Zynga

Social games news roundup: Zynga, Zynga and more Zynga

by M. Dorn on July 21, 2012 · 0 comments

Zynga teams up with Wildlife Conservation Society — Zynga.org announced it is partnering with the Wildlife Conservation Society. The company is offering exclusive starter packs for Bubble Safari players, with 100 percent of the proceeds going to the WCS.

Mark Pincus doesn’t plan to change Zynga’s operating strategy — Zynga Founder and CEO Mark Pincus sat down to chat with GamesIndustry.biz. When asked about whether or not recent stockholder reactions would affect the company’s business strategy, he said,”It’s OK to be a little misunderstood; but what’s not OK is to change your strategy or your execution because you’re worried about what your industry or investors are going to think of you in the short term.”

Marvel: Avengers Alliance getting new characters — Disney Playdom’s Marvel: Avengers Alliance is getting an upgrade in the form of new playable characters. The new characters are from on the current Avengers vs. X-Men storyline and include Emma Frost, Rogue, Beast, Quicksilver, Gambit, Havok, Tigra and Valkyrie.

Tencent may bring some Chinese games to Western markets — Speaking at last week’s GamesBeat conference, Tencent Senior Executive Vice President David Wallerstein said the company is building up its Western presence, but still isn’t sure about importing games from China in order to do so: “We thought about it. We’ve looked at certain titles internally, and it’s been really tough. For us to bring a game over, it has to be the right game.”

Pangalore announces Knightly Adventure — Developer Pangalore announced it’s working on Knightly Adventure, a cross-platform social RPG. The game is scheduled to launch on mobile devices and Facebook sometime in August.

Zynga appoints Ellen Siminoff to board of directors — Ellen Siminoff, a founding executive at Yahoo and  CEO of Shmoop University, Inc., joined Zynga’s board of directors this week. Siminoff  is the first woman to join the company’s board and will also join the company’s audit committee.


Source: Inside Social Games

Zynga and EA: Dog chasing tail

by M. Dorn on June 26, 2012 · 0 comments

This week, we saw EA launch a citybuilder game that evokes memories of 2010′s CityVille from Zynga. Less than 24 hours later, Zynga announces a life simulation that looks an awful lot like EA’s 2011 hit The Sims Social. Has the copycat phase of Facebook games finally jumped the shark?

As we’ve detailed in our coverage, The Ville is a life sim where players build a dream house and interact with other players’ avatars — going so far as to have sex with them where possible. SimCity Social is a citybuilder where players construct a metropolis by placing buildings and increasing a population while also meeting its citizens’ needs (or ignoring them to cause pain and suffering).

In EA’s defense, SimCity Social was in development for nearly two years as a collaboration between EA Playfish and EA Beijing. Citybuilding games on social and mobile platforms are a much older concept in China compared to Facebook, so many of the gameplay mechanics were established as best practices long before CityVille popularized them in North America. Plus, the game draws most of its concept from the original SimCity games that first hit personal computers in 1989 — and many developers since then have used the game as a template for console, PC download, mobile and social games in the same genre.

In Zynga’s defense, The Ville is an example of what the company does best: taking a game concept proven by another company, adding a layer of polish and social features, and then feeding it to a massive network of dedicated users on Facebook and mobile that trust the Zynga brand. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Zynga is doing to Sims Social exactly what it’s done for the past two years. The developer has a proven business model that it sticks to, both to produce high-trafficking games on a tight development schedule and to please anxious stockholders that don’t necessarily understand the social games market.

Even so, both companies could be taking a misstep in recycling game concepts that may be past their prime on the Facebook platform. According to metrics recorded by our AppData traffic tracking service, CityVille peaked on Facebook three months after its December 2010 launch with over 101 million monthly active users and above 21 million daily active users. Though still one of Zynga’s top-earning games and the No. 4 top grossing game on Facebook’s App Center, no other citybuilding game on Facebook has ever found comparable traction or monetization that we’ve known of since CityVille. Likewise, The Sims Social peaked two months after its August 2011 launch at over 66 million MAU and above 11 million DAU. It’s now Facebook’s No. 12 top grossing game in App Center, but no other life sim has been able to follow it.

That doesn’t mean The Ville and SimCity Social won’t see early rises in users. Zynga has a proven track record of capturing lapsed fans of older non-Zynga games with fresh new ones (e.g. Hidden Chronicles winning over lapsed Gardens of Time players while Playdom’s Gardens of Time sequels can’t come near the traffic of the original). EA, meanwhile, can tap into the hardcore gamer market using the SimCity brand to build trust among the demographic, which may not otherwise deign to play a Facebook game (and may have missed out on CityVille). We expect to see both games spike in growth quickly — with Zynga’s dropping off coming rather quickly after six to eight weeks, while EA pushes out SimCity Social’s growth curve to three or four months. We do not expect SimCity Social to surpass CityVille’s peak traffic because the Facebook platform is a lot less amenable to rapid games growth as it used to be in 2010 and 2011. We do, however, think  it stands as much of a chance to unseat CityVille’s current position in AppData rankings as Sims Social once did. The Ville could pass Sims Social’s peak traffic in the short term because Zynga’s cross-platform network is incredibly powerful and fast-acting, but the game probably won’t enjoy as much long term support with no core franchise to support it.

A very big question mark comes from EA’s ability to connect its games to the rest of its franchises. This is the one thing Zynga simply cannot copy — and EA has the right idea in ramping up cross-platform compatibility between mobile and social titles titles. It also seems to be taking steps to integrate its Origin platform across all games regardless of platform — increasing the size of its user acquisition funnel and supporting online games with a solid infrastructure. But EA has also lost some momentum as the company undergoes corporate restructuring and struggles to transition its packaged goods-based business model to a digital one. If Zynga can grow its Zynga.com platform into a healthy self-sustaining ecosystem before EA finds its footing and accomplishes similar goals with its Origin platform, Zynga may come out ahead. But for now, with The Ville and SimCity Social being the big Facebook game releases of the summer, it looks more like the dog is chasing its tail.


Source: Inside Social Games

Zynga gets in on the match-3 game with Ruby Blast

by M. Dorn on June 19, 2012 · 0 comments

Zynga’s next arcade title, as our sources told us, is a match-3 game called Ruby Blast.

Ruby Blast is Zynga’s second social arcade game in as many quarters; the first being Bubble Safari, which is currently tied with Texas HoldEm Poker as the No. 1 game on Facebook by daily active users. Ruby Blast is the first collaboration between Zynga Seattle and Zynga China. We got to spend some time with the game in a hands-off demo during a recent interview with Design Director Jonathan Grant.

Ruby Blast stars an archaeologist named Ruby digging for magic gems in a tropical mine. The gameplay features classic match-3 mechanics: Players click on clusters of at least three matching gems, clearing them and causing the leftover columns to drop down. Bedrock at the bottom of the screen can be demolished by clicking on adjacent bomb gems, clearing all of the rocks delivers a time bonus.

Each match costs energy to play, and players can spend soft currency on up to three powerups to use during the round. When Ruby Blast launches, there will be four different powerups, but a fifth is  coming soon. Each powerup provides different types of play bonuses — like clearing large areas of gems or rearranging the game board — and can be triggered once players fill an energy bar on the right side of the screen, accomplished by clearing gems of the same color.

Grant says the game’s social mechanics are designed to foster competition with their friends. Player experience is earned by collecting rubies in the game, which are tracked via the game’s ruby leaderboard. Ruby Blast also has weekly tournament leaderboards, where players compete with their friends to earn high scores in the game. The weekly tournament leaderboards will clear each week and the top three scoring players earn in-game rewards like extra currency.

Match-3 games are certainly popular on Facebook right now, with Wooga’s Diamond Dash, PopCap’s Bejeweled Blitz and King.com’s Candy Crush Saga all appearing on June’s Top 25 Facebook games list. What could help Ruby Blast stand out from the match-3 crowd, though, is its planned synchronous multiplayer mode. Grant won’t say much more about this mode, but he says it’s planned to launch in the game before the end of the year.

Zynga’s also hoping that Ruby Blast’s visual style distinguishes it from other match-3 games on Facebook. Zynga developed the game in Flash 11, allowing the developer to take advantage of Stage 3D technology. As a result, all the in-game special effects will be rendered by the computer’s GPU and the dynamic graphics will hopefully be more appealing to players than the pre-rendered effects that are normally used in such titles.

Ruby Blast is will launch on both Zynga.com and Facebook sometime later this week.


Source: Inside Social Games

Loot Drop’s Pettington Park launches on Google+ under Zynga umbrella

by M. Dorn on June 14, 2012 · 0 comments

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

Zynga Shares Tumble, Traders Say Fewer People Gaming On Facebook

by M. Dorn on June 13, 2012 · 0 comments

Social gaming company Zynga, which opened in December at $ 10 per share, has seen its stock fall below $ 5 for the first time, as traders believe fewer people are playing games on Facebook.

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Source: AllFacebook

Zynga Bingo and Empires & Allies are this week’s gainer and loser among June’s Top 25 Facebook games

by M. Dorn on June 7, 2012 · 0 comments

Now that we’ve given the June Top 25 Facebook list time to breathe, it’s time to start looking at the traffic patterns of the games that appeared.

Counting down from No. 25 on the list, we examine the behavior of six or seven games each week. When we do this, we look at a game’s daily active users — as that’s the best way to measure an app’s core audience — and predict how these traffic changes will affect a title’s position on the next month’s Top 25 list.

For the first week of June, we’ll examine No. 25 through No. 19.

T23. ?????

Happy Elements’s Chinese language aquarium sim ????? (“Aquarium Open Heart Box”) managed to stay on our list, although it dropped five spots from May because its traffic declined by 200,000 DAU to 1.3 million. The 2009 game has bounced between 1.3 million and 1.6 million DAU, but the erratic nature of these changes makes it difficult to predict if ????? will gain enough traffic to move it up the chart in July. If the game stays at 1.3 million DAU, this may not be enough to keep it on our chart next month, depending on minimum DAU requirements.

T23. DoubleDown Casino

DoubleDown Interactive’s Doubledown Casino is up from last month’s 1.3 million DAU to 1.4 million. The game has been holding steady around 1.3 million DAU since December 2011, and peaked at 1.5 million in March. DoubleDown Casino’s growth slowed down after DoubleDown Interactive was acquired by International Game Technology in January; if traffic doesn’t begin to significantly improve and minimum DAU increases, it’s possible the game might be knocked off June’s list.

T23. Empires & Allies

Zynga’s Empires & Allies is staying at 1.3 million DAU, but it seems like only a matter of time before the game’s traffic takes another hit. Over the past month, the title has dropped by 200,000 DAU from 1.5 million to 1.3 million, in keeping with the average traffic loss since January. When the game launched a year ago, it quickly peaked at 7.7 million DAU and began losing users shortly after. If the traffic pattern holds true, Empires & Allies probably won’t appear on July’s Top 25 list.

22. Top Eleven – Be a Football Manager

Nordeus’s Top Eleven – Be a Football Manager continues its steady growth, jumping up another 100,000 DAU to hit a new peak of 1.5 million DAU. Since the game launched in May 2010, it’s been steadily gaining traffic, but the numbers began to dramatically increase in January. Since then, Top Eleven has gone from 1 million DAU to its current level; these increases were coming at a rate of approximately 100,000 DAU every six weeks, but the timetable looks to be speeding up as of late. If the game sees another gain before the end of June, it’s entirely possible it’ll move up a few spots for the July Top 25 list.

21. Marvel: Avengers Alliance

Disney Playdom’s Marvel: Avengers Alliance climbed four places from its May Top 25 debut, no doubt helped by the record-breaking success of “The Avengers” movie. Now that “The Avengers” isn’t quite dominating the box office any more, growth seems to be slowing down and the game’s actually down from its 1.6 million DAU peak to 1.5 million. This could be a temporary drop, though, as next month will see “The Amazing Spider-Man” hit theaters. No plans have been announced for Marvel: Avengers Alliance to include tie-in content to the upcoming film, but Spider-Man is a playable character in the game. This will likely generate a fair amount of user interest. Marvel: Avengers Alliance could go either way now, but if “The Amazing Spider-Man” does manage to increase traffic then the game will probably move up a few spots next month.

20. Bubble Island

Wooga’s Bubble Island looks like it’s starting to recover from last month’s traffic drop, having gone from 1.7 million DAU to 1.8 million. Launched in 2010, Bubble Island peaked in March with 2.8 million DAU but began a steep traffic slide afterwards for no obvious reason. The game seemed stable for most of May at 2 million DAU before suddenly dropping towards the end of the month. This is another title that could go either way next month. If Bubble Island is able to continue regaining its lost traffic it may bounce back up a couple of spots, but if it drops further it will likely be in the bottom five games on July’s list.

19. Zynga Bingo

Zynga Bingo launched on Facebook at the end of May and shot up the charts enough to debut on our Top 25 list. After jumping up this week to 2.2 million DAU, the game has returned to 1.8 million. It’s too early to discern a traffic pattern for Zynga Bingo, but the developer’s games tend to reach a spot within the top 15 titles on Facebook, and social casino games have a habit of maintaining traffic longer than arcade titles on the social network. Expect Zynga Bingo to jump up by at least a few more spots next month.

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for next week’s continuation of our Top 25 gainers and losers, when we look at No. 18 through No. 13 on the list.


Source: Inside Social Games

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