Electronic Arts’ The Sims Social hits 4.6 million daily players a week after launch

Electronic Arts’ latest Facebook game, The Sims Social, has picked up more than 4.6 million daily active users after launching a week ago, according to AppData.

The Sims Social was the fastest growing social game this week, picking up 2.6 million daily active users as of the beginning of the week and 1.2 million daily active users today alone. That’s compared to Zynga’s smash hit Empires & Allies, which lost around 328,000 daily active users today. Frontierville, another Zynga game that recently released a new sub-game called Pioneer Ville, lost around 220,000 daily active users today, according to AppData.

Electronic Arts’ newest social game looks like it will give Zynga — which hasn’t really faced any stiff competition in Facebook games —?a run for its money. That’s because the game has a massive franchise and name behind it, along with a development team that has a pretty stellar track record. EA has sold more than 140 million copies of the The Sims and its sequels and expansion packs and has generated around $3 billion in revenue from it.

The Sims Social is basically a lightweight version of The Sims built into a browser on Facebook. The team behind The Sims and casual games maker Playfish both worked on the game. Electronic Arts bought Playfish in 2009 when it was vying with social games maker Zynga for the top social gaming spot.?Zynga has since lurched ahead and claimed the top spot, with 264 million monthly active.

Before The Sims Social launched, Electronic Arts had around 29 million monthly active users,?according to AppData. The company has since risen to around 34.6 million monthly active users, passing social gaming company Wooga (which has around 34 million monthly active users).

The Sims was a smash hit with casual gamers because it was a very light game that was easy to get into and offered a lot of depth. You basically control a “sim” as it lives its life and try to achieve lifetime goals — which lets gamers accomplish whatever they want to do in the game. ?The games are known for having tongue-in-cheek humor and sharp writing.

Electronic Arts has not-so-quietly established a fierce casual and social gaming team. The company bought Playfish back in 2009 and also bought casual games maker PopCap?for $750 million. Both teams have made successful games, and once the PopCap deal closes,?there’s a good chance Playfish will be working with casual games maker PopCap.

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Tags: CityVille, Farmville, social games, The Sims, The Sims Social

Companies: Electronic Arts

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OpenFeint’s single sign-on for social games to replace Apple’s UDID (exclusive)

Apple caused panic among app developers last week when it announced that it would phase out an identification system for users on its mobile devices such as the iPhone. Mobile gaming company OpenFeint says it will help solve the problem created by the elimination of this feature by offering its own “single sign-on” identification system for app developers.

Apple’s announcement caused fear among developers because many use this unique device identifier (UDID) number to identify a user in order to quickly access that person’s history and offer cross promotions.?Apple decided to “deprecate” the UDID, meaning the company will phase out the use of the feature and no longer support it at some point in the future. Apple gave no explanation for the deprecation, but some speculated it was to end concerns about privacy.

“Developers have been panicking to some extent,” chief executive of OpenFeint, Jason Citron said. “That is why we decided to do this product.”

OpenFeint, which is owned by Japan’s Gree, said it already has 115 million users logging into games that use the OpenFeint mobile social gaming network for online play and leaderboards. Third-party app developers can now use the OFUID (OpenFeint user identification) to identify users in the same way that Apple did with UDUDs.

When a user starts playing a game or app with the OpenFeint system built-in, OpenFeint asks them to sign into their account. It asks the user if they want to access online play. If the user answers yes, OpenFeint signs them in and the app developer can get access to the player’s anonymized data and history, Citron said. OpenFeint has more than 6,800 games using its platform.

That’s certainly better than the alternative, where developers would have to create their own identification system requiring users to sign in with a username and password before playing a game. OpenFeint removes some of the potential hassle with a more streamlined sign-in system.

It isn’t a perfect replacement for UDID, which was able to log every time a user started a game. The OFUID can only gather information when the user logs into OpenFeint. That doesn’t happen every time a user plays a game. But Citron said this was the next best thing, as “the user can opt in with just one click.” The user has to have the OpenFeint app in order to sign in. However, to play online, users often have to download the OpenFeint app anyway.

The OFUID will give developers access to information such as what games are installed on the user’s phone, their usage of games, and what offers they have taken before. Developers would have otherwise had to figure out a way to do this on their own. To create the workaround, Citron said OpenFeint engineers had to figure out a way to do the single sign-on without using UDID numbers. Citron said that developers who use OpenFeint can learn how to better monetize their users with better targeting.

OpenFeint also announced an “install trade program” for developers that use the new sign-on process. OpenFeint will guarantee developers 1.5 new installs for every new install of Game Channel, an app that is needed for users to enjoy the benefits of single sign on. Game developers will be able to offer incentives for users to use the sign-on process, said Ethan Fassett, senior vice president of product at OpenFeint.

The single sign-on with OFUID will launch later this fall. Citron said that OpenFeint does not make money on this feature. On Android, Citron said that there are fewer restrictions related to the use of a UDID. But OpenFeint also offers its own single-sign-on process there.

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Tags: single sign on, UDID

Companies: Apple, Gree, OpenFeint

People: Jason Citron

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Inkling social functions make digital textbooks a study group in a box

Imagine a classroom living inside your textbook, constantly chattering and available to answer your questions. That’s what digital textbook creator Inkling wants to bring students with its announcement of social functions for its iPad app.

Inkling takes textbook content licensed from publishers and turns the otherwise static material into an interactive app. In the app you can still read the same traditional textbook content, but you can also view 3D images such as a molecules or monuments, test your knowledge, access definitions, listen to a speech or symphony while you learn, highlight content and save highlights and notes in a sidebar notebook for later. Book cost varies and can be purchase by chapter, to lower the cost.

But learning is a social activity and students oftentimes benefit from collaboration. That is why Inkling has integrated social capabilities directly into the app. Now, students can leave a public note in the margin of their Inkling book, and save others’ notes and highlights to their notebooks. Professor, or expert commentary is distinguished from peer commentary through color coding. Student contributions are denoted in blue in line with the text, while professors’ posts show up in purple. Your highlights and notes appear blue.

“The idea is that whenever you download any Inkling title, you have the collective wisdom of anyone else who has been in that book,” Matt MacInnis, Inkling founder and chief executive told VentureBeat in an interview.

Students have the choice to follow specific people and watch their edits as they simultaneous move through the same downloaded book.

In the upper right hand corner of the app, shared comments and highlights, or posts, are aggregated. Post notifications are separated into notes from followed users, your own posts, and “suggested” posts. Entries are suggested based on a scoring system, which ranks user intelligence. This rank is most heavily based on how often a person puts your posts into their notebooks and how well you do on practice tests.? A post will only show up in your notebook if you find it valuable and manually choose to save it there.

Students can opt out of the social features entirely or make specific posts private.

In essence, the app becomes a study group. MacInnis used the example of a stuck student. He can write a note next to the content that confuses him, go to sleep and wake up with a crowdsourced explanation in the next morning.

But these textbooks can be very heavy on an iPad. A full Inkling textbook can fill up 2 gigabytes of space and for users who only have a 16g iPad, that’s precious space. The only way to combat this is to delete Inkling titles to download new ones. But what happens to all that data that will now be even more extensive with the social features function? According to MacInnis, this data is synced in the cloud and repopulates itself when a title is re-downloaded.

Still, you have to re-download a book you already downloaded once.

Competitors like Kno offer light, but slightly less robust digital textbook options. MacInnis says while Kno is a competitor, Inkling is solving for a different problem.

“From our perspective, we’re solving for a very specific problem. There’s no scalable way to publish digital content for learning. They know how to dump a PDF on a screen, but we have a whole infrastructure to publish this stuff at scale,” said MacInnis. He continued, adding Chegg to the conversation, “They’re taking a PDF and they’re putting it on an iPad or computer screen. That’s fine for now, but it’s not the future of publishing.”

To MacInnis, Inkling isn’t creating an eBook, it’s looking toward a new way of experiencing educational content through apps. What once was a still and mute book, now uses technology to move, speak out loud and glean intelligence from others outside your comfortable campus study group, all from one device.

“On a basic level, this social stuff is what it is,” MacInnis explained, understanding that social is everywhere and the ability to interact with the world is much easier than it once was. “But we think the implications are huge.”

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Tags: digital education, digital textbooks, publishers

Companies: Inkling, Kno

People: Matt MacInnis

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