via insidesocialgames.com

In today’s Inside Social Games, King’s MAU (Monthly Average Users) and DAU (Daily Average Users) for newly launched Miner Speed are illustrated, showing a fantastic growth curve.  The game was just released on the iOS as a free app just last week, so these numbers are especially impressive.

The social games industry is moving more towards the cross-platform approach, yet few if any have been able to successfully bridge the divides.  With these results, King is proving they are onto something.  Puzzle Saga, Bubble Saga, Miner Speed and King’s games portal all occupyed spots in the weekly lists of top 20 games by growth on AppData in the last month.  I’m excited to see what’s next!

Related articles

• King.com Games Gain Growth Through Cross-Platform Play (insidesocialgames.com)
• King.com launches its first cross-platform mobile game (exclusive) (venturebeat.com)

Last night we descended upon Bar888 in the Intercontinental Hotel to greet movers, shakers and opinion makers in the gaming, virtual world and technology scenes.  Monday was the first day of the Game Developers Conference which took place in the Moscone Convention Center, and as far as I could tell, it appeared that gamers were recession proof as throngs of games developers, producers, publishers and reporters filled the rooms to hear speakers talk about every aspect of gaming you could imagine.

One of the speakers was our very own Raph Koster, President of Metaplace.  Raph is a superstar amongst gamers – so much so that he can’t even walk down the streets of San Francisco without people snapping his photo.  I quipped it was like walking with Sean Penn (not that I’d know what that really felt like… but I can imagine).

At 5:30pm, we joined together with Riccardo Zacconi, Robert Norton and Matthias Schmidt-Pfitzner of King.com to greet the guests that ranged from start-up entrepreneurs, to games bloggers, mainstream reporters to execs from the biggest games companies in the world.  We noshed on crab cakes and goat cheese puffs, sipped wines, and talked about the past, present and future of games.  A good night of casual conversation indeed.

If you want to see the full details behind the event and who was on the list, check out the link here:  Keeping it Casual – Monday Night Mixer.

P.S. If you want to see who’s in the photos, just hover your mouse over the pic and the details should appear – but here’s a quick synopsis:  Top photo: Summer Richards, official bouncer and name checker; 2nd photo:  Robert Norton, King.com and me; 3rd photo; good friend Tomio Geron, Dow Jones VentureWire, BFF Shireen Piramoon, TumbleCloud, Riccardo Zacconi, CEO of King.com, and me; 4th photo: journalist turned Consort,  Mark de la Viña, casual games queen and founder of the Casual Games Association, Jessica Tams, and me; 5th photo:  Mark de la Viña, Sunil Vemuri, co-founder of reQall, Chris Bauman, US Head of Swoopo, and me.

And yeah, I guess you can tell I had my photo arm stretched and ready…

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• Boing Boing Video (and Offworld!) coming to Game Developers Conference 2009 (boingboing.net)
• GDC 09: conference to reflect a more global game industry (venturebeat.com)
• GDC Cometh [Note] (kotaku.com)
• An Early Glimpse at GDC [Gdc09] (kotaku.com)
• GDC 09: Team CrunchGear invades San Francisco (crunchgear.com)