DeNA-owned ngmoco has signed up Kabam as the newest publishing partner for the Mobage platform. The announcement comes out of DeNA’s Mobage Forum conference in Japan this week.

Kabam has only just entered the mobile market with a version of its Facebook game Kingdoms of Camelot on iOS. Kingdoms of Camelot: Battle for the North debuted on our Emerging Apps list at No. 33 early last month and has since gone on to claim the No. 1 spot on Top Grossing just last week. The social game developer is partnering with DeNA to release Android games on Mobage, but declined to confirm if the first offering would be a port of Battle for the North. The first game from this partnership will be available on the network this summer.

Speaking to Inside Mobile Apps, Kabam President Andrew Sheppard explains that DeNA’s expertise on Android and its understanding of the hardcore gamer market made it an appealing publishing partner.

“It gives us the resources to quickly and easily deploy our games not just in North America and Europe, but Japan as well. They also are helping manage the QA and testing for the wide range of Android devices and OS versions,” Sheppard says. “The biggest difference between [Android and iOS] boils down to hardware and OS fragmentation. Given the sheer number of Android handsets and OS flavors in the market, we need to do more testing and tweaking to make sure we deliver a great experience on a wide range of Android devices.”

As to what Kabam has learned from its first foray into mobile that it can take back to its social games business on Facebook and Google+, Sheppard says that mobile and social players demonstrate similar usage patterns in alliance and chat features, but introducing new players to the gameplay systems was a key learning in going mobile.

“With Kingdoms of Camelot: Battle for the North we spent a lot of time refining and streamlining the on-boarding process for new players. It’s definitely something we’re looking at for our Web games,” he says. “One of the key differences we’re noticing between web and mobile is that a significantly higher percentage of mobile users are converting to pay. They also tend to spend sooner in their lifecycle than with web games. Lastly, despite the fact that we’ve heard mobile games have lower [revenue per daily active user], we’ve been seeing RPDAUs that are as high, if not higher, than our web games.”

DeNA’s most recent high-profile partnership for Mobage is a Disney deal that includes Marvel-branded social games for Mobage’s networks in North America, Europe, Japan, China and South Korea.

Atari has updated its Pong Indie Developer Challenge to improve its payout system to offer developers who enter the contest better rewards.

The contest challenges independent developers to create a new version of Pong for iOS. Winners can earn up to $100,000 in prize money and a publishing deal with Atari. Some developers have criticized the contest, saying its requirement to relinquish ownership of submissions to Atari and payout terms make it a bad deal for independents.

According to Atari, the company has extended the revenue sharing portion of the publishing agreement from one to three years in order to offer larger financial incentives. The three grand prize winners will receive prizes with potential values ranging from $30,000 to $100,000. Half will be awarded up front as a cash prize and the other half will be based on an 80/20 gross revenue split between Atari and the winning apps. The contest’s runners up will receive $5,000 cash prizes and be eligible for the same revenue sharing deal.

Atari has also added a developer showcase to further highlight the contest’s finalists.

When Inside Mobile Apps asked Atari for a statement regarding the change of rules, a company spokesperson provided us with the following statement:

While the Pong Challenge has received much positive feedback, we are aware of the concerns some have raised. Ultimately our intention with this contest is to support and celebrate both the developer community and Pong’s 40th anniversary as well as offer truly valuable rewards – cash prizes and a revenue sharing partnership (recently extended to three years) that will see a developer’s game promoted under the Atari brand. Although a few people have cast this contest as “bad,” we believe it presents a good opportunity for many real indie studios - and the positive feedback and participation we’ve seen thus far proves it.

 

Some concerns have been raised with the terms of ownership of submissions, but we’re not aiming to steal anyone’s ideas. These terms are fairly standard in development agreements and we’re asking submissions to be branded as and based off of a property we own – after all, a developer couldn’t release a submission in the form it was presented to us through the contest as it would legally violate our intellectual property.

The contest, which will be judged by David Whatley, Dave Castelnuovo, Mike Schramm and Atari Corporation founder Nolan Bushnell, is accepting entries until April 15. According to Castelnuovo, the judges are looking for entries that reflect the unique personalities and sensibilities of the developer who created them.

Ngmoco’s chief publishing officer Simon Jeffery has resigned. According to GamesIndustry International, Jeffery is not moving to another company, but will instead work as a consultant and advisor to developers working on mobile-social apps.

Jeffery’s departure is the second high profile loss for Ngmoco this year. In February Ngmoco’s vice president of social applications Jason Oberfest left the company to co-found a mobile health startup called Mango Health.

Jeffery joined Ngmoco in June 2009 to oversee the company’s Plus+ publishing arm. In 2010 Japanese gaming giant DeNA purchased Ngmoco in a deal worth up to $403 million as part of its plan to bring its successful Mobage mobile-social network to North America. As we pointed out last month, with the passing of Ngmoco’s first earnout date, its not unexpected to see movement from within the company’s ranks. Jeffery’s departure is a significant loss for the company, however.

During Jeffery’s tenure as chief publishing officer, Ngmoco brought some of the most successful developers on iOS under the umbrella of DeNA’s North American Mobage network. Under his watch the company inked deals with Glu Mobile, TinyCo, NimbleBit, BackFlip Studios, Game Insight, The Playforge, Uken Games and RockYou among others. Ngmoco has not announced a replacement yet.

Prior to joining Ngmoco, Jeffery served for four years as the president and COO of Sega of America and for six years as the President of LucasArts.

Jeffery’s move marks the latest in a series of departures from DeNA’s North American ranks. In addition to Jeffery and Oberfest, Riz Virk and Mitch Liu left DeNA-owned Gameview Studios in early February.

Columbian developer Brainz Games is betting that quirky humor and surprisingly deep gameplay will help it conquer the tower defense genre with its game, Vampire Season.

Due to be released as a universal app for iPhone and iPad at the end of March, it will be in the first wave of mobile games published by 6L (formerly known as 6waves Lolapps). Brainz Games was one of the first 16 developers to sign a mobile deal with the publisher.

Although Brainz has been in business for more than 10 years, Vampire Season is actually its first original game. The company has a long history in animation, TV commercials and development of mobile adver-games for the likes of Guinness and Coca-Cola.

In order to make its transition from service work to original IP a success, Brainz has invested heavily in Vampire Season. The game has spent eight months in development with a budget of $350,000 to ensure it stands out with its polish, storytelling and high production values. The game is also free-to-play — a decision that Jairo Nieto, Brainz Games’ head of games (pictured right) describes as a “leap of faith.”

“When we started working on the game we thought it would be pay-to-own. Through the development cycle we came to understand that freemium was the way to go. But that also affects game design because you need to have purchasable items in the game to monetize it,” he explains.

It was this blend of experience, yet newness to the freemium market that helped the company decide to sign with 6L, explains Brainz’ CEO Alejandro Gonzalez (pictured left).

“Since we’re new, we wanted someone who was super committed,” he says. “We wanted our brand to go as far as possible and 6L wanted to do the same thing in mobile. We were really synchronized there. They promised a lot of commitment on paper, and then we signed and it was even better.”

According to Gonzalez and Nieto, 6L helped Brainz improve how users engaged with the game and helped ensure that North American audiences would get all the small details and subtle jokes in the game — an important point for Brainz, who set out to make the game funny and incorporate humor into the narrative.

Described by Nieto as a blend of Blizzard’s real time strategy games and humor website 9gag.com, Vampire Season a subversive take on the tower defense genre. In it, the player commands an assortment of classic monsters (imps, zombies, werewolves and vampires, to name a few) as they defend Dracula’s coffin from wave after wave of rampaging townsfolk. The game’s enemies can be the typical heroes from other games — think handsome princes and ninjas — but also include more left-field choices like interior decorators.

Each unit has its own strengths and weaknesses, and they can be combined to form new, usually ridiculous units. Combining a zombie and a vampire yields a zampire; adding a werewolf to an imp gives the player a wimp and so forth. This adds an additional layer of strategy to the core gameplay as players discover new unit combinations.

Although the game is funny, it’s also designed to be challenging. The game features an endless survival mode and 30-level story mode where players can earn up to three stars for each level. Brainz implemented the star-based scoring system to ensure casual players would be able to advance through the story, and to make sure players looking for a greater challenge would have something to do in the game.

“We wanted to serve a more mid-core audience, but I also believed we could pull off taking a casual gamer and giving them a game that was more rich and had more layers and tell a great story,” explains Nieto. “This can be either a tower defense game that has some more complexity to it, or it could be a little bit like a real time strategy game. You’re not placing towers, you’re placing units and allies [that move and battle]. I think those subtle differences will help it stand out. Not only visually but in terms of gameplay. We wanted people to feel like they were playing something that felt new.”

Brainz Games is backed by $1.5 million in series A funding from a Columbian investor. The company will be releasing four more original games on iOS and Facebook in Q2. Neither Brainz, nor 6L would reveal if the two companies will continue their publishing partnership on future releases.

6waves Lolapps is doubling down on mobile publishing, announcing deals with 16 separate developers today. Future publishing partners could be guaranteed $100,000 in launch marketing.

“We’re approaching mobile to how we did social,”  says Jim Ying, 6waves Lolapps’ senior vice president of publishing. “We want to be a broad appeal publisher. As long as the game is great and there is audience out there for it, we’re happy to work with developers.”

The announcement also signals that 6waves Lolapps — one of the larger venture-backed players in the space with $32 million in funding from Insight Venture Partners and Nexon — still believes there is an opportunity to become top dog in mobile publishing. This comes in spite of both Zynga’s massive growth in the industry, and arguments that the mobile market is too fragmented for there to be a “Zynga of mobile.”

“Everyone likes to point at examples like Temple Run where the game just kind of virally explodes on its own,” says Ying. “There may still be the opportunity for that to happen, but we think that mobile is where social was two years ago. Everyone is going out with games, but no one has figured out what the right and steady way to grow a game is. It’s only a matter of time before consolidation happens.”

To have that happen, Ying says, a game needs to be great and be supported by marketing and distribution. That second component is what 6waves Lolapps brings to the table — assuming the mobile games industry heads toward consolidation. As for the first, he tells us the company’s plan for support developers of great content: the 6waves Lolapps product team will review all publishing submissions and choose games to award $100,000 in launch marketing. Ying also tells us that if 6waves Lolapps doesn’t make good on spending that money to launch the game, 6waves Lolapps will return publishing rights to the developer.

That last bit seems like a gesture of good faith to encourage developers that might’ve been scared off by the recent Triple Town dust up. According to legal documents filed in a lawsuit earlier this year, developer Spry Fox was allegedly in negotiations with 6waves Lolapps when the later abruptly pulled out and published a clone of the game — called Yeti Town — on iOS. Yeti Town’s developer, Escalation Studios, was later acquired by 6waves Lolapps for an undisclosed sum.

We asked 6waves Lolapps if they would consider future publishing partner acquisitions, and while the company did not rule it out, according to Ying, the company is not actively planning for any further acquisitions.

The full list of 6waves Lolapps publishing partnerships is:

• 42 Games, Hong Kong
• August Impression, China
• Big Blue Bubble, Canada
• Brainz Games, Colombia
• Harebrained Schemes, USA
• iLogos, Ukraine
• KOD Games, China
• Leiyou, China
• Mindstorm Studios, Pakistan
• Oxyful, China
• Shiny Shoe, USA
• Signus Labs, Russia
• Sixits, USA
• Winlight, Japan
• XIGANTIC/Playviews, USA
• xKey Media, USA

The majority of the games released through these partnerships will be available on both iOS and Android. Although most of the games will be out within the next two to three months, one game, August Impression’s Oh Monster is already available on iOS.

There are plenty of iOS developers working on games in their spare time, but few have had the same journey as Salt Lake City-based SixHourSoft.

A two-man company founded by Raytheon engineers Jason Taylor and Karl Zeibig, the pair still develops apps in their spare time. After using their 2010 Christmas vacation to develop a game called Breakout Mania, the company transitioned from making games inspired by Atari to having Atari publish their games as the official version.

SixHourSoft’s Atari-published Breakout: Boost has now seen over 2.5 million downloads, and the company recently released a paid version of the app, Breakout: Boost+.

Inside Mobile apps recently connected with Jason Taylor, one of SixHourSoft’s co-founders, and ask him what it was like to work with Atari.

Inside Mobile Apps: Why did you want to start making mobile apps?

Jason Taylor, co-founder, SixHourSoft: Well, it’s funny. Me and Karl [Karl Zeibig, SixHourSoft’s other co-founder] are actually in the security business. Almost exactly three years ago, I was reading an article on some guy working at Sun Microsystems had written a game called iShoot and made like, a million dollars and quit his job. We’d already worked on a couple of dummy games in Java and we though “we could do that.”

IMA: Why did you choose to develop games inspired by Atari’s classic titles?

Taylor: We all remember playing Space Invaders. I couldn’t have been very old — maybe eight or something, but my uncle got an Atari and we played Space Invaders for weeks. It’s just a good, classic genre of game — you’re in a space ship and you’re shooting aliens. I remember playing Super Breakout a ton and Arkanoid at the arcade. I’ve always just enjoyed those kinds of games.

IMA: Your most successful games before you worked with Atari were your Breakout-inspired Breakout Mania games for the iPhone and iPad. How did those games do?

Taylor: The iPad version, which was only out for a month, maybe had not quite a million downloads, but it was close. They were free downloads though, not paid. Everyone likes free right? It’s crazy what getting featured and getting on one of those top lists does. I don’t know for sure how many downloads [the iPhone version] had, but I think it was about the same, but it was over six months.

IMA: How did you start working with Atari?

Taylor: It was interesting! We released the iPad [version of Breakout Mania], and it was doing awesome. We were jumping for joy. And then we got an email from Apple saying there was a potential trademark issue [and] we should contact Atari. We were like “Crap! That’s not good”, but we talked to a few people and most of the advice we got was that we should work with [Atari].

We connected with Maria [Pacheco, Atari’s vice president of mobile games] and we were still a little apprehensive. Atari sounded like some huge thing to us, some corporate monstrosity. But believe it or not, it wasn’t that way. Right away, we got a call from Maria and we talked to them about working together and producing an official Breakout-branded version, which was just huge. To have the Atari name behind it with the trademark Breakout was awesome. We had taken [Breakout Mania] off the App Store when we got the letter and so we decided let’s re-work it, and re-launch it as the official Atari version.

IMA: What’s working with Atari been like?

Taylor: It took a little while to work out all the contract details and we’d never done anything like that before so it’s been a huge learning experience. Originally we were kind of worried because we’d never done this before or worked with a publisher.

From our point of view it was hopefully going to be a win-win situation. It’s so hard to get noticed [in the App Store], but with a name like Atari, people will know right away. The same with Breakout. That was a huge prospect from our point of view. People were going to see and play [our game].

IMA: Are you making more money now that you’re working with Atari?

Taylor:  I don’t know yet. We get a shared percentage of the game’s revenue, but it’s only been a month. I’m assuming it’s going to be more.

IMA: Was the plan always to do a paid version of Breakout Boost, or was that decided afterwards?

Taylor: It wasn’t always the plan, but the main thing is that you want to reach an audience that you can get some revenue from.

I think that there’s almost two different audiences on the App Store. The majority of people surf the free apps and will download them, and if they really like it, they’ll buy it. But, you also have an audience of people who look mostly at the paid apps, because they have a feeling that the only the paid ones are the good ones.

Sometimes that’s true, but it means those people don’t look at the free ones very often. I’ve read studies where app developers have released a free version of an app with in-app purchases and a paid one and they don’t detract from each other because they’re different audiences. After Christmas Atari said “why don’t you make a paid one, with some new levels?” We thought it was a great idea.

IMA: Do you have any plans to keep working with Atari?

Taylor: No plans at the moment, but obviously we think its a logical succession. We do plan to keep supporting Breakout, adding new level packs and content into the future, but hopefully it could lead to more. That’s another reason we thought it would be smart to work with Atari.  They have tons of games that could be remade.

IMA: Are you going to keep developing games on your own?

Taylor: Sure. We have some ideas, but we’ve been working so much on Breakout for the past while that we haven’t had time… We have a few ideas for games we’d want to make ourselves, but we also have some ideas for some ones that may be better done with Atari. I’d like to do both. Diversity is good.

IMA: Even though you’re coming to game development later in your career, you’ve been successful. How do you feel about that?

Taylor: It’s nice. The whole mobile platform has given a someone who’s not a full-fledged developer with 50 employees the ability to create apps. A normal person can develop something and put it in the store. Before, that would be almost impossible. It’s exciting and fun to not need a full game studio to be able to produce something.

Indie developer Spry Fox has filed suit against developer-publisher 6waves Lolapps in Seattle, WA district court, alleging that the company deliberately cloned Spry Fox’s Triple Town even as discussions continued between the two companies to publish the game on Facebook and iOS. Spry Fox is asking for an injunction against the clone called Yeti Town, damages up to $100,000 and any profits from 6waves Lolapps gained from Yeti Town in an amount no less than $500,000.

The complaint (downloadable here) lays out the timeline of events as follows:

• July 2011: 6waves – acting in conjunction with Lolapps prior to the merger – signs a non-disclosure agreement with Spry Fox as part of negotiations to publish the game on Facebook and possibly mobile.
• October 2011: Spry Fox self-publishes on Facebook, files with United States Copyright Office.
• December 2011: 6waves Lolapps breaks off negotiations with Spry Fox on the same day that Yeti Town is released in Apple’s App Store.

On its blog, Spry Fox explains that as part of the publishing negotiations, 6waves had access to Spry Fox’s private beta months before the game’s release (hence the NDA). The developer believed that negotiations were progressing while Yeti Town was being developed. This makes the cloning doubly egregious in Spry Fox’s eyes, and “we can not, in good conscience, ignore it.”

6waves Lolapps is sending out an emailed statement to press outlets seeking comment. We’ll publish as soon as the statement is made available. Note that given the timeline above, 6waves Lolapps could claim ignorance of cloning as Yeti Town was developed by Escalation Studios and released on iOS before 6waves Lolapps acquired Escalation. We observe that when Escalation’s own site was live before the acquisition, Yeti Town wasn’t at all advertised while all its other iOS games were.

To the larger point of cloning, we know that this is not the first — and probably not the last — time a developer’s game is ripped off by a studio looking to publish said developer’s game. Whether or not an NDA is signed often doesn’t matter as few developers are prepared to go to court over a clone, especially when it could put its resources toward developing a new game instead of paying a lawyer. In general, when fingers are pointed over too-similar games, it is the habit of publishers to settle the cases out of court.

UPDATE: 6waves Lolapps responds with the following statement.
“6waves Lolapps is disappointed that David Edery has chosen to file a lawsuit, and believes his claims are factually inaccurate. We respect others’ IP and did nothing to violate any contracts our team had in place. The copyright infringement claims are unjustified.”

This story originally appeared on our sister site, Inside Social Games.

Tapjoy, a company that helps mobile developers monetize their apps, says its reach on Android has now grown to 25 million monthly active users. It also now publishes more than 130 apps through an Android fund it launched earlier this year that was designed to bring popular iOS titles over to Google’s mobile platform.

Tapjoy launched the fund amid a tumultuous time for the company. It was shortly after Apple dealt a blow to the company’s iOS business by cracking down on offer walls.

So Tapjoy tried to speed up its diversification across multiple platforms by launching a $5 million fund to finance ports of promising iOS titles to Android. Developers in the fund get financing to move their titles to Android either through help from Tapjoy’s own staff or recommended contractors. They also get discounted or free distribution through Tapjoy’s network, which cross-promotes apps across other ones.

Since then, the company has signed games like MachineWorks Northwest’s 3D Hunting™: Alaskan Hunt, which has more than 1 million users. It also snagged Duke Nukem, and Overkill from the Czech Republic’s Craneballs Studios’, which has more than 900,000 users. The company also mentioned games from from CerebralFix, Sneaky Games, SkyVu, Bushi-Go, Galatea, Candella Software, Liv Games, Mention Mobile, Veraxon, Digital Harmony, PixoFactor and Stark Apps.

Now the company is boasting that it’s one of the largest publishers of mobile games to date — which would support another revenue stream for it beyond offers and incentivized video ads.