Kobe Bryant will appear in a Facebook game that Endemol USA and 6Waves are creating, and the basketball star will have creative input during the development process.
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PopCap Games, one of the most popular gaming developers on Facebook, today launched Zuma Blitz on the social network.
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Crowdstar, Facebook’s third largest game developer behind Zynga and Phrases, has teamed up with Microsoft to add social networking features to a new casual gaming hub.
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This week we had a chance to interview Trip Hawkins, the founder of Electronic Arts and Digital Chocolate about his new NanoStar platform, Nick wrote a report from SXSW about the economics of Facebook Games, we looked at 3 ways social gaming is mimicking the Atari games revolution, we reviewed Gangster City and Friends for Sale and published a report that suggests Users Buy More Virtual Goods on New Years and Valentines Day Than Christmas.

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If you are looking for a fun way to waste a few minutes each day, I highly recommend checking out Mouse Trap. Mouse Trap is a game of strategy which requires players to figure out ways to trap the most number of mice as possible. You accomplish this by choosing the right combination of cheese and mouse traps. As you progress through the game you obtain new mouse traps and begin acquiring new types of cheese.

I have been playing the game for days and I keep checking back a few times each day. It’s pretty addictive and the illustrations are of amazing quality. Personally, I think that this game is a perfect example of a high quality Facebook game. It is extremely simple but it drives you to return. While the game isn’t extremely social, there is a forum where users discuss various strategies about how to obtain the most amount of gold and maximize game scores.

So far I haven’t been able to generate a substantial amount of gold but I also haven’t been playing it for long. I think the creative illustrations help to make the game more engaging. Even though there isn’t much motion taking place I am working to unlock other locations to travel to and unlock more advanced mouse traps. If you’ve come up with any highly effective strategies, please post about them in the comments. Otherwise, if you haven’t had the opportunity to check out Mouse Hunt, I highly recommend doing so.

Will Electronic Arts (EA) lumber to a bargain basement valuation behind the record labels?

Will EA’s Pogo.com raise the company to a Facebook style valuation? (using social network community metrics and Facebook as a comparable).

Gabe Zichermann made a strong case at the LA Games Conference that Facebook is going to Napsterize the games industry. Incumbent majors are taking a wait and see approach to Fabook, while the people, “the little guys”, now have the tools to create a whole new gaming paradigm.

Gabe cites developers who are not traditional game developers are using Facebook’s platform to create highly successful games: Blake Commagere created Vampire, Zombies and WereWolves, some of the most successful apps ever. Scrabulous took an established game and leveraged Facebook as a social utility to achieve a new level of success for the game Scrabble (at least its hard to believe that the board game would have over 600 concurrent users 6.22.08). Zynga Game Network raised 10 million dollars and SGN raise 15 million on the promise of building games on top of the social graph.

Gabe has the perspective to make such assertions. As founder of Trymedia, Gabe was the first to make a business of putting legitimate music content on Napster. Trymedia received applause from only the youngest employees at the labels, and open disbelief and hostility from the labels’ executive ranks. Gabe is a bear on the prospects of the video game majors if they put their head in the sand like the record labels did in the late 90’s.

Gabe is CEO of rmbr.com, and clearly understands the power of Facebook. rmbrME is Social Networking for Real Life. It’s an easy way to share your socially-networked contact information with someone using text messaging. It works with every phone, carrier and social network (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.). There are no downloads or subscriptions–it’s an easy, fun, cool and green way to keep in touch with new friends you meet in real life. Check out Gabe’s profile for his contact information and read more at http://rmbrme.com/.

This afternoon I got sucked into banging on my computer mouse trying to get a simple digital basketball into the hoop. It’s a simple concept but for some reason nobody else has built a good Facebook basketball game so far on the site. I’m not quite sure why nobody has made a Facebook basketball game but this one sucked me in for at least 45 minutes as I tried to continuously beat my own high score.

The Hot Shots game has been successful at attracting close to 56,000 players. The game accepts both single player and multi-player. Playing is easy. All you do is drag your mouse around and click on your mouse button. I’m not sure if there are any other Facebook basketball games but this is so far the best one that I’ve played. I’ve played a fair number of games on Facebook and I’d say this one is one of the simpler ones.

The multiplayer version of Hot Shots is turn based like most other games on Facebook. Unfortunately though when I tried playing the multiplayer version, it ended up reverting back to single player. While perhaps a little misleading, the game did appear to get the job done. I was playing it for almost an hour but chance are good that I won’t go back again. If you are looking to waste a little bit of time I highly recommend checking out Hot Shots Basketball.

Today there is big news from Kongregate, the social gaming website. On Monday Kongregate will be launching the Facebook Challenge Platform. Kongregate is an indie gaming site with over 4,000 original user-uploaded Flash and Shockwave games. Kongregate has decided to launch a platform which enables users to challenge their friends to compete for Kongregate points in one-on-one, asynchronous challenges.

Players using the platform can compare their high scores with immediate friends, others in their network, or across the entire Facebook network. Individuals can also play alone if they’d like. I often times get sucked into playing Dolphin Olympics 2 for a couple hours. While I currently do not leverage all of the features of Kongregate.com, which includes personal accounts with points and achievements, the system synchronizes accounts on Facebook to accounts on the website for those that use it.

For developers there are new APIs that make it easy to port games to the Kongregate Challenge platform with little effort. While not all of the games will be launching initially, the platform will launch with Dolphin Olympics 2, Filler, Particles, Ragdoll, Avalance, MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), Super Crazy Guitar Maniac Deluxe 2 and others. This new platform is a direct competition to Zynga and SGN both of which already have plenty of active users. It will be interesting to see if Kongregate experiences the same explosive growth that many of the Zynga and SGN games did during launch.

Below are some screenshots of the games running on the Kongregate Facebook Challenge Platform from within Facebook.

Dolphin Olympics 2

Guitar Maniac

Jumpcat Challenge

Yesterday, news surfaced that the social gaming site Kongregate had launched a Facebook widget which enables you to display your Kongregate profile data within Facebook. This is only the beginning as Kongregate recently raised a round of funding from Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos. I’ve been wondering for a while why many of Kongregate’s games are not already on Facebook. I have spent hours playing Dolphin Olympics 2.

Currently, the primary social level to Kongregate games is the chat room next to each game. Aside from that there isn’t much that’s social about the site. Their entry into Facebook should be interesting and given their financing and history of growth they should prove to be formidable competitors to SGN and Zynga, the current leaders in the space. There are a number of companies that are trying to become the dominant players in the space but overall this competition appears to making the pie a little bit bigger for everyone.

While nobody knows if users will grow tired of games on Facebook and other social networks, both Zynga and SGN have been relatively successful so far at retaining users. Kongregate already has a loyal following and hopefully that will transfer over to Facebook and any other platforms the company decides to launch on.

Asia has been one of the leaders in monetizing social networks. How are they making money? Virtual goods. Those virtual goods are sold so users can build virtual houses, clothe their virtual avatars and a number of other things. I’ve found one of the first avatar worlds on Facebook called, Fresbo world. The application provides you with an avatar that you can proceed to purchase clothing, furnish your apartment and play games with.

Currency in the game comes in the form of points and credits. The credits can be purchased and the points are earned. The only way to earn points currently is through a game called “Pass the Bomb.” Pass the bomb is a game of chance with a little bit of strategy. All you have to do is guess what number is under the bomb and based on the number you think it is, you ad 1, 2 or 3 clicks to the counter each turn. If the counter reaches the number under the bomb during your turn, the bomb explodes and you lose points.

I’m embarrassed to say that I played “Pass the Bomb” for a solid hour this morning. Honestly, the game is not that unique and it isn’t challenging. I just found it interesting that I could use the points I earned during the game to go purchase more goods from the local shopping mall. Currently there is only 1 village in the game and it’s called “Noob Villiage.” Given that the game is in beta they will be adding a lot of features.

I can see people figuring out a way to pour a lot of time into this virtual world, the same way people spend time on second life. While there is not as much customization as there is within second life, there is enough for those looking to have fun and waste time. I’ve argued that there is no real point to second life in conversation with my friends and ultimately there is really no point to Fresbo world except for building up your avatar’s inventory and wasting time playing games.

Perhaps I’m just frustrated that I don’t get paid real dollars to play games in real life. Either way, Fresbo world is a great application if you are looking to waste some free time or get sucked in to building up your own virtual character. If you are interested, go check out the Fresbo World application.

A Store in Fresbo World

Pass the Bomb Game