Online gaming network Mochi Media launched its Mochi Social platform for adding social features to Flash games and monetizing them, and announced a $10 million Mochi Game Developer Fund.

Mochi Social enables developers to build features like inviting friends, sending gifts, or posting to an activity stream into their Flash titles. These features are available wherever a particular game is played, whether on a social network or portal, and can plug into social graphs across Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter -- with support for more networks planned.

Developers using Mochi Social can broadcast in-game notifications through a notification channel, keeps fans of a specific game informed about game updates, friend activity, or challenges. The platform also collects and offers data on gameplay and virality, which developers can study and use to adapt their titles.

Mochi Social is currently in private beta, though the first game to use the platform, A Thinking Ape's Kingdoms of War, will release next week. Developers can learn more about Mochi Social and apply to participate in the beta at the company's site.

Level 3, a fiber-based bandwidth provider, has announced partnerships with developers CCP and Icarus Studios to deliver various bandwidth services for the MMOs EVE Online and Fallen Earth.

The company has separately entered into an agreement with game publishing software developer Solid State Networks that will pair Level 3's content delivery networks with Solid State's acquisition and monetization services.

"CCP requires a network that can deliver fast, secure, high-quality file transfers to hundreds of thousands of end-users worldwide," said CCP COO Jon Horodal in a statement. "The agility and reliability of the Level 3 network combined with the real-time traffic and user insight of the reporting platform were driving factors in our decision to work with them."

Reykjavik-headquartered CCP, which also operates an office in Atlanta, is responsible for the intricate space-set MMO EVE Online. Unlike most MMOs, which split their player bases across an array of game servers, EVE is notable for concentrating all subscribers in one instance of the game's universe.

Icarus Studios CEO James Hettinger also had words of praise for the bandwidth provider. "With Level 3, we have increased our bandwidth capacity by 20-fold and supported peaks of up to 4,000 Megabits per second," he said in a statement.

Based in Cary, North Carolina, Icarus markets its own MMO development technology, and last year released its first internally-branded MMO, Fallen Earth.

Level 3 says its partnership with Solid State will allow faster downloads and improved analytic services for Solid State's game publishing suite.

In a statement, Solid State CEO Rick Buonincontri said, "In combining capabilities with Level 3's network, we have an end-to-end solution that improves the overall user experience. With this improved experience also comes richer data, as our customers now have access to both our reporting and the Level 3 analytics platform."

MMO developer Sony Online Entertainment launched its first Facebook game, an adaptation of popular turn-based strategy game PoxNora with new social features.

Originally released in 2006, PoxNora is part turn-based strategy game, part collectible card game, and is set in a fantasy world of creatures, relics, and spells. The game was originally developed and maintained by Tucson, AZ-based developer Octopi, which SOE acquired in 2009 and set up a Tucson studio around.

Since the purchase, PoxNora has brought in more than 2.5 million registered accounts. SOE hopes to expand that userbase to a wider social networking audience by including new features in the Facebook version like the ability to invite friends and post updates of accomplishments.

SOE, which typically developers PC and console MMOs like Free Realms, EverQuest, Star Wars Galaxies, and many others, says it plans to create more games for the Facebook platform based on both existing franchises and new intellectual property.

“The Facebook platform offers gamers a new and powerful way to interact with and tap into their social communities,” says SOE president John Smedley. “With the launch of PoxNora for Facebook, we are leveraging the expertise SOE has gained bringing entertainment to the online gaming community for over 10 years.”

Chinese online game company Globex Studios has opened a new development branch in Los Angeles with a number of veterans from recently closed Electronic Arts developer Pandemic Studios.

Globex Studios LA will act as its parent company's North American development and project management arm. Founded in 2005, Globex Studios's operations include development, publishing, localization, outsourcing, marketing, and more. The company also has offices in China and Taiwan, and expects to expand to over 100 employees at its three locations by the end of the year.

Carey Chico, formerly executive art director of Pandemic Studios, will work as president and chief creative officer at the new LA studio. Globex Studios LA's staff collectively boasts more than 100 shipped console and PC games, including Pandemic releases like Star Wars Battlefront and Mercenaries.

Electronic Arts closed down Pandemic's physical studio and reportedly cut around 200 employees last November as part of a round of layoffs and restructuring. The pubisher saw its losses widen to $391 million in its second fiscal quarter and plans to cut some 1,500 jobs by April 2010.

U.S. gamers spent $3.8 billion on massively multiplayer online games in 2009, almost 15 times more than other substantial MMO markets in Europe, according to a new study.

Consumer data from Today's Gamers MMO Focus Report by Gamesindustry.com and TNS indicates that the number of MMO players in the U.S. has reached 46 million, 46 percent (21 million) of which paid to play online games; the rest, around 25 million gamers, play MMOs without spending any money. The average paying MMO player spent around $15.10 per month on their games.

The report points out that Blizzard's World of Warcraft has the most number of players in the U.S. out of all the MMOs it tracked, just in front of NeoPets and Club Penguin. Other MMOs in the top five include Disney ToonTown and RuneScape.

The study also breaks down the $3.8 billion total spent on MMOs in 2009: 47 percent ($1.8 billion) was spent on monthly subscriptions, 15 percent ($580 million) on annual subscriptions, 19 percent ($740 million) on virtual currency, 8 percent ($280 million) on direct microtransactions, and 11 percent ($400 million) on the initial boxed product or client download.

As GDC begins, German browser games portal Bigpoint has announced -- alongside the opening of a U.S. office -- that it is planning to debut games that allow head-to-head PC versus iPhone play using Unity, and is developing an MMO based on NBC Universal's Battlestar Galactica property.

The company currently employs 340 people in Hamburg, Germany and has 110 million registered users for its gaming services -- for which is U.S. is its number three market. "It's not the top market, and we want to make it our top market," Nils-Holger Henning, the company's CCO, tells Gamasutra.

The company currently runs 30 free-to-play games which have been developed in-house, with another 20 externally-developed titles, in over 30 languages. The company's mission, says Henning, is "all games must be browser-based without download installation, games you can play from any device you want."

The company's U.S. office, announced last month, will be based in San Francisco. In 2008, NBC Universal acquired 35 percent of the company -- which both opened the door to its San Francisco move, and explains the emergence of the just-announced Battlestar Galactica MMO, which is due in the back half of this year and is based on the popular Syfy TV show.

Citing a desire to "decentralize" the company, Henning says the SF move is "linked to our partnership with NBCU." Henning notes that the company's founder and CEO, Heiko Hubertz, is making the move to the Bay Area, an area Bigpoint finds attractive because "we love the spirit of San Francisco. You have a lot of talent, and you're at the foundation of everything... It came out of the Bay Area." Henning cites the fact that "all of the internet players", such as Facebook, are in the Bay Area, and so are "excellent schools like Stanford. That's, for us, the place to be."

Engine tech company Emergent is under the stewardship of a new CEO -- the company says Scott Johnson took on the role late in 2009.

Johnson is former co-founder and CEO of mobile game developer Mobility Entertainment, which was acquired by Foundation 9. Prior to that, he spent seven years with Vivend in various managing franchises like Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon.

Emergent says it has Johnson's leadership to thank for its strong close to 2009, which saw a 35 percent year over year increase in revenues and a 58 percent profitability boost. The company saw particularly strong growth in North America, Japan and China, where it says the success of its Gamebryo Lightspeed development platform drove results.

Overall, Emergent boasts 120 licensing deals sealed throughout the year 2009, and says more than 50 games built on its technology are coming from Asia -- most of them free-to-play and social MMOs.

Emergent is apparently focusing more squarely on that high-growth space. According to CEO Johnson, the company's tech is ideal for developing within the category.

"Over the past 12 months the video game industry has seen a dramatic shift in the way it conducts business. The era of $15 million plus titles is in our rear-view mirror and changing focus to the new way business is done will be challenging for our competition," Johnson says.

Korea-based NHN Corporation announced that it signed a publishing deal for a fantasy-based massively multiplayer online roleplaying game that features an Asian theme and uses Crytek's CryEngine 2 game engine.

The publisher signed the deal with Polygon Games, which is comprised of the Polygon Visual Works art team and the primarily developers behind free-to-play MMORPG Rohan: Blood Feud. Polygon Visual Works has previously worked with companies like Nintendo for game cinematics.

NHN plans to publish the project, which is currently codenamed Project E:st, in Korea and other markets, including North America and Europe. It intends to begin closed beta testing in Korea later this year. You can watch a trailer for Project E:st after the post break.

"The project name, E:st, was selected to show the commitment between NHN Corporation and Polygon Games to develop the best Asia fantasy game," says NHN Corporation's Hangame CEO Wook Jeong. "We believe that the high graphical quality realized with CryEngine 2, coupled with an immersive storyline, will strongly appeal to gamers."

Gareth Davis’ GDC Social Gaming Summit keynote was a mixture of old and new, but his larger takeaway was the potential future of cross-platform gaming, based around your friends.

There were quite a lot of congratulatory statistics (rightfully so), including the facts that 70% of the Facebook audience is global (i.e. non-U.S.), 200 million people use Facebook daily, and 400 million monthly. Over a million developers have created over 500,000 apps over the last few years, and more than 200 million people are playing games every month on the service.

Davis is platform manager at Facebook, heading up the games division. “We’ve moved beyond the core gamer,” he said, “and we now have people playing games across every demographic.” Much of this was old news to veteran Facebook developers, who packed the keynote on the new summit’s first day. Davis mentioned that the Facebook platform is changing the way games are designed, monetized, developed, and marketed – and that interacting with friends is the true value seen in these games, calling this “the ultimate compulsion loop.”

He reminded us that most games throughout history have been social, from backgammon to chess, and that even modern board games and video games are social, from Risk to Rock Band.

“Pretty soon all games will be social,” said Davis, “and we won’t call them social games, we’ll just start calling them games again.” This was one of the better points made during the keynote – extrapolating on the sentiment, the way we describe these games may alienate certain developers from appreciating their applications beyond just the Facebook realm, which in fact is a point Davis addressed later.

Panelists billed as the world's foremost experts on funding, buying and selling game companies have a view of gaming's future that's likely to be controversial to those working in traditional development.

In a panel at GDC 2010, Northwest Ventures' Tim Chang, Trinity Ventures' Gus Tai, Pacific Crest analyst Evan Wilson and Making Fun and Minor Studios CEO John Welch discussed what companies and products will get funded today -- and according to them, it's not triple-A.

Gaming is still a highly active arena for venture capitalists, says Chang -- and yet every news broadcast on the industry shows the console games business contracting, presenting a paradox of an industry that's "screwed yet growing," he says.

Chang, whose firm has backed Ngmoco and Playdom, says the shift in the games business is a mirror of what has happened in the music industry as much of it goes digital. Now, time and attention is shifting to the online space and the social players that are growing the existing game audience.

Developers' attention is best served thinking about "how to use all of your expertise to create this engaging, interesting flow that could lead to a proposition where you can make money," suggested Tai of Trinity Ventures, which has invested in Trion and Playfirst.

"The industry is in huge disarray," agrees Pacific Crest's Wilson, who believes console game developers are "in denial." The evolving blend between gaming and media is "scary," he admits.

"It was easier ten years ago... when you'd just ship a great product and the users pay you up front," Wilson says. "Those days are over."

As part of a technical talk at GDC’s Social Games Summit, Amitt Mahajan, lead developer of Farmville, revealed a number of interesting statistics about the game, including current stats of 32 million players per day.

Farmville, a Harvest Moon-like farming social game, is one of Facebook’s biggest success stories, earning the small team huge accolades before being purchased by Zynga.

The game took only 5 weeks from conception to launch, developing the back end, using off-the-shelf components when possible, but more than that using best practices from both the web and game development worlds to keep the game extremely portable. Multiple times during development, or even after, Facebook’s API or rules changed, and with a strong web development sensibility at the beginning, nothing slowed the team down significantly. This also helped them avoid user fatigue due to lag or errors.

The core team was six web developers, two artists and three designers. After launch, they wound up getting 18,000 users in the first 24 hours. At the end of four days, they had 1 million users per day, all without having ever promoted it.

Now, the game has more than 110 million installs, and they recently breached the 32 million daily user mark, though the “official” number is still 31 million, and as Mahajan says, that number is still growing.

Sony Computer Entertainment America is rolling out a new update to PlayStation Home tomorrow. The company says Home version 1.35 will bring faster load times and a new navigation interface to its console virtual world.

The new interface features several categories designed to make it easier for users to find their friends and favorite spaces in the Home environment, and to navigate quickly via a category system of favorites.

SCEA also aims to make the login process faster and easier through the update. Users can access the new navigator directly from the PS3's XrossMediaBar.

According to the company, Home's now up to 12 million registered users worldwide, who average about 60 minutes per session in the world. Players interact with one another via avatars, and in addition to socializing among themselves, they can play games, get virtual items and engage with spaces themed around major console titles.

"With new users, games, entertaining new spaces and virtual items added weekly, PlayStation Home continues to dramatically evolve to offer new challenges and experiences with every visit," says PlayStation Home director Jack Buser.

MySpace revamped the Games section of its site to make it easier for users to discover and share games, and also revealed new application and analytics tools for developers on the MySpace platform.

The new MySpace Games Gallery is designed to make it easier for users to stay up-to-date with games through notifications, as well as discover new games through personalized game recommendations, popular game charts, and their friends's streams. They can also now rate games, which will affect search results and recommendations.

The social network's new analytics tools enable MySpace platform developers to review application-specific analytics through a new API (e.g. invitation conversions, active users, notification responses, and demographics), and track the source of application invitations and utilization to see how users are finding and choosing games.

Developers can now build 3D titles with Unity's 3D engine, which MySpace users can play with a new plug-in. Studios can also tap into Scoreloop, which allows games on different platforms to share leaderboards, achievements, challenges, and buddy lists; and GroovyCortex, a cloud-based solution deigned to provide "low latency push data for multiplayer games".

MySpace is hosting a "Game Development on Social Platforms" session today at GDC, where it's discussing "understanding how to build games for social platforms, the business aspects of developing social games, and how developers and designers can tap MySpace's massive and highly engaged audience." The company will announce its MySpace Developer Challenge winners there, too, including:

- Best New MySpace App: Paradise Paintball
- Most innovative use of the Real-Time Stream API: GeoMeme
- Most innovative use of the Open Search API: Social Mention
- Most innovative use of the Photos API: Browser Not Included
- Most innovative MySpace Integration on Mobile: iSkoot

The social network also announced MySpace Neon, an upcoming iPhone app that gives users access to their MySpace games on their handset. Gamers can interact with games on their iPhones, share real-time notifications with friends, and view the Stream with game-related notifications. Furthermore, MySpace Neon gives users access to all games available on MySpace and allows them to remotely install games.

"Free" has often been a dirty word to the game industry, says Playfish co-founder Kristian Segerstrale -- but it shouldn't be.

"Far from being a threat to our industry, 'free' and the lowering of barriers is actually the biggest growth opportunity in our industry in the next five years," Segerstrale argued in a Social and Online Game Summit talk at the Game Developers Conference this week in San Francisco.

"It allows us not only to bring in new customers, but to interface with those customers in ways we couldn't previously," he said.

Piracy has long been a major area of concern for traditional video game publishers, and now there are increasingly frequent claims that free online and social games are crowding traditional console-based experience out.

But "we continue to have console blockbusters," Segerstrale observed. "We haven't killed anything. I think all those newspaper headlines about social gaming killing this or that isn't true. We've been hugely additive to the industry."

And one of social gaming's additions is the growing pool of knowledge about lowering barriers to entry.

Level 3 Communications announced an agreement with online game developer and publisher Funcom to expand their current relationship and offer content delivery network services to more titles from Funcom's catalog.

Funcom has worked with Level 3 since April 2008 to take advantage of the latter's Origin Storage, Caching, and Download services for game patch updates, as well as large file game downloads for MMORPPG Age of Conan. It has has since expanded its relationship with the firm to include CDN services in all its titles and games currently in development.

Level 3's scalable network is designed to accommodate large file downloads of media content for online audiences without disrupting the user experience. The CDN company says that the speed, quality and reliability is promises with its services are necessary for providing "the real-time user experience demanded by online gamers today."

"Over the past two years, we’ve been thoroughly impressed by the Level 3 network’s ability to handle simultaneous traffic to our global audience of gamers, which for the Age of Conan has translated to more than 200 million collective hours of play time by its players,” says Funcom COO Ole Schreiner. "As a result of that experience, Level 3 was a natural choice for Origin Storage, Caching and Download services for all of our games."

Prepaid card company InComm has acquired virtual currency provider Zeevex, a move the two firms believe will help them grow sales of prepaid digital content and speed consumer adoption of open virtual currency.

Zeevex offers a platform that supports both token-based and point-based virtual currency models. It provides an open virtual currency through its Zeevex Extreme Game Card, which is sold in more than 31,000 retail locations like GameStop, Blockbuster, and 7-Eleven across the country.

Founded in 2008, the company has offices in Atlanta, Georgia and Palo Alto, California. InComm says its purchase of the virtual currency startup as "an integral component" of its digital content strategy that will support its "commitment to innovation in the prepaid environment.

"Our move into the virtual currency and microtransaction space strengthens our position as a pioneer in digital content at retail and helps InComm drive value to our digital partners allowing them to monetize their content immediately, at a lower cost than many other options, while establishing an unprecedented connection to retail consumers," said InComm's Consumer Products and International SVP Brian Parlotto.

"This represents a great opportunity for our existing digital content partners and the consumers who have come to rely on Zeevex tokens to enhance their online experience," adds Zeevex CEO Ron Williams. "Aligning our virtual currency platform and innovative Digital Locker with InComm's proven expertise in marketing and selling prepaid digital content products at retail will speed the adoption of an open virtual currency."

As part of its recent efforts to compete against rival social networks Facebook and MySpace in the thriving social games space, hi5 has announced a new Game Developer Program designed to encourage developers to release games to its platform by offering various promotion, distribution, and monetization benefits.

The Game Developer Program will provide developers who release their games exclusively on hi5 with a free marketing and promotion package comprised of free banner ads, placement on the hi5 Games page, inclusion on the hi5 Games tool bar, user recommendations, and more. hi5 says it will allow partners to receive a share of advertising revenue generated from their games, too.

Select developers will receive access to the hi5 coins payment interface, the site's virtual currency system for in-game microtransactions, which offers more than 60 payment systems through 30 currencies. The site notes that its system allows studios to avoid the technical and business development work required for integrating other payment systems into their titles.

Developers working on the platform will have access to game-specific AIs for incorporating user profiles, user achievements, and high scores into their titles. They can also use the social network's newly announced Facebook-compatible APIs, which enable developers to take their games initially created for Facebook and run them on hi5 with "little to no revisions".

"To date, social games have been distributed on open platforms competing against thousands of other titles with nothing but their own spamminess to get them discovered," says hi5's recently appointed CTO and president Alex St. John, formerly CEO and founder of casual gaming studio WildTangent.

He adds, "As the market has saturated, getting noticed has become more and more difficult and expensive, particularly for smaller developers. hi5’s new Game Developer Program solves this problem by providing great games with free promotion, rapid audience acquisition and favorable revenue share for new content on hi5.com."

Social advertising and analytics company Sometrics launched its first direct-to-consumer product, GameCoins.com, a community where gamers can meet friends, participate in forums, and discuss news about their favorites games and virtual worlds.

The site is also an online marketplace for virtual goods and currency. Members can use the Sometrics Offer Solution to participate in advertising offers and earn in-game cash and digital goods for their favorite MMOs, virtual worlds, and social games. Sometrics say that publishers can expand their reach to more gamers through the increased exposure GameCoins.com offers.

Sometrics initial publisher/developer partners on the community site include GamersFirst, IMVU, and Playdom. GamersFirst, which created free-to-play first-person shooter War Rock, says the site helps it market its title to new gamers while providing added value to its existing players.

"This is the first time we’re going to consumers directly with our virtual currency products,” says Sometrics co-founder and CEO Ian Swanson. "Until now, our solutions for earning that game’s virtual currency have lived within the individual games themselves."

Swanson continues, "But with Game Coins we can broaden the reach for all the publishers and games that partner with us. It serves as a hub for consumers, to enable them to share their enthusiasm for a game with others and, while there, discover new games for themselves."

Independent consultant and lawyer Alexander "The Mittani" Gianturco gave an impassioned talk Thursday at GDC, urging developers to examine the inherent "espionage" metagame of EVE Online and take inspiration from it for other products.

"In my opinion, espionage is the ultimate in user-generated content," said Gianturco. "You don't constantly have to crap out new raids, players will amuse themselves by trying to tear each others' throats out."

The metagame Gianturco referred to is practically unique to EVE Online: high-level players may manipulate others through means outside of the game client itself in order to attain their goals, be it that player's in-game currency, the advancement of his affiliated group, or something else entirely. While this is not an official feature of the game, it is supported by developer CCP's hands-off approach, meaning players have practically created it from scratch.

"Players in an espionage metagame get to use cunning and manipulation as a skill, which is rare in games," he continued. "For those of us who like that sort of thing, it's a huge draw."

Gianturco defines an espionage metagame as having three key components: player-created factions, significant consequences, and a developer-supported environment.

"Espinage cannot exist in an arena where nothing is risked," said Gianturco, explaining that a loss in World of Warcraft might result in an annoying temporary setback, but a screwup in EVE can literally cost a player $4,000 in assets.

There are of course significant risks in giving your players as much freedom as CCP does with EVE. According to Gianturco, game makers who might allow and foster an espionate metagame must be prepared to field significant user complaints.

"You have to deal with people whining and complaining," he said. "If you can't deal with that, you can't have an espionage metagame worth playing."

In a lecture Thursday at GDC, Blizzard EVP of game design Rob Pardo shared Blizzard's core design concepts, offering examples of places where the World of Warcraft developer succeeded and failed in creating compelling multiplayer experiences.

Pardo offered a plethora advice to the designers present, stressing that these lessons may not necessarily gel with other studios and suggesting that everybody go through this same exercise to set down their individual design team's rules.

Below are a few of Blizzard's rules that we found particularly helpful. Some may seem obvious, but often it is the obvious advice that we tend to forget about first.

Gameplay First

Blizzard's core design philosophy is to design around the core fun gameplay concepts, rather than working around other aspects such as tech. By way of example, significant changes had to be made in the world's lore between Warcraft III and World of Warcraft in order to make a more fun and balanced game, despite pushback from some who felt the lore was sacred.

R.A. Salvatore, the popular fantasy author best-known for his Forgotten Realms novels starring Drow Elf Drizzt Do'Urden. For the past several years, he's been working with Curt Schilling's 38 Studios to produce a game codenamed Copernicus, an MMO.

With the disclaimer "I'm not here to tell you how to create a world. I am certainly not here to tell you how to design a game. What I am here is to tell you the principles I use when I create a world," Salvatore began a journey through his gaming and writing careers and espoused core concepts of his world building methods.

"The first thing in an MMO is the size of the world. Any discussion of game design is about hitting sweet spots. For me, one of the most important things in an MMO is the size of the world," said Salvatore. "[EverQuest] is still the game that I look to as the best world in a game," due to its size and scope.

As an avid EverQuest fan, Salvatore also said "I've come to believe that one of the problems of gamers going forward if we're not careful is how mechanics will take all of the pain out of the games." At 38, he's gotten in many arguments about death penalties -- EverQuest can actually de-level you if you die.

"If you take out of a world two things: the pain of losing, it will diminish the accomplishment of winning. And if you take the element of chance of out it, I won't enjoy it," said Salvatore. "You need that in games. It's harder to do that in a computer game, because your phone lines will light up. Never listen to your customer service guys when you're designing a game."

Casual gaming network WildTangent announced that social game studio Playdom is incorporating its recently launched BrandBoost advertising platform into the developer's Tiki Farm Facebook title.

BrandBoost enables Playdom to reward gamers with virtual items and premium content in exchange for viewing a video or a "rich media advertisement" within Tiki Farm. WildTangent points to a recent Nielsen survey of 27,000 consumers indicating more than 85 percent of gamers prefer not to pay for digital game content, and that its platform allows gamers the choice of receiving content for free by viewing ads.

Launched last December, Tiki Farm has more than 5 million monthly active users. Other companies that have integrated the BrandBoost platform into their games include Sony Online Entertainment (free-to-play MMO Free Realms), MMO publisher and operator Outspark.com, and online gaming portal and developer OMGPOP.com.

"BrandBoost offers a new, frictionless option for our players to get access to valuable game items courtesy of trusted brands," says Playdom's Business Development VP Sean Phinney. "This means more of our players will be able to experience the benefits and thrill of premium virtual goods while playing play Tiki Farm.

Casual gaming portal and developer Big Fish Games announced the release of My Tribe, its second Facebook game and a port of its downloadable Mac and PC game originally released in 2008.

The company says the new release is the second in a series of social game initiatives its launching in 2010. Big Fish Games has redesigned and extended My Tribe for the Facebook platform, adding microtransactions by letting players level up faster and "enhance [their] gameplay experience" by buying virtual goods.

In My Tribe, players pick a unique island with varying levels of natural resources and mysterious objects. Players maintain a group of tribespeople, helping them develop specialties like construction, fishing, agriculture, science, and more. Each member of the tribe grows from child to you to adult, learning new skills ,having children of their own, and becoming respected elders.

Players can unlock knowledge as their tribespeople grow and learn, allowing them to create customized clothing and accessories, build shelters, provide food, and make scientific discoveries. Gamers will also earn trophies and quests, and can visit other islands within their friend network to help with those challenges.

"Social gamers are increasingly drawn to game experiences that offer greater depth of gameplay in easily accessible, social formats," says Big Fish Games's vice president of social games Will O’Brien. "My Tribe is precisely that."

He adds, "What’s cool about My Tribe is that when you’re actively playing, you govern your tribe, but while you are away, your tribespeople will take matters into their own hands. Your teenage tribespeople, for example, may choose to sleep or eat instead of chopping wood!"

The shift of the game-playing population to internet-based games is analogous to the growth of the American supermarket, according to EA's Ben Cousins.

In a talk Friday at the Game Developers Conference, Cousins explained how studying the history of the American retail experience solidifies his somewhat controversial theory that quick, convenient, internet-based gaming will overtake traditional retail-based products completely.

According to cousins, the retail dynamic at the turn of the 20th century was a high-quality, boutique experience - consumers would interact directly with an expert behind the counter, who would suggest and personally package up products. It was expensive, inconvenient, and slow.

With the rapid adoption of automobiles and growth of paved roads, what we call "supermarkets" became the norm, and consumers gravitated toward the convenience, speed and lower prices they offered.

Cousins argued that traditional packaged retail games are going the way of the old-fashioned market, pointing as many GDC speakers have this year to FarmVille as his primary example. FarmVille's 80 million users make it the most popular game in the history of the Western world, despite the experience not being as high quality as a traditional, high definition retail game. Consumers, he said, are willing to look past a game's quality if the game is free, quick, and easy to access.