CasualCafe Unveils Facebook Games

Redondo Beach-based CasualCafe, an online games developer, has unveiled the company, and launched a set of two new games on the social networking site Facebook, the firm announced this week. According to CasualCafe, it has launched two games, Spyde Solitaire and Burdaloo, for the Facebook platform. Spyde Solitaire is a card game, and Burdaloo is a mix-and-match game focused on animated characters. CasuaalCafe's founder is Michael Scholz, who has previously served at WildTangent, SkillJam Technologies and THQ.

Gameloft experimenting with Facebook games

We've written a lot about Facebook games in recent months, and specifically the efforts made by Digital Chocolate, I-play and others to promote their mobile games by launching free-to-play versions on Facebook.

Quietly, Gameloft joined their ranks a few months ago, with the release of a Facebook version of its Brain Challenge brain training game.

It appears to offer mini-games along the same lines as the mobile version, with comments indicating it's been live since March or April. However, with 164 daily active users (4 per cent of its total install base), it's seemingly an experiment rather than a full push into social media.

In an interview with PG.biz yesterday (to be published later this week), Gameloft's Gonzague de Vallois expressed caution about social games, saying that the publisher is following the area, while stressing that it's not clear how to best monetise it.

Having a toe in the water with the Brain Challenge app will presumably help in that process, with Gameloft clearly keen to explore any new platform that may be suitable for its games.

Playfish Creates Addictive Facebook Games

Company Name: Playfish

20 word description: Playfish develops and publishes video games on social networks. We’re backed by Accel and $4m in funding.

CEO’s 100 word description: Playfish develops and publishes video games on social networks. Unlike other social games companies our team’s background is video games - we’ve developed and published over 100 video games titles on other platforms (mainly mobile and casual) between us prior to Playfish. All our three titles so far are in the Facebook review games top-10 (Who Has The Biggest Brain?, Word Challenge, and Bowling Buddies). We have grown to over 7 million players in less than 6 months from launch. In the month of May we served over 300 million minutes of player engagement globally (10% YouTube reviews’s stated monthly engagement).

We are backed by Accel Partners, our advisory board includes Atari CEO and long time EA veteran David Gardner. We are headquartered in London with offices in Beijing and Tromsø, Norway. We believe social games are the next really big growth opportunity for the video games industry and are working hard to be one of the leading companies in the area.

Mashable Mashable reviews’s Take:Playfish is a game developing company that creates great time wasters on Facebook. So far with $4 million in investment funding and backing from Accel Partners, Playfish has published three games, all of which rank high amongst Facebook applications; Word Challenge happens to be my favorite.

Similar to Buddy Media and a few other seemingly platform-specific developers out there, Playfish is out to make compelling games that are highly engaging for users. Throw in an ad here and there, and Playfish can work towards becoming a self-sustained platform itself. Given Playfish’s collective team experience as video game developers for consoles, online and mobile platforms, it’s evident that Playfish is capable of taking advantage of most of the gaming and social media trends out there.

Playfish is a registered iPhone developer, so I do expect to see something in the way of mobile games once the 3G iPhone is released. It would be a good route to take, considering the need for the developer community to leverage devices like the iPhone to catalyze cross-device adoption and promotion of new models occurring around the casual gaming industry.