, and TallTree Games’ Fish World — all have long histories on Facbeook dating back to fall and winter of 2009. These games found success throughout the first half of 2010, in the days when the Facebook games platform still offered extensive viral channels through which games could attract new users. As an example, Happy Aquarium and FishVille at one point each boasted more than 25 million MAU and 7 million daily active users during their first three months in contrast to their present-day levels.

After the first three months of growth, each of our top tier aquarium games slowed in growth, creating a gradual downward slope. The beginnings of these slopes happen to coincide with the period of time in which Facebook clamped down on viral channels available to developers — spring 2010. While one could argue that the loss of growth in our aquarium games could be connected to the loss of the viral channels, we’re can’t necessarily reach that conclusion as the downward slopes remained gradual throughout spring and summer of 2010 as opposed to showing a sharp drop-off. Moreover, most social games in any genre see growth in three to four months followed by a period of decline as players simply run out of things to do in-game and move on to other titles. Even so, it’s not hard to imagine that once the viral channels were restricted, each developer faced an uphill battle to bring growth back to the games.

The exception here is the Chinese language version of My Fishbowl, which appears to be on a long-term upward trend begun in early April of this year, up 33% in MAU over the last two months. The reasons for this trend are not immediately clear; other international versions of My Fishbowl aren’t performing nearly as well.

In the mid tier of aquarium games, we see the original My Fishbowl still stuck in a decline slope, but we also see a notable newcomer. Akvaryum is a Turkish-language aquarium sim from Peak Games, a developer that’s seen success in the Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) region where other developers tend to struggle. The game launched only in the last two weeks and is already number five out of all fish games with over 500,000 MAU and 100,000 DAU.

Also in this tier is Gaia Online’s Ocean Party, an older aquarium game with an interesting history. It was the developer’s first Facebook game built off of a similar activity in its successful virtual world, Gaia Online. Based on its experiences with Ocean Party, Gaia Online went on to create monster collection and combat game, Monster Galaxy, which is shaping up to be a Facebook success story. Ocean Party hadn’t seen much activity in the last nine months, but a small spike in MAU and DAU in early June hints at signs of life in the otherwise dead-in-the-water game.

At the bottom of our aquarium spectrum are more language variations of My Fishbowl, several decaying clones of Happy Aquarium, and a slew of games that don’t exactly fit the aquarium genre. The two that make our top 10 — ???? (Happy Fish Ponds) and Fish Isle — do actually fit the genre, but like their siblings in tiers one and two, they haven’t seen significant growth of late.

While the Chinese language version of My Fishbowl and Akvaryum’s sudden popularity suggest that there is still an audience for the aquarium genre in the international market, most of these games tell a sad story for aquariums on Facebook. We don’t think it’s going to completely discourage developers from attempting new aquarium games, however. Already we see mobile developer Jirbo actively try to port its successful iOS aquarium sim, Tap Reef, to Facebook; and other developers like HitGrab are seeing success with variations on the “collect fish” theme of aquarium games as applied to the actual sport of fishing in games like FishHunt.

All data in this analysis was compiled with our social game traffic tracking service, AppData. If you believe a game has been left off this list in error, please reach out to us in the comments.

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Large Animal Games, 6waves, Starz Look to International Market for Spartacus Off Season

Spartacus: The Game (a.k.a. Spartacus: Gods of the Arena: The Game) launched on Facebook in January to coincide with the release of the a prequel to the Starz Spartacus TV series. Now that the six-episode run of the show is complete, developer Large Animal Games is looking to publisher 6waves to get the game localized ahead of the TV show’s air dates in foreign territories.

When the game launched, Spartacus showed strong growth in daily active users and monthly active users, climbing to an all-time high of 1.1 MAU users and and 123,000 DAU between March and April. By that time, the six-episode prequel series had been done for over a month and it appears as though the game waned a little through the end of April. Starting in May, the game is showing an uptick again in both MAU and DAU as new content rolls out within the game and publisher 6waves localizes it for foreign territories in Europe where the TV show is only just beginning to air or will air over the summer.

In our continuing series on brand integration, we touched on branded properties whose brands were the game, such as TV show properties like game shows and Jersey Shore. With Spartacus, we get a rare look at the life cycle of a deep brand integration game that is both dependent on its origin intellectual property (in this case, the TV show) and a stand alone property that needs to adjust to the social games market. Speaking to ISG, representatives from Starz, Large Animal Games, and 6waves explained how they plan to keep Spartacus: The Game going while the TV show languishes in the off season.

First, says Large Animal’s Wade Tinney, the developer has to make a game that’s a game in and of itself. “I think that’s the way to make a successful branded social game,” he says. “Something that didn’t have meaning just because of the [network] association.”

In the game, players run a gladiator training house (or ludus) where they buy and train fighters to then send out against other arena fighters. Aside from two mentions of Starz at the upper and lower quadrants of the screen where 6waves and Large Animal Games’ logos also appear, the TV show connection isn’t made much of within the game. Outside of the game, Facebook ads for Spartacus: The Game do not bear the Starz network logo and the character art isn’t immediately recognizable as “game-ized” versions of the show’s cast members.

“We started [development] in September [2010] with a very tight timeline,” Tinney says. “We just wanted something that had a clear core gameplay loop. And the art had to look fantastic.”

Next, the network has to support the game in a way that contributes to the gameplay without taking away anything from the TV show. For example, Starz made the decision to share production stills and full episodes before their air date with Large Animal Games to give the developer ideas for the plot, but Starz is currently not allows Large Animal to tease anything about the next season of Spartacus. Instead, the network is working with the developer to identify additional characters in the existing series that Large Animal can use as fresh content for the game, such as new gladiators like Oenomaus (pictured below) for sale in the game’s marketplace.

“We knew that [a social game] would be a way for fans to connect and engage with the brand,” Katz says. “Very early on, we were considering the various digital distribution channels for Spartacus and we noticed the fan Page was over 1 million [Likes]. We saw an opportunity to launch the prequel with the game.”

The last piece of the puzzle is localization support from publisher 6waves. Within the last month, the company had the game localized in Turkish and French before rolling out localizations for German, Chinese, Spanish, and Portuguese-speaking territories. Interestingly, Spartacus isn’t localized for Italian yet, but 6waves reports that the game does well in Italy among English-speakers. Tinney says Large Animal was surprised to see that Turkey was Spartacus’s number two audience in size behind the United States. In additional to Italian, Spartacus is also currently being localized for Korean, Russian, and Arabic.

“The conversation, internally, for us was [how] well the game would work globally,” 6waves Product Manager Catherine Herdlick. Given the growth trend Spartacus: The Game has seen as these localizations go live and the prequel series hits international networks, it’s clear that the game’s got the global potential the publisher looks for.

Katz and Tinney declined to discuss plans for Spartacus: Season 2, which is currently in pre-production following a re-cast of the show’s main character. Assuming the show is on-target for the January 2012 season, we expect to see second season teasers or video ads emerge in late summer or early fall 2011.

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