King, the world’s leading cross-platform, bite-sized games company, today announces that its popular, top 10 Facebook game, Pet Rescue Saga, is now available on Mobile. The game, which has over 5 million daily players, is available on iOS (iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch) and on Google Play for Android devices.

“Pet Rescue Saga is one of King’s most-played games. It has strong puzzle challenge and a great story where players work to save cuddly dogs, cats and birds from dangerous scenarios,” said Riccardo Zacconi, CEO and co-founder of King. “Just like with our popular cross-platform game Candy Crush Saga, players will now be able to play Pet Rescue Saga anywhere, anytime and ensure their leaderboards, scores and progress is synchronized, regardless of device.”

Pet Rescue Saga Screenshot

Pet Rescue Saga launches on mobile with over 72 levels featuring more than 10 cute, animated pets in dire need of help from all kinds of threats across a fantastic Saga land that includes both fairytale and urban landscapes. Boosters allow gamers to clear columns or individual blocks in various ways to save enough pets and advance through each episode, which includes 5-10 different types of puzzle levels.

Pet Rescue Saga’s mobile features include:

• Synced with Facebook: Players can continue their progress, unlock new levels and access leaderboards in both the Facebook and mobile versions
• Ability to unlock helpful charms and boosters to benefit players’ journey through the Saga
• 72 exciting levels and several modes for players to test their pet-saving skills against time limits, a limited number of moves and any threats
• Sharp, vivid retina display and 3-D visuals
• Built-in online connectivity to see friends who are also playing

Pet Rescue Saga for iOS and Google Play is free and available now. To play, please click here for iOS or for Android go here.

This week we profile Miniclip, a game developer with over 100 million game plays per month. The company develops online, mobile and social games and you can play them across many platforms. Social Games Observer contacted them to learn a little more about them:

Developer Name: Miniclip

Where founded and office/s location/s: Founded in London, headquartered in Switzerland. Offices in London, Switzerland, Portugal, Italy and the US.

Founded by: Robert Small and Tihan Presbie

Funding: Self-funded

Number of employees: 146 (as of April 29^th)

Number of games published: Over 1000

Describe what you do in one sentence: Provide great games for anyone, anytime, anywhere

Where games are published: Miniclip.com, Mobile, Facebook

Game genre/s: Action/Sports/Social/MMO/Multiplayer/Arcade/Puzzle/Racing

8 Ball Pool

User demographics: Male and Female

User demographics: Worldwide, with big presence in US, Canada, UK, Australia, Brazil, India, Indonesia

Best-selling virtual item: Pool Coins in 8 Ball Pool by Miniclip

Most expensive virtual item: Platinum Cue in 8 Ball Pool by Miniclip

What do you see as the current most exciting trend in the industry: cross platform game experiences

DeNA is working with Wizards of the Coast to bring a new role-playing game based on Dungeons & Dragons to iOS and Android.

Dungeons & Dragons: Arena of War is a battle RPG that has players picking their legendary characters to take on quests solo or online with other gamers. It uses the Forgotten Realms setting as a backdrop, and it should look familiar to D&D fans. Developer DeNA Santiago is combining the classic Dungeons & Dragons rule set with modern mechanics like massive in-game events and multiplayer competitions.

Fans can sign up now to pre-register for the games Android and iOS release at DNDArenaofwar.com, which will get players access to a rare power in the free-to-play title. DeNA expects to release the game this summer.

“Arena of War is a free-to-play, turn-based battle RPG,” DeNA Santiago head developer Tiburcio De la Carcova told GamesBeat. “It has a very strong social component. You can play and interact with your friends.”

De la Carcova explained that the team is making every effort to optimize the playing experience for mobile devices. This is a fully 3D adventure game, so DeNA wants it to appeal to real gamers. At the same time, it doesn’t want to frustrate players with difficult or unfriendly controls.

“We didn’t try to replicate the PC experience,” said De la Carcova. “We made it a unique experience for mobile devices, and we think we came up with a real novel way to play.”

That means a lot of taping, swiping, and other finger gestures to control the on-screen action.

Despite the new controls, De la Carcova wants to bring the classic feeling of D&D to mobile. He is designing the game to lower the barrier of entry to the beloved series.

“I don’t think there is a D&D game in the mobile arena that captures the classic elements,” he said. “And this one isn’t just about the classic D&D rules — it is also about adapting those elements for mobile.”

This is a free-to-play game, but that doesn’t necessarily mean players will start with under-powered characters. Gamers can choose from 16 classes, but DeNA plans to expand that in the future.

After that, it’s all about doing quests with a party of other characters. The A.I. can control those roles, or players can team up with their friends online.

via: GamesBeat

King announces it now has more than 70 million daily players across all platforms and three top 10 Facebook games

King, the world’s leading cross-platform, bite-sized games company, today announces that it is releasing its popular, top 10 Facebook game, Pet Rescue Saga, on mobile early this summer. The game, which is the third largest overall game on Facebook with more than 6 million daily players (DAU), will be available on iOS (iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch) and on Google Play for Android devices. Pet Rescue Saga becomes King’s third Saga game to be released on mobile and will further position the company as a leader in mobile games alongside their hit mobile title, Candy Crush Saga, which is one of the most popular titles across Android and iOS in many major markets seeing over 500 million gameplays a day on mobile alone.

Social Games Observer spoke to King’s US VP of Business Development, Jong Woo, who told us that the company has more than 70 million daily players and 130 million monthly players across all platforms. This surpasses Zynga’s 52 million daily players. The company currently has three top 10 Facebook games with Candy Crush Saga (15.5M DAU), Pet Rescue Saga (6M DAU) and Farm Heroes Saga (4.8M DAU). King’s games have taken the number one application and game slot on Facebook and top grossing app positions on iOS and Android, clocking over 21 billion gameplays per month across mobile, social and online. Of the different platforms, Woo told us that both iOS and Android see similar levels of engagement and retention although with monetization, the iOS seems to monetize better than Android.

“We are completely humbled to have three of our games among the top 10 on Facebook and seeing that our games are attracting over 70 million daily players and 21 billion gameplays a month across all platforms,” said Riccardo Zacconi, CEO and co-founder of King. “Pet Rescue Saga’s fun puzzle challenges have proven to be extremely popular since its release in October. The game quickly became one of the most prevalent games on Facebook and is one we are confident will translate well to mobile.”

Indeed, King’s Candy Crush Saga was a huge hit on both mobile and Facebook. Jong Woo explained that the release of the game on mobile definitely boosted its popularity. Cross platform synchronization means that users can now play anywhere and still have their gameplay updated on each platform. Woo also put the success of Candy Crush Saga down to its playability factor – it is a “bitesized” game, meaning you can pick it up at any time and play for one or two minutes from anywhere you are.

Pet Rescue Saga will launch on mobile with over 72 levels, providing a seamless gameplay experience across mobile and Facebook. Players will be able to play the game anywhere, anytime – ensuring their leaderboards, scores and progress are fully synchronized regardless of device.

As King looks towards its future, Woo told Social Games Observer that they would continue to adopt the strategy of first prototyping the games on King.com before moving the games across to Facebook and then to mobile – the same route taken by Pet Rescue Saga.  The future certainly looks bright for King – having overtaken Zynga with the largest number of daily active users and a robust pipeline of games, King looks set to dominate its stance as the largest game developer and leading mobile gaming company out there.

Rovio is launching mobile apps for Angry Birds Friends.  The social game has picked up 60 million installs and 15 million monthly active users on Facebook’s desktop platform in the year since its launch. The news was announced during a Facebook mobile event in Helsinki: the social network is doing the rounds in Finland this week talking to mobile games developers based in and around the city — home to two of the biggest mobile games developers there are, Rovio and Supercell.

Adding another platform for this popular game will give Rovio more exposure for its brand, an important part of the business to keep up demand for merchandise. It is also an essential move to respond to current trends in gaming, which see the vast majority of the most popular games favoring a free-to-download model with revenues picked up through in-app purchases, a shift from the paid model that has fuelled a lot of growth for Rovio to date.

Mobile Version Screenshot: Angry Birds Friends

“Rovio I think is very inspired by Supercell, which is absolutely ruling the App Store when it comes to top grossing apps,” Julien Codorniou, who heads up Facebook Gaming partnerships in Europe, pointed out. “No one cares about paid as much as they do about grossing.”

via: TechCrunch

Trip Hawkins is one of the game industry’s most prolific and influential people. He worked for Apple before he founded Electronic Arts, and later 3DO. Currently he is CEO of his latest venture, mobile and social gaming firm Digital Chocolate. We got the chance to sit down with Trip and discuss why he advocates the browser as the platform of choice for developers, as well as some other topics around gaming, discovery and disruption.

SocialGamesObserver: Trip, you said in the era of convenience the browser is going to win – but isn’t a closed ecosystem, e.g. a console or App Stores so successful precisely because they are most convenient to use?

Trip Hawkins: The thing about private clubs is that not everybody can get in, and not everybody wants to join the same club, so they end up being elitist institutions. It’s OK if you’re one of the members but if you’re a game developer you want to reach a larger audience than that. And pretty much from this moment forward every human being that’s going to be born is going to know how to use the browser by the time they’re five years old. It’s a very solid, very capable platform, and when people are using the browser they’re also using all the social channels.

I think this is a big change in how we’re going to decide what to try because we come from this history of going to a shop and somebody else has decided what we see in the front of this shop – but they don’t really know me or care about me that much. They’re responding more to brand power and financial leverage and whoever has got a chokehold over controlling that shelf space.

When you look at the discovery model on the internet, the storefront is created by the consumer. One way the consumer is looking is ‘What are my friends doing?’ Anything that comes with a recommendation like that has more meaning to me because it’s from a trusted source that knows me. The second category is search – clearly that’s me designing my own store that has sponsored sections where somebody paid to respond to that search, and it has an organic section where the search engine has decided who deserves to be there purely on their own merit. That’s a relevant source to me because I’m looking for something specific and here are the people that really want my attention.

SGO: But what about people who aren’t searching for games. Doesn’t a more closed environment like Facebook or the App Store turn a lot of people into gamers because it brings games to the attention on regular users?

Trip: I don’t think the point is the fact that it’s closed. What Apple did, in a very inspiring way is that they reinvented a user experience on a mobile device that was really fresh and appealing. It immediately caused a lot of people to think ‘Oh I didn’t realize I needed a mobile content platform but now that I can do it that way, I want it’. They didn’t want it in a Java feature phone but when they saw an iPhone they went ‘That looks like fun’. Android is an example where there is a more open platform because there are different manufacturers, different handsets and fragmentation. If an Android device has as much graphic processing power and capacitive touch display, it’s going to have a lot of the same appeal and positive characteristics of an iPhone – and it’s about that and not the fact that it’s a closed system.

SGO: Do you think that the browser can replace native apps?

Trip: The game industry has a huge bias towards game performance, graphics and animation. It’s always overrated, and the industry continues to overrate it. When you look at every other medium you see that it’s been disrupted in this fashion already. It’s a little slower to happen in games because they’re more complex data type. But inevitably it’s going to happen – and Japan is an example where it’s already happened. In Japan the big high-growing game markets are in the browser on feature phones. The console market has declined and the smartphones are just beginning to arrive in Japan, but they had already decided that the browser is the better way to go and they were doing it even on the feature phone.

Maybe it’s harder to believe that the browser on a smartphone, maybe the Android smartphone, will blow the App Store out of the water. But what about tablets? A tablet has a bigger screen, it’s much easier to access World Wide Web content on it and be able to use it. A lot of people would like to use them as mobile devices but something like battery life I think is more mission-critical for a phone than it is for a tablet. If my phone goes dead, I go dead. If my child’s tablet goes dead in the car – it’s not the end of the world. The tablets are going to improve in performance, screens will get better, they’ll be able to run better browsers.

SGO: So tablets will be the future of browser-based games?

Trip: When the iPhone was introduced, Google didn’t already have Android. It took three years for them to make it and convince people to adopt it. With the iPad, Apple didn’t have a lead because Android was already in the market and manufacturers were building Android products. Whatever happened in smartphones, it’s going to be more extreme in tablets.

The volume in non-Apple tablets is going to get so big so fast it’s going to make your head spin. The other thing is that when Apple introduced the App Store, they caught the fancy of the world because it was very clever. The first year of tablets coming to market every review talked about screen size, battery life and App Store. Nobody talked about the browser. I guarantee you within a year a lot of the reviews of tablets will talk about the browser and the public is going to figure out that the World Wide Web will always have more content than any app store. And thankfully there are no corporate profit interests that can prevent the browser from existing.

Read the second part of the interview

WeeWorld is rocking the mobile world: The UK-based social platform for teens and women is seeing some remarkable results – especially on iPhone. We sat down with WeeWorld’s CEO Celia Francis to discuss the company’s mobile approach.

WeeWorld has been around since 2002, it started off as an avatar creating site and later expanded its services to a standalone platform for female and teen audiences, allowing them to style avatars, decorate places, meet people and play mini-games. According to WeeWorld, 50 million avatars -or WeeMees- have been created so far.

Paid apps monetize well, but freemium is here to stay

Since 2010, WeeWorld publishes free as well as paid iPhone apps, the most successful one being the WeeMee Avatar Creator (priced at $0.99), which features additional in-app purchases and was downloaded over 3 million times, according to WeeWorld. The company achieves strong results with in-app purchases – one fifth of users pay for additional virtual items. On Android, however, things are different: With app discovery being a main issue in the Android Market, WeeWorld has published only one (free) Android app that has about 100,000 downloads.  The freemium trend hasn’t gone unnoticed, so more free apps with in-app purchases are to be expected from WeeWorld for both iOS and Android.

Mobile became an effective user acquisition channel

While the opportunities for cross-platform approach are enormous, HTML5 still isn’t quite where it should be. WeeWorld is keeping an eye on HTML5 but focuses on building individual apps for each platform at the moment: “Native apps allow us to take advantage of all the different features of handsets, which is something that we are very keen on,” Celia explained. All of WeeWorld’s mobile apps provide distinctive features, rather than reproduce the whole platform.  “So far, we keep it simple on the mobile side,” said Celia. People tend to use mobile apps in between other activities, that’s why they’re made easy and fun  – rather than overloaded with too many features.

For WeeWorld, mobile apps have become an effective user acquisition channel that allowed the company to tap into new audiences, Celia explained: “Usually, our user base is 20 years our younger, but our mobile apps attract older demographics as well. Especially middle-aged women discover our platform through mobile apps.”

Users share creations rather than achievements

Establishing more connections between their mobile offerings and the core web-based platform, is the main focus for the months to come. Be it on mobile or web-based, WeeWorld is all about self-expression.  “Our audience is younger than the Facebook audience. In Facebook, you use your real persona, we take a different approach by offering personalized entertainment,” said Celia. Especially young people enjoy to express themselves and play different roles, or even become someone else for a day.

There are overlaps with Facebook’s social graph, but most of the users choose not to post WeeWorld updates on Facebook. And interestingly, only around 20% log in with Facebook Connect. “There are a lot of sharing opportunities around achievements. But to share something you have created, is an even greater motivation,” Celia believes. These means of self-expression are not only attractive for teens – the CEO herself is an avid user.

Justin Bieber and other stars stop by regularly

Even though WeeWorld is operating in the UK, their main user base is located in the US. So far, WeeWorld doesn’t localize for European markets. “We utilize network effects to grow our audience and that’s a lot easier in a homogenous market,” explained Celia.  Because of  the attractive user demographics, integrating branded virtual goods has helped to provide another solid revenue stream. Also, WeeWorld frequently integrates celebrity-themed virtual items by stars like Snoop Dogg, Justin Timberlake, and teenage idol Justin Bieber.

OpenFeint, the leading cross platform mobile social gaming network has announced that it will be working with AT&T to power social gaming for AT&T mobile devices this year. The two companies demonstrated the benefits of the collaboration at theAT&T Developer Summit in Las Vegas earlier this month. Expected to be available on Android devices in the first quarter, OpenFeint’s Game Channel product will be a new service for users of AT&T Android devices to discover new games, get social deals and connect with other gamers. AT&T and OpenFeint are working together to make it easier for developers to create socially connected games by enabling the world’s largest cross platform social gaming network which currently has over 15,000 mobile game developers. Android users will have access to social promotions on games and virtual goods as well as customization of their OpenFeint user profile.

Available soon in the Android Market, customers will see OpenFeint’s Game Channel on new AT&T Android devices in the coming months. Android customers will be able to download via the Android Market when available. Users will be taken to Android Market to purchase games. OpenFeint is the largest cross platform mobile social gaming ecosystem with over 65 million registered users. Launched just 21 months ago, OpenFeint has a community of 15,000 developers who have launched over 4,500 games.

Adknowledge today announced its venture into the mobile ecosystem with the release of its Android SDK. The new Android SDK provides publishers with the ability to maximize earnings per user, gives consumers the ability to acquire virtual currency in multiple ways and provides advertisers with new channels to reach their target market. As the leading long tail advertiser marketplace, Adknowledge connects advertisers to consumers in hard-to reach places on the Web, including email, search, domains and social networks. In addition, through its Super Rewards division, the company has led the revolution in the monetization of games on social networks and standalone sites.

“Subscription, banner and paid download models have proven to be challenging ways to monetize many mobile games and apps,” said Chris Smutny, general manager of Adknowledge’s game division. “However, the free-to-play model is proving itself to be a powerful way to monetize games. We have seen the success of F2P in games on social networks, as well as on standalone games. The next frontier is mobile. Over the last three years, Adknowledge has helped thousands of publishers to develop, grow and monetize their F2P games. We are uniquely positioned to do the same with mobile game developers.”

As smart phones become increasingly powerful, the opportunity for them to be used as robust gaming platforms greatly increases. Among smart phones, the Android ecosystem provides mobile game developers the ability to reach a rapidly-growing user base. In 3Q10 for instance, the Android OS represented 26% of new smart phone sales (Gartner November 2010 report “Competitive Landscape: Mobile Devices, Worldwide, 3Q10″).