The Inside Network Job Board: BrightRoll, MegaZebra, MetroMile and more

The Inside Network Job Board is dedicated to providing you with the best social media job opportunities across social and mobile application platforms. Here are this week’s highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at:  BrightRoll, MegaZebra, MetroMile and more.

Mediabistro Event

Discover the impact that social media strategy will have in driving business forward at Inside Social Marketing, this December 3-4 in New York! You’ll hear from social media experts like Michael Cupo, Director of Business Development and Social Media for ESPN. Early bird prices end November 6 so register now!

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The Inside Network Job Board: Rumble, MegaZebra, Mind Candy and more

The Inside Network Job Board is dedicated to providing you with the best social media job opportunities across social and mobile application platforms. Here are this week’s highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at:  Rumble, MegaZebra, Mind Candy and more.

Mediabistro Course

Turn one vacation into dozens of story ideas, and learn how to pitch your pieces successfully to various travel publications. Join our Travel Writing course, starting October 15th, to learn what travel editors look for and how to create salable pieces that will get you published. Register Today!

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Social gaming news roundup: Zynga, MegaZebra and Japan

Analysts say Zynga must add nine million new DAU per quarter - Industry analysts Cowen and Company have calculated than in order to maintain its current DAU count across its business, Zynga must add at least nine to 10 million DAU every quarter — approximately 100,000 new users every day — to outpace the number of DAU lost quarterly. According an interview on Gamasutra, Zynga’s games lose about 18.4 percent percent of DAU each quarter.

Japan gets mobile social games platform for adults only - Japanese video distribution company DMM has launched its own mobile social network featuring pornographic social games according to Japanese industry watcher Serkan Toto. DMM is a leading Japanese producer of adult video content.

Namco Bandai: free-to-play damaging game industry – Gamespot is reporting that Olivier Comte, Namco Bandai’s SVP for Europe has come out swinging against the free-to-play model, saying games that follow the model aren’t high quality, and that low-cost games lower the perceived value of games, ultimately harming publishers.

Sterne Agee: Zynga loses $150 to acquire every new paid customer – According to Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia, Zynga has spent $120 million on new player acquisition so far this fiscal year, or $150 for every new paying customer according to his interview with Develop.

513 million internet users in China - Penn Olson is reporting that China now has 513 million citizens online. According to the latest data from the China Internet Network Information Center, 38.3 percent of the country’s population now uses the internet.

MegaZebra appoints Godager and Goeldner to board - Munich-based social game company MegaZebra has appointed European video game industry veterans Gaute Godager and Jürgen Goeldner to its board of directors. Gaute Godager was a co-founder of Funcom.

Japanese social games market to be worth $4.4 billion in 2012 – Japanese market research firm Yano is predicting the Japanese social game industry — driven mainly by mobile social game companies like DeNA and GREE — will be worth $4.4 billion in 2012.

Zynga moves towards online gambling – Zynga has confirmed what many already suspected, telling All Things D that it looking into real money gambling. The company is currently is undertaking “active conversations with potential partners to better understand and explore this new opportunity.” While Facebook does not currently allow real-money gambling on its platform yet, the company will soon in regions were it is legal.

Final Fantasy Brigade has half a million users – Square Enix’s first mobile social game based on the Final Fantasy franchise is now live on  DeNA’s Mobage network for both feature phones and smartphones. According to Andriasang, the game already has more than 500,000 users.

GREE buys stake in Mobicle for mobile social game development - GREE has bought a 6.8 percent share in Korean game company Mobicle. The two companies will co-develop a variety of mobile social games that will be available globally in the second quarter of 2012.

Nexon licenses Unity - Tokyo-headquartered gaming company Nexon has signed a deal to license Unity’s game development platform, reports Develop. According to a statement from Nexon, the company will be using Unity to develop multi-platform content.

[Launch] University of Washington releases Facebook game – The University of Washington Bothell has released its first Facebook game. Called UWB Wetlands Restoration, the game was created by undergraduate students and 100 percent of the proceeds go to restoration of the real UW Bothell wetlands.

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MegaZebra On Ad Spend, Localization and Facebook-only Development

Two weeks ago, German social game developer MegaZebra announced a second “multi-million Euro” round of funding to put toward hiring more staff and development on new games. Inside Social Games follows up with CEO Henning Kosmack on how MegaZebra’s strategy will evolve in 2011.

Inside Social Games: In addition to launching a new game this summer, we understand that you’re using this second round of funding to tweak your existing games Nuzzle Puzzle and Magic Islands. What do you plan to do for those games in the coming months?

Henning Kosmack: Moving forward, we always want to, on the one hand, take things that have proven successful in the past and do more of that, but we also like to venture into slightly new areas. So we will continue to further develop Mahjong Trails and bring out new features. We have a whole bunch of ideas we’re going to be working on with the new guys we are hiring.

Nuzzle Puzzle, that is something [where] a lot of the elements of the core engine are kind of the same as Mahjong Trails, so we’re trying to build on something that proved successful. And we are taking a concept, a genre that actually draws inspiration from the Nintendo DS, and putting out a game we haven’t seen on Facebook yet. Trying new stuff.

On Magic Island, when we started with that game, Kingdoms of Camelot wasn’t out yet. We thought that, given the browser gaming background that Germany has, we wanted to see if some of those elements could be transported into Facebook. Because obviously all the big browser game companies here [in Europe] have tried. Bigpoint tried, Gameforge tried, Ubisoft tried. So we thought, OK, let’s give it a try and see if we can’t be more successful given the learning we have. While we were working on [Magic Islands], Kingdoms of Camelot came out and some other titles, proving that there is sort of a demand for more traditional gaming genres on Facebook. And that’s why we think we want to continue and explore that genre.

I think in 2008 or 2009, when we [released] out our first mahjong game, I think it was the first mahjong game on Facebook at that time. So we are always trying to do something, push the industry a little bit further. Sometimes we have been successful. Sometimes not so much.

ISG: What can you tell us about your new game, due out in summer?

Kosmack: Not so much yet. Again, this is something that, to my knowledge, hasn’t been done on Facebook yet, but we are super excited about it. It will mix some known Facebook elements but brings something to Facebook that isn’t there yet.

ISG: Since 2008, you’ve transitioned all your game development to Facebook alone. Can you walk us through that process?

Kosmack: When we started in 2008, we spoke to all the social networks in Europe and the [initial] plan was “OK, let’s get onto all of these and Facebook.” Then, as we started doing that, we realized very early on that the kind of game experience and gameplay that we have as our goal would require a whole lot of work [to make it cross-platform for all the networks]. Then we thought we either had to compromise gameplay and user experience, or we had to have a lot of people and a lot of resources to adapt each game to individual networks. Because we didn’t want to compromise the user experience and at that time we weren’t in the position to hire four times as many people, we decided to focus everything on Facebook. If you can do it there, you can do it anywhere.

Looking back, this has been a good strategy for us. Since then, Facebook has kind of taken over not only the whole world, but the continent here in Europe.

ISG:Facebook has changed since then. Do you think you’ve grown your network of users large enough to support cross-promotion within your user base for the new game? Or will you have to invest in advertising?

Kosmack: So far, I think we have done quite well. Until this year, we hadn’t spent anything on marketing. We reached 4.4 million MAU at [our peak]. We reached that without any spending, just through viral and cross-promotion. Now we are going to make some changes because I have the feeling that Facebook has changed their algorithms, so we are going to bring out some more [viral type] features.

Going forward, we are definitely going to have to commence marketing for the games to make them bigger and that’s also one of the things we want to do with this financing round. But still I think if you really have a good game and you’re smart with how you develop your viral channels, Facebook still offers a lot of value that you can actually build upon.

ISG: Your viral growth seems particularly successful across various regions. We were surprised to see how big your French audience is.

Kosmack: So were we. [Laughs] Since we grew completely through viral measures, I think that’s why we’re so very big in western Europe, Turkey, and North America because that’s where our friends worked and we sent the games to them and the [audience grew]. Mahjong seems to be extremely popular among French women. We didn’t know that beforehand but, quite frankly, this is obviously good. We do love our user base. And we do like the fact that we have users from Western Europe and North America, which allows us to monetize [effectively]. I think there are other developers with more monthly active users, but since we don’t have so many users in countries that are more difficult to monetize, I think that’s an advantage that we have.

ISG: You also seem to have the upper hand on localization. How did you get ahead of other games so quickly?

Kosmack: When we started in 2008, we had our games live in multiple languages. I’m not aware of any Facebook developer that had something like that [at launch]. From the very beginning, we developed an in-house tool that we use for all our games that’s very efficient to localize the games. Then we have native speakers for the games we have going — for English, Italian, French, German, and Spanish — that we focus on. If you start out of Europe, you focus on localization from day one because it’s a big topic here in Europe.

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