We’re combining forces with EA!

We at Playfish are proud to announce that we are joining the Electronic Arts family, one of the most successful games companies in the world. Read the full press release in our press section for the official announcement.

Needless to say we’re very excited about the increased resources and scale that this brings to Playfish and ultimately to our players. We can’t wait to start exploring social versions of some of the well-loved franchises that this combination brings to us. We also look forward to being able to bring our games to more platforms and more players around the world with the help of our new friends! So this is an exciting time for all of us at Playfish.

A huge thanks to all our players for all your support. Please keep your feedback on our games coming and stay tuned for even bigger and more exciting things in the future!

Pet Society becomes the first game on Facebook to surpass 1,000,000 fans!

We’ve been delighted to watch the continuous growth of Pet Society – our social virtual world on Facebook and MySpace. Since launch 8 months ago it has grown steadily to become the biggest game on Facebook by daily active users. Around 3 million people play every day, and around 11 million played in the last month alone. Today we’re delighted to announce passing another milestone – 1,000,000 fans! And it’s the first game on Facebook to get there!

‘Love’ has always been an important success metric for us at Playfish. Our teams across our studios work hard to create games that our players love to play together as much as we love to create them. ‘Love’ is, of course, difficult to measure in numbers, but there is one metric on Facebook – fans. And today we’re proud that Pet Society has passed the 1 million fan milestone as the first game on the platform! That means that over 1 million players have found the ‘become a fan’ link in the game and chosen to register themselves as a fan of the game.

As ever, we’re hugely grateful to all our players and their support and help in our efforts to evolve the game and make it better. We appreciate that the game has a monthly population that’s bigger than Belgium if it was a country and around the size of Ohio if it was a state. So we’re working hard on adding features, items and new exciting things to do in the game!

Please keep the feedback and suggestions coming. We can’t always reply to every mail and forum post, but we do read them and value all the comments we get!

We’re live on iPhone and iPod touch!

At Playfish, we’re huge fans of iPhone and the iPod touch. We speculated last summer that the iPhone would make an impact on social games. So we’re today very excited to be part of the launch of Facebook Connect for the iPhone and iPod touch and proud to announce our first games, downloadable from iTunes, that let you play with your Facebook friends any time, anywhere. Read the official press release here.

Our first title, Who Has The Biggest Brain? – played by over 15 million people so far, is available for download now in the iTunes Store. It features the full pro-mode of the game – 12 mini games, a practice mode, a performance calendar, and the ability to connect and compete with your Facebook friends, see their pictures, scores and check their brain profiles. The game is of course fully optimised for the touch screen interface and you can even unlock a mobile exclusive achievement to show off online! Read about the full feature set here.

Additionally, Word Challenge and Geo Challenge will be available for download on iTunes by summer. As with Who Has The Biggest Brain? both games take full advantage of the touch screen interface. The games have feature sets similar to the fully unlocked Facebook pro versions you’re familiar with, but add content exclusive to the iPhone and iPod touch. And – most importantly – they let you play with your Facebook friends!

We believe Facebook Connect for the iPhone and iPod touch will revolutionise how games are played on mobile. Instead of playing to kill time, you can now play to interact, express, communicate or compete with friends – which are far more interesting emotional drivers to play games. Being a launch partner for Facebook Connect and offering games for the iPhone and iPod touch is an important step in Playfish’s mission to change how the world plays games by creating experiences that are more social and connected. We’re very grateful for Facebook’s support and, as always, look forward to your feedback and ideas!

We’ll be releasing a few updates and tweaks over the coming weeks so be sure to let us know if you have ideas of how to make Who Has The Biggest Brain? on the iPhone and iPod Touch even better.

Some screenshots are below. To try it out yourself, download the game now from the iTunes Store! And be sure to let us know what you think!

Here are a few of my friends with bigger brains than me!

Look familiar? Facebook Connect lets you log in to your Facebook account

The game features 12 touch optimised minigames and fast game play

Based on my perfomance online and on mobile, I’m officially an Alien

Celebrating 50 million players!

It was almost exactly a year ago when we wrote a blog post celebrating our 100,000th install on Facebook for Who Has The Biggest Brain? – our first title.

Today, or last week to be precise, we passed the 50 million registered players mark. Quite some growth in less than a year! We also recently passed the 4 million daily active players mark – up from around 40,000 a year ago.

We’ve been amazed at the response from our players to our 6 released titles – Who Has The Biggest Brain?, Word Challenge, Bowling Buddies, Pet Society, Geo Challenge and Minigolf Party – all developed by our three internal studios.

Facebook users were the first ones to have access to our titles and that shows – we now have 5 out of the top-10 games by activitiy on the platform. But our recent launches on MySpace, Bebo and Yahoo have grown quickly, too!

Social gaming is a hot topic at the moment. Just this month we were featured in EDGE magazine as well as listed as one of the top-10 most promising start-ups in the UK in the Financial Times (UK’s leading financial newspaper – clip below). And it seems the rest of the games industry is slowly but surely starting to catch on – social gaming has suddenly popped up as a major topic in key games industry conferences including GDC 2009 and Develop 2009.

So lots to celebrate and lots of work ahead – we still feel we’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s possible and are working on a lot of fun things in all our studios. A very exciting time for the industry and for all of us at Playfish!

Thanks for the support in 2008!

What a way to end a great year! Thank you all for taking the time to vote for us in the 2nd Annual Mashable Open Web Awards.

It was great to be nominated in the Online Games category, but to go on and win both the Blogger’s Choice Award and the People’s Choice Award was a huge deal for us, especially against such strong competition.

Thank you again for all your support, not just during the awards but over the whole year. We hope you’ve had as much fun playing our games as we’ve had making them! We can’t wait to show you what we’ve got planned next!

Announcing our $17m round of finance from our friends at Accel and Index

We just announced our $17m round of funding today from our friends at Accel and Index – read the full press release here!

Needless to say we’re really excited about it, and we’re even more excited about the potential to bring our games to other places than just Facebook (some of you may have seen we recently launched Bowling Buddies on Myspace).  A big thanks to all the ideas and feedback from our players and fans so far – keep them coming!

We promise to keep working hard to improve our games and create new, fun ways for people to play games together!

So Who Really Has The Biggest Brain?

Who Has The Biggest Brain? – our competitive brain training title on Facebook has now been played by over 9m people in the world from over 200 countries and is still in the Facebook games top-10. We thought it might be fun to look at the results to date in terms of countries, states and cities worldwide and share the results from the over 350 million game plays so far. There’s a lot of data here but it’s worth checking out!

First – the global winners. The bronze medal goes to Israel, scoring an average brain size of 2,161 cm³. Congratulations Israel! Second up is Serbia with 2,162 cm³ and finally (and you might want to play a quick drum roll in your head before you finish this sentence), the gold medal goes to Montenegro – scoring an incredible average brain size of 2,170 cm³!

Worldwide Top 10 Average Scores

Meanwhile the USA (1,827cm³), Canada (1,814cm³) and UK (1,790cm³) ran a close race coming in at 91st, 96th and 101st respectively, but they’ve still got a lot of catching up to do if they’re going to have a chance at a medal in the next competition.

Breaking it down further, it seems sunshine can do wonders for your scores because Hawaii led the charge for the USA with 1,942cm³ and California wasn’t far behind at 1,924cm³. Meanwhile South Dakota came second to last with 1,730cm³ with Vermont at the bottom with 1,727cm³, but then they do make great ice cream so they must be doing something right over there.

Worldwide Average Scores

In Europe the results are also pretty interesting, with Eastern Europe showing very strong performances such as Slovakia with 2,092 cm³. In Western Europe, France (2,032 cm³) out-scored its neighbor the UK (1,790 cm³). Southern European countries such as Greece (2,116 cm³), Turkey (2,079 cm³) fared considerably better than Northern European countries like Iceland (1,826 cm³), Sweden (1,760 cm³) and Norway (1,713 cm³).

To focus on the UK rankings, we can reveal that the northernmost and westernmost reaches of the country beat their rivals in the South to the top with Edinburgh (1,833 cm³) taking pole position and London lagging behind at 16th place with an average of 1,787cm³.

UK Top Average Scores

Hopping across the Atlantic again to Latin America, Peru took the top prize averaging at 2,043 cm³, while Paraguay fell behind with an average of 1,718cm³.

Latin American Top Average Scores

We don’t think the scores reflect anything other than persistence and competitive spirit – players tend to achieve higher scores the more they play through learning tricks in the game. And we certainly don’t imply that it reflects any real differences in brain size or intelligence between countries or cities, but we had such fun looking through the data that we just had to share the results. If anyone has any interesting theories based on the game and this data, we’d love to hear from you!

A quick note on methodology – we took a random, anonymous sample of 500,000 players, counted individual best scores from each country / city / state as determined by the regional network specified on Facebook and took an average of those scores. We only considered countries which had more than 30 players as part of the sample. The full set of data is available here for those wishing to look at more detail or quote from the source.

Congratulations to the high fliers and commiserations to those who found themselves at the bottom of the tables. There’s always next time and remember, everyone’s score counts!

Around the world with Playfish and Geo Challenge!

It’s only a month or so ago that we launched Pet Society on Facebook – and what a month that has been. The game has already attracted over 1.5 million players, it’s made it to the Facebook games top-15 by activity and we’ve loved the amount of excellent feedback and suggestions we’ve received from our players. And we’re not done yet – the team at Playfish London is still hard at work fixing issues, adding features and completing the Stadium feature for the game so keep that feedback and those ideas coming!

Meanwhile, it’s time to announce the beta release of our next title – Geo Challenge from Playfish China – our Beijing Studio.

It’s been fun to see how many of you have appreciated the learning element in our top-10 titles Word Challenge and Who Has The Biggest Brain?. We wanted to expand on this a little further in our next game and explore a competitive game around knowledge of geography.

Geo Challenge is designed for friends to compete and show off their knowledge of the planet. You travel the world together with our friendly tour guide and get to test your knowledge of countries, cities and flags in a collection of minigames. The game rewards speed as well as knowledge and accuracy and gives you a geography knowledge rating – or geo score – between Agoraphobe and Geography Guru with ratings like Bus Driver, Sailor and Airline Pilot in between. We’re still tweaking things and thinking of features to add, so all feedback is much appreciated.

So, if you have a moment and feel like putting your friends to the test, give Geo Challenge a try on Facebook! You never know, you might even learn something new at the same time?

Announcing the beta launch of Pet Society!

We at Playfish have been hard at work all summer and are finally pleased to announce the beta launch of our next title, Pet Society!

Pet Society lets you create and care for your own pet and interact with your friends. You can feed, wash and play games with your pet, as well as choosing clothes and accessories for it. You can also explore the village and visit shops and your friends’ pets. While visiting someone you can leave notes and gifts to your friends, or just watch TV or dance together if you feel like it!

In Pet Society we wanted to explore social game play with a lot of depth, persistence and expression – it’s all about having a good time with your friends, collecting new items and playing games together. For those of you who like a little bit of competition there are experience points and we’ll be adding some mini-competitions in the future as well!

We wanted to design the title around a micro-transactions model to give players a choice to spend as much or as little as they like. The economy is based on coins that you can either earn through gameplay or buy through various payment methods by going to the bank in the village. There’s plenty to spend your coins on – ranging from food to shirts, hats, shoes, plants, and tons of different types of furniture and accessories.

Pet Society is a Playfish London studio production and the team is still hard at work adding features and fixing some known issues. We really want to give people a chance to look at our new game early while working hard with our beta testers to do the last bits of polishing and balancing that we all love!

Check out Pet Society beta on Facebook by clicking here and let us know what you think!

Transactions in Social Games – Launching Who Has The Biggest Brain? Pro Player Club

Who Has The Biggest Brain? has in six months amassed over 6 million installs, over 200 million game plays and a great set of feedback from our players. And last week we launched our first major new update to the game including our first transactions based service.

We launched a new achievements system, taunts, new brain types and a brand new profile viewing page all accessible to everyone. We also launched a new Pro Player Club for the game which gives you access to new exclusive mini-games, a practice mode, a calendar view of your progress in each category, exclusive taunts and more, all at a $9.99 / year subscription price.

We are excited about the update as it lets us provide our most engaged players with additional depth into the game while at the same time delivering more features for people who want to play the free version of the game. We will continue to update the free to play version of the game and the Pro Player Club with new features, as well as providing additional, more convenient payment options.

We believe the future business model for social games will be primarily transactions driven where consumers play for free supported by advertising but have the option to pay for virtual items and premium features. Given that people currently pay over $50Bn to play video games on other platforms we believe the potential for transactions in social games to be sizable. So we are very excited to have our first transactional model launched in addition to our in-game advertising offering. As always we are eager to hear what you think of the mix and any ideas on how to further improve the game play experience.

Thanks to all of our players who have alreardy sent us some great feedback – keep it coming and hope you enjoy the update! You can try it out on Facebook here!