After trying to stay under the radar for the past few months, CrowdStar, the company behind the fourth largest game on the Facebook platform, Happy Aquarium, is launching their fourth game: Happy Pets. The application first debuted last Thursday and already has over one million monthly active users, approximately the size of the company’s other two games: Know-It-All Trivia and Restaurant Life. The company has great ambitions, with a goal of taking on Zynga.
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This evening, Sony officially announced support for Facebook on the Playstation 3. While integration was first rumored last week, there is now an official video of the Facebook features which we’ve embedded below. Included in the integration is the ability to: share trophy information, share purchase information, and share game event information. Each of these features take place automatically once configured.
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Last month we wrote about the impending launch of Facebook on XBox LIVE and now it’s official. According to Microsoft, Facebook will launch on Xbox LIVE on November 17th, the same day we mentioned last month. Facebook integration is relatively robust (see here) including the ability to update your status, view your Facebook stream, photos, and profile, and the ability to share scores with your Facebook friends. News of the launch comes just as rumors about PS3 launch a similar service was leaked.
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Can’t get enough of Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook? Now you won’t have to sit at your computer to play one of the most addictive Facebook games. According to Games.com, the service will soon be released for the iPhone via a free update to the already popular Bejeweled 2 iPhone application. Now you can feed your already damaging Bejeweled Blitz addiction on the go!
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Less than a month we wrote that Facebook had just trademarked FishVille. Weeks later the company is officially launching FishVille. Happy Aquarium, the application which FishVille is based on, is now the 5th largest application on the Facebook Platform. Given Happy Aquarium’s presence, I’d expect to see FishVille advertisements all over Facebook.
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It’s a good month for Zynga. The company has one game which continues to thrive as the largest Facebook application ever and has a second application, Café World, which has raced up the charts in just a couple weeks. Playfish, now the second largest developer, also has had a great month with close to 20 percent growth, however it hasn’t been able to match Zynga who is simply dominating the Facebook platform.
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Zynga doesn’t stop growing. The company, which now owns 6 of the top 10 Facebook applications, has watched it’s latest application, Café World, leap up the charts in just over a week. It’s now the second largest game on Facebook in terms of daily active users and the tenth largest game in terms of monthly active users. With such a large number of daily users, it appears that Zynga has another hit on their hands.
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At the beginning of June I wrote about the new Facebook XBox integration, and according to a number of sources, the beta is going live later this month with the full release coming by November 17th. So what does this mean for the future of gaming? It simply means that we’ll see further integration between console games and the social stream.
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Playdom, one of the leading social gaming networks, announced today that they are launching a line of prepaid cards that will soon be available at Target, Walgreens, and 7-11. If you had any doubt that the social gaming space has become a big business, this should make things clear. The cards will now be available at more than 150,000 retail locations and can be used to purchase in-game currency on Mobsters and Sorority Life, two of Playdom’s largest games.
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An interesting take on the Mob Wars genre is a new game which lets you battle Al-Qaeda terrorists. The game, called “Al-Qaeda Wars“, was developed by Rage on Gaming, a company dedicated to making what appears to be relatively violent games. The company’s website includes a number of demo clips. One is of a terrorist blowing up the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the other is simply a man opening a package and getting shot in the head.
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