Social Gaming Roundup: Playfish and Playdom Expand in SF, and more

German app developer MegaZebra gets funding to build social games for Europe -- The company raised funding in the "six digits," it says, to continue building games in different European languages. It has already launched eight titles, mostly Facebook versions of well-known types of games; Zebra Mahjong, for example, already has nearly 150,000 monthly active users. Funding comes from Germany-based Kizoo Technology Ventures. Playfish opens studio in San Francisco -- It already has two studios in Europe and one in China, so the new one is intended in part to attract local gaming and tech talent. The company will be expanding its small, existing office in downtown to accommodate the new hires. "The group will be working closely with the global Playfish team of artists, coders, designers and product managers in other parts of the world," according to the company blog post. Aaaand, Playdom expands up to San Francisco -- Not to be confused with the last item, Mountain View-based Playdom is opening up a new office an hour north on the peninsula, in San Francisco's tech-heavy SOMA district. The company has expanded from 60 to 110 employees in the last two months. The new, 10,000-foot space is intended to help it recruit new SF-based employees, as well as let current employees based up north have a shorter commute. Offerpal launches new testing tools -- For games with virtual goods, developers may not always price their currencies right, meaning they either cause demand by oversupply or they lose out on potential revenue due to undersupply. While other tools already exist on the market to optimize currencies, Offerpal is getting into the mix. It's launching its own, called the "Multivariate Testing" platform. It lets you do A/B or A/B/C testing for variables like revenue per user based on changes that developers make to the currency. More on the company blog post. For developers who buy Facebook ads: A new ad manager tool -- We heard about this in August, and now it's starting to get rolled out to a few advertisers. The new ad manager tool includes: multi-ad management, a manager-wide campaign selection area, and new navigation, as AllFacebook discovered. We also previously heard that Facebook is also working on a new tool for advertisers, where it will allow the bulk uploads of many ads at once. Right now, advertisers have to manually creating them in the standard campaign manager or through third party scripts. That doesn't appear to live yet. [San Francisco skyline via Franco Folini.]

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Social Gaming Roundup: Playfish and Playdom Expand in SF, and more

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