Casual gaming is big business. It’s also an ever-changing landscape in which no market share is safe.

In April, developer King ruled the casual market on Facebook and mobile with its Candy Crush Saga. Meanwhile, former top dogs Zynga and Disney are shedding active users.

“King’s color-matching [puzzler Candy Crush Saga], which debuted last November, now holds the No. 1 ranking in all of our mobile top-grossing charts and is No. 1 by daily active users on the Facebook platform, while placing No. 2 on our Facebook top-grossing chart behind Zynga’s Farmville 2,” Cowen and Co. analyst Doug Creutz wrote in a note to investors.

Creutz notes that companies like Electronic Arts, DeNA, Gree, Supercell, and Kabam are emerging as market leaders alongside Zynga and Disney. King is the most significant competitor to those more-established industry titans.

“Zynga.com [is] shedding players fast,” said Creutz. “We estimate that the average number of players on Zynga’s homegrown gaming platform dropped by 20 percent during April and is down 33 percent since January.”

Similarly, the Cowen analyst see trouble with Disney, who doesn’t have a top-grossing mobile game in the top 20. This is a big change from when Where’s My Water? was the puzzler capturing the casual zeitgeist.

“Marvel: Avengers Alliance on the Facebook platform is Disney’s sole entry in any of our charts,” said Cruetz. “By contrast, big-media peer Warner Bros. appears to be gaining momentum by placing in the top 10 on both the iPhone and iPad charts.”

Warner Bros. fighter Injustice: Gods Among Us is currently the eighth highest-grossing app for the iPhone.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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On a worldwide basis, King’s Candy Crush Saga leads the way on the Apple iOS app store in downloads, and Imangi’s Temple Run 2 is tops in the Google Play store. But when it comes to revenue, GungHo Online Entertainment’s Puzzle & Dragons has conquered all, according to March data from market research firm App Annie.

The results show the competitive market for mobile games is becoming a battle among the same players each month for the top rankings, with no clearly dominant company.

King’s match-3 puzzle game has steadily grown in downloads on iOS since its release in September 2012. Now it is No. 1 in the most-downloaded game on iOS, and it is No. 3 on Google Play. Candy Crush Saga was No. 4 in revenue on Google Play and No. 3 in revenue on iOS. The top five grossing iOS publishers in March were unchanged from February, with Supercell (maker of Clash of Clans) and GungHo Online at the top of the charts.

GungHo’s Puzzle & Dragons, meanwhile, is No. 1 on both iOS and Google Play for the month of March in terms of most revenue. That tells you that the game, which is particularly popular in the Japanese mobile game market, has been designed for maximum monetization. (I happen to know a chief executive who admitted spending $300 in the game.) Puzzle & Dragons has generated more than 10 million downloads to date in Japan alone.

Electronic Arts had the No. 1 spot on iOS in top downloads, but it did so with a total of 984 apps on the market. On Google Play, EA was No. 3, with 107 games on the market. On iOS, EA was No. 3 in monthly game revenue and it was No. 6 in monthly game revenue on Google Play. EA’s top downloadable game on iOS was Real Racing 3 at No. 2. And EA’s top grossing apps were The Simpsons: Tapped Out at No. 5 on iOS and Real Racing 3 at No. 7 on iOS. On Google Play, EA’s The Simpsons: Tapped Out was No. 6 in monthly revenue.

Rovio, saw its place move up four spots due to the strong downloads on iOS for its Angry Birds game and The Croods. Glu Games also jumped seven spots on iOS to No. 6. Rovio was the top publisher in downloads on Google Play in March.

One of the rare new players on the charts was Fingersoft, the Finnish startup that published Hill Climb Racing. Fingersoft hit No. 4 in top downloads on Google Play thanks to its release of Benji Bananas, an “endless swinging” game.

NHN has begun to climb the charts thanks to the strong performance of games published on its Line mobile messaging network in Japan. On Google Play, Asian game publishers have posted three games on the Kakao Talk mobile messaging network in South Korea.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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A sea change has happened in social gaming. The Zynga era is over. Long live King.

It’s not quite dramatic as that as the competition is still fierce for games on social networks and mobile devices. But Zynga’s earnings call revealed a big change in the standings. Zynga said it has 52 million daily active users of its social games on Facebook, Zynga.com, and mobile devices. London-based King says it now has more than 66 million daily active users. And the remarkable thing is that King has just 400 employees while Zynga has 2,902.

Zynga has had a long run as the king of social games as it jumped on the platform as soon as Facebook opened itself up to third-party applications in May 2007. It grew quickly and, with the help of games like Mafia Wars and Zynga Poker, became the No. 1 company on Facebook in early 2009. It held that rank ever since. When Zynga launched FarmVille in mid-2009, the company’s users shot through the roof to nearly 83 million monthly active users in a single game. It started crushing rivals, who decided to flee to new platforms on mobile devices as a way to escape it.

Many contenders emerged, like Berlin’s Wooga and Electronic Arts. Just a year ago, it looked like EA would give Zynga a run for its money thanks to rapid growth of titles from its Playfish division, acquired for up to $400 million in late 2009. EA saw rocket-like growth for titles like The Sims Social and SimCity Social. It looked like, if anyone could do it, EA would supplant Zynga with its well-known gamer brands. Then, poof. EA’s audience evaporated as mobile devices grew in favor and the company failed to capitalize on its one-off successes. EA finally shut down Playfish this month.

But you can’t fully credit Zynga for EA’s defeat. Ten-year-old King played a role, too, and it was much more methodical in catching up in social games.

“King now has more than 66 million daily players of our games, and in Candy Crush Saga, we have a global hit on Facebook and on mobile,” said Riccardo Zacconi, the chief executive of King, in a statement. “Our players love being able to switch from mobile phone to tablet computer to PC without losing their progress in the game — the cross-platform synchronization that makes that possible is a big reason for our popularity. Our bite-size games are perfect for coffee breaks, bus journeys, or any spare few minutes in your day.”

Born on the web in 2003, King focused on tournament games and web-based casual titles for years. But by 2011, it was clear the audience was shifting. Rather than dump its 300 games from the web onto Facebook, King experimented for a while to see what worked.

King launched its first Facebook game, Bubble Saga, in April 2011. That title hit the top 10, and King’s ranking was No. 45. In September 2011, the company launched Bubble Witch Saga on Facebook. By October 2011, King became a top-10 Facebook developer. In March 2012, King acquired mobile-game developer Fabrication Games.

In April 2012, King came out with its most triumphant game, Candy Crush Saga, on Facebook. The success of that title catapulted it ahead of EA, Wooga, and Disney-Playdom. King kept bulking up its studios. It figured out that gamers were growing up and out of the simple simulation games that they first embraced on Facebook. They were increasingly playing arcade-like games that could generate outcomes in a minute or two. They were short, fun, frenzied, and addictive. Zynga was slower to recognize this shift.

The smart thing that Zacconi did was that he viewed social networking and mobile as the same platform. He drove King to design games that could be played on a PC or Mac on Facebook, or on a mobile device. You could log into the game on any platform and find your progress and scores synchronized. That allowed consumers to “consume our content in a seamless, ubiquitous way,” Zacconi said.

It did this first with the mobile version of Bubble Witch Saga, launched as King’s first real push into mobile games in July 2012. By January, Candy Crush Saga became the No. 1 game on Facebook. It was joined in the top 10 by Pet Rescue Saga and Bubble Witch Saga. Last month, King launched Farm Heroes Saga and Papa Pear Saga. Zacconi said recently that, after the mobile version of Candy Crush Saga launched, King saw a big increase in demand for the PC version as well. It is also leveraging Facebook’s fast growth on mobile to find new users for its games.

During the past year, as King was on the rise, Zynga was hurting. It missed its earnings targets as Facebook’s growth slowed. The company lost money for a couple of quarters, and it has had to retrench. In the past two quarters, Zynga has returned to breakeven results. But it has shrunk its staff and seen a lot of executive churn.

David Ko, Zynga’s chief operations officer, said in an interview that he isn’t overly concerned about losing the top spot in users to King as he doesn’t see the competition as a zero-sum game.

“The way I look at it is, we have a belief that social gaming is a huge opportunity,” Ko said. “Not only from the estimate that it is a $9 billion market but also from what we’re seeing in the marketplace. Competition like this just reinforces the opportunity. My biggest thing is, I want to make sure that we’re confident that you’re going to see more of our franchises in that mix.”

There are a lot of metrics where Zynga is still No. 1 in social games, such as revenues. But King is on the march. It will have to defend its ground and extend its lead, or the King era may be very short.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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It’s good to be the king. It’s also good to be social-game developer King (formerly King.com), which is pulling in revenue from a number of online, mobile, and social games.

King is celebrating its 10-year anniversary by dropping the “.com” from its official name and pointing out that it has over 108 million monthly players across its hit titles, like mobile puzzler Candy Crush Saga. The studio is rewarding itself with an updated brand logo, and for the players, King is revealing two new Facebook games: Papa Pear Saga and Farm Heroes Saga.

Papa Pear Saga is a Peggle-style arcade title that has players firing off the titular pear at acorns and other objects to score points. Farm Heroes Saga is another match-three puzzle game with leveling elements.

“We have had lots of fun over the last 10 years making great games and we are honored to have acquired such a loyal fan-base,” King chief executive Riccardo Zacconi said in a statement. “The exceptional growth of our mobile, Facebook, and cross-platform audience is a testament to the care and craft that goes into our games. We’re pleased to announce two new Saga games on Facebook with Papa Pear Saga and Farm Heroes Saga. These games build upon our Saga portfolio with new concepts that players are sure to enjoy.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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SAN FRANCISCO — Two years ago, King.com wasn’t on Facebook, and its web-based games were in danger of becoming ghost towns on the web. But the London-based company now has the largest game on Facebook in Candy Crush Saga, and it is growing quickly on mobile platforms as well.

Since Candy Crush Saga launched in November on mobile, the number of users has surpassed 10 million daily players. And the amount of activity on the Facebook desktop version has increased since the launch of mobile. King.com chief executive Riccardo Zacconi [above] said today that this was because the cross-platform nature of the game made it more appealing to play it on multiple platforms, including desktop. He made the comments at Facebook’s seminar on games at the Game Developers Conference today.

King.com’s mobile games are architected so that you can play the same game both on mobile and Facebook desktop, or canvas. That means you can play on mobile and continue in the same spot in the game on desktop.

“We let them consume our content in a seamless, ubiquitous way,” Zacconi said.

While Facebook gaming has its critics, the social network has 250 million of its monthly active members playing games, or one out of every four Facebook users. That number is growing on the desktop as well as on mobile, said Sean Ryan, director of game partnerships at Facebook, in a GDC  talk today.

Zacconi said that Facebook gives game developers the advantage of knowing the identity of a player, the social graph of that individual’s friends, and discoverability. That is especially important on mobile, where it’s easy for a game to get lost among hundreds of thousands of titles on app stores.

Zacconi said the web is still important, as it is where King.com has more than 300 games and lots of customers. Facebook desktop is also important because the company can launch social versions of its web games there and work out the bugs, using constant analytics and user feedback to tune the games so they work optimally. Then it launches a mobile version of the game.

Games product manager George Lee said Facebook is making improvements to strike the balance between respecting those who don’t play games on the social network and promoting virality of games. One example is that, starting tomorrow, Facebook will turn on a discovery feature called “game collections” that shows a library of games at a glance for any given game-savvy Facebook user.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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People love games in North America, but the free-to-play market is truly popping in Japan and Korea.

Today, developer King.com announced plans to localize its popular Candy Crush Saga and Bubble With Saga titles for Japanese and Korean audiences. The social-puzzle games are currently available for Facebook, iOS, and Android. King.com will first adapt them for the Asian nations with App Store and Google Play market releases to follow soon after.

The developer already released the game in Hong Kong, where Candy Crush Saga has 1 million daily players.

“We have been looking towards Asian markets for some time now and feel this is the perfect [opportunity] to offer localized versions of our games in Japan and Korea,” King.com chief executive officer Riccardo Zacconi said in a statement. “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.”

“There are a high number of gamers in both of these markets,” King.com chief marketing officer Alex Dale told GamesBeat. “Japan and Korea are two of the three largest Android mobile markets worldwide. Mobile is a large growth area for King.com and is where we are currently seeing most of our traffic from these regions currently.”

I asked Dale if King.com would release its future games simultaneously is these markets, but he wants the company to take a wait-and-see approach.

“This is our first time to venture into localizing for these two markets,” said Dale. “We’re hoping to learn from releasing both Bubble Witch Saga and Candy Crush Saga first.”

While gamers in the U.S. seem unsure about the future of free-to-play games, it’s clear to developers that the people in Korea, Japan, and China have latched on to the model. That’s a huge audience that publishers won’t ignore.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Mobile gaming is hitting its renaissance. In both the Google Play and Apple iTunes app stores, the percentage of money spent on games out of the total amount spent on apps is increasing, according to analytics firm App Annie, which released the data this week at the Mobile Gaming USA East event in New York.

The gaming industry and mobile device makers alike are putting their hopes in mobile games as the rocket to vast profits. While smartphone and tablet revenues are a small slice of the overall game market, the growth rates based on data from December are gathering momentum. Evidence collected by App Annie in December suggests that mobile gaming nirvana is not so far away.

The iOS app store continues to generate five times more revenue from games than Google Play, but Google Play is growing. In fact, in South Korea, the money spent on games is almost entirely on Google Play. In Japan, iOS is significantly bigger than Google Play. Apple generates more game revenue than Google Play in the United Kingdom, China, Australia, Canada, German, France, Russia, and Italy. Still, Google Play earns a higher percentage of its revenue from games compared to the Apple iOS app store.

“What was very telling was that December was the biggest increase we have ever seen for iOS, driven by device sales and promotions,” said Oliver Lo, vice president of marketing at App Annie, in an interview with GamesBeat.

Google Play gaming grows

For games, the top three countries generating revenue in the Google Play store are Japan, South Korea, and the U.S. Together, they drove about three-fourths of the Google Play games revenue in December, said Lo.

These three countries also spend a higher percentage of app money on games than any other country. In data from the month of December, South Korea’s Google Play app revenues are 95 percent based on games. Japan’s Google Play app revenues are about 88 percent based on games, and the figure for the U.S. is 76 percent.

With Google Play, the percentage app downloads from games ranges from mid-20 percent to low-40 percent figures. Arcade, action, and casual games make up close to two-thirds of game revenue. Other popular categories in descending order are brain and puzzle games, cards and casino, sports, and racing. South Korea and Japan skew toward brain, puzzle, and casual games. In the U.S. and Australia, the more popular categories are card and casino games.

Japanese gamers are big spenders. With Google Play, Japan has the highest games revenue-to-download ratio by far. As a category, cards and casino games have a high revenue-to-download ratio.

On Google Play, the top app publishers in December in terms of downloads were Facebook, NHN, Rovio, Google, and GO Launcher. Japanese and South Korean game publishers dominate the revenue rankings for Google Play. The top revenue producers worldwide were NHN, DeNA, GungHo Online, Gree, and Colopl.

For games, the top revenue generators on Google Play in December were GungHo Online’s Puzzle & Dragons, DragonFlight for Kakao by NextFloor, NHN’s Line Pope, Anipang for Kakao by Sundaytoz, and a casual title from Patistudio. Of these top five, all were from Japan and South Korea.

“We’re seeing reverse globalization, where Japanese and Korean companies are dominating the store,” Lo said.

In the U.S., the top revenue generators among games on Google Play were DeNA’s Rage of Bahamut, DeNA’s Blood Brothers, Ateam’s Dark Summoner, Playtika’s Slotomania, and Dragonplay’s Slot City.

iOS app store gaming stats

App Annie found that the U.S. and Japan contributed over half of the total revenue for the iOS app store in December. Asian countries lead the way in percent of revenue coming from games on the iOS app store. China has more than 80 percent of its iOS app store revenue coming from games. It is followed by Japan, Macau, Singapore, and Canada.

Japan has the highest games revenue-to-download ratio on the iOS app store, followed by Switzerland, Australia, and Singapore. As a category, card games have the highest revenue-to-download ratio in the iOS app store, followed by role-playing games, casino games, and strategy games.

Apple’s store is still the cream of the crop, earning 350 percent more revenue than Google Play, and growing more in absolute dollar figures than the upstart Android store.

On iOS, Apple and Google are the top app store publishers in downloads during December. They were followed by EA, which had 958 apps, Rovio, which had 28 apps, and Disney, with 199 apps. But in revenue, EA was No. 1 in December, followed by Supercell, the Finnish publisher of Clash of Clans. It was followed by Gameloft, Gree, and GungHo Online. The rest of the top ten included Zynga, Kabam, NHN, Square Enix, and Rovio.

When it comes to games alone, Clash of Clans was the top worldwide revenue producer on iOS  for each month in the fourth quarter. It remained No. 1 in December, followed by EA’s The Simpsons: Tapped Out, Puzzle & Dragons by Japan’s GungHo Online, Supercell’s Hay Day, and King.com’s Candy Crush Saga.

And in the U.S., the top revenue generators among games in the iOS app store were Supercell’s Clash of Titans, EA’s The Simpsons: Tapped Out, Supercell’s Hay Day, Backflip Studios’ DragonVale, and Kabam’s Kingdoms of Camelot: Battle for the North.

Putting mobile gaming in perspective

The amount of money associated with mobile apps is still relatively small. Electronic Arts reported $1.2 billion in revenues in the last three months of the year. But mobile games accounted for only $100 million of that amount. That was up 18 percent from a year ago. And EA said that  EA said that The Simpsons: Tapped Out was a top-grossing game on iOS in the quarter, generating $23 million in digital revenue. By comparison, a top hit on the consoles can generate hundreds of millions of dollars in sales.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Measured in daily active users on AppData, King.com’s Candy Crush Saga has 9.7 million users while FarmVille 2 has 8.8 million and Texas HoldEm Poker has 7.1 million. In monthly active users, Zynga still has the top games with FarmVille 2 at 41.8 million and 35.2 million for Texas HoldEm Poker, compared to 25.8 million for Candy Crush Saga. The game is a simple one where you match three pieces of candy together, but it is played in a fast-action, arcade style. Such games have gathered huge momentum on Facebook in the past year.

Still, the daily active user count is significant because it means more when it comes to monetization of users, said Riccardo Zacconi, the chief executive of London-based King.com, in an interview with GamesBeat.

“We’ve seen tremendous growth on social and mobile,” said Zacconi. “Candy Crush Saga is doing well everywhere. We use our existing user base to launch our new games, and that helps each game grow bigger than the last one.”

King.com has been methodically gaining on Zynga for the past 18 months, and its users now play 5 billion game sessions a month, up from 3 billion just months ago. Its strategy is to launch a game or two a month on its web-based and social network platforms. It tweaks those games until it gets the gameplay and monetization right. And then it takes only the most successful titles over to mobile platforms such as iOS. That formula helped it boost revenues from ads in social games more than tenfold in 2012.

Candy Crush Saga, which was the company’s most popular game on Facebook, released on mobile platforms in mid-November. The title is fully social, with leaderboards, scores, and virtual goods synchronized between mobile and social networking platforms.

“People are playing their games on mobile devices even more than they have on their computers,” said Zacconi. “This complements our ‘play everywhere’ strategy.”

What is remarkable about King.com’s progress is that it has been able to create the top game on Facebook with a team of just 400 employees. By comparison, Zynga has more than 3,000 employees. Zynga is strong on Facebook, but King.com’s biggest gains have come on the mobile side. King.com is active on Facebook’s mobile network, and it uses a variety of mobile ad networks to market its games.

On the advertising front, King.com is running ad campaigns in its social games that have attracted major brands such as Samsung, Procter & Gamble, Macy’s, Nestle, and T-Mobile. The click-through rate on King.com’s ads (such as incentivized video, where a user gets something in exchange for watching a video) is more than 5 percent. About 85 percent of the people who start watching videos complete them. That’s higher than the industry average. King.com appeals mainly to women ages 25 to 55, a key demographic for advertisers.

Candy Crush Saga is listed in the top five grossing iPhone and iPad apps in 10 of the top markets, according to market research firm AppAnnie. King.com has three games in Facebook’s top 10 game apps, including Pet Rescue Saga with 3.2 million daily active users and Bubble Witch Saga with 3.6 million daily active users. Bubble Witch Saga launched in September, 2011, and it was in the top 10 through the whole year.

Candy Crush Saga launched on the web in April 2012. Currently, the game is played over 55 million times a day across both Android and iOS (iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch devices). King.com still has a long way to go before it is done converting its titles from its website to Facebook and mobile platforms. Altogether, it has 150 exclusive games in 12 languages. King.com launches a couple of mobile games a quarter.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Pushing further into the mobile market, King.com‘s flagship casual game Candy Crush Saga is launching on the iPhone today. On top of that, King.com is announcing that its revenues from advertising in social games have increased ten-fold in 2012.

The Candy Crush Saga game is an important one for King.com as it tries to transfer its success in casual games on the web and Facebook to mobile devices. The game is King.com’s most popular game on Facebook and it will now be available on the iPhone, iPad, iPad mini, and iPod touch.

The game, where you match three pieces of candy in arcade-like fast action, has more than 5 million daily players on Facebook. Now those players will be able to play on mobile devices, and their leaderboards, scores and virtual goods will be fully synchronized regardless of where they play. King.com already had good success launching its Bubble Witch Saga game earlier this year on mobile.

“There were over 100 million mobile game plays within only a few days of launching Bubble Witch Saga on iOS. And, we have been experiencing two times the engagement from players on both Facebook and iOS since its launch,” said Riccardo Zacconi, chief executive and co-founder of King.com. “Candy Crush Saga becomes the second Facebook game to launch on mobile with fully synced capabilities to allow players to access their game when and where it’s most convenient for them without losing their progress and virtual goods.”

The title has 125 levels and several modes for players to test their skills against time and other variables. An Android version is coming early next year. King.com has more than 40 million monthly players and more than 3 billion games played per month. In the past year, it came out of nowhere and became the No. 2 game company on Facebook. .

On the advertising front, King.com is running ad campaigns in its social games that have attracted major brands such as Samsung, Procter & Gamble, Macy’s, Nestle, and T-Mobile. The click-through rate on King.com’s ads (such as incentivized video, where a user gets something in exchange for watching a video) is more than 5 percent. About 85 percent of the people who start watching videos complete them. That’s higher than the industry average. King.com appeals mainly to women ages 25 to 55, a key demographic for advertisers.

Ad revenue is now 15 percent of total company revenues. King.com said it hired Charity Sabater as its senior director of ad sales.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

In February 2011, King.com seemed like it had been passed up in the gaming innovation race. It had 150 casual tournament games on the web but had only just begun to release those titles on Facebook, where Zynga dominated social games. Now, King.com is the No. 2 social gamemaker on Facebook with 48.5 million monthly active users.

For its next act, King.com is focused on mobile. Today, the company is launching its Candy Crush Saga game on iOS (iPhone, iPad, iPad mini, and iPod Touch). The hope is that the same match-three, short-duration game will be as popular on mobile as it is on Facebook, where the game has five million daily active players.

Full told, gamers play more than three billion King.com game sessions a month. Riccardo Zacconi, the chief executive of London-based King.com, said the move is part of the company’s push to make its games available on all platforms and territories. King.com, which is big in Europe, is in the midst of a big expansion in the U.S., and it will also be expanded in Asia, Zacconi.

“We’ve got a play-everywhere strategy,” said Zacconi (pictured).

Sean Ryan, the director of games partnerships at Facebook, recently pointed to King.com as proof that a diverse group of companies is finding success on Facebook. King.com is also tapping Facebook’s mobile app to make it easier to discover its games on mobile platforms. Facebook is good for game discovery because it shows a player what his or her friends are playing on mobile devices.

Candy Crush Saga will have complete synchronization with Facebook, keeping player’s leaderboards, scores, progress, and virtual goods seamless across both platforms. In the game, you match different types of candy so that you can get three in a row. The title will have more than 125 levels and modes where gamers can test their skills against a timer. The mobile game will let you start on a computer and then pick up the game in the same place on the iPhone. Candy Crush Saga joins Bubble Witch Saga, a web and social game that has also become a hit on mobile.

King.com isn’t abandoning Facebook, though. The company is also launching a new game, Pet Rescue Saga, on Facebook. Most of King.com’s games have been hits on Facebook, but not every title is. King.com uses the web to test hundreds of titles with users. Those that take off are moved over to Facebook, and now they will be adapted to mobile as well, said Zacconi. Eventually, King.com will expand to Google Android devices. But for now, it is “wait and see” on Windows Phone 8, said Zacconi.

The rapid growth on Facebook has enabled King.com to hire a lot more people. At the beginning of 2011, it had 110 employees. Now, it has more than 300 and is expecting to expand to about 400 by the end of 2013. The company has six game studios, each of which makes games for social, mobile, and the web.

The Pet Rescue Saga game will have 50 levels. Like other King.com games, it will share common features for leaderboards and sharing. Zacconi said the company saves on development costs by creating a core platform that every game uses for features such as multiplayer.

The long-term question is whether or not King.com can stay on top of the trends. Facebook users have proved to be fickle. They once embraced casual simulation games like FarmVille, and they still do to some degree. But the diversity of popular genres is spreading out. Social casino games have blossomed and so have sports betting games and hidden object games.

But Zacconi said that King.com won’t clone games and chase others into new categories. Rather, his company focuses on innovation.

“We don’t like to play catch-up,” he said. “When we started on Facebook, we were told the game was over. But we have innovated. Our games are hit-driven, and we have to continuously replenish them.”

[Photo credit: Dean Takahashi]

The common belief is that Zynga has social games locked up on Facebook. But the social network is eager to dispel that idea, even if Zynga has 243 million monthly active users, or more users than the next top five players combined, according to AppData.

Sara Brooks, the game strategic partner manager at Facebook, said in a talk at the Casual Connect game conference in Seattle that plenty of new players have engaged in social games in the past year. She said more than 130 games have over 1 million monthly active users (MAU) on Facebook.

King.com, for instance, now ranks at No. 2 on Facebook with 51 million MAU. In August, the company launched its first Facebook game, Bubble Witch Saga, and reached 3.5 MAU in its first month.

Other up-and-comers include Peak Games, Cookapps, and Fresh Planet, the maker of SongPop. Omgpop also saw a fast rise to the top with Draw Something early this year. Zynga acquired the company for $183 million-plus.

New genres that have emerged include hidden object games, which a year ago only had two titles. Now there are at least a half-dozen hits, Brooks said. Those include Victorian mysteries, romance games, and titles such as Disney’s Animal Kingdom Explorers.

Casual arcade games have also experienced a boom. More than 75 million MAU are playing bubble-shooter titles, where you shoot bubbles at fruit hanging on trees or something like that. Big hits in the arcade space include King.com’s Candy Crush Saga, which has 13 million MAU; GameHouse’s Collapse Blast!; Social Gaming Network’s Panda Jam; and Wooga’s Diamond Dash.

Casino games are on the rise, as seen with IGT’s $500 million acquisition of Double Down Interactive, a social casino game company that has a big hit in slot machine games. Sports titles are also catching on. And hardcore games such as Kixeye’s War Commander are taking off. Other hits include Citizen Grim and Total Domination.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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London-based King.com is launching Candy Crush Saga on Facebook today as part of its bid to capitalize on the shift in audience tastes toward increasingly casual games. Since debuting its first social network title last fall, King.com has become the fourth-largest publisher on Facebook.

In the past, players have been in love with Zynga’s simulation games such as FarmVille and CityVille. While those appeal to casual audiences, they often consume an increasingly large amount of time as players create their dream farms or cities. King.com, on the other hand, has launched six Saga titles that are appealing because they can be played in a minute or two. The trend is so strong that now King.com’s Facebook users are playing 2.5 billion matches a month. A year ago, that was just 300 million on King.com’s web site.

Candy Crush Saga is a candy-themed match-three switcher game like PopCap’s Bejeweled, where you line up three corresponding colored jewels within a larger patchwork puzzle. One of King.com’s most popular to date, it has 65 levels and provides several modes for players to test their skills against time, limited moves, collecting objects, and removing jellies. Your goal is to help Mr. Toffee and his daughter Tiffi to travel the world, meet fun characters, and get around “blockers.”

Candy Crush Saga competes with Berlin-based rival Wooga’s top game, Diamond Dash. King.com has 36.7 million monthly active users on Facebook, making it the fourth-largest on the social networking site. But in daily active users, King.com has just edged out Electronic Arts with 9.44 million compared to EA’s 9.40 million. That makes King.com the third-largest developer on Facebook in this measure. That is a big change from a year ago, when King.com wasn’t even on Facebook.

Both King.com and Wooga are out to prove that Zynga does not in fact own the entire market on Facebook and that the market is a lot more competitive than others would have you believe. They are both jumping on the casual trend. Back in January 2010, there were no casual titles where play time was focused on a minute or so on Facebook’s top ten list. In January 2011, there was one title. And in January 2012, there were five titles, said Alex Dale, chief marketing officer at King.com, in an interview with GamesBeat.

Founded in 2003, King.com has had big advantages because it has had long experience running its own casual games website. Only recently has it adapted its strategy to cross over to Facebook. It started last September with the launch of Bubble Witch Saga, King.com’s most popular casual title. Now, King.com has a total of eight games on Facebook, and each one is generating more usage through strong cross-promotion, Dale said.

Compared to Wooga, King.com’s business model is a lot different. At its main website, King.com has tournament games where players put some real money down to enter. Its games monetize through both competition fees and advertising whereas Wooga’s title monetize mainly through virtual goods sales, said Dale. But King.com also monetizes through virtual goods sales, so it has more ways to make money.

“Our engagement numbers are high in both the U.S. and Europe,” Dale said. “We’re very bullish on Facebook.”

Riccardo Zacconi, chief executive of King.com, said in an interview with GamesBeat earlier this year that the company’s rollout on Facebook has been slow and deliberate. Now. Zacconi is rolling out more and more of King.com’s 150 titles, and in the past nine months, King.com has doubled its workforce to more than 200 people. It is hiring more than 100 people this year and will likely expand to mobile as well. It has already expanded to Google+.

“We had a disadvantage at the beginning because we had to figure out Facebook,” Zacconi said. “But now we understand it, and we can bring our assets from 150 games in eight languages to bear.”

Zacconi will speak at our upcoming GamesBeat 2012 conference in a case study on the crossover strategy of moving from the web to Facebook.

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your early-bird tickets here.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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