Oberon Media COO Don Ryan says the company is chuffed with the success of the Facebook version of Bubble Town, the arcade-puzzler that's also available as a mobile game.
"We're blown away by the success of Bubble Town," he told PG.biz. "By our calculations it's the second fastest growing application on Facebook, and the second most addictive. Our goal is to get it to number one."
Currently, Bubble Town has 153,230 daily active users on the social network, which is 16 per cent of its total installs (in other words, more than 957,000 people have installed it).
By contrast, Digital Chocolate's Tower Bloxx currently has 109,825 daily active users, although a larger install base of 1.8 million. Bubble Town is actually the 13th most popular Facebook app in terms of daily active users.
The big question, though, is whether the game is making any money for Oberon, the parent company of the I-play brand that it's published under.
"We're trying to monetise it in multiple different ways," says Ryan. "Advertising is being pumped into the Bubble Town Facebook application, and that's what we think is going to be the principle means of revenue. But we are also experimenting with using it to drive traffic to the mobile game."
How's that going?
"The mobile revenue is good; not fantastic, but good," he says. "It's strong. On the mobile side, it's early days, but they're very promising early days. We can afford to get in early and experiment because we can monetise it [Facebook] in lots of different ways."
Oberon is currently considering whether to relaunch Bubble Town as a PC download on the back of its Facebook success the game started life as Scrubbles, a $20 PC download that didn't sell well according to Ryan.
Meanwhile, the viral aspects of Bubble Town on Facebook may be used elsewhere in Oberon's business, with the company developing its own community platform for its white-label casual games business.
"It's a showcase game to see what is possible in some of our own internal community offerings, as well as on Facebook," says Ryan.
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