Happy Pets: Encourage the shy pet in your room for a new Shadow Pet

Happy Pets Shadow Pets and Triceratops
Happy Pets creator Crowdstar just announced that the shy pet hiding in your room is actually an exclusive shadow pet, waiting for encouragement to reveal itself as one of seven Shadow Pets. Simply find the pet hiding in a picnic basket in your room and click on it to ask your friends for their blessing.

Check behind the cut for a list of what might be in your picnic basket.
Happy Pets Shy Pet Help Screen

Receive seven blessings and the scaredy Shadow Pet will finally reveal itself to be one of these seven pets:


    Shadow Hamster
    Shadow Parrot
    Shadow Bunny
    Shadow Guinea Pig
    Shadow Ferret
    Exclusive Shy Triceratops


Oddly enough, the Shy Triceratops doesn't seem to be much different from the normal one, according to the posting on the Happy Pets fan page. Let's hope this was just an error in posting the image and not an in-game bug. But hey, at least waiting for a Shy Triceratops is better than paying up for a Random Triceratops.

Social City creator Playdom accepts Facebook Credits exclusively across all games

Just like that, the final domino falls. Playdom is the next company to submit to Facebook's demands for social game and app developers to accept only its virtual currency. As of today, Playdom will only be accepting Facebook Credits as its virtual currency. Fortunately, the company will, of course, still accept credit and debit cards as well as PayPal payments.

If this deal is anything like Facebook's previous three, we imagine Playdom will have to deposit 30 percent of all Facebook Credits sales into the social network's bank account. It also bears mentioning that the unique currencies to Playdom's games like City Bucks in Social City and Campus Cash in ESPNU College Town aren't going anywhere; it's the third-party payment methods that are officially kaput. And thankfully the free offers from Playdom's ad partners for in-game money don't seem to be going anywhere either.

This isn't the first time Facebook has coerced social game companies into using its new currency, which is now available at GameStop and Radio Shack in addition to nearly all major department stores. With CrowdStar the first to go and later Zynga giving in, it was only a matter of time before EA and Playfish accepted the offer too. Finally for Facebook, the company will be reeling in 30 percent of the top four social gaming companies' profits via Facebook Credits. Let that one sink in for a while and you'll understand why Zynga might want out.

It Girl maker CrowdStar looks beyond Facebook for 1 billion players

TechCrunch reports that, as part of its plan to diversify beyond Facebook, CrowdStar will launch It Girl (and Top Girl for iOS) franchise in Asia across Japan, Korea and China. Starting with NHN Japan, the company plans to introduce both It Girl and Top Girl to five Asian social networks in Q4 (October through December) alone. According to TechCrunch, Top Girl has already been downloaded from the App Store 4 million times.