Developer Loot Drop ‘s new game Pettington Park is now available to play on Google+, arriving on the social network under Zynga’s publishing banner.
Pettington Park’s look and mechanics bear a resemblance to what Loot Drop originally planned for Cloudforest Expedition before the title was shelved by RockYou. Players assume the role of a dog or cat who is part of a larger force at war for control of a park. These characters are tasked with decorating a park with buildings, arcade cabinets and courts; the latter items provide soft currency rewards via their minigames based on popular genres like pachinko, tennis and match-3. In order to build these structures, players also have to harvest resources and fend off dogs hostile dogs/cats invading their territory.
There’s also a light player-versus-player element in the game that maps to its cats and dogs theme. Everything players do is assigned a point score and counted as part of an overall team score; every Wednesday, the total scores are compared and a winner is declared. No details have been revealed about what kind of bonus — if any — members of the winning team will receive.
Pettington Park marks two firsts for Loot Drop: Its first time creating a game for Google+ and its first time working with Zynga. A spokesperson from Zynga said the company had no comment about details of the relationship. Zynga has announced publishing deals for its own platform with Playdemic, Rebellion and Konami as well as with Sava Transmedia, Mob Science and Row Sham Bow. So far, Row Sham Bow is the only game to see the benefit of Zynga’s cross-promotion bar on Facebook. None of the developers currently have games on Zynga.com.
The game’s launch on Google+ seems a little odd; Zynga only has three of its own games on the platform so far and hasn’t made any other investments in it that we know of. Zynga’s interest seems especially curious given that fellow Google+ Games launch partner wooga is leaving the social network. Several developers we’ve spoken to over the past few months have expressed reluctance to join Google+ because there just aren’t enough users or social features for their taste yet. It’s also been nearly a year since Google+ launched its games platform, and there still haven’t been any publicly-reported traffic for its social games channel or custom social features that set it apart from Facebook. Taking all of that into account, it could be that Zynga is using Google+ as a proving ground for Pettington Park before it commits the resources for a larger launch.
As for developer Loot Drop, Pettington Park is its first ever Google+ game and its second game launch in as many months. May marked the first official launch for Loot Drop under publisher Ubisoft with Facebook game Ghost Recon Commander, a tie-in title that shares unlockable content with console game Ghost Recon: Future Soldier. Ghost Recon Commander has only been live for a little over weeks and has yet to gain much traction on Facebook. The title was featured prominently, however, at Facebook’s App Center launch last week, which could give the game a lift for the month. On for future games, Loot Drop seems to be committed to the publisher-developer relationship despite the fallout from RockYou and Cloudforest Expedition last year; that game has yet to find a publisher after being shelved. Note that Cloudforest’s early concept drawings hint that the game had an awful lot in common with Zynga’s Adventure World.
Source: Inside Social Games
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