Tiki Resort: Hire a cabana boy to tend your island

Ringing the icon of a hotel styled desk bell on the left side of your Tiki Resort game will allow you to summon Dan the Automator. Dan is a new game feature that promises to collect money and charms from your attractions, pick up trash, and tend your pets. He comes with a chart that'll let you to see just how much work he's done by how many things he's collected on his shift.
Tiki Resort Dan the Automator Shifts
Dan has two shifts you can set him up on. A 15 min. shift requires 25 Coconut Drink Charms, while a 3-day shift goes for 39 Facebook Credits, or roughly, $4 USD.

Coconut Drink Charms increase the walking speed of your tourists, leading them to visit more attractions, which means they'd spend more. You can buy a set of 50 at the in-game store for 149 FB Credits, which is approximately $14.90 USD. So unless you've got an attraction that generates that charm, the 15 min. shift isn't Dan's best deal for you.

Social City's Gala Raffle: Win past decor and Limited Edition buildings

Social City Gala Raffle
Players who click the "Build" menu can now participate in Social City's new Gala Raffle to win buildings and decorations that are no longer available in gifts or up for sale at the store. This new feature seemed to have quietly rolled out last week and the response among fans is pretty positive.
Social City's Gala Raffle in the Build icon menu
One excited player described the raffle as "kinda fun, but also kinda dangerous." How? Well, the raffle is divided into three categories. The first category offers Limited Edition attractions and discontinued giftables. The second offers Limited Edition residential buildings. Both of these require City Bucks, or Social City's form of premium cash, to make your spin. The first one requires 8 City Bucks, while the second needs 5. For $4.99 USD, you can get 55 City Bucks. So this is going to cost real world money, and what you get is luck of the draw.

But the third category uses virtual coins to work. Even at 50,000 Coins per spin, it's as good as free. Right now, that raffle's offerings include premium-level Japanese style buildings and the discontinued giftable Sakura Paths.

ESPNU College Town brings Baseball, Softball and giftable All Star Refills

Getting bored of football (impossible) and basketball? Playdom has added both baseball and softball to ESPNU College Town among a litany of other features, fixes and items. Players can now build baseball and softball fields on their campus and, of course, recruit new baseball and softball All Star players.

On top of that, a slew of new items have been added to the store along with some fixes to the game that you'll find behind the cut.
Max All Star Plays
In addition to the new baseball field and new All Stars, a new giftable item was introduced called "Max All Star Plays." This free gift will refill all of your All Star's plays, allowing you to use the same All Star players over and over again. However, Playdom also added a list of items that aren't so cheap:

    Samford Hall - Auburn
    Science Building - Baylor
    Healy Hall - Georgetown
    Campus Recreation Center - Georgia Tech
    Beardshear Hall- Iowa State
    Memorial Union - Iowa State
    Hale Library Kansas State
    Marquette Hall - Marquette
    Memorial Bell Tower - North Carolina State
    Rebecca Crown ClockTower - Northwestern
    Edmon Low Library - Oklahoma State
    College Building - Providence



Each of these buildings inspired by true-to-life university buildings costs between 29 and 39 Campus Cash, or between $6 and $9, which is pretty steep for some XP and School Spirit. Playdom made a few mysterious fixes to the game to improve the overall experience as well:

    Numerous fixes to address loading and synchronization issues.
    Numerous fixes to the competitions section of the game.
    Various fixes to improve user experience and minor textual issues.

Friends Only
While Playdom is unclear on what these fixes might have actually... fixed (I wasn't experiencing any problems in-game), hopefully they solved some issues for players. In yet another change to the Competitions section, players can now filter their potential Challenges to just their friends in the Competitions menu, which is a small but welcome addition. Honestly, we just can't wait to see what sport Playdom adds to the game next. Come on, crew team!

Top 25 MySpace games of Dec. 2010: The land beyond Zynga's rule

Top 25 MySpace Games
Thanks to Inside Social, the results are in for this month's top MySpace games and the results would be shocking for anyone who doesn't normally game on the platform. Essentially, things over at MySpace could be known as the bizarro world of social gaming. In a land where MySpace is second fiddle to Facebook, so is Zynga to Playdom in a strangely mirroring way with its hit game Mafia Wars (13.4 million players) beat out by its direct competitor, Playdom's Mobsters (14.9 million players) by over one million players.

However, this list includes products that are more web apps than true social games like Tag Me from BitRhymes sitting in the number 5 spot with 8.4 million users. Though, web apps and games competing for the same audience is also common on Facebook with Phrases recently dethroning FarmVille as the top app in town. In fact, web apps are the majority on MySpace with 12 spots on this list including Bumper Stickers in the number 3 spot with 12.8 million users and Own Your Friends in fourth place with 10.3 million users.

Filling out the rest of this month's top MySpace games are a slew of pet care games such as SuperPoke Pets by Slide in ninth place with RockYou Pets tailing behind them in the 10 spot. Then rest of the list includes more obscure titles by Zynga and Playdom such as the former's Street Racing in the 13 spot and the latter's Bloodlines in 24th place. All in all, it shows that despite the power and insane growth of social games, social web apps can still give this relatively new genre of gaming a challenge.

Zynga dominates social games market with 38 percent share

Surprised? If Zynga were a person, he'd probably be Daddy Warbucks, or maybe even Uncle Pennybags. IHS Screen Digest reports that Zynga, who brought in $554 million in revenue in 2010, now holds 38.1 percent of the overall social games market share. That's almost a 5 percent increase from the previous year's 33.9 percent. This means that not only is the creator of FarmVille and CityVille filthy rich (it's estimated to be worth $9 to $10 billion), it's also very, very powerful. At least when it comes to social games, anyway.

According to PCMag, the report goes on to reveal that EA, the second place social game publisher and owner of Playfish, recorded a mere estimated $90 million in revenue, or 6.5 percent of the market. And the third place publisher and developer team, Disney and Playdom, hold just 5.5 percent of the market with an estimated $77 million in revenue.

But Zynga's power isn't just it's money, but what that money allows it to do. When it wants to enter a new market, create a game with a new feature or on a new platform, it just buys companies with an existing presence or expertise there. Regardless of whether its methods are 'borrowed' from weaker companies, when Zynga introduces a relatively new feature to its games, the entire industry takes notes.

Just look at the questing system first released by Zynga through FrontierVille. Sure, it could have been picked up from another company, but look at every single social game you play now. (Does it have quests? We thought so.) While we're all looking for innovation from these smaller, more fearless social game companies, it's Zynga that will bring that innovation to the forefront regardless of where it comes from, legitimate or not.