Playdom VP Raph Koster has a theory about the origins of social games

by Joe Osborne, Posted Nov 12th 2012 5:30PM

The man who has a hand in pretty much all of the games that Disney's social gaming studio, Playdom, puts out knows a thing or two about gaming. One of the creators of storied MMO Ultima Online, Playdom VP of creative design Raph Koster has quite a few theories about his craft. (In fact, he wrote a book that covers the entire industry and the creative processes that underpin it quite thoroughly.)

Of course, the gaming veteran has a theory pertaining to social games as well. More specifically, he has an idea of how social games might have been born. (You know, aside from a bug in Ultima Online.) Here's what Koster had to say during a recent interview with Games.com News:

I have this pet theory, and it was really more Ultima Online and also at the same time Dark Ages, Kingdom of the Winds and Lineage made it over to Asia and brought all of that crafting stuff. Lineage and Dark Ages originally didn't have a lot of that. That crafting stuff met up with some of the traditions like Harvest Moon and things like that that were going on in Japan. It became taken for granted in Asia that MMOs were worldy, they had crafting and politics elements.

To this day the [World of Warcraft] model is not actually what most MMO models are like in Asia. They have all of these other things like politics, housing and whatever. That market eventually shifted with companies like Nexon and others, who started, I remember particularly in Korea. Korea didn't have consoles, so console games started getting made for the web by MMO companies in Korea. They had MMO qualities to them and one of them was essentially, 'Let's make Harvest Moon online on the web with MMO qualities,' and that was exported back to the states.

That is how we got FarmVille. So, I actually think that those farming games are a direct descendant of MMOs in a very literal sense. We were putting farming and crafting into the UOs and the [Star Wars Galaxies] in hopes of reaching a mass market audience and we didn't. Then it turned out that we did later by stripping away the MMO keys. That's the part that unlocked it, because you didn't have the giant time commitments, the heavy clients and all the rest.

Do you agree with Koster's per theory? What do you think of social games compared with the MMOs of today? Sound off in the comments. Add Comment. Tags: disney, facebook games, facebook games origins, playdom, raph koster, social games, social games origins, ultima online

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New hires in social gaming: Kabam, Plumbee and Playdom

Hiring in the social gaming industry was up sharply this week, with 12 companies reporting 24 recent hires. According to data from LinkedIn and other sources, Zynga reported the most activity with 10 hires. Despite the flurry of activity, there were no high-profile hires to report this week.

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

Thomas Jung, Art Director — Our hires roundup starts the week off with a promotion for Jung, who was previously a lead concept artist at Disney Playdom.

EA Playfish

Clay Zhong, Software Engineer — Zhong was also a software engineer at Augmentum before joining the Playfish team.

East Side Games

Annie Dickerson, Designer — Dickerson was previously the lead designer at Digido Interactive.

GSN

Jim Otermat, Game Developer — Otermat was a flash developer at 6waves Lolapps.

Kabam

David Dawson, 3D Art Lead – A pair of hires for Kabam. First up is Dawson, who was a lead environment artist / senior artist at Secret Level/Sega.Thomas Baxter, Player Experience Agent — Baxter also works at the University of Colorado.

Kixeye

Evan Jones, Gameplay Engineer — Jones was also a gameplay engineer at 6waves Lolapps.

Kontagent

Sean Po, Software Developer Intern – A promotion this week at Kontagent. Po was previously a Back-end Engineer Co-op at the company.

Loot Drop

Caulder Bradford, Software Engineer – Bradford comes from IQ212, where he was a lead Flash engineer.

Peak Games

Eyup Citci, Software Engineer — Two hires for Peak Games. Citci was a team leader at Mynet.Tolga Firatoglu, Lead Software Developer — Firatoglu starts his career at Peak.

Plumbee

Pablo Varela, Software Engineer — Varela was formerly the director of architecture at EA Playfish.Phillip Runyan, Marketing Consultant — Runyan makes the jump from Double Down Interactive where he was the senior marketing manager.

Social Point

Xavier Manuel Ruiz, Community Manager – Ruiz was previously a Colaborador at RAC 1.

Zynga

Steven Noble, QA Engineer I — Zynga dominates our roundup with 10 new hires.   First up is Noble, who worked in functionality quality assurance at THQ.Jon Weber, QA Manager — Weber was previously the senior manager and scrum master at Avid Technology.Christopher Coster, Senior Software Engineer — Zynga picks up three former 6waves Lolapps employees. Coster was a senior software developer at the company.Hans Park, Concept Artist — Park was also a concept artist at 6waves Lolapps.Tian Han, Software Engineer — Han was a game developer at 6waves Lolapps.Dan Alioto, Art Producer — Alioto comes from enVie Interactive, where he was a producer.John Mathew, Associate Product Manager — Mathew was a software engineer – team lead at L&T Infotech before joining Zynga’s Indian team.Nikhil Kurian, Associate Product Manager — Kurian was previously a DSP software engineer at Analog Devices.Aihua Liu, Software Engineer — Liu comes from Supertech Shanghai, where he was also a software engineer.Pavan Madhini, Content Writer — Finally we have Madnini, who was a management associate at Carpe Diem Marketing in India.

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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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Playdom folks name the 10 most important Facebook games of 2011

The Game Developers Conference (GDC) may be a time for connecting and brainstorming, but it can also be a time for back patting. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. Jokes aside, It's important to recognize past achievements to inform future decisions. Playdom VP Steve Meretzky and creative director Dave Rohrl named the 10 most Facebook games of 2011 during a talk at the event in San Francisco.

According to Gamasutra, Meretzky and Rohrl named the following games because they represent popular, emerging or overlooked trends in social gaming. (And the lot of them are spot-on.) Playtika's Slotomania was mentioned as "one of a whole wave of casino-themed games," Meretzky said, according to Gamasutra. The two also noted the likelihood of online gambling being legalized in the U.S.

Zombie Lane by Digital Chocolate was name-dropped for its zombies that "percolate through the game in interesting ways" in what otherwise is a farming game, Meretzky said. The VP went on to give King.com's Bubble Witch Saga a nod for adding a social progress map that isn't present in other bubble-bursting games on Facebook. Of course Playdom's very own Gardens of Time was mentioned for popularizing the hidden-object genre on the network.

Oddly enough, Meretzky made an example of Playfish's Monopoly Millionaires as a branded Facebook game gone wrong. Gamasutra reports that the Playdom VP called the game "too simple and shallow" and that it was "repetitive and grindy, lacking any strategic depth." Ouch. That said, the duo turned around and congratulated Playfish on an unparalleled use of branding for The Sims Social, calling it a "category killer."

CastleVille by Zynga earned a mention purely for its production values, though they called the game a "slick and really polished FrontierVille re-skin," according to Gamasutra. Social Point's Social Empires was name-dropped for proving Rohrl wrong that strategy social games would fall by the wayside in 2011. The indie darling of the social games world, Triple Town by Spry Fox, was named for being the most innovative Facebook game the two saw last year.

Of course, Words With Friends was mentioned for being the biggest game on Facebook in terms of daily players. Rohrl believes that the Scrabble knockoff will herald a trend in 2012: "This is the year of crossover from mobile to web." Well, congratulations, guys, most of you managed to impress two of the most important folks at Playdom.

Do you agree with Meretzky and Rohrl's estimations of these hit Facebook games? What Facebook games do you think deserve to be mentioned? Sound off in the comments. Add Comment.

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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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Playdom co-founder: Facebook farming games aren't social games

Rick Thompson, co-founder of Disney-owned social game studio Playdom, is not happy with the lot of social games. During an interview with All Things Digital (ATD), Thompson was asked if he finds many Facebook games enjoyable. "I think they are fairly scarce," Thompson told ATD. While he did shout out to games like Kixeye's Backyard Monsters and Gardens of Time by his own former company, Thompson said that the established powers in social games are having a hard time raising the bar.

"I tend to think that those will not be very interesting in another two years, and they aren't social games," Thompson said to ATD, referring specifically to the myriad of Facebook games that insist on farming mechanics. "They are single-player games with the possibility of visiting your friend's aquarium – that's not social." (And you should already know just where Thompson is pointing.)

Despite this, Thompson says that the maturity of Facebook games is leaps and bounds beyond what it was just three years ago, mostly because of how much it costs developers to acquire new users ever since Facebook changed things up. But Thompson--now a social gaming veteran that has invested in companies like Funzio of Crime City fame to Idle Games--still sees companies that focus primarily on increasing players numbers as, well, doing it wrong.

Thompson isn't alone here, either. A number of analysts and designers alike are calling the industry out. Most recently, Eedar analyst Jesse Divnich claimed that we're on the verge of the next generation of social games. Designers like Braid creator Jonathan Blow, however, simply see the current lot of Facebook games as exploitative and not much more. (And we all know how Ian Bogost feels about the games.) Sadly, it likely won't be until arguably forward-thinking games like IdleWorship become as profitable as, say, FarmVille that Facebook games begin to agree with Thompson's sentiments on a wide scale.

Do you agree that the current lot of top Facebook games lack real social gameplay? What do you think it will take until that becomes a reality in the top 10? Sound off in the comments. Add Comment.

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Playdom leads gamers into double life in Secret Agent X on Facebook

By day, you're a suburban soccer mom who brings dinner to the table for her kids. By night, you're a secret agent working for an undercover organization that keeps the world safe. This is the general premise for Playdom's next game since Disney's GnomeTown, Secret Agent X. The game, set to launch this fall, pits you against the evil organization known as SCAM.

All Things Digital reports that the game is available in some international markets in a closed beta test. The Disney-owned developer released a teaser trailer that reveals next to nothing about its gameplay, but we can always image what it'll be like. Based on what Playdom has told ATD, the game will send players on adventures using high-tech gadgets only to have them return home to the normal duties of suburban life.

It's easy to envision "home" being the hub of the game in which you customize a house, while you explore large maps on missions as a secret agent. (Again, this is speculation.) Playdom tells ATD that, starting with Secret Agent X, the company will release a dozen games within the next year. Up to three of those games--coming in January, March and August 2012--will revolve around Disney brands, according to ATD.

Playdom has been under fire from analysts for dragging its feet into the social games race since Disney bought it for a whopping $563.2 million over a year ago. How does the developer plan to catch up to the likes of wooga, Playfish and possibly Zynga: Explore new concepts and leverage the bevy of Disney mega brands. "A year after the acquisition, we are successfully transitioning into an operating division within Disney," Playdom COO Brad Serwin told ATD. "We are 100 percent back to work."

Based on the teaser trailer, what do you expect from Secret Agent X? Which of Disney's brands do you hope becomes a Facebook game most? Sound off in the comments. Add Comment.

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Google+ Announces Games, Launches With Zynga, Playdom, PopCap Games, Wooga, Rovio, Kabam, More

Google+ officially launches its Games service today with a series of established Facebook and mobile developers including Zynga, Playdom, PopCap Games, Kabam, Wooga, Rovio and more.

The above screenshot shows the list of launch titles for Google+ Games. While we’re not surprised by most of the games we see on this list — established titles with healthy audiences, all — we do note that CrowdStar and 6waves Lolapps don’t appear to be Google+ launch partners.

In a blog post announcing the launch, Google’s Vic Gundotra, senior VP of engineering, explains that the Games stream will show up as a button at the top of the Streams list. Clicking it displays game updates, invites, and recent gameplay activity from those within your circle. This stream is also where a player’s in-game activity is shared, eliminating the spam problem Facebook experienced last year where games posts clogged the feeds of non-gaming users. The post says the Games button is live today, but we haven’t seen it appear in our Google+ account as yet. When it does, here’s what it will look like:

Google+ Games will also launch with in-app payments, Vikas Gupta, Product Leader for Payments at Google, tweets. (Gupta came to the company via the Jambool acquisition.)

The announcement ends months of speculation about how and when Google would integrate social games into its social network experience. Previous discoveries suggested APIs similar to what Facebook offers social game developers, and there were rumors that a small pool of developers had been sought out by Google to launch games. The inclusion of Zynga Poker on the list of Google+ games is significant, as it helps us narrow down the list of Zynga games the developer is required to maintain exclusively on Facebook.

Games launching on Google+ is a symbolic moment in the evolution of social platforms in the United States. Over the last couple of years, there has been no viable alternative to Facebook for social game developers looking to get their games in front of a large audience. MySpace has fallen off the radar completely, and smaller networks like Bebo, Tagged, and Hi5 don’t have the traffic most developers are looking for. Though the Google+ Platform is currently only available to those developers Google invited to participate in the launch, its existence and possible growth will potentially grant developers an actual choice of platform and perhaps even some negotiating room with Facebook.

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E3 2011: Playdom offers in-game bonus for Gardens of Time in activity book

by Brandy Shaul, Posted Jun 10th 2011 1:54AM

The Disney booth at this year's E3 may have been filled to the brim with the brand's major stars like Cars' Lightning McQueen and Phineas and Ferb, but tucked away in a corner sat a demo station of Gardens of Time, Playdom's hidden object Facebook game. Next to the unassuming PC sat a Gardens of Time activity book, containing some stationary hidden object scenes, allowing visitors to see what the game was about without requiring them to actually sit down, mouse in hand.

While browsing through the book for new details or announcements, I found a bonus at the end. Disney and Playdom are offering users a free decoration for our gardens if you visit a particular link. Even if you didn't go to E3, you can still get your hands on this bonus item - just click right here. Once you visit this link, it appears that the bonus is the same regardless of visitor, and you'll receive a free Mandarin Ducks item.

We're not sure if this link will only remain active for a limited amount of time, but it does seem to be permanent. Either way, make sure you visit the link sooner, rather than later to claim your Mandarin Ducks decorative item while you know it's still available.

What do you think of your free Mandarin Ducks item? Are you happy Gardens of Time was shown off at the show? Let us know in the comments.

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Tags: disney, e3, e3 2011, facebook games, gardens of time, gardens of time facebook, hidden object game, hidden object games, playdom, social

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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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New Hires in Social Gaming: CrowdStar, Digital Chocolate, Playdom, & More

After two weeks of relatively heavy hiring, the stream of new faces has finally begun to slow down, even if only by a little bit. According to data from LinkedIn, only six developers hired new team members this week and we didn’t see any executive hires.

As always, if your company is hiring new people or making a notable promotion, please let us know. Email editor (at) insidesocialgames (dot) com, and we’ll get it into this or next week’s post. Also, please note that the information about most new hires, below, comes directly from company updates from LinkedIn, and is only as current as people’s profiles.

Looking for new opportunities? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.

CrowdStar

Brinton Williams, Producer — Joining CrowdStar this week,  Williams was previously a producer at Harmonix Music Systems.Nicole Epps, Flash Developer — Also joining CrowdStar, Epps was a lead programmer and designer at Semiotic Technologies.Chad Wilson, Game Designer — Wilson was previously a game designer (systems) at Cryptic Studios.Sam Juarez, 3D Artist — Juarez was previously sales at Best Buy.

Digital Chocolate

Playdom

Stephen Justice, Quality Assurance Tester — Joining Playdom, Justice was a quality assurance tester at NetDevil.Alex Kivelstadt, Associate Product Manager — In an internal change at Playdom, Kivelstadt changes roles from that of a  ”game services agent.”Russ Zaliznyak, Senior Acquisition Analyst — Zaliznyak was previously a business analyst at Intuit – Homestead Technologies.

Playfish

Simon Hunter, Senior Artist — Joining Playfish this week, Hunter was most recently a freelance artist.Paula Valença, Analytics Developer — Also joining Playfish, Valença was previously a tutor at Universidade do Minho.

PopCap Games

Joshua Carter, Quality Assurance Tester II — Joining PopCap Games, Carter was previously a cashier with Best Buy.

Zynga

Yuvaraj Gautam Chakravarthy, QA Lead — Chakravarthy was previously a software QA engineer at AOL.Reginald Harris, Senior Program Manager — Now at Zynga, Harris was a senior project manager for Android and Chrome at Google.Michael Courage, Principal SDE — Also now a part of Zynga, Courage was most recently a senior SDE at Microsoft.Stuart Capewell, Lead Software Engineer — Capewell was previously a senior software engineer at Electronic Arts.Huyen Huynh, Senior QA Manager — Huynh was previously an information services consultant at the Judicial Council of California.Kimberly Sambrook, Research Recruiter — In an internal shift at Zynga, Sambrook changes roles from university relations manager.Brian Crombie, Site Support Lead — Crombie was a DMS deployment tech at Pfizer.Timothy Dyer, Accounts Payable Specialist — Joining Zynga this week, Dyer was previously a financial specialist II at Gilead Sciences.Wilfred Schmidt, Senior Software Engineer — Schmidt was most recently a software engineer for Microsoft.Praful Kaul, Engineering Manager — Now at Zynga, Kaul was previously a file systems engineer at NetApp.

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Playdom Commands This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Games by DAU With Gardens of Time

This week’s list of fastest growing games on Facebook based on daily active users features Playdom front and center in the number one position. The new hidden object game Gardens of Time has been showing a fascinating amount of growth. Launched on April 7th, Gardens of Time has gained almost 600,000 DAU in under two short weeks. This highly polished and fun game is on its way to surpass Playdom’s most popular game Wild Ones in daily activity within a day or two.

According to AppData, our metrics platform for tracking new Facebook games like this, the game is currently seeing 50% of its monthly active users logging in each day to play. Of course, this number is likely to go down quite far, as is usual for newly launched applications — but still, it’s an early indicator that Playdom has a game with good potential. For sake of comparison, Playdom’s other new game, Deep Realms, sank to under 17% DAU/MAU after two weeks.

Zombie Lane, the newest Digital Chocolate title, has still been going strong and climbing up the charts. Having launched in late March, this zombie-slaughtering sim game has been on a direct path to popularity ever since. Though there is nothing overly original about Zombie Lane aside from a fresh theme, there is something that just feels right while playing it. Everything is in its place — well planned out quests, fun objectives, an enticing game loop, and cheerful and polished graphics and gameplay. It’s no surprise that Zombie Lane has over 516,000 DAU and 2.2 million MAU in less than a month. It’s a well done game and is now Digital Chocolate’s second most popular game after Millionaire City. Zombie Lane shows that developers don’t have to take too many risks; there is still a place for a well-designed game that sticks to the tried and true but delivers a high quality experience.

Stay tuned for our look at the top emerging Facebook games on Friday, and the top weekly gainers by monthly active users on Monday.

The data in this post comes via AppData, our data service tracking growth and trends across the Facebook platform.

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Wooga surpasses Playdom, PopCap to become number four studio

by Joe Osborne, Posted Apr 12th 2011 6:20PM

Who saw this one coming? No one, that's who. Wooga announced on its company blog that it is officially the fourth most popular social game studio in the world, according to AppData. At 20.4 million monthly players, the Berlin-based developer is now more popular than both Playdom and PopCap of Social City and Bejeweled Blitz fame, respectively. And Wooga, who recently released a social puzzler called Diamond Dash, isn't stopping anytime soon.

"Capturing 20 million active Users in just 20 months and surpassing Playdom to become number four in the world is a stunning accomplishment," said Jens Begemann, Wooga founder & CEO. "We will remain focused on producing high quality games with a unique game experience for the future. With our ambitious team, we aim to become number two by the end of this year."

To add insult to injury put things into perspective, Wooga went to mention that it has just 70 employees compared to Playdom's 300 plus, not to mention that its owned by Disney. A little cocky, and rightfully so, Wooga is quickly becoming a powerful force in the social gaming industry. What's even more exciting is to see how PopCap and Playdom will respond. As the competition comes to a head, it's only a matter of time before one of these developers truly disrupts Zynga's choke hold on the market.

[Image Credit: Wooga]

Are you a fan of Wooga's games on Facebook? Do you think the company can take the number two spot by the end of 2011? Sound off in the comments. Add Comment.
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Tags: appdata, bejeweled blitz, diamond dash, disney, growth, playdom, popcap, social city, wooga, zynga

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