Sebastien de Halleux, vice president of business development and strategic partnerships for EA Interactive, recently told Forbes that they had sold 60 million virtual goods on Pet Society in the two weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day. In addition, “tens of thousands” of real-world flowers were sold, up 20% from the same period and same promotion last year. The real-world flowers are one of Pet Society’s innovative features, where users are able to gain virtual currencies by purchasing flowers online from within the game.  This publicly reported news also marks a shift for Playfish, who used to hold their cards close to their chest prior to being acquired by EA, a public company.
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Electronic Arts is looking forward and betting on mobile and social gaming, and the timing couldn’t be better: the company posted its 11th consecutive loss, down $82 million for the quarter ending December 31st.  Getting deep into the financials, the packaged goods games market has continued its decline quarter after quarter, and EA is predicting it will fall a further 3% in the coming year.  These packaged goods are 80% of EA’s bottom line, and the change is hurting EA’s core business.  At the same time,  EA has been increasingly focused on mobile and web games, and with the purchase of Playfish, entered the realm of Social Gaming in a big way.
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Coinciding with recent announcements by Playfish that they were going to bring an EA brand to Facebook, Peter Moore just announced that “Madden NFL” will be released for Facebook.  The details are sparse, but Moore stated on Bloomberg Television that “we have to make Madden’ more accessible,” and “you’ll see us on Facebook going forward.”
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As the Facebook gaming wars continue to heat up, analysts seek as many ways as possible to measure each companies’ gaming success.  Monthly Active Users (MAUs), Daily Active Users (DAUs), Page Views, Monetization… the list goes on.  There are as many ways to measure an application’s success as there are applications in the Facebook directory.  That said, the dimension of user loyalty has always been interesting to me, and the concept of the users-to-fans ratio for a given application does a good job of indicating what percentage of users play the game and publicly demonstrate their affinity by signing up as a fan.
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The Wall Street Journal has published recent comments made by Playfish’s CEO, Kristian Segerstrale. They are among the first public comments since Playfish’s acquisition by Electronic Arts late last year. One of the more notable comments made by Kristian was that Playfish plans to release a social game based on a well-known EA brand this year.  This brings some meat to EA’s stated plan to transition from their console retail business suffering to a digital distribution model.  Specifically, they are tying their existing and well-known brands with the gaming expertise of high-quality social game makers, Playfish.
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Electronic Arts, one of the world’s top games developer might not be finished with acquisitions in the Social Games space, according to a recent report by Reuters. Electronic Arts, which has popular games like Madden NFL and FIFA soccer to its credit, recently acquired Playfish for around $300 million in 2009.
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There is certainly no lack of Apple Tablet information circulating the news web these days, but as the January 27th announcement date approaches, some of the key information is beginning to firm up.  As the feature-set becomes more concrete, the implications of the device become clearer – specifically, the potential increases for the Apple Tablet to be a new avenue for social games.
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Last month Playfish held a holiday contest which challenged users to create holiday decorations that were inspired by Playfish games. This year’s winner spent 5 tireless days developing something extraordinary. While it isn’t exactly breaking news, this robot, developed by Tami Ka, is pretty incredible. The robot is inspired by the Crazy Planets robot. Honestly, this robot is something I’d expect to find in Make magazine with the incredible to detail. Check out the photos of below of Tami’s development of the robot.
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There have been rumors circulating over the past month about Playfish, the second largest Facebook Platform developer, being acquired by Electronic Arts. This morning the news was confirmed via a press release stating that:

EA has acquired Playfish for approximately US$275 million in cash and approximately $US25 million in equity retention arrangements. In addition, the sellers are entitled to additional variable cash consideration, up to a maximum of US$100 million, contingent upon the achievement of certain performance milestones through December 31, 2011.

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This afternoon I had the opportunity to speak with Sebastien de Halleux, the Chief Operating Officer and Co-Founder of Playfish, one of the top social gaming companies currently out there. The company also has some of the most engaging gaming applications currently on Facebook. Sebastien also discussed plans to expand beyond Facebook to other social networks as well as the iPhone.

I also had the opportunity to ask Sebastien whether he thought social gaming deserved the separation from casual gaming. Sebastien argued that it does deserve a clear distinction and that the term means baking social into the game design and making the game an object of social interaction. The games also get incrementally more fun as you add more friends to the game.

The social gaming space has been heating up most recently with Zynga’s $29 million round of funding. Currently the cost of social games has been low in comparison to traditional video games which have budgets in the six and seven figures as Sebastien points out. It’s an exciting time to be part of the social gaming space and Playfish is definitely one of the leaders. To learn more about Playfish and Sebastien’s thoughts on the social gaming space, listen to the podcast!