EVCin

Now that Mafia Wars by Zynga is charging close to $6 for the new Thailand expansion pack, does this new wrinkle in the freemium model for social games signal an inevitable emulation of MMORPGs?

When viral marketing tactics were curtailed by Facebook’s platform and policy updates, the question wasn’t whether developers would take a hit, but how much? And whether those that thrived on aggressive viral tactics would be hurt more than those that didn’t. I look at what appears to be behind those who did well and those that took a major hit.

After being fairly quiet since early August’s launch of (Lil) Farm Life, Playdom launched two games in the last two weeks: TikiFarm (a South Pacific themed farm sim) and Wild Ones (an artillery/strategy game with pets – still in alpha).
CrowdStar and Zynga have been greatly accelerating the deployment of games and it’s possible [...]

All of the major game developers have launched a game with Facebook’s Credit payment system, with CrowdStar implementing them in all their games. This is a rundown of those implementations and the potential pros and cons for developers as we near Facebook’s official launch of their credits system.

Today InsideSocialGames.com reported Playdom was making upwards of $50 million, but taking look at the numbers, they just don’t seem to make sense.
The numbers presented in the article infer that Playdom is making more money per MAU than Zynga:

Playdom $50 million annual from 28 mil MAU = $0.149 per user per month
Zynga $200 million [...]