Since Windows 3.x Solitaire is a constantcompanion of Microsoft’s operating systems. Originally made as a programming exercise by Wes Cherry in 1989 and called Klondike, this digital variation of the card game Patience caused many paid working hours being wasted. Solitaire was a casual game before the term even existed and certainly one of the most played games on earth.

GameDuell turned it with Solitaire Harmony in a cross-platform social game for iOS, Android, Facebook and a web game on their own web platform. GameDuell is Germanys most visited internet-games site and ranks #2 of the Top Developers from Germany on AppStats and with a brought catalog of cross-platform games GameDuell is pushing into the cross-platform market. One of those games is Solitaire Harmony.

Title: Solitaire Harmony
Developer GameDuell
Genre: Puzzle
Languages: English
Platform(s): Facebook, Web, iOS, Android
Active users (Facebook): 9,000 DAU; 50 .000 MAU

How to play:

Solitaire Harmony is played as the standard Solitaire game known from windows. A standard 52 card set with no jokers, is laid out as 7 stacks of overlapping cards, called tableau.

From Right to left the number of card decrees from 7 down to one. Only the top card is visible. The remaining 24 cards are combined in a pile, often refereed as the talon.

Now the Player has to build the 4 foundation piles (one for each suit) from Ace to King (lowest to highest), by moving cards on the tableau. The tableau have to be build from highest to lowest in alternate colures and empty pile can be filled with kings. Cards from the Talon can be pulled in packs of three where all three cards are viable, but only the card on top can be placed in on the tableau. A score is given rating the draws a player needs, also a time bonus is added if he solves the game in less than five minutes. Those scores have different meanings on all of the three Platforms.

On their own game portal GameDuell offers real opponents and real prizes. The players set their stake before the game and in the after the game the scores are compared. Winner takes is all. That is enough insensitive for a player to play the web version of the game, but since waging with real money is prohibited on Facebook and in the Apple App Store, other rewards are needed – changing the framework, but not the core game play.

Competition has still made into the Facebook version, but not for real money. The player plays for a ‘Harmony Cash’ Jackpot, player with the highest scores wins. Harmony Cash can buy new live and helps the player to upgrade his castle. If not bought with Harmony Cash, the player hast to wait 14 minutes for a new life and until he levels up to upgrade his castle. This can be quite annoying, because the limit of hearts that can be stored is very low with only two. But on the other hand it makes it quit tempting to buy a bit Harmony Cash. Some players will be scared of other will buy and some will just have the patience. Or maybe change to the mobile version.

The framework of the game is quite similar to the Facebook version. The player also upgrades his castle by winning games of solitaire. Different is, that he doesn’t earn Harmony Cash but Crowns and there are now lives limiting the amount of plays. Also added are powers that can be bought to enhance winning chances. First this powers have to be unlocked for a certain amount and then and then the player pays a small fee each round he uses them, making crowns very valuable. They can be earned by winning games, leveling up, bought or earned by participating in promotions as signing up for a page or buying something. This kid of promotion is also used in the Facebook version, but only as an occasional offer. Here this option is always available to the player.

We had the pleasure to talk to GameDuell ask some questions about their experiences in developing cross-platform games ant the HTML 5 version of Solitaire Harmony.

Social Games Observer: Why is the mobile version of Solitaire Harmony not linked to the Facebook version?

GameDuell: Solitaire Harmony was the first game we offered on basically every possible platform. For us it was at the beginning more important to offer a perfect cross-platform experience, as we for example know that retention rates are higher for such games, than integrating every possible social feature that we had on the list. As of today people can play the Solitaire Harmony on Facebook, our own social site, iOS, Android and since a few weeks it also runs with HTML5 which makes it possible to open the game in almost any mobile web browser.[...] We tried to bring a lot of improvements with this new version of the game – one of them is the login via Facebook. Additionally the game play was improved, graphics got polished and animations look smoother. ince we believe that HTML5 will play an important role in games development in the future, as one big advantage of this technology is that you develop a game once and run it on any device and platform, we really wanted to build a first HTML5 game now. It gives us the opportunity to gather now already first experiences and learnings to be prepared for the future when HTML5 will be ready for the masses.

SGO: What are the challenges trying to translate skill based competitive games into a social or mobile environment?

GD: The interaction between friends has to be in the center of the game. People love to beat their friend’s highscore, be able to level up, send gifts, see how their friends do, etc.

Especially for mobile games it can be challenging to make everything totally social since users want to play everywhere – with or without internet connection – and at any time. Sometimes, they just open the game briefly to play for a minute or even less. But this one minute needs to be a perfect social experience and other challenges like the small screen on mobile devices as well as interruptions through phone calls and messages need to be handled as well.

When it comes to Android mobile devices it gets even trickier. The fragmentation is very high and currently there are over 500 different Android devices with different screens and set-ups out there. Even though it looks easy to make a game run on all of them, it isn’t.

We also learnt that even rather simple games can be considered as complex by many players. Therefore we started to create easy and simple tutorials that increase the accessibility and connect players emotionally with the game.

Also, we not only try to make the start into a game and its game play as enjoyable as possible but also try to make sure that it is visually a great experience (e.g. on Bubble Speed, that you named “Game of the week” last week, we recently spent a couple of weeks just on fine tuning and improving the graphics, which is certainly one of the reasons why the metrics improved) – people simply love it when a game looks more cute and lively.

SGO:Playing on a touch screen gives advantages and disadvantages in comparison to mouse and keyboard as an input device. What are the challenges in balancing the different platforms and their strengths and weakness, concerning skill based competitive gaming?

GD: While surely game development requires understanding of the users and creativity, most game developers also have developed strong analytics around games.  For us, the advantage of having a big community on different platforms is our ability to test and measure a lot. We have constantly A/B tests running and compare the behavior of different cohorts with similar feature sets on different devices. This helps us to understand the proper balancing and we constantly work on improving the user experience. We don’t only give them what they say they like, but also constantly observe how they enjoy our games. If we discover imbalances across platforms, we can spot them and provide solutions.

In the end all versions of Solitaire Harmony are driven by different mechanisms.  Missing is a linking between them – which goes beyond cross promotion. The r social and mobile versions with the campaign model just don’t have what it needs to keep the user playing. In the best case the social and mobile version teaches the player solitaire and gives him the confidence to compete in the web version for real money. Even thought Solitaire Harmony is available on 3 different platforms, they are three different Solitaire games – of which the web version hast the most appeal.

In the history of social games there seems to have been only one global number one: Zynga. But there are several companies fighting for the second spot – and interestingly the two hardest competitors right now are from Europe: King.com, headquartered in London with offices all over the continent, and Berlin-based Wooga.
This week, King.com announced it had overtaken Wooga to become Europe’s number one. Let’s take a look at the numbers:

King.com, whose most popular Facebook game is Bubble Witch Saga, now has 10,446,002 daily active users (DAU) putting it ahead of Wooga at 10,280,501 DAU.

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King.com’s performance is particularly impressive because King launched its first Facebook game just over a year ago. According to the company, the number of times King’s games are played each month has risen from 300 million to more than 2.5 billion.
When looking at monthly active users (MAU), Wooga is still in the lead with 44,669,005 MAU, King.com has 39,750,020 MAU.

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Usually, the DAU number is considered the more relevant one because it indicates users are actively returning to a game – so it would be fair to say that King.com wins this round due to a boost in DAU caused by the release of Candy Crush Saga last week.
Wooga hasn’t released a new game in a while but the German developer has been growing steadily and is likely to bounce back.
More in-depth information and data on Facebook games and apps is available on our all-new relaunched AppStats – the public beta is now open for free registration.

Social intelligence company Claritics has announced it has received $1.5 million in Series A financing lead by Cervin Ventures and TiE Angels. The financing is meant to enable Claritics to accelerate its mission to turn social data into social intelligence that helps application developers improve their reach, retention and revenue campaigns. “Social gaming and social commerce provides a unique opportunity for companies to understand their customers’ activities, behaviors and demographic profiles like never before,” said Raj Pai, CEO and co-founder of Claritics. “Our goal is to organize the enormous amount of social data in a way that not only delivers immediate, actionable insights but allows our clients to create automated processes around it and leverage predictive modeling to optimize campaign performance on-the-fly. This allows us to offer forward-looking social intelligence instead of the typical, backwards-facing analytics approach.”

The funding will be used to develop Claritics’ suite of SaaS social intelligence applications, which track data from across multiple social platforms in real-time and deliver it via a dashboard  to help marketers and application developers take immediate action on their acquisition, engagement and monetization campaigns. “The rise of social commerce is being led by social game developers, but there is tremendous opportunity for nearly every type of merchant, from retailers and media companies to service providers and resellers,” said Neeraj Gupta, managing director of Cervin Ventures. “But to operate in this realm effectively, companies have to harness the incredible amount of data flying around, which requires a fundamentally new approach. Claritics gives app developers the ability to identify trends in real-time and make immediate improvements to their application’s content, viral features, marketing campaigns and other business-critical functions.”

Claritics’ analytics platform has been in private beta and has been working with social game developers like Grab Games. There is certainly a demand for social analytics in both, games and e-commerce. The company with the currently biggest momentum is the US based company Kontagent, but more social analytics firms keep popping up like the German company Honeytracks which is still in closed beta.

For the first time Newzoo will add New and Emerging Markets (Spain, Brazil, Mexico, Russia) to its portfolio of National Gamers Surveys.  These markets have traditionally been viewed as hard to monetize through retail channels, but online and mobile business models are changing this – a change witnessed daily by GlobalCollect, world’s premier payment service provider of local e-payment solutions and launch sponsor of the US and Emerging Markets surveys. Asian markets (China, Korea) will be surveyed in May.

This expansion into new markets is designed to enable game companies and investors to make well informed decisions on emerging markets, and to provide a global perspective on gaming that includes all game platforms, genres and business models.  Bob Voermans, Senior Business Development Manager EMEA at GlobalCollect: “We see it as our responsibility to make sure our clients make well-informed choices and have therefore chosen to back the new series of surveys performed by Newzoo. Having been payment consultants for the games industry for over 15 years, we know that research is vital to make sure gaming companies implement the right strategy to grow their online business.”

New Official Facebook Stats

Facebook has published some interesting statistics on its official company Statistics page, which can be found here: http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics. According to the new numbers there are now 900 million objects; or groups, pages, events and community pages, for the Facebook user to interact with, which is a massive increase from the 160 million objects available in June. Today more than 150 million people are using Facebook in their mobile phones. The site is currently translated into more than 70 languages and the average user has 130 friends and is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events.

Facebook Looking To Expand Operations In Vietnam

Facebook has announced that they are looking for someone to be involved in user acquisitions programs, identifying growth opportunities and represent Facebook in meetings with government officials in Vietnam. The Vietnamese government has on several occasions previous tried to block Facebook, because it doesn’t like the company’s presence in the country.

Skype And Facebook Integrated At Last

The new version of Skype has just been released with several new features up its sleeve. The most prominent of which is the highly anticipated integration with Facebook. It is now possible for users to chat, SMS or call their Facebook friends directly from Skype, right from the News Feed. You can easily view your News Feed directly from inside Skype as well, just click the home button and you’re on your way.

More Payment Methods Are Coming To Facebook

PlaySpan will bring at least 20 more payment options to Facebook in the coming months, as a part of their newly announced collaboration with the social network. PlaySpan, a company specialized in virtual goods and monetization services, has been working on several methods of payment for international customers, and will broaden the methods of which users can pay with Credits, something that Facebook welcomes with open arms. Facebook’s goal is namely to make Credits the only virtual currency used within social games and all other applications on the platform. PlaySpan’s payment method is called “Ultimate Pay” and can already be seen to some users in the Credits interface on Facebook.

Bing Partners With Facebook- Making Web searches More Personal

Soon, Microsoft’s search engine Bing will have access to Facebook user’s friend relationships and Likes, including this information in its search results. This was announced on October 13th and will bring a more personalized search, and ultimately put pressure on Google.
Facebook Invites More Developers To Use Credits
Facebook announced that it now has the capacity to partner up with three to four times as many companies, in order to make Credits the only virtual currency on the platform. Credits are now used by more than 75 developers, including Zynga, Crowdstar and RockYou.

Facebook Chat “Clear Chat History” Feature Removed

When Facebook updated many of their features recently, including the chat function, they’ve apparently also removed the ability for users to clear their chat history. This feature protected users when surfing on public computers or otherwise engaged in private conversations, and has brought many complaints to Facebook.

MeinVZ is the main driver of the three VZ Networks, at least in terms of monetization. The user base is lower than on SchülerVZ and a bit higher than StudiVZ. MeinVZ was originally launched for users that were no students and did not quite fit in to StudiVZ. Today, MeinVZ is the most interesting VZ platform for game developers as it does not show a strong downward trend like StudiVZ and the user base is willing to spend money on the network, unlike on SchülerVZ. We see a couple of games growing, particularly games by wooga, Goodgame and Plinga. Farming games are extremely popular on MeinVZ: four of the most popular games are farming games. All Happy Harvest versions are represented in the Top10.

	App Name	Developer	MeinVZ	Gain in %
1.	Frohe Ernte	Elex	1.171.972	+0.03%
2.	Brain Buddies	wooga	751.962	-0.42%
3.	Bubble Island	wooga	521.313	+0.04%
4.	Frohe Ernte 2	Elex	393.270	+0.23%
5.	Monster World	wooga	375.827	+1.45%
6.	Frohe Ernte 3	Elex	331.897	-0.19%
7.	Mein Fisch	HappySNS	256.860	-0.87%
8.	Goodgame Farmer	Goodgame Studios	242.403	-0.91%
9.	Wobbix Quiz	Quiz-Fabrik	221.462	-0.93%
10.	Fröhlicher S	Elex	192.698	-0.48%
11.	Cute Pig	Plinga	180.933	+1.63%
12.	Traumstadt	Elex	171.887	-2.13%
13.	Glücklich	Elex	143.362	-1.52%
14.	Icy Tower	Plinga	141.767	-0.75%
15.	Turtle Squad	Plinga	139.429	-1.00%
16.	Goodgame Café	Goodgame Studios	136.812	+1.38%
17.	Crazy Charley	Plinga	223.530	-0.89%
18.	Das Quiz Rennen	Quiz-Fabrik	134.251	-0.70%
19.	Cool Fish	Elex	131.539	-1.81%
20.	FunCards	Plinga	129.396	-0.88%

Run With Robots today announced the launch of its Roar Engine social game building platform. Roar Engine is an industry first, providing a powerful and robust WebAPI toolset designed specifically as a one stop “backend” solution for cross-platform social game developers to build, manage, grow, and monetise online casual games, social games and websites. The core system is powered by a rich game mechanics engine, supporting rapid backend development of social RPG gameplay and appointment gaming mechanics, popular in many social network games. Using Roar Engine developers can create rich and complex items, quests and tasks, easily integrate badges, achievements and leaderboards, and earn real money through premium virtual currency sales. The powerful content management system enables updates of production volumes of game and player data, with analytics and reporting tools providing critical insights into game usage patterns to optimise engagement and player retention.

These industry leading, easy-to-use tools help solve difficult ‘backend’ technical problems faced by developers and provide a standardised approach to building and managing multiple games that was previously available only to the largest and most advanced game studios. Run With Robots, CEO Clint Walker said “Roar Engine gives developers a serious advantage when creating online games, enabling them to compete using the best technology right from the outset, rather than having to build complex server systems from scratch. This means more time spent making games fun and engaging, which translates into better games and improved revenue opportunities for developers.”

“When you’re creating online games, you should be focusing on making the games fun and engaging, not on building complex technical backend systems just to make your game work.” CTO, Michael Anderson said, “Roar Engine is free to try for any sized developer. And it’s the only system of its kind that allows developers to build rich game mechanics, including appointment gaming hooks, into their games and build them using any technology that can talk to the open web. This includes technologies like HTML5, Flash, Unity, and devices such as iPhone and Android. Developers can use Roar Engine to support multiple platforms, which all ‘talk’ to the same game backend.”

Compared to last week there are no significant changes as all Top 10 games remain on the same position. We can see that all games grew in terms of app installs and seven out of ten games grew by at least two digit percentages. As “Swiat Danio” was a new entry last week and the only new game on Nasza Klasa for weeks it is not surprising that the game registered tripled installs this week compared to the last. Other than Swiat Danio the best received game on the Polish social network was Plinga’s Pet Party that also shows good performance on other social networks. On Nasza Klasa Pet Party grew by almost 30% in the last week. The overall enthusiasm for games on Nasza Klasa does hardly diminish: Total app installs grew by 17.47% in the last week compared to 20.2% in the week before.

	App Name	Developer	Nasza Klasa	Gain in %
1.	Icy Tower	Plinga	1.868.214	+7.67%
2.	Happy Harvest	Elex	1.175.589	+19.54%
3.	Maffia New	i-Jet	1.000.567	+18.35%
4.	Pet Party	Plinga	912.986	+29.17%
5.	Moja Szkola	i-Jet	683.068	+5.82%
6.	Crazy Charlie	Plinga	643.932	+9.90%
7.	General Hospital	i-Jet	584.775	+12.17%
8.	Funtris	Plinga	574.169	+10.34%
9.	Turtle Squad	Plinga	498.177	+10.83%
10.	Swiat Danio	Danio	273.991	+210.65%

On Nasza Klasa total game installs increased by over 20% from 5.8 million to almost 7 million installs in the last week. The top gainer is Plinga’a Pet Party which gained over 40% in unique installs. The only new entry in our Top 10 is dairy producer Danone’s game “Swiat Danio” (Danio World). In Swiat Danio you can build your own world of funky flying creatures and play several mini games like pac man revolving around the product Danone Danio. Although the game is constantly down and significantly differs in terms of game quality it had over 88.000 installs in the first week. Certainly, the high figures are due to the lack of other new games and an overall low number of games on the social network. However, the activity on Nasza Klasa shows the curiosity of the users and their willingness to play games on a platform that’s original purpose is to find old class mates. Games are received very well on Nasza Klasa and in this early stage of the games section it is relatively easy to gain many installs – certainly attractive considering the 27 million registered users. Plinga positioned itself as the top publisher on Nasza Klasa and will further benefit from cross promotion possibilities.

	App Name	Developer	Nasza Klasa	Gain in %
1.	Icy Tower	Plinga	1.735.175	+13.46%
2.	Happy Harvest	Elex	983.446	+30.63%
3.	Maffia New	i-Jet	845.462	+18.52%
4.	Pet Party	Plinga	706.836	+42.25%
5.	Moja Szkola	i-Jet	645.504	+10.93%
6.	Crazy Charlie	Plinga	585.910	+19.57%
7.	General Hospital	i-Jet	521.337	+16.01%
8.	Funtris	Plinga	520.347	+19.87%
9.	Turtle Squad	Plinga	449.502	+21.03%
10.	Swiat Danio	Danio	88.200	new

Consumer data from Newzoo’s new Social Gaming Monitor 2010 shows a large overlap between two favourite pastimes: playing computer games and using social networks. Of all 143 million social network users in the US, 88% also plays computer games. Vice versa, 79% of all 160 million Americans that play games are active on social networks. As such, it’s not surprising that an ever increasing number of “social games” are offered through platforms such as Facebook. The survey reveals that 61% of all social network users play games within the network adding up to 87.3 million US social gamers. This is 41% of the total online population aged ten years and up; a percentage slightly lower than the UK (42%) but significantly higher than France (35%), Belgium (35%), Germany (30%) and the Netherlands (27%).

Women like to play but men pay

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The majority of games on social networks are free to play. Money is spent on in-game items, additional levels and giving friends virtual gifts to enhance their game experience. The share of people willing to do this is comparable to traditional game websites and ranges from 12% in the Netherlands to 32% in Germany. The UK and US are in-between. Social games are slightly more popular with women – 51% of all social gamers – than men (49%) but men are more likely to spend money, making up 58% of paying social gamers. Alex Agostini, Director of Business Development at social games publisher 6Waves comments: “2010 will be a year of transition for most social gaming companies. Transition from management of explosive growth to search of higher efficiency”

Social games, side dish or main dish?

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It is hard not to run into a social game when active on a social network but there are signs that social games are attracting a steady crowd. Almost half (47%) of American social gamers plays three or more games a month and also almost half (49%) plays frequently: three or more days a week. There is room for growth too, as only 26% spend more than an hour a day on social games and 44% play a single game not more than a period of four weeks. But with 46% of social gamers stating Facebook as their main online gaming destination – 61% in the UK – there is no question that social networks provide an opportunity as well as a challenge to all “traditional” console and online game platforms. Peter Warman, MD of Newzoo adds: “There is no game company out there that does not have social networks high on the agenda. The big question is if playing games on social networks is tapping into a new group of consumers, adding more time and money spent to existing gamers or taking time , players and budget away from game websites and consoles. The same accounts for iPhone, iPod and iPad gaming. With our surveys we aim to get a grip on these major shifts in the games market.”

Click below to see detailed statistics about the US, the UK, France,  Netherlands and Belgium. (more…)