Zynga is pulling the trigger faster on weak games. Today, the company announced it would close down its CityVille 2, The Friend Game, and Party Place, even as it praised the success of FarmVille 2 and moved to launch its real-money gambling games.

Chief operations officer David Ko said in an analyst conference call that Zynga is closing down games that don’t meet expectations, such as CityVille 2, which failed to match the audience of its record-breaking CityVille game.

The move shows that Zynga is willing to take swift action that may upset some customers, if it means that it can put more effort behind games that are getting traction. That’s important as the company tries to hit its goal of becoming consistently profitable in 2013.

A bellwether for social and mobile gaming, Zynga fell in hard times last year as growth slowed for its Facebook games. Now the company is showing no mercy. It has closed its Boston and Japan studios and is trying to reduce operating expenses further. Ko described the company as setting up “guard rails” where it requires managers to shut down unprofitable games earlier than in the past.

During the fourth quarter, CityVille 2 failed to get a huge audience. But FarmVille 2 exceeded expectations by 100 percent and was the company’s best launch in two years. It’s no surprise that Brian Reynolds, chief game designer and the lead on CityVille 2, resigned from the company last week.

Chief exec Mark Pincus said during the call that Zynga took a bunch of actions to realign around its core goals. It shut studios and laid off staff. It realigned its teams for mobile first, so that it now has more teams on mobile games than it does for the web or Facebook. It promoted four leaders — Ko, Steve Chiang, Barry Cottle, and Mark Vranesh — into key management roles. And it realigned its studios around social casino games, casual, midcore, and “invest and express,” or its simulation games like FarmVille 2.

Pincus said that Zynga “leveled up,” or promoted, 550 people in the quarter. Zynga closed the quarter with 3,050 employees.

“We’ve always been a learning company, learning from our successes and our failures,” Pincus said.

Pincus said that new mobile games are on the way. Zynga has 298 million monthly active users, including 72 million on mobile.

Zynga is amid a “platform transition” toward mobile, said Vranesh, the chief financial officer of Zynga.

Pincus said the company’s three goals this year are to expand the company’s franchises and launch new ones, improve the reach of the Zynga network, and improve profits.

He said that FarmVille revenues (not counting Facebook’s 30 percent partner fees) have exceeded $1 billion life to date, across both FarmVille and FarmVille 2. Zynga also said that the FarmVille franchise has generated $100 million in gross bookings for six quarters now.

Zynga Poker grew its audience to 37 million monthly active users in the fourth quarter, up 8 percent for the year. In 2013, Zynga will introduce its Elite Slots game, which is currently in testing.

Pincus also said that Zynga is looking forward to entering real-money gambling in the United Kingdom as part of its previously announced partnership with Bwin.party.

FarmVille 2 and CityVille 2 were launched two months apart. An analyst asked if FarmVille 2′s success cannibalized the audience for CityVille 2. Ko said the company is learning from every launch and is focused on franchises. It will also launch fewer titles and space its games further apart.

“It’s hard to say,” Ko said. “We had a longer lead cycle where we tested. We didn’t have that for CityVille 2.”

Words With Friends continued to generate a huge audience on mobile, with 7.5 billion minutes of use in December alone.

Ko said that midcore gaming is getting Zynga’s development teams excited, and the pipeline of new games is heavily weighted toward midcore games (which are hardcore in nature but can be played for five minutes at a stretch) in 2013.

To reduce its costs, Zynga is adding to its low-cost development centers in India and China.

“2013 is a pivotal year for us at Zynga,” Pincus said. “We are realigning for $9 billion in socail gaming. Our goal is to make it easier and better to play across mobile and social.”

Big Fish Games has launched its first casino game in the United Kingdom that enables real-money online gambling.

The new Big Fish Casino U.K. app allows players to choose whether they want to play for fun or if they want to make a real-money wager in the slot machine title.

The game uses technology from Betable, which hopes to enable online gambling as an option for all sorts of social mobile games. Betable does the hard work of verifying who a user is and determining if that player is old enough to make real-money bets in a game. It also checks to see if the player is in the right location for legal gambling, and it executes the round to determine whether a player won or lost a bet.

The game is the first in a series of Betable-enabled games that Big Fish will launch. The title is available in the Apple App Store in the United Kingdom and runs on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch.

“Real-­money betting is just one more way we are enhancing the Big Fish Casino gameplay experience,” said Carey DiJulio, the general manager of Big Fish Casino. “With the launch of Big Fish Casino U.K., real‐money players in the United Kingdom can join our other Big Fish Casino players in the social aspects and thrill of casino gaming from their iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch — anywhere they happen to be.”

Seattle-based Big Fish said Big Fish Casino is one of the top-grossing mobile games with more than one million monthly active players worldwide. Betable’s servers for handling the processing are based in the U.K., but Betable contends that its technology could be used by developers anywhere in the world except in countries that explicitly forbid online gambling like the U.S.

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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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Zynga’s mobile gaming business is growing fast and now accounts for 20 percent of its bookings, according to company chief executive Mark Pincus (pictured above) while speaking on a conference call with analysts. Zynga’s stock is rising in after-hours trading thanks to a stock-buyback program and beating analysts’ reduced expectations for the third quarter.

That’s a much larger proportion than in the past, though it is down from the previous quarter because of the rapid decline of Draw Something, the Pictionary-style game that Zynga bought with the $180 million-plus purchase of OMGPOP in the spring. Zynga took a write-off of $95 million related to that acquisition, as the value of OMGPOP has declined to a level beyond what Zynga paid for it.

Despite the big disappointment with the OMGPOP acquisition, Pincus said the social-gaming giant’s fast-growing momentum on mobile is encouraging. Zynga now has the No. 4 mobile network of any apps in the U.S., and it has three of the top five mobile games. He said Zynga reaches 30 percent of mobile users, and its players play 10 billion minutes a month of mobile games. At the same time, mobile is a challenge for Zynga because it is a fragmented market and distribution is more limited than on the web.

Zynga expects to launch two web games a quarter and four mobile games a quarter for the foreseeable outlook. Pincus also said that FarmVille and ChefVille are doing well on the web and on Facebook. FarmVille 2 has 61 million monthly active users, including 500,000 who are buying goods in the game for real money. In a single day, players recently spent $950,000 in the game. FarmVille 2 grew to 17 million installations in its first 21 days.

“We had a major breakthrough with FarmVille 2,” he said. “We showed we could bring a major 3D game” to the market. CityVille 2 is also coming soon.

Pincus said the recent acquisition of A Bit Lucky will lead to the company’s entry into the mid-core gaming market — which is in between hardcore console games and casual games — early next year. This could help Zynga reach more traditional hardcore gamers, who spend more money than casual gamers.

Zynga has started bringing more third-party games such as Horn to its mobile network as well as other games to the web-based network. The idea is to reach more genres and more game types faster by leveraging the talent of third-party game developers. Pincus said in the next year that the company will “continue to turn the network conversion on mobile.

Zynga is testing out all of the available genres, as more of the genres are available.

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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 gamers are increasingly focused on mobile devices. Market researcher NPD said its research shows that 23 percent of app gamers say that they only play on mobile devices.

This shows that mobile device gaming is becoming a destination for game players, rather than just a distraction. NPD said 59 percent of all game play now happens on a mobile device.

About half of the gamers in a survey of 5,923 U.S. residents in August said that they’re playing more mobile games now than a year ago. The main reason, cited by 37 percent of those surveyed, was free games, followed by portability and convenience (34 percent).

About 30 percent of app gamers have made either an in-app purchase (buying a virtual item from within a game) or have upgraded from a free app to a paid version. The average price that app gamers feel is a good value for a purchase or upgrade is $3.

Those who play on smartphones the most are not as likely to have made an in-app game purchase or to have upgraded to a paid app when compared to tablet gamers, who are more likely to have done both. As gaming playing frequency increases, so does the likelihood of having made a purchase or upgrade.

“Many mobile gaming consumers have grown accustomed to gaming for free, making it essential to find the sweet spot for pricing that encourages purchasing by as many consumers as possible,” said Liam Callahan, an industry analyst for The NPD Group. “Mobile game developers and publishers need to be able to maximize their opportunities by identifying ways to increase the number of gamers willing to upgrade their free apps or pay for in-app purchases, which currently stand at close to 30 percent. Another opportunity for the industry as a whole is to convert mobile-only gamers to engage in other gaming activities across portables, consoles and PCs where we see more money being spent per 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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Computers, TVs, and smartphones are turning us into sedentary beings. Novusport wants to get us off the couches and make us more active through its real-world fitness game that motivates people to play real sports and share their achievements with friends.

The Houston-based startup is one of the companies that is “gamifying” sports so that they are more engaging, trackable, and fun for weekend warriors. (Gamification is the use of gameplay to get people more engaged with nongame applications). By gamifying sports, the company hopes to make people more healthy.

Novusport notes that 81 million Americans visit sports web sites each month as spectators. But far fewer actually participate. Novusport is a social media game designed to promote participation in sports via a mobile app.

While the rest of us sat in the audience during DEMO, the Novusport guys ran a 40 yard dash across the stage and tossed around a football, to demonstrate the technology.

Here’s how it works. You download the app, pick a sport from among 20 options. Then select an ActivR (a predefined sports goal). You check in at the location, where you will play the sport and bring a friend to record video on the ActivR on your smartphone. You upload the video to validate that you performed the activity. Novusport then calculates your stats and adjusts your Sports Graph (pictured in the phone at right) based on 10 physical and mental attributes.

As you complete more ActivRs, you earn points and medals and build your virtual trophy room. You can share the accomplishments with friends and challenge them. you can discuss graphics, stats and tally points within the network.

Hugo Aguilar, the founder and president of Novusport, said in an interview that he has been obsessed with sports since he was a kid. He wanted to play all of them and was thrilled to watch the Olympics. As an adult, he developed a passion for technology and dreamed of a way to combine those passions. He wants to use tech to help people be the best they can be.

He decided to create a tool that could measure the achievements and unique “sports graph” of an athlete, which others could use as a part of a platform to entice all athletes to try new sports, regardless of talent level. Aguilar showed me the app, demonstrating how it could be used for ActivRs such as throwing a football as far as you can or running a 40-yard dash.

By getting fans to participate in sports, Aguilar believes they can experience sports in a different light, getting people to play with each other and become more active. Novusport has raised $165,000 in seed funding and is aggressively pursuing partners.

Aguilar believes that more and more people will be drawn to sports and logging their performance, partly because of the march of technology. As smartphones become part of our daily lives, “lifelogging” will catch on, where people measure everything they do, and that will spread to sports.

“Can you imagine a high-tech, two-week competition with the top 100 overall superathletes in the world?” Aguilar said. “But to get there, athletes must qualify through Novusport.com. Imagine the possibilities. The future is what we make of it, and we at Novusport are working extremely hard to make our future a reality.”

Novusport’s algorithm measures an athlete’s performance based on 10 factors: Ground Speed, Water Speed, Endurance, Strength, Vertical Jump, Accuracy, Courage, Balance, Novusport IQ, and Popularity. Novusport’s iOS app enables users to create their personal “sports graph” using fantasy sports-style statistics that they can share via social media. The company has partnered with YouthAid and the Olympic tae kwon do Lopez Family to use its platform as an aid in the fight against bullying.

Rivals include Fitocracy, Nike+, and Daily Burn. The company has 13 employees, including Daniell Iturbe, its chief executive and cofounder, who asks you not to “friend, like, tweet or follow me…challenge me.”

Novusport is one of 75 companies and 6 student “alpha” startups chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

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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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John Davison, a well-known figure in video game media, has joined Red Robot Labs in a new publishing position. Red Robot is a hot publisher of location-based mobile games such as Life is Crime, which boasts more than 4 million downloads.

Davison will take a new position as director and general manager of content and publishing. But his first project isn’t a game. Rather, he said in an interview with GamesBeat that it will be an app that is relevant for gamers, to be unveiled in the not so distant future.

In his new role, Davison will manage and curate content for the game community and developers as part of the unannounced project. The product will “tap into industry trends, gamer conversations and foster new social video game discovery,” according to the Mountain View, Calif.-based company. Davison’s role will also be important as Red Robot signs more third-party developers for the R2 platform, which is a location-gaming technology.

“As a video game industry veteran with a proven entrepreneurial track record, John is the perfect addition to Red Robot as we aim to disrupt and innovate the mobile space for gamers,” said Mike Ouye, Red Robot Labs CEO.

“”I have been in games media for 21 years, and the media has changed, and the audience has changed,” Davison said. “To me, this is pouncing on the opportunity at the right time. Mobile has been a passion for a long time. If I don’t do this now, I’ll never do it.”

Davison has managed global game editorial teams at Ziff Davis Media (Electronic Gaming Monthly, 1UP) and IDG Media. He was most recently vice president of programming at CBS Interactive Games, where he oversaw all content production for GameSpot and Metacritic, as well as Giant Bomb and Comic Vine. Before that, he was in charge of revitalizing the GamePro brand at IDG. He also founded What They Play in 2007 and sold it to IGN/Fox Interactive Media in 2009.

Red Robot Labs was started in January 2011 by Mike Ouye, Pete Hawley, and John Harris. It received funding from Social+Capital Partnership, Shasta Ventures, Rick Thompson (co-founder of Playdom), and Mitch Lasky (general partner, Benchmark Capital). Red Robot recently revealed its Life is Magic game.

Davison said he has known Hawley for a long time and met with him recently. In a conversation, they found they had been thinking about the same kind of idea to meet the needs of the gaming audience, based on mobile technology.

“The way that gamers interact is changing on the web,” said Davison. “The way that communities form and gamers self-identify is changing. The traditional media’s job is different. Gamers are congregating around individual games and tastes. There’s a lot you can do to help them.”

As for traditional paper-based and web-based game media, Davison said they are being disrupted by the rise of community-based media on YouTube, Twitch, and Machinima.com.

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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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The move is a first for Zynga, as content developed for the Japanese market doesn’t often make it overseas. But role-playing games such as DeNA’s Rage of Bahamut have begun to figure prominently in the top-grossing charts on Apple’s iTunes App Store in the U.S. Known as a copycat, Zynga is chasing DeNA’s success.

But in this case, the two Zynga Japan games, Montopia (pictured top) and Ayakashi: Ghost Guild (pictured right), are original titles that have been out on the market for the past eight months, said Scott Koenigsberg, the general manager of games for Zynga, in an interview with GamesBeat. Zynga’s own Japanese studio created the games, and now they will be translated into English, Chinese, and Korean. It’s one more sign that Japanese culture, rooted in modern animation such as manga, has become popular on a worldwide basis.

The titles are the first role-playing games that Zynga will put on the market and the first from Zynga Japan on the global market. The moves show that Zynga is making use of its worldwide development resources, said Koenigsberg.

“We’re very excited about expanding to RPGs and bringing these games to the global market,” he said. “Here in the U.S., the RPG market has blossomed recently. It may have been an underserved market here.”

The games appeal to the collecting urge in everyone. Montopia is a Pokémon-like role-playing game in which players try to discover the truth about a lost utopia called Montopia. Players collect monsters through an adventure and then fuse the monsters together to improve their abilities.

Meanwhile, Ayakashi Onmyouroku is a role-playing game where players battle numerous ghosts (Ayakashi) to gain control of them and then change them to demons (Shikigami). It’s like a kind of exorcism game, in which players can then battle against each other. Both games have been big hits in Japan, and they monetize well. Zynga is not trying to change them for the U.S. market.

Zynga started its Japan studio in July 2010. The studio localizes Zynga games for the Japanese market, both for Facebook and mobile platforms. The studio also makes new games for Zynga’s global market. The games are available on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and Google Play. Zynga has 306 million monthly active users playing its games.

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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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Perry Tam wasn’t a seasoned game developer when he co-founded Storm8, a mobile social game developer, in March 2009. He was a Facebook platform developer who worked on payment technology, but he could see that it was turning into a real game platform. Then the iPhone came out, and Storm8 jumped on the opportunity to become a “mobile first” game company.

Now Storm8 has stolen a march on a lot of rivals, reaching more than 300 million downloads and more than 100 million users. Each day, more than 6 million people play a Storm8 game (that figure is up 20 percent from the prior quarter). And the company leads in role-playing games on iOS (Apple iPad, iPod Touch, and iPhone) and Android. Its hit titles include World War, Racing Live,Pets Live, iMobsters, and Vampires Live from Storm8. It also has a second studio, Team Lava, that has created Bakery Story, Restaurant Story, City Story, Farm Story and Fashion Story. The company has quadrupled its staff in the past year to 150 people, and it did so by bootstrapping itself, with no outside investment. Some rivals have anonymously accused Storm8 of cheating in its marketing tactics, using unfair tricks such as automated bots. But Tam denies that and says the company has earned all of its users.

And while other mobile game publishers are selling out, Tam is positioning the company so that it can stay independent and jump fast on the latest trends in mobile games. The company recently launched its Bubble Mania arcade shooter game (a fresh genre for Storm8), and it hit a million downloads in just three days with zero dollars spent on marketing. We caught up with Tam in a recent interview. Here’s a transcript of our talk.

GamesBeat: I wondered if you could talk about the beginning of Storm8, how you guys got together and what prompted you to form the company.

Perry Tam: We started back in March of 2009. At the time, I was working at Facebook on the payments team, building their credits system. The whole Facebook credits system was part of my work back in those days. We saw that social gaming was really taking off on the Facebook platform. Social games back in early 2009… It was basically just Mafia Wars. It was even before FarmVille happened. But we already could see that social games really worked. Games were so much more fun when you played with friends, and how these games worked, at the time, was totally new.

Also, the iPhone had just come out a short time before. They’d opened up the software development kit (SDK) and opened up the platform for people to start making apps for the App Store. We looked at the iPhone and said, wow, this is going to change how people interact with their mobile devices. This is a game-changing device. So we combined those two ideas, social games and mobile — it was a great way to bring social games to people — and we formed Storm8. We added a couple of other people, I dragged a few people from Facebook, and we formed this company. We literally started out in my living room.

Now we have 150 people. In fact, we just quadrupled in size last year, and we’re on track to double it this year. Right now we occupy half of a building, about 30,000 square feet, but we recently signed a lease, starting this October, to occupy the full 50,000 square feet of the building. There’s a lot of room for us to grow even bigger. That’s where we are. So I think you’re aware of the million-dollar day we had last year. We also announced recently that we have more than 300 million downloads across 100 million devices in our network. Most recently, with the Bubble Mania launch, we announced that we have over six million daily active users (DAU) in our network.

GamesBeat: That’s all been pretty organic, right? You’ve grown it all from the ground up.

Tam: It’s not just organic. It’s also strongly bootstrapped, as far as funding the company. We have no outside capital supporting us. Every single dollar that we spend is our own money that the company made. We haven’t done any acquisitions, so every hire that we get is organically grown.

GamesBeat: Is everybody located in the one Redwood Shores area, or do you have other offices now?

Tam: No, everyone is in one area, in this office. We don’t have other offices elsewhere. We believe that it’s very important for us to put everyone under the same roof, for multiple reasons. First and foremost, we care about our culture. If we start building offices outside here, it gets harder to communicate that culture to those teams. Second, there’s the speed of development. Our dev cycle is very short. In order for us to execute that fast, to create a high-quality game at a fast pace, we need people to be paying attention all the time. They need to be sitting next to each other. They need to share ideas. We need to solve problems as soon as possible. Having everyone under the same roof is very important to us.

GamesBeat: As you get bigger, as you expand, what are your priorities? How do you choose to expand? There’s a lot of different strategies you could pursue. A lot of your rival companies have already sold out, right? Like ngmoco, they’re part of DeNA now. Funzio was just acquired by Gree for $210 million. Zynga has bought a lot of companies as well. But you’ve deliberately chosen to stay independent here.

Tam: Our strategy is definitely to stay independent. From our perspective… Some things might make sense to grow the company faster. We’ve self-funded, we haven’t raised funding. But with this kind of structure, we have a lot of freedom. We control our own destiny. That’s a good thing in terms of growing the company for us.

GamesBeat: What about the kinds of platforms you’re making games for?

Tam: We’re constantly looking to expand on the game front. Different genres of games. We can talk about Bubble Mania in a second, which is a totally new genre of game that we’re coming to. That’s one way to expand. The other way is onto different platforms. We’ve always pushed into different platforms. For example, we came to iOS really early, back in 2009. We went to Android in 2010. That was before anyone offered a lot of competition there. We also launched with Amazon just earlier this year. That’s another platform expansion. We’re constantly looking to work on other platforms as they become a significant part of the mobile ecosystem. The one thing that I want to stress here is that we do have a fairly strict focus on mobile. Anything that’s mobile-related, we’ll pay a lot of attention to it.

GamesBeat: Tell me more about the Amazon launch. You had a pretty good first month. How is it going now?

Tam: It’s going really well. We were a launch partner with them on the in-app purchases. We integrated our games with their in-app purchases and the first month was amazing for us. I think we made over $700,000 dollars in the first month of integration. Ever since then, we’re constantly seeing very good traction on the Amazon platform.

GamesBeat: They’ve got an event they scheduled for September 6. I wonder if they’re going to get into the phone business there…

Tam: [laughs] Yeah, I’m eager to see what they’re going to share in September. Any mobile devices that they’re creating will definitely be a win for the mobile ecosystem.

GamesBeat: Once you get really big, people like to take shots at you. You guys are almost in that category now. I could put these questions in the category of “things your competitors say about you.” One is, a lot of the games look pretty generic, I guess? They look like clone games. A lot of Storm8′s games look like clones. Do you have a response to that?

Tam: Sure. I want everyone out there to understand… We’re not a one-trick pony here. We’re actually very multitalented. I’d like to point out that when we first started in 2009, we started with the Storm8 brand, which… We made RPG games. And then in 2010 we started another brand called TeamLava, and that makes all the Story games that people really enjoy. Restaurant Story, Farm Story. And then in 2011, we opened another brand called FireMocha, which makes core games. They combine the TeamLava presentation with the Storm8 RPG game mechanics. So that’s again another example of us reinventing ourselves.

In 2012, we’ve come up with two different new genres that we’re stepping into. One is called Shark Party, which holds our casino games. We have two games right now underneath that brand. One is Slots and the other is Poker. That’s a totally new genre for us. It’s not something that we’ve done before, but we’re stepping into that. And then most recently is this Bubble Mania game that we shared with you early on. That, again, proved to everyone that we can consistently step into new genres and we can really make use of that. The way that I think we’re different, in terms of making those games, is when we decide to go into a genre, when we decide to make a new game, we always keep in mind that we want to make the best game in that category. I think a lot of companies out there that try to clone other people’s games, they don’t have that in mind. Their job is just to clone. For us, our job is to make it the best in that category. When we made Bubble Mania, we put a lot of attention into the details. I have to give a lot of praise to the team for making it so polished. It’s the best bubble-shooting game on mobile, period. That contributed a lot to its success, on top of every other important asset that we have. Our platform technology allows us to create games of a pretty high quality at a much lower cost.

GamesBeat: Another category where competitors complain about you is… Your games grow so fast that you much be using bots. Or you must be promoting them with armies of people in other countries or something like that.

Tam: [laughs] Right. It’s a very interesting comment there. I don’t know if you’re aware that there was a question on the forums that asked about that…

GamesBeat: Yeah, I saw that. [Your co-founder] William [Siu] put up an answer to that, right?

Tam: Exactly. I think we’ve done a great job of answering that question. [Editor's note: Perry added later, "I did want to quickly come back to your question about bots. In case my answer wasn't clear, Storm8 doesn't use bots and never has. We drive downloads as fast as we do by building great games and marketing them through our proprietary network of 6M+ daily active users (DAU).]

Basically, over the years we’ve built up this network of users. More than six million daily active users playing all our games, every single day. I’d point to Bubble Mania. We announced that we’ve accumulated over one million downloads in three days, and we’ve done that with zero marketing dollars. To be honest, if you use bots, you still have to spend some money on it. We haven’t spent any. That kicks the bot thing out of the picture. Nobody can do that. The key thing here is, we really leverage our DAU, our network, actively. As William pointed out, if you have six million DAU, you need only one percent of them to get interested in the game, and you’ve got 60,000 installs right away.

Our conversion rate is much better than that, because our users are very targeted. They all love social games. They have a certain expectation when it comes to TeamLava games, because we’ve trained them that high-quality games really matter. They have high expectations for every game we release. When we put a game in front of them, they say, great, I’ll try it out. That’s very important for everyone to understand. It’s the reason why Storm8 is doing better in this space. It’s because we’ve built up this network. To give some more color to that… If a competitor, who does not have this network, would want to buy those users, using paid user acquisition, what it boils down to is that it takes at least, maybe two dollars, per download to buy those. Let’s say the game’s ARPPU is one cent. If it takes you two dollars to get a user and the (average revenue per paying user) ARPPU is one cent, you need 200 days to recoup that cost, assuming that the user even stays that long. Most people don’t stay for 200 days, so it’s a losing proposition for a lot of our competitors to do user acquisition. We just get it for free.

GamesBeat: That amount of users is enough to push a game into the top 25, I suppose? The number of referral users you get from your own games.

Tam: Yeah. From our perspective, it’s not about the ranking. It’s about whether our users really like the game. Yes, we have this cross-promotional marketing power, but at the same time, we pay a lot of attention to make sure that we have the right users for the game. By doing that, by creating games we think our users will like… It makes more sense as far as cross-promoting with them.

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Mobile games are so plentiful that discovering the right one has become a nightmare. But Facebook believes that it has a solution in layering its own social network on mobile gaming platforms such as the iPhone and Android. By making games more discoverable, the social network believes it can justify its existence in the mobile world.

Half of Facebook’s 845 million users — roughly 425 million people – are mobile users. Facebook’s app on mobile lets those people connect with friends and share photos. But the app has also turned into a great way to get games noticed, said Gareth Davis, platform manager at Facebook.

“Our goal is to help consumers find your app,” said Davis in a talk at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco today. “We have 60 million people discovering apps and games on mobile. We are committed to games on the platform, both desktop and mobile.”

The Facebook mobile platform launched in 2009 and has been evolving ever since, adding social channels, web payments, and a variety of new distribution features. The Facebook app is available either as a mobile web app or a native application on various mobile devices. Among the latest features: native linking, where a developer can direct traffic from Facebook to a native app and an easy payment system with the world’s carriers — AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Vodafone, Softbank, KDDI, Orange, and Telefonica — that’s rolling out soon. Mobile partners among game makers include Zynga, Electronic Arts, Wooga, Glu, Storm 8, and others. And Facebook’s app works on 2,500 mobile devices.

Davis said that Facebook sends 2 million people a month to Wooga’s Diamond Dash, largely by sharing game content to Facebook’s various features.

“We surface the game for users,” Davis said. “They click on that and it takes them to the game or, if you are not an existing user, to the game in the App Store.”

The first part of embracing Facebook is using its single sign-on system that authenticates a user’s identity and links him or her back to their Facebook account on the desktop. Then the developer’s game can send information out to a user’s friends, the user’s news feed, and be found in search. It can send out game notifications, requests, and be found through bookmarks, Open Graph, and Timeline. People see it and they click through to the app.

“As soon as the player uses an app, we create a bookmark, which you can search and find,” Davis said.

You can, for instance, include a feature in your game that posts activities, such as playing a word in Zynga’s Words With Friends, to a user’s activity feed. Other players can see it and click into the game. You can use analytics from Facebook to measure everything inside the game to improve engagement and monetization.

In free-to-play games, where users play for free and pay real money for virtual goods, Davis said developers should use retail-grade merchandising. That means you should use tricks like having something cheap for a $1 purchase in the store as well as things that are expensive, such as a $200 decorative item that only “whales,” or high-monetizing players, will buy.

Here’s Davis’s full list of tips:

1. Add login with single sign on for bookmark and search. Make it easy for people to sign on to your app in one click if they’re already logged into Facebook on their phone.

2. Single app ID. Use the same Facebook app ID for your games on all platforms to make it easy for users to play across platforms. When you do this, people can play with their friends in the same game no matter if they’re on the web, desktop, or a mobile device.

3. Publish via Open Graph. Publish compelling game actions to Open Graph, such as game scores and achievements. Use “player beat friend” and “player won” stories to allow players to celebrate and brag, and get greater distribution through Timeline and News Feed.

4. Requests. Use the Request channel for user-to-user invites and exchanges like gifting and turn notifications. The Request channel automatically triggers a notification on iOS through the Facebook app.

5. Use all social channels. Use all the social channels (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/channels/) available to you, including requests and bookmarks, so you get maximum distribution from all channels.

6. Native, deep Linking for native distribution. Decide if you want to take advantage of native linking, which will drive all feed stories and request notifications to your game in the App Store or Marketplace. This is done via a simple update to your game settings on Facebook. You can also implement deep linking support so that clicking on a game story takes the player to a specific piece of game content, such as the specific word played.

7. Social design. Build your app to be social from the ground up so people can find, play, and compete with their friends. Social features will personalize the game for the user, keep them engaged through play with their friends, and help your game spread faster through Facebook social channels.

VentureBeat is holding its second annual Mobile Summit this April 2-3 in Sausalito, Calif. The invitation-only event will debate the five key business and technology challenges facing the mobile industry today, and participants — 180 mobile executives, investors, and policymakers — will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. You can find out more at our Mobile Summit site.

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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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According to the press release, Gameloft Live is a new version of the multiplayer service already in many Gameloft-published games and used by over seven million players. The new dedicated mobile app will allow users to create a 3D avatar and virtually connect with friends who also use the service to play games, chat, and see their accomplishments across the Gameloft gaming scene. The new hub will also incentivize players with gifts and avatar accessories, again similar to the console service.

It’s interesting to note that Gameloft is not the first games publisher to this space, as Ngmoco/DeNA launched Mobage this past summer, GREE acquired OpenFeint this past April, and Tapjoy connected with PapayaMobile to provide a similar social mobile service last November. Gameloft Live is entering an already crowded social mobile gaming space, hoping it has the winning combination of games, rewards, and user loyalty to come out on top.

Why are all these companies creating their own mobile social networks? In a sea of apps on both platforms (iOS has over 500,000 apps, the majority of them games), discovering games has become a serious issue. The App Store, Android Marketplace, and Amazon Appstore are the only viable markets for apps, but these are like small doors opening on a huge number of competing and sometimes look-alike apps, confusing savvy and newbie consumers alike. A mobile social network with its requisite avatars, social connections, and virtual rewards make it more likely that consumers will discover apps within that social network more often. Hence the current trend.

Gameloft is based in France and publishes and develops both original and franchised games on all major gaming platforms, including consoles and mobile devices. It is listed on the Paris Stock Exchange (ISIN: FR0000079600, Bloomberg: GFT FP, Reuters: GLFT.PA).

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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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Heyzap, operator of a social mobile gaming network, has unveiled a list of 12 mobile gaming leaders that are partnering with it to promote mobile games.

The partners include Spacetime Studios, Nubee, PocketGems, Bionic Panda Games, Magma Mobile, GameDuell, Digital Chocolate, Animoca, Fluik, Get Set Games, the BBC, and Vostu. All of the companies have integrated Heyzap’s free software development kit (SDK) into their games so that users can share their own gaming activity and achievements with their friends by “checking in” to games. About 3.6 million users have downloaded Heyzap’s mobile game check-in app on smartphones, said Jude Gomila, co-founder of Heyzap.

The companies hope to boost the number of users who install their games. It works like this. A user checks into a game. One of that user’s friends sees that happen via a notification on his or her smartphone. The friend can then click on the game icon and check it out or install it. It’s a social discovery tool that can make a game more viral.

“Heyzap was easy to integrate and a good way to boost installs,” says Andy Smith, Production manager at Get Set Games.

PocketGems also said the integration was simple and it worked well within minutes. Digital Chocolate praised Heyzap’s flexible user interface and high traffic volume for driving new users to Millionaire City.

“Heyzap provides the best UI in the space and was able to generate noticeable lift,” said Jason Loia, Digital Chocolate’s chief operating officer.

These developers are 1 percent of Heyzap’s total developer base, which includes 800 more game makers.

Nubee uses Heyzap’s social analytics dashboard so the company can track statistics like check-ins and Facebook shares for each game. Users can download the Heyzap app for iOS or Android.

Developers can also take full advantage of the Heyzap app, which increases user engagement and retention with social features like live chat, tips, and badges. Heyzap is based in San Francisco and has raised $3.6 million from Union Square Ventures, Chris Dixon, and Naval Ravikant.

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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-based 6waves Lolapps is one of the biggest social game makers on Facebook, with more than 14.6 million monthly active users. But 6L, as the company will be known in the future, considers mobile to be its fastest-growing market opportunity, said Arjun Sethi, chief product officer, in an interview. It’s also a market that, unlike Facebook, isn’t dominated by Zynga or any other company.

“This feels like the early days of Facebook,” Sethi said. “The good thing about mobile is that there is no clear winner. It’s going to be a huge playing field. “

The Escalation Studios team will stay at its location and continue to focus on delivering cutting-edge mobile games such as Doom Resurrection, pictured. The team was founded by Tom Mustaine and Marc Tardiff, both veterans of the game industry. They will become design directors. A third co-founder, Shawn Green, will become director of engineering for 6L. The company’s more recent games include the musical chain reaction game Splode and Yeti Town. Tardiff said the company started out with work-for-hire and later moved on to original titles.

“Marc and his team are doing wonderfully,” Sethi said, adding that he was impressed that Escalation’s goals for its future aligned closely with 6L’s.

6L plans to double its business in 2012, and mobile is expected to play a big role in that growth. As the company expands, it will both hire and acquire new talent.

Escalation Studios has 30 employees, while 6L has 200. So the combined company will have around 230 people. GCA Savvian Advisors was the financial advisor for Escalation.

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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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The game is part of Zynga’s strategic expansion into mobile games, a market where its social chops can be an advantage. But Zynga faces stiff competition in the mobile market and has far less market share in that segment than it does as a dominant player on Facebook. Zynga launched seven mobile games last quarter.

The game is a fast and fun social word puzzle game that is the latest installment in Zynga’s “With Friends” mobile social apps. In the game, you look at a four by four grid of letters and use your finger to unscramble as many words as you can see in the grid. The fun part of the game is challenging a friend to a match and taking turns to find as many words as you can within 2 minutes. The challenges last for three rounds and the one with the most points wins. You can take your turn at your own leisure, as the play is asynchronous, where one player moves at a time.

Ya-Bing Chu, general manager for the game, showed me a demo. You can start a game by challenging a friend and making your move. When you complete it, your friend gets a notification to take a turn. In the first round, you get standpoint values for each letter scored in a word. In round two, you can can double down, where you get double letter and word values for certain highlighted letters. In round three, you get triple letter scores when you score Triple Crown letters in a word.

You can use Power-Ups before each round that give you special abilities. With the “freeze,” you can stop the clock and get more time. With “inspiration,” you get some hints for three words you haven’t found yet. And with “scramble,” you can get a new view of the game board. You can send in-game chat messages and view a variety of “With Friends” apps at the bottom of the screen so you can see which games have pending turns.

You start each match with tokens that are replenished over 20 minutes, but you can buy tokens and use them to get additional power-ups. In the free-to-play version of the game, you get seven tokens and view ads in between rounds. If you pay $2.99, you get more goodies and don’t have to view the ads.

Chu says the game has immersive audio and visuals and good tactile feedback.

Previous games in the series include Chess With Friends, launched in 2008, Words With Friends from July 2009, and Hanging With Friends from June 2011. Zynga picked up the series with its $53 million acquisition of Newtoy in McKinney, Texas in December 2010. Newtoy was valuable because its biggest hit, Words With Friends, had been downloaded millions of times.

But this game was made by the San Francisco With Friends mobile game studio, in consultation with the team at the Newtoy studio. The game was based on an earlier Zynga title called Scramble, which had a kind of cult following. One fan, Manoj Saranathan, drafted a petition beseeching Zynga and Facebook to keep it going. But Zynga zapped the game on Sept. 30 on Facebook and now it’s available on mobile.

The Scramble With Friends game will be out on Android and the iPad later. Overall, Zynga is on an accelerated pace for introducing new games not only on mobile devices but also on Facebook. It introduced Hidden Chronicles on Facebook this week.

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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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The platform won’t be available until the second quarter of 2012, well behind DeNA/Ngmoco’s currently available Mobage platform. For developers, the system will give game makers a target platform to build free-to-play games that can use Gree’s global payment solution and out-of-network cross-promotional opportunities. The idea is to create a social mobile game platform that makes it easier for games to be discovered and spread in a viral fashion. Gree can give developers access to a network with more than 150 million registered gamers around the world.

Gree will make the software development kit available for both iOS (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch) and Android games.

“This new Gree platform continues to show the commitment we have to building a truly global, free-to-play ecosystem for mobile developers. Our goal is to offer the best social gaming experience to players around the world,” said Yoshikazu Tanaka, chief executive and founder of Gree. “Gree worldwide has the largest cross-platform network and this is a step closer to our goal of reaching one billion users.”

The SDK will have seamless cross-platform integration and analytics tools. Gree will launch an app discovery portal with new social tools. Users will be able to access features such as leaderboards and achievements.

Available in Q2 of 2012, the new platform will provide developers worldwide with a seamless iOS and Android integration process, as well as rich analytics tools. The unified iOS and Android APIs and app discovery portal will offer games with the next generation of social tools and interaction, and continue to provide all of the most popular gaming features such as leaderboards and achievements. Gree acquired OpenFeint in April 2011 and it offers more than 7,500 games for smartphones.

Gree has been growing fast. Between 2008 and 2010 Gree claims to have seen its sales growth rate increase by more than 4,000 percent. It has 26 million registered users in Japan and, thanks to its acquisition of OpenFeint in April 2011, now boasts 145 million users worldwide. After the announcement of the $104 million acquisition, the two companies explained that they would be creating “a global ecosystem of distribution channels for game developers.”

In addition to OpenFeint, which is a wholly owned subsidiary, Gree also has partnership agreements with two very popular social networks in Asia. In April, Gree announced a partnership with Project Goth, the company behind Mig33, a mobile social network with 47 million users worldwide, but with a particular focus on emerging markets like South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.

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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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The results show that MindJolt is well on its way to having three legs of a stool in terms of business diversification, with businesses focused on Facebook, the web and mobile. Altogether, MindJolt’s games have been installed more than 100 million times.

“This feels like success,” said the company’s chief operating officer, Colin Digiaro, in an interview. “We’ve also begun to generate a lot of revenue through virtual goods purchases.”

The former SGN crew is turning out to be a productive bunch. The team recently launched the games Warp Dash, Master Shot, DressUp!-Fashion, and Mini Café. The LA-based company also recently re-released the SGN flying combat simulation game Skies of Glory.

“All of these games hit at about the same time, and it shows we’ve made a lot of investments,” Digiaro said. “The good thing is that we can now distribute our games to a sizable installed base.”

In the past, MindJolt generated most of its revenue via ads or paid downloads. But under free-to-play, users play for free and pay real money for virtual goods. Virtual goods — mostly from mobile games — now account for about a third of the company’s sales.

Digiaro said that the company plans to launch seven more iOS games later this year and will build franchises inspired by SGN properties DressUp-Fashion!, Fluff Friends, and Bird’s the Word. That’s a big change from the company’s position just five months ago, Digiaro said.

MindJolt has had more than 30 million mobile installs, 70 million social network installs and 25 million web installs. Rivals include Zynga, Electronic Arts, Glu Mobile and a wide variety of others. MindJolt is led by the team that founded MySpace and it has funding from Austin Ventures.

Over time, Digiaro said that the company will expand to the Android platform.

“Overall, we think mobile is a fantastic market,” Digiaro said.

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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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The deal adds more mobile game development talent to Zynga’s fold as it tries to rapidly expand into the smartphone and tablet game markets. While Zynga dominates social games on Facebook with 259 million monthly active users, it doesn’t have nearly the same presence in mobile, which could turn out to be a larger and more lucrative gaming market. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The acquisition also gives Zynga access to talented developers in the UK. Wonderland Software is known for making GodFinger, a big hit on the iPhone that was published by Ngmoco. The purchase of the studio does not include rights to Godfinger, though it includes other intellectual property owned by Wonderland.

Wonderland Software chief executive Matthew Wiggins assumes the job of general manager of Zynga Mobile UK, reporting to David Ko, senior vice president of mobile at Zynga. Zynga will use the team to create new mobile social games. Wonderland Software was started by Wiggins, Mark Rose and Al Harding in 1999. The deal is Zynga’s 12th acquisition or purchase of a game team in 12 months.

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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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The deal with CSL showcases Scoreloop’s ability to create a social network that is focused around mobile games. It’s a quick way for major carriers around the world to draw more attention to money-making games, since the social networks are often embedded in phones much the same way the phones come with a pre-installed Android Market.

The social network helps users engage more with games, share games with friends, and socialize with each other. That means games are more sticky and have long usage, according to Marc Gumpinger, chief executive of Scoreloop. The carrier, meanwhile, doesn’t have to build its own mobile game social network from scratch.

Scoreloop cut a deal last year with a Taiwanese carrier, but this is the first time a mobile operator has deployed Scoreloop’s full solution — including an embedded app, gaming store and catalog of games. The effort is part of CSL’s initiative to create greater brand awareness using social tie-ins that are more organic than pure advertising. Mark Liversidge, Chief Marketing Officer of CSL, said that games are becoming a more important part of content on mobile phones.

Scoreloop has created a mobile game social network using its white-label service for CSL. The service, now available to any CSL customer with an Android phone, will let users access a gaming center app that can be downloaded for free and that will be pre-installed on certain phones.

Scoreloop has integrated its technology into two branded services offered by CSL, called 1010 and one2free. Players can connect with friends and other gamers. They can search and download new games via the Android gaming center. The launch games available on the service have been chosen from the hundreds of games already using Scoreloop.

Scoreloop has been integrated into CSL’s billing platform to create a seamless experience. If a player decides to make an in-app purchase — buying extra levels or in-game currency — the Scoreloop platform detects those being made by a CSL customer and instantly routes the transaction via CSL’s own platform, billing the customer directly.

“We see social games as an increasingly important sector of the mobile app market,” said Mark Liversidge, Chief Marketing Officer of CSL. “Because of this we’ve been working closely with Scoreloop to create a platform where our users can interact socially across games. Through letting users connect within the context of our brands, 1O1O and one2free,we’re not only building customer value, but also enhancing lifestyle experience.”

Another first for Scoreloop and CSL is the way in which in-app purchases and billing have been integrated into CSL’s billing platform to create a totally seamless experience. If a player decides to make an in-app purchase — such as extra levels or in-game currency — the Scoreloop platform detects those being made by a CSL customer and instantly routes the transaction via CSL’s own platform, billing the customer directly.

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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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