Good Old Games is running a $4.99 sale on multiple Sierra titles including Space Quest and Kings Quest. The games come in packages of three and are compatible with Windows (sorry, Mac users, but here’s a consolation prize).

Each package includes three parts of each series, including Police Quest, Space Quest, and King’s Quest. This includes such hits as the original King’s Quest: Quest for the Crown rendered in beautiful 16-color CGA, a game that literally made my jaw drop when I saw it boot up on my friend’s XT computer in about 1985. That, my friends, was true gaming, before the days of rail shooters and endless RPGs.

Product Page via The Verge

Is there room for a big splash to be made at the “deep end” of online gaming? The newly public Zynga has been making waves with free online casual games, or the “shallow end,” dominating the Facebook platform, and relying on analytics and in-game purchases to drive revenues and engagement. EA and others have been rushing into the casual gaming fold, buying up digital game developers like Playfish, Chillingo, Firemint and PopCap. But, EA is also taking a longer-term, diversification view, showing that there’s demand for richer, more complex MMO online gaming experiences, snatching up KlickNation in December.

Trion Worlds, a lesser known game development company headquartered in Silicon Valley, yesterday gave even further evidence that the “deep end” of online gaming is alive and well, announcing that it has raised an $85 million round of strategic growth equity financing from Ontario Teachers Pension Plan and Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments. The round adds to the $100 million the startup has already raised from investors like Time Warner and Trinity Ventures.

That’s not bad considering Trion has only released one game. But, that one game, Rift, a MMO fantasy role-playing game has been a huge hit for the company, with more than one million players activating accounts in less than four months. And Trion said yesterday that its North American and European revenues surpassed $100 million in 2011. It seems yet more evidence that there is a thriving market for these large-scale, dynamic multiplayer online games, and the early success of Rift already has Trion thinking about an IPO, according to Reuters.

The success of Rift has led the company to begin developing two more game projects, including a realtime strategy game, End of Nations, designed in conjunction with Petroglyph Games, and Defiance, which sees Trion embarking on an ambitious partnership with the Syfy Channel to create an experience that is part TV show and fictional drama and part online action gaming. How gamers play the game will influence the show, and vice versa. (You can read more in our prior coverage of Trion and Rift here.)

Of course, being a one-trick or even a one-platform pony no longer cuts it in today’s wild world of gaming, as it’s become tough for game developers to become profitable off one hit, especially for those developing complex, MMO online games that cost millions to make. They’re riskier investments. What’s more, unlike other social games, Rift makes money not by freemium, the now go-to revenue model for online gaming, or by in-game purchases, but instead by monthly subscriptions.

This can be more lucrative than the former, with consistency in returns, but with online gaming and distribution plodding along towards free, it behooves the gaming startup to find other sources of revenue (and develop a lot more games) if it wants to stay in the game for years to come — and pursue an IPO. (Though, of course, $185 million in funding doesn’t hurt.)

This was the thinking behind Trion’s recently announced Red Door, a platform initiative that will allow the startup to run online games developed by third-party publishers, and presumably sell them through a consumer-facing storefront. Trion will likely be charging game developers to use their technology, which allows third-parties to create games with massive, scalable and synchronous gameplay.

As we touched on last year, the value proposition of Trion’s unique platform is its distributed computing framework in which gameplay, characters, and interactions between players are housed in the startups’ server cloud and are broken down by function — rather than location, like most other games. This means that, for example, one set of servers handles non-player functions in the game’s world, while another processes encounters with “bosses.” This allows Trion to remodel less-played portions of the game, activate more servers for scale, or make changes to the game in realtime — right in front of players — without having to patch their machines.

Leveraging this software/hardware, in which Trion has invested tens of millions, to sell to the developers of MMORPGs could have big potential, and with a whole pocketful of new capital, Trion now has more flexibility to tinker with its business models, continue scaling its infrastructure and developing further platform initiatives. And it wouldn’t be a surprise if those games showed up on mobile.

For more, check out Trion at home here.

Following its November partnership with TinyCo, social games outfit ngmoco (now a DeNA-owned company) is partnering with game publisher Glu Mobile, Inc. The deal will brings Glu’s popular Gun Bros game to ngmoco’s Mobage gaming platform for Android.

No word yet on whether the rest of Glu’s titles – many of which are more well-known than Gun Bros – will port over as well.

Mobage arrived in an English version post-DeNA’s December acquisition of ngmoco for $400 million. The social gaming platform now serves over 35 million users with more than 1,800 game titles for smartphones, feature phones and PC’s. DeNA is now working to expand Mobage globally by building up a presence in the U.S., European and Asian markets.

With Gun Bros now in tow, Mobage now includes the following titles:

• Paper Toss, Ragdoll Blaster (Backflip Studios)
• Ant Smasher, Bunny Shooter (Best, Cool and Fun Games)
• Pocket God (Bolt Creative)
• Nightclub City (Booyah)
• Touch Hockey (Flipside5)
• Paradise Island (Game Insight)
• iBlast Moki 2 , Stardunk (Godzilab)
• Fragger 2 (Harold Brenes)
• Haypi Kingdom (HaypiCo)
• Texas Poker (KAMAGames)
• Backyard Monsters (Kixeye)
• Solitaire (MobilityWare)
• Maple Story (Nexon)
• We Rule, Mobage Blackjack , VIP(ngmoco)
• Pocket Frogs, Tiny Tower (Nimblebit)
• Checkers (Optime)
• Putt Putt Penguin (OMGPOP)
• Zombie Farm (The Playforge)
• Zoo Land, City Land (RockYou)
• Cupcake Maker (Sunstorm Interactive)
• My Monster Rancher (Tecmo/Koei)
• Tiny Chef, Tiny Nightclub (TinyCo)

It appears the iPad gamepad of our dreams has finally arrived. The 60beat is a full-sized gamepad designed for iOS devices and it connects to iPads and iPhones via the headphone jack. While there aren’t many games that support the technology (yet), the concept is fairly simple. The controller works by sending signals through the devices’ microphone jack.

Because it is portable it won’t bog down your baggage like the iCade accessory and it should be trivial for games makers to add support in future titles. $50 is a little pricey, but it might mean the difference between fun and failure when it comes to run and jump classics like Mega Man on the iPad.

Product Page

With all this talk of 360-degree customer service and Zappos ninjas who help babies out of burning buildings while taking orders for clogs, it’s nice to remember that for every heartwarming tale of customer satisfaction there is a dude like Paul Christoforo.

The tale begins with a controller accessory. It’s called the Avonger en-kontrol (my misspelling) and it’s some kind of octopus that helps you press more buttons on your game controller. We wrote it up in February 2011 so you can check it out there. A quick web search will bring up the actual product. I’m not about to give them any Google Juice.

Plenty of people pre-ordered and waited patiently for the devices to ship. One customer, Dave, emailed the company with a question:

The “marketing guru” Paul Christoforo (who runs SEO expert site OceanMarketing (amazing, right?)) eventually gets into a heated Internet exchange with Dave (read it all on Penny Arcade when it comes back up) and ends his tirade with this gem of social media marketing done right (warning, NSFW language):

If you tl;dred that, here is one of the pertinent points:

This is the 38-year-old marketing manager and LinkedIn User (and presumably president of a company that is apparently trying to make a living selling marketing accessories) responding to a customer. I doubt this strategy is in the Amazon CSR handbook.

The fact that I’m writing about this feeds directly into Christoforo’s sense that any PR is good PR, but I assure you that’s not the case. Battles against Internet tag teams that involve Kotaku, SomethingAwful, and Reddit rarely end well and products built marketed by petulant 38-year-old former real estate salesmen rarely, if ever, ship. It’s easy to build a buzz on the Internet, and it’s just as easy to kill it in a few keystrokes. Wurd up.

UPDATE – After many machinations, it’s clear the Christoforo isn’t the brains behind this project and that it’s a legitimate device. Don’t hold Avenger Controller responsible for this debacle.

Playdom’s Gardens of Time took the #1 spot of Facebook’s Most Popular Games of 2011 list. But wait, Zynga’s CityVille was ranked #3 despite peaking at over 100 million monthly active users and 21 million daily active users — far more than Gardens of Time’s peaks of 17 million MAU and 4 million DAU, or its current stats according to AppData. That’s because Facebook’s list was mostly based on vaguely described “recommendations”, and hardly on active users.

It’s almost as if Facebook used its cloudy methodology to keep Zynga from completely dominating the list, as the Mark Pincus machine currently owns all 5 Facebook games with the most DAU and still ended up with 4 of the top 10 spots on Facebook’s list.

[Update 9:25pm PST 12/21/11: Facebook has integrated the feedback from this article and updated its Top Games post to more clearly explain what it means by 'Most Popular'. The methodology note now reads: "This list was compiled by looking at the top games on Facebook with more than 100,000 monthly active users and giving priority to those games with the highest user satisfaction scores. The result is a list of the games that received the most user recommendations in 2011."  As long as it's transparent, we're happy to see Facebook finding more ways to feature high quality games, and not just those with the most users.]

Here’s an image of the list Facebook published and the note on its methodology:

A Facebook PR representative denied my theory. She told me that in the methodology, “the top recommended apps (from surveys presented to users in the canvas ticker where they can answer yes/no to, ‘would you recommend this to a friend’?”)…were ranked higher over highest monthly active user numbers. Another way to say it is that these apps were the highest rated among users.”

But why not just say in the post that this was based on ratings, not on active users? The list should have been labeled “Most satisfying games” or “Most recommended games”, not “Most popular games”. Missing the top spot probably won’t help Zynga’s stock, which IPO’d last week. Zynga and Facebook have partnered for years to help Zynga attain traffic goals. However, that relationship may be strained as the gaming company plans to serve games directly to users outside of the Facebook platform.

Facebook could have predicted that people would ask why the #3 game peaked at 80 million more monthly users than the #1 game. If CityVille had a 20% ‘Yes’ rating average and Gardens of Time had an 80% ‘Yes’ average, then fine, the rankings make sense. But if the ratings were even somewhat close, it seems a little fishy that CityVille didn’t take the #1 spot, and Facebook didn’t disclose the actual rating scores or even that they were the core of the methodology.

To really win big on the Facebook platform, you need a substantial marketing budget, existing games to cross-promote from, and sophisticated A/B testing technology. Zynga has all of these and most developers don’t. #1 Playdom and #2 EA (The Sims Social, with peak MAU of 66M MAU and 11M DAU) both do too. Still, Zynga taking the top spot would have really driven home the point that the Facebook gaming business is run by the big boys.

That’s a problem, because attracting the long tail of small and medium developers is essential to retaining gamers who are always looking for something new to play. Facebook went out of its way to feature smaller and non-Silicon Valley developers. It included categories such as Top up-and-comers (Battle Pirates by Kixeye) and most popular games with 50,000-100,000 users (Super Slot Machines). It also cited top sports app TopEleven as having a team of just 30 out of Serbia in an email to us, and noted other develpers from Germany, Japan, and Prague.

There’s nothing wrong with Facebook promoting developer diversity, but it needs to be up front about how this list was calculated. It’s in Facebook’s interest to avoid making it seem like the platform is winner-take-all or like it depends on Zynga. Through obscured methodology, Facebook didn’t have to highlight this by giving CityVille the top spot.

Update 9:23pm PST 12/21/11: Facebook has edited its Top Games post to integrate the feedback from this article. The more transparent explanation of the Most Popular list’s methodology now reads: “This list was compiled by looking at the top games on Facebook with more than 100,000 monthly active users and giving priority to those games with the highest user satisfaction scores. The result is a list of the games that received the most user recommendations in 2011.”

San Francisco-based Fingerprint Digital, a startup building educational apps for kids, is blowing up. The company released its first apps into iTunes on December 1st, and already, it has seen over 270,000 game playing sessions for a combined total of over 2 million minutes played. And, according to CEO Nancy MacIntyre, its apps are about to reach download numbers in the six figures.

In just two weeks, Fingerprint pushed two of its games into the top five in the educational apps’ category: Big Kid Life Firefighter and Big Kid Life Fairy Princess. (And yes, despite what those titles sound like, they are actually games for learning.)

The key to the startup’s early success is having an innovative twist on educational gaming combined with a solid team. Fingerprint was started by Nancy MacIntyre, formerly the EVP of Products and Marketing at LeapFrog, and Brad Edelman who co-founded social gaming company PlayFirst. It also has Heather Regan, the former COO of Everloop, as VP of Product Management and Learning. Former game marketing lead at 2K Games (a division of Take Two Interactive) Phil Shpilberg is on board as well, serving as VP of Marketing.

What’s great about what Fingerprint is doing is that it’s re-opening the lines of communication between parent and child – lines which are often shut down as the kid gets sucked deeper into the video gaming world. Not only are the company’s apps educational, they also feature a built in sharing platform (“Mom-Comm”) which allows kids to share their progress with their parents.

The grown-ups get to stay in the loop (for a change) with a news feed detailing their child’s progress and activity. In return, the parent can then provide encouragement and support through text and voice messages that are played directly in the game. Through this proprietary system, parents have received over 500,000 “snapshot” reports in December, the company says. And the kids are addicted, too: average gameplay sessions last 7.35 minutes and kids have returned to the games four times this month.

The company now has five apps: three “Big Kid Life” titles (Fire Fighter, Veterinarian, Fairy Princess), Play Maker and one third-party app Do Re Mi 1-2-3. They’re really well-made, quite cute and a lot of fun. You can check out the complete set here.

The third-party app is the first to use the Fingerprint SDK, which allows any title to integrate the parent-child communication system for free in exchange for revenue share with Fingerprint. The company says it will vet the titles first to make sure they have a strong educational foundation.

Fingerprint raised $1.4 million in funding earlier this fall, and says its goal is to build a large network with dozens of apps. It will release several new apps next quarter including one that they’re dubbing their “biggest product initiative” and an “all new app experience.”

Fingerprint is currently giving away its apps (typically $1.99-$2.99) for free, in conjunction with its Facebook promo.

Well, it looks like hardcore gamers would like to have a word with you, social and casual gamers. Yes, the stories in the media of late have been all about Rovio’s Angry Birds skyrocketing past half a billion downloads, or Zynga and its ilk overtaking social games. Both casual and social games have been growing like gangbusters, but the latest data from Pando Networks reveals some fairly serious growth in the free-to-play gaming industry across the globe.

Free-to-play games, just another way of saying “freemium games” are, to clear up any confusion, any game that is free to download and monetized by in-game purchases. Today, in mobile and web apps (and really the consumer web), we are seeing the coming of age of the freemium model and, as a result, advertisers and developers are being forced to find new ways to create revenue and monetize their games, whether that be by way of mobile advertising, virtual goods, avatars, in-game rewards, or incentivized installs.

Today’s data from Pando Networks, a game delivery network for free-to play massively-multiplayer-online (MMO) games, is showing that free-to-play games are growing exponentially, right alongside their casual and social game bretheren. For example, the company’s data shows that the number of gamers downloading free games has grown 450 percent from 2009 to 2011, as more than 38 million people will download an online game using Pando in 2011 — and over 70 million people have downloaded free games since 2009. (And that’s not including the 11+ million playing Blizzard’s World of Warcraft.)

Again, this hockey-stick growth has resulted from an industry-wide transition from a paid to freemium model, as can be seen in online gaming by the likes of both Turbine’s Lord of the Rings Online and WoW, which have both taken to the land of the free — along with newer, popular games like League of Legends (by Riot).

And, in case it still needs hammering home, the explosive growth in free-to-play games is far from an American-only phenomenon. According to Pando, from October 2009 to October 2011, downloads in the U.S. have grown from 4.8 million to 12.6 million (an increase of 162 percent), while Latin America has seen downloads increase by 595 percent, compared to the U.K., where growth has shot up by a whopping 1025 percent.

Furthermore, developing nations like Turkey are gobbling up an increasingly significant share of downloads, considering over the last year, the number of gamers in Turkey downloading free-to-play games today sits over 5 million — an increase of 534 percent since 2010 (and more than 14 percent of the country’s total population).

As Turkey’s infrastructure and connectivity continues to expand, the country’s freemium gaming market has exploded right in tandem, and currently shows no sign of slowing down. Surely, this is a great sign for freemium games and the international gaming market, but it does make on worry about Turkey’s overall productivity. Here’s to hoping GDP doesn’t slip at the hands of widespread MMO gaming adoption.

Compared to the size of population, Turkey certainly has one of the fastest growing freemium gaming markets, compared to, say, France, which has seen its freemium gamers grow from 139K in 2009 to 2.6 million in 2011, and Poland, which grew from 145L to 1.5 million over the same period. While it’s been clear for some time now the extent to which mobile and online platforms are being used by the ever-increasing gaming population in Asia, there hasn’t yet been such a clear picture of the extent to which the freemium model is being adopted in other global regions.

And, again, turning to other sources, Pando’s data also seems to be clearly in support of PopCap’s November study (via Informations Solutions Group) of the growing social gaming market in the U.S. and the U.K., which found that more than 118 million people now play social games once per week, and 81 million people play at least once a day (which is 68 percent of all social gamers). Of course, that’s nice, but what’s really important is that today 31 million players have purchase in-game currency, up 86 percent from the previous year.

Not only that, but Flurry blogged back in September that freemium games are leading all of the app revenue models in the iOS and Android app economies, as they now account for more than 65 percent of app revenue.

So, to sum up, in the event that you’ve missed out on the last two years of gaming trends, it seems that freemium has not only fully arrived, but it’s here to stay, it’s taken over your home, and it’s raising your kids.

For more, check out Pando’s data dump here.

Playd is a new mobile application that lets you check in to games the way Foursquare users check in to venues. Actually, the app is more akin to something like Miso, GetGlue or IntoNow - apps which extend the check-in metaphor to other activities, like watching TV or seeing a movie.

The company is one of the first to launch from the NewMe Accelerator, the startup accelerator whose focus is on giving black founders a leg up in Silicon Valley. It was also featured in CNN’s documentary on race and tech entrepreneurship – yep, that one – but lets not hold that against Playd, OK?

The concept behind Playd is familiar: users check in to the game they’re playing to alert their social network of fellow gamers of the activity.  But Playd is different from other entertainment-focused check-in apps because it verifies that users have access to the game in question. The app currently supports check-ins for any game, old or new, through the use of a UPC barcode scanning feature. Alternately, gamers can also connect their online accounts for Xbox LIVE, PSN or Steam, in order to authenticate their activity. (Steam, however, will be removed in the next update due to its recent security issues. Playd will bring it back when Steam fixes its problems, we’re told).

This verification process is useful for Playd’s potential partners – retailers, game developers and advertisers – because it will allow them to authenticate the game’s users and specifically target a niche group with offers or rewards.

Currently, gamers collect these rewards in the form of tokens, which are now being redeemed for badges and free Playd gear. In the future, partners could also dole out things like discounts, free merchandise, exclusive downloadable content and more. For example, a partner could choose to reward gamers who scanned the barcode of a newly released title on launch day. Or publishers could reward a game’s most active users.

While the company doesn’t have any partners to announce publicly just yet, Co-founder Anthony Frasier says they’re in talks with several and hope to be able to announce the first soon. In the meantime, gamers can try out the Playd experience by downloading the app here on iTunes or here on the Android Market.

Since NewMe didn’t offer funding, Playd will be looking to raise a seed round in early 2012.

W3i, a monetization and distribution network for mobile app developers, is announcing the launch of a new $10 million “AppX Game Developer Marketing Fund” at this week’s AppNation conference in San Francisco. The fund will provide developers with a suite of free services that offer production support, analytics and user acquisition channel analysis, all of which are designed to help indie developers compete with today’s “AAA” gaming giants.

The company says that it wants to help level the playing field for indie game developers by providing them with better analytics on their mobile apps, allowing them to make better business decisions. This, in turn, will help developers with the increasing challenge of user acquisition and monetization in the ever-crowded Apple and Android app stores.

The AppX services will be provided to the developers who qualify (sign up is here) for no charge and without any long-term revenue share. Developers don’t have to give up IP rights either, says W3i.

Riptide Games, makers of My Pet Zombie, is one of the first to use the AppX suite of services, and claims it helped them become profitable and increase the lifetime value of its users by three times.

LaunchNow.co is a new startup that turns building startups into a game. (Yes, we’re there now.) The idea is that players will pit their companies against each other in order to earn badges, achievements and a “Gamerscore” which is then published to their startup’s profile page. Oh, and here’s the crazy part: LaunchNow is meant to be used with real-life startups, not fake ones.

To get started, players enter in some basic information about the startup they’re working on and are then given a set of goals they have to complete in order to enhance their company and earn badges. These achievements include things like product milestones (alpha, beta, etc.), investments, turning a profit, adding new hires and press mentions. (Score one for LaunchNow, I guess). 

At its core, LaunchNow isn’t all that different from Klout, which measures an individual’s influence on social networks by doling out points. It’s just that on LaunchNow, startups are given points for other, arguably more important types of achievements than being a prolific twitterer or an early adopter of Google+.

LaunchNow’s creator is Raymond Angel, the CEO of Guild Press, and the former CEO of amassed lust entertainment, MOSH mobile and the Interim CEO of Startup Weekend. Craig Crook, Co-founder of the New Media Cartel, helped create the idea for the company, which is operating now in a fully bootstrapped mode with just Angel at the helm.

But who’s going to use this thing, I wonder? After all, if you have a great idea for a new startup, you don’t want to post it online where other entrepreneurs can read all the details, right? Angel says that’s true, so LaunchNow players can choose to keep their startup listed as “private” while they play, allowing it to remain in stealth mode.

Given the explosion of new companies, the idea for a startup-ranking service isn’t an entirely bad one. But LaunchNow is no Klout. Klout’s evil genius is that it sucks in public data to perform the rankings automatically – you don’t even have to register for Klout to have a Klout profile. On LaunchNow, however, rankings are based on manual data entry.

Seriously, if you’re a startup creator who’s more focused on your startup’s gamerscore, instead of, oh say, writing code, it may not matter how many badges you earn – you’re probably not going to win the real game: being an awesome company.

LaunchNow is still very much a bare bones site, with tons of other features planned, including a startup feed, user profiles, forums, customizable URLs and more. Until it adds automation to that list, though, it’s hard to believe that any serious entrepreneur would stop what they’re building to play this game.

LaunchNow is very much a sign of the times, where there’s so much opportunity and so much money, that some are approaching building a startup as a casual exercise, even a game, and not the very hard work it is supposed to be. At the end of the day, it’s not necessarily a bad thing to see the barrier to entry lowered – tomorrow’s casual one-off built by a developer scratching an itch could very well be the next big thing. And gamifying the whole ecosystem isn’t as crazy as it sounds, either. But as long as LaunchNow requires entrepreneurs to stop coding to play, it’s not likely to attract the right kind of folks to try the service. But then again, in today’s ecosystem, that may not matter. If LaunchNow now was playing its own game, it just a press mention, points and a badge. So throw some money at it, right?

It’s not hard to love Mario. He’s had his ups and downs – what, for example, was the deal with Paper Mario? And Super Mario Strikers was pretty hard to love, at least for this non-sports fan – but darn it if the little guy doesn’t keep coming back for more and keeps you, at the very least, entertained.

Super Mario 3D Land is the latest in the Mario saga. The story is fairly typical – something was stolen (a lot of leaves) and Bowser took Princess Peach. Your mission is to find the leaves (which are special and give you the Tanooki suit) and then find Peach. What you go through to find her, however, is where all of the fun comes in.

The game is a 2D platformer turned 3D. You move swiftly through a nicely rendered 3D land and hop, stomp, and jump on enemies and into question blocks. Initially gameplay is a bit stiff and weird but once you realize you’re actually following a nicely and cleverly set path through this 3D world you can loosen up and explore a bit.

Mario has existed in 3D before, most strikingly in in Super Mario 64. This game has very little to do with that title and is instead a fully-formed platformer in 3D. It is more on par with Super Mario Galaxy in terms of gameplay and mechanics and it’s clear the 3D Land is a Galaxy title reduced in scope and, obviously, space flight.

Now for the million-dollar question: how is the 3D on the 3DS? The problem with the 3DS is you often lose the 3D sweet spot while heavily into gameplay. This problem is quite pronounced in action titles like Starfox and less prevalent in SM3DL. However, it was a bit frustrating and I often resorted to turning 3D off while playing. Does this mean the 3D doesn’t work? No, but it wasn’t quite to my taste.

The game itself offers excellent playability and the “help” system, namely a super leaf that essentially allows you to breeze through the level unharmed by enemies and with a flying Tanooki suit, makes it great for novices. The help system kicks in after two deaths – it gives you a power-up – and then when you die five times it gives you the special leaf. Basically it helps reduce the frustration for casual gamers.

This is a Mario game. Mario is great. Is it worth buying a 3DS over? Probably not unless you’re also a Zelda fan as Ocarina of Time is superb on this device. However with the launch of the equally superb Mario Kart 7, Nintendo does offer some compelling reasons to pick up their console – and this game – for the holidays.

Social gaming network PapayaMobile and the value exchange-based mobile ad network Tapjoy are today announcing a partnership that will combine the power of their two communities to help Android users better discover new mobile games. The jointly developed product will be called “Social Marketplace” and it will serve to recommend new games to mobile users based on their popularity among a user’s Papaya friends. In turn, developers will be able to better target consumers with more relevant ads, which means increased opportunity for engagement and monetization.

For background, Tapjoy rewards mobile users who install apps with virtual currency they can use within their favorite mobile games. The company’s Personal App Marketplace, which offers customized app recommendations based on user interests, came online earlier this month at www.tapjoy.com (that is, when accessed from a mobile browser).

The new Social Marketplace will be a dedicated product feature that’s visible within Tapjoy’s Marketplace. When Android users visit the Social Marketplace, they’ll be able to pick out the games being played by their Papaya friends and then download those apps so they can play, too.

This new feature isn’t live yet, but will arrive for developers by year-end, the companies say. It will be enabled only for those developers who integrate both the Papaya Social SDK and the Tapjoy SDK into their mobile applications. However, it should be noted that the Papaya Social SDK works to generate its recommendations based on anonymous user data in an effort to protect consumer privacy. In other words, it doesn’t necessarily show you who’s playing a given game, but it will show which games are currently “hot” on Papaya. (See this screenshot for a close-up example of how this will look).

Additional information and sign-up details will be made available on both companies’ websites: papayamobile.com and tapjoy.com.

Mobile gaming is big and getting bigger. You’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it one thousand times. Japan’s mobile, social gaming giants are killing it; Android and iOS games now generate more revenue than all of Nintendo and Sony’s portable games combined; and games are the most popular mobile app category in the U.S.

What’s more, according to the New York Times, quoting Gartner, game-related spending is on pace to reach $112 billion by 2015 (it’s expected exceed $74 billion this year, up from $67 billion in 2010), and mobile gaming is expected to increase to a 20 percent share of gaming platforms by 2015. Mobile is expected to hold the largest growth of all platforms over that time.

Hooray!? That’s all well and good, but the question remains: If people are increasingly opting for free apps over paid apps (and Distimo’s numbers show that the average selling price of games declined 28 percent over this year), how are mobile game developers going to make money? Over the next 5 years, where is mobile gaming revenue going to come from, and how are game creators going to monetize?

Thanks to a nifty infographic from Mixpanel, the realtime analytics service, most of the future revenue from mobile gaming will come on the back of mobile ads and in-app payments.

According to Distimo, in-game virtual currency is currently one of the foremost drivers of in-app monetization, with 35 percent of the 300 most popular free games using some form of virtual currency to monetize on the App Store.

Then there’s mobile advertising, which will no doubt continue to sky rocket as game developers and ad networks capitalize on the $20 bilion opportunity identified by Mary Meeker in her latest Internet trends report. Americans spend 8 percent of their time using media on their phones, but only 0.5 percent of advertisers’ total ad spend is directed to mobile.

As this tectonic shift continues, and as technology grows around ad personalization, game developers will be able to increasingly rely on advertising as a form of monetization.

Freemium monetization models are becoming increasingly popular, as you’ll see in the data below, but while mobile advertising gets busy maturing, there’s also the monetization model of incentivized installs. This approach, which rewards users for downloading a mobile application in exchange for a secondary reward, usually free in-game virtual currency or goods, definitely has some potential. Incentivized traffic can be a meaningful alternative when things get slow organically building traffic, and the ROI can be there. But there is still some skepticism over the efficacy of incentivized installs, as you can see from Sarah’s post here.

The upside is that there is a huge market for mobile games, and if you’re a game developer, there are increasingly more ways to make money from their games. Some will prove to be more valuable than others, but below is Mixpanel’s snapshot of where we stand in the evolution:

Excerpt image from Dotsauce.com

The popular social gaming network for Android, PapayaMobile, is announcing today that it’s now expanding its gaming platform to iOS. The company is making its social development toolkits available to iOS developers as a beta release, allowing them to connect users on both platforms (iOS and Android) for in-game features including challenges, game invites, leaderboards and more.

In addition, developers who have built their social games using Papaya’s Social Game Engine can now export both iOS and Android versions of their game from a single code base, the company says.

To kick off the iOS support, several third-party game developers will bring their new games to the Papaya network in the coming weeks as iOS releases. The current list of expected games includes X-City by Aidi Game, Contagion by 2Clams and Burger Joint by Arctic Empire. All developers will also have access to PapayaMobile’s recently launched Gateway to China program, which localizes, distributes and promotes Western games in the Chinese market.

Earlier this summer, Papaya announced it had reached 25 million users – 940% growth since the beginning of last year. The growth was attributed to the ever-increasing size of the Android market. Now, the company says it has over 30 million users. And all this before it hits the iPhone.

PapayaMobile raised $18 million in a Series B round led by Chinese venture firm Keytone Ventures and DCM this April, bringing Papaya’s total funding to $22 million. Last week, the company announced, too, that it will be one of the first startups to receive an investment from DCM’s A-Fund.

The $100 million A-Fund is intended to support early-stage startups focused on Android. DCM partnered with gaming giant Tencent, Japan’s largest mobile gaming social network GREE and Japan’s second largest mobile operator KDDI, to fund the startups, each which will receive anywhere from $250,000 to $5 million.

I took my six-year-old son Kasper to Microsoft’s Kinect For Kids event yesterday in hopes of better understanding Microsoft’s efforts at grabbing the younger demographic. While he’s already an avid weekend gamer, I wondered if Microsoft’s latest immersive play solutions would stir him in anyway. I discovered two things: that the Kinect for Kids initiative, as evidenced by the image above, is a sometimes sad but immersive Kinect playspace and that Microsoft has a very narrow age window into which they release most of their games.

First, the good stuff. I’m pleased to report that the Kinect version of Puss In Boots is the winner this season with a protagonist that allows for some fun, immersive play. You’re Puss (he of the boots), late of Shrek fame, and you’re outfitted with a sword, hat, and a pair of botas of Spanish leather. You slash, kick, and punch your way through the game, occasionally jumping from rope to rope as you make your way through the slums of Far Far Away. It’s one of the more immersive adventure games we saw and Kasper loved it. A close second was Kinect Star Wars although the interactions and gameplay are still too wonky for my liking. The on-screen Jedi flail around and it feels more like a rails shooter than anything else.

Another winner was Kinect Sports 2. This adds skiing and tennis to the mix and it worked as well as the original Sports which is to say that the faux sports were realistic enough to simulate actual sports.

Then we degenerate into the interactive “little kids” games, Once Upon A Monster, an interactive Sesame Street and National Geographic “show,” and the Disneyland Adventures. These games simulate, in order, being a monster, Sesame Street, and Disneyland. For example, in Once Upon a Monster you become Elmo or Cookie Monster and run around in the woods and balance on stuff. In Disneyland Adventures you go to Disneyland. In the National Geographic interactive television program you pretend to be a bear eating moths. This is Microsoft’s checkbook development writ large. By paying for the hearts, minds, and trust of parents wholesale through these brands, they don’t have to generate it themselves.

To recap, my own six-year-old test subject, then, found Puss In Boots quite fun, Star Wars Kinect pretty rocking, and the Disney and Elmo stuff pretty juvenile, even for, well, a juvenile. He also enjoyed Kinect Sports 2 because he’s an avid (if reckless) skier.

The games are truly interactive and immersive, that much is true. You can actually play as one of your favorite Sesame Street characters and, as we reference above, you can “hug” princesses at Disney World. But these are video games. There is some basic reading and counting involved for the wee ones, but these games are aimed at the youngest kids and will quickly bore children who have already left the Sesame Street demographic. Microsoft is caught in the traditional trap of so-called “educational” gaming: either the educational portion is too preachy or the game is too thin. Games that got it right – Mavis Beacon, Math Blaster, Oregon Trail – are classics because teachers and parents treated them as treats given once the regular work was done.

The question I have as a parent is where is the value in simulating Disneyland? In creating mini-games based on Sesame Street characters? In dumping an interactive portion into a show about a man who tamed a grizzly bear? I don’t want to be a wet blanket, but how are these games teaching anything? The anti-marketer in me, for example, find Disneyland Adventures cynically mercenary, an attempt to give pressure kids into wanting to go to Disneyland. No harm in that, I agree, but why else does it exist? The image of a child hugging the air is the saddest I’ve ever seen and to suggest that a digital simulacrum of Snow White will please a child is wildly off-base. It’s this image that my ire returns to, like my tongue probing a sort spot in my mouth: that Disney and Microsoft think you can hug nothingness.

As I said before, Microsoft has a very narrow window into which it must inject its kids’ content. Children under 2 shouldn’t watch TV at all while pre-schoolers and first graders are already forming some very strong attachments to Pokemon, Bratz, and other brands. Microsoft hasn’t yet cracked the Nintendo code which, as I noted before, is essentially the creation of umami for the heart. Xbox hasn’t quite reached that family demographic in a way that makes sense for them and, like Sony, they’ve depended on marquee mature titles to keep them afloat. Kinect is clearly for kids – adults flailing around in a living room is an invitation to spill the scotch but, as of yet, Kinect Adventures and maybe the dancing game have grabbed any traction.

But what happens in the year or two between Sesame Street and early literacy? Does Elmo look as appealing to a kid who is familiar with more mature fare? While I know these games aren’t in it for long-term enjoyment, isn’t it a little cynical to hope that kids will pester their parents to buy the game (“It’s educational! It’s Disney!”) only to have them abandon it once they realize Cookie Monster is for babies?

My son enjoyed the adventure games and I’m certain my daughter will enjoy some of the Disney games although, at 3, she lacks the coordination to actually play with the Kinect. The helicopter parent in me wants Microsoft to keep its nose out of my kids childhood whereas the neophile wants to see where this immersive gameplay is headed. In the end, neither will win and Kasper will start to play New Super Mario Brothers for a few minutes ever weekend, abandoning Digi-Minnie and Mickey to their soulless kingdom while we, if forced, will walk the streets of the real Disneyland as a family.

Crowdpark, a Berlin-headquartered game developer, announced today that it has raised $6 million in series B financing from top German venture capital firms, Target Partners and existing investor, Earlybird Venture Capital. Waldemar Jantz, partner at Target Partners, will be joining the startup’s board as a result of the investment. The new round of funding brings Crowdpark’s total to $8 million.

Why should you care? Well, Crowdpark is aiming to give gamers their fix of legal gambling, er, betting. Using its patented “dynamic betting” technology, Crowdpark enables forecasting in realtime for social gaming in much the same way the brave among us play the stock market. Unlike its social gaming competitors, the German startup allows gamers to compete against each other in betting events using virtual currency. This includes the opportunity to bet on real world events taking place in everything from sports and entertainment to news and technology.

Other developers in the larger category of casino games have mostly focused on slot machines and card games (read: Poker, Blackjack), bingo, or roulette. Unlike, say, Zynga Poker, Crowdpark’s “Bet Tycoon” brings live betting to Facebook, allowing you to challenge your friends to bet on a wide range of realtime events, with each bet becoming an opportunity to move up the rankings, show off to friends via social networks, and rack up virtual currency. Generally speaking, betting is a one-time only event (as you have to wait until the event expires to reap what rewards may come), but Crowdpark lets users bet throughout the lifecycle of a sporting event, for example.

And since the winnings are all based on virtual currency, no real money changes hands, it’s all legal — and avoids that shady “gambling” moniker. Crowdpark also thinks that it can offer a great value proposition for its users by building a cross-platform social betting service. While online gambling and betting companies are eager to move into Facebook, Crowdpark is already there with Bet Tycoon (as well as the Web), and will soon be offering a mobile game for Android and iOS where bets can be made instantly on your smartphones and tablets.

Crowdpark plans to use its new round of funding to speed up the development of its cross-platform functionality, develop new games, and ramp up hiring to build on the early success of Bet Tycoon, which is currently seeing around 500K monthly active users on Facebook.

As for a sneak peak at the kind of games Crowdpark plans to release on mobile? A game called Fanatical, which is currently in development, targets sports fans in such a way as to combine Foursquare with realtime, location-enabled betting. This means that users will be able to check in wherever they are, through their platform of choice, placing bets, collecting badges, joining in on friends’ bets, and issuing challenges to everyone else using the app at TGIFriday’s.

From betting on who will win (or score the most goals) in a FC Barcelona/Real Madrid match to what Obama’s approval rating will be by the end of the week, to who will get voted off American Idol, the topics are diverse — and users can cash out at any point to redeem their points for virtual currency. The platform also includes the “Crowdpark Social Betting Index”, updated weekly, to reveal insights on top-trending bets, and who’s raking in the most cash.

For more on Crowdpark and its social betting platform, check out the video below:

Capcom has let slip that an official Nintendo 3DS add-on circlepad – the circular joystick on the left side of the console – will be available for purchase in February to coincide with the launch of Resident Evil: Revelations. The dual circlepads will allow for more accurate aiming in many titles and I can definitely see the value, even over the 3DS’s built-in gyroscopic sensors. I’ve found that playing games like Star Fox in 3D is quite difficult because you leave the 3D sweet spot.

Nintendo World has no further info on the pads and there’s no description of the size, cost, or US availability. All I know is that it makes the 3DS look huge.

Over the weekend, Nokia launched a suite of casual games developed at Nokia Research Center which are meant to demonstrate how NFC can enable new forms of mobile gaming. The three new games include Nokia World Flags, Nokia Shakespeare Shuffle and Nokia Nursery Rhyme Shuffle. All can be played now on any Nokia Symbian NFC-enabled phone including the Nokia C7 Astound, C7-00, 600, 603, 700 and 701.

Nokia calls the games “tangible” mobile games because of the way they interact with physical objects in the real world using NFC tags. The games don’t have to read or write to the tags in order to work – they only need to detect the tags’ presence. That means they will work with blank NFC tags or even “contactless” credit cards, transit cards or ID cards, the company explains.

Frankly, the user interfaces for the games are only so-so, but to be fair, these are more akin to demo apps than “real” games meant to attract thousands of users. Instead, it’s the idea behind these games that’s meant to be the focus of this news.

For example, one game involves NFC-tagged playing cards which are used to play a digitized version of a child’s simple matching game. Traditionally, you would play this game by flipping over cards to find the matched pairs. With the NFC game, however, you tap the card with your phone. While I’m not sure if a game like this is screaming out for NFC, the concept of combining playing cards with NFC in new ways has some appeal. Imagine playing a NFC-enabled version of one of those “Magic: The Gathering” type games where with a tap you could actually see the battles between wizards animated on your phone’s screen, while the mobile app also kept score for you. That might be cool (well, for nerds, wink wink).

The two other Nokia games now available involve tapping cards to mix up either nursery rhymes or Shakespeare quotes. They look pretty boring.

In a video, Nokia shows off a fourth concept (not available) where you tap different parts of a stuffed animal with an NFC phone to play games. That could provide toy makers a new avenue for upselling that was previously limited to ads that appear on their toys’ boxes and in their instruction manuals. Still, as much as I personally love technology, the idea that my child’s teddy would simply serve as an avenue to toddler’s first gaming addiction kind of makes me sad. Whatever happened to actually playing with your toys? (Maybe I’m just getting old.)

Nokia, it should be noted, is not the first to have ideas about NFC-enabled gaming. One high-profile example comes from Rovio, which, launched an NFC-enabled version of Angry Birds called Angry Birds Magic earlier this year. That game also works on Symbian.

Widespread NFC adoption is several years out, and is still waiting on Apple’s participation. That means opportunities for NFC-enabled gaming are few and far between today.

Nokia is often early to the smartphone space with innovative concepts, but it’s not until Apple executives upon them do they really reach the mainstream. Something tells me that NFC mobile gaming will be just another example of this ongoing trend.

So, this isn’t exactly breaking news, but it’s so awesome that it’s worth sharing again in case you missed it. HIV/AIDS has killed some 25 million people worldwide and scientists have been working diligently since the virus was discovered in 1981 to find a cure. While a cure still eludes researchers, several protease inhibitors have been developed to slow its progress. But last week, HIV/AIDS research took a huge leap forward, thanks to the work of gamers. Yes, gamers.

About three years ago, a team of researchers at the University of Washington created a game called FoldIt to allow gamers to contribute to scientific research by playing with the shape and structure of proteins. Why proteins? Well, there are more than 100,000 kinds of protein in the human body, and understanding the structure and makeup of these proteins is key to understanding how they work and as well as to designing drugs that target them.

As proteins are found in the majority of diseases we suffer from, they are also key to developing cures, and so FoldIt enables gamers to design new proteins and fold known proteins into their most workable forms in an effort to contribute to disease prevention.

According to FoldIt’s website, “Foldit attempts to predict the structure of a protein by taking advantage of humans’ puzzle-solving intuitions and having people play competitively to fold the best proteins”.

And last week, FoldIt became more than just a cool idea, or an exercise for scientifically-minded gamers. Scientists have been attempting to decipher a protein called “retroviral protease” for over 15 years, as the protease is one of the key proteins that allows HIV to multiply and replicate itself in living cells. Using FoldIt, gamers were able to identify the structure of the protein — within a matter of 10 days.

With the structure of retroviral protease unlocked, scientists can now begin taking the necessary steps to build a drug that could significantly slow the speed at which HIV develops. The findings were initially published in a Nature article, which readers can find here.

“Following the failure of a wide range of attempts to solve the crystal structure of M-PMV retroviral protease by molecular replacement, we challenged players of the protein folding game Foldit to produce accurate models of the protein”, the University of Washington research team said in its findings. “Remarkably, Foldit players were able to generate models of sufficient quality for successful molecular replacement and subsequent structure determination. The refined structure provides new insights for the design of antiretroviral drugs”.

In this MSNBC report, the gamers describe the way in which they were able to work together cooperatively to solve a puzzle that has confounded scientists for more than a decade. And what’s so cool is that, while some of the most important progress in the game was made by those with biomedical academic backgrounds, the majority of active players playing with FoldIt did not have this kind of scientific background. Many of them were just average gamers like you and me.

“The monkey-virus puzzle solution demonstrates that Foldit and other science-oriented video games could be used to address a wide range of other scientific challenges — ranging from drug development to genetic engineering for future biofuels”, Firas Khatib, a biochemist at the University of Washington told MSNBC. “My hope is that scientists will see this research and give us more of those cases”.

What a remarkable win for the non-shallow end of gamification. We hear so much about how game layers are being added to consumer tech products to encourage engagement and interaction with products and apps, but with FoldIt, we have a real example of how gamification can help solve some of the trickiest of scientific problems and help make the world a better place.

Way to go, gamers.