Last week, San Francisco-based Funzio released its newest game Kingdom Age for Facebook and iOS, marking the first time a social game has launched on both Apple iOS and Facebook simultaneously. Previously, Kingdom Age was exclusively available on Google+.

The game is a strategic action RPG in which players construct their own kingdoms, hack-and-slash monsters and battle other players army-to-army. Funzio’s VP Business Development Jamil Moledina tells us that Kingdom Age is actually less hardcore than it seems. ”The apparent complexity of the game is actually linear,” he explains. ”We have three layers of game design which give players a choice to do the things they enjoy most at the time: questing, battling or building.”

Kingdom Age is tuned for 20 minutes of play when doing all three activities, but it can also be played in six or seven minute sessions when focusing on just one aspect at a time. The accessible gameplay has helped Funzio to tap into new audiences with 35 percent female users – a high percentage for the genre. Funzio’s biggest game to date, Crime City, has a 75 percent male players, for Modern War the audience is 85 percent male, according to Moledina.

He says that on iOS play sessions are significantly shorter so Kingdom Age was tuned for three and a half minutes of play with a less complex battle system and has fewer menus for the users to deal with on a smaller screen.

Because iOS is not inherently a social network, Funzio had to create a way to connect players – which was realized by letting them exchange individual codes to battle or join forces. The results were surprising, says Moledina: ”On iOS we saw higher multiplayer activity. Players would have twice as many and in some case four times as many battles on iOS than on the Facebook version.”

Funzio’s first two titles, Crime City and Modern War are available for iOS already with good performances in the top grossing charts. Most recently, Crime City was released for Android enabling Android users to battle across platforms against iOS opponents.
Moledina says that Funzio’s Google+ exclusive phase was insightful and the company will continue to experiment with other platforms that are potentially capable to host free-to-play social games for larger audiences.