Deny it all you want, but tons of your Facebook friends tap into the world of Zynga's "ville" games every day. Whether they're asking you to join them for rewards, or hiding their every movement by deleting errant status updates, the games enjoy an undeni...
Deny it all you want, but tons of your Facebook friends tap into the world of Zynga's "ville" games every day. Whether they're asking you to join them for rewards, or hiding their every movement by deleting errant status updates, the games enjoy an undeniably huge-and-growing player base. If you've ...
#pioneertrail
Pioneer Trail is the brand-new, massive sequel to FrontierVille, one of the most popular games on Facebook. It's got a few twists that are going to throw any FrontierVille fan for a loop. ...
#pioneertrail
Pioneer Trail is the brand-new, massive sequel to FrontierVille, one of the most popular games on Facebook. It's got a few twists that are going to throw any FrontierVille fan for a loop. More »
Back in March, the ridiculously named pair of Lady Gaga and Zynga formed a union to donate funds for Japanese disaster relief; a goal they accomplished to the tune of $3 million. Yesterday, they announced a new partnership to raise money for Lady Gaga ...
Back in March, the ridiculously named pair of Lady Gaga and Zynga formed a union to donate funds for Japanese disaster relief; a goal they accomplished to the tune of $3 million. Yesterday, they announced a new partnership to raise money for Lady Gaga and Zynga, which entails the May 17 opening of "GagaVille" -- a neighboring region to FarmVille that features unicorns, crystals and an early chance to listen to unreleased tracks from the stylish songstylist's upcoming album, "Born this Way."
Other promotions include a free download voucher for the album included with every $25 Zynga gift card sold at Best Buy, a Words with Friends contest to snag Gaga merch, and a handful of Gaga-themed items added to the RewardVille storefront. Now, if you don't mind, we're going to print off this article, throw it in a time capsule and bury it in our yard, because in 50 years we're pretty sure most of the words we've used so far are going to be hilariously nonsensical.
The day time soap opera is dying. Perhaps the most clear and recent evidence of its demise is the impending cancellation of long-running soaps All My Children and One Life To Live, shows that have been on the air for more than 40 years. Who...
The day time soap opera is dying. Perhaps the most clear and recent evidence of its demise is the impending cancellation of long-running soaps All My Children and One Life To Live, shows that have been on the air for more than 40 years. Who's responsible? Is it Farmville? More »
During a presentation at SXSW Interactive yesterday, Zynga chief designer Brian Reynolds shared an emergent game feature that the team discovered when making Frontierville, one designed to appeal to juvenility.
The "tutorial" mission in Frontierville i...
During a presentation at SXSW Interactive yesterday, Zynga chief designer Brian Reynolds shared an emergent game feature that the team discovered when making Frontierville, one designed to appeal to juvenility.
The "tutorial" mission in Frontierville involves finding a lost sheep and bringing it back, he explained. Because it's a Facebook game, you get the option to post when you've done so, which shares a little blurb about your achievement and a picture of a cartoony character struggling to pull a stubborn sheep. But that's not what players' friends saw.
"What is she doing to that sheep?" was a common refrain from people who saw that post, Reynolds said. "The look on the sheep's face kind of sells it." But this wasn't a problem, as it turned out. That pseudo-scandalous sheep image "has our highest post rate and our highest clickthrough rate," he explained, with many more replies to those posts creating increased visibility, and thus inadvertently promoting Frontierville. And so Zynga went forward with innuendo-laden status messages, more examples of which you can see above.
At the end of the presentation, Reynolds answered a question about his reaction to Satoru Iwata's GDC keynote, during which Iwata pretty clearly denounced social and mobile games in general. "I don't understand why they'd feel threatened," he said, suggesting that social games and console games can coexist. "Maybe that person thinks a lot about console games," but not about mobile games.
#pc
There was a time when Brian Reynolds was best known for his work on epic computer strategy games like Civilization II, Rise of Nations and Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. But nowadays he's the poster chil...
#pc
There was a time when Brian Reynolds was best known for his work on epic computer strategy games like Civilization II, Rise of Nations and Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. But nowadays he's the poster child for the casualfication of gaming. More »
#facebook
The people who make the games you either love or love to hate on Facebook have a new one coming out in a few weeks. It's called CityVille, which looks like Sim City without the tornadoes or FarmV...
#facebook
The people who make the games you either love or love to hate on Facebook have a new one coming out in a few weeks. It's called CityVille, which looks like Sim City without the tornadoes or FarmVille with skyscrapers. More »
#zynga
While the majority of U.S. states don't legally recognize same-sex marriage, the wilds of of Zynga's Frontierville have no need for laws, spawning 650,000 boy-boy, girl-girl unions. More »
...
#zynga
While the majority of U.S. states don't legally recognize same-sex marriage, the wilds of of Zynga's Frontierville have no need for laws, spawning 650,000 boy-boy, girl-girl unions. More »
#badmomma
An hour after hosing blood off the street and ordering a bystander away from the guy her twins had beaten into a seizure, according to cops, a Staten Island mom was back in Frontierville in searc...
#badmomma
An hour after hosing blood off the street and ordering a bystander away from the guy her twins had beaten into a seizure, according to cops, a Staten Island mom was back in Frontierville in search of tools and hardware. More »
Google has "secretly" invested an undisclosed amount of money (estimated to be between $100 million and $200 million) in virtual Ville creator Zynga Games, TechCrunch claims. Why would one highly profitable company dump such a large amount of duckets int...
Google has "secretly" invested an undisclosed amount of money (estimated to be between $100 million and $200 million) in virtual Ville creator Zynga Games, TechCrunch claims. Why would one highly profitable company dump such a large amount of duckets into another successful company's coffers? TechCrunch believes that it's part of a strategy to partner with Zynga Games in the forthcoming launch of something called "Google Games."
The service is said to use Google logins and will presumably run the Zynga titles popularized by Facebook, albeit with a different payment system (allegedly Google Checkout rather than PayPal). Though these claims are still unsubstantiated -- neither Google nor Zynga have officially confirmed the report -- a recent Google job listing for a "Project Management Leader, games" seems to lend the idea some credence.
Zynga recently learned a very profitable lesson from the launch of its newest casual networking game -- people aren't obsessed with Farms, as it turns out. What they can't get enough of are Villes. The player base for Frontierville, a browser-based famil...
Zynga recently learned a very profitable lesson from the launch of its newest casual networking game -- people aren't obsessed with Farms, as it turns out. What they can't get enough of are Villes. The player base for Frontierville, a browser-based family-raising (and, yes, farming) sim set in the Wild West, is evidence of this assertion -- Zynga emailed us earlier today, announcing the game has racked up over 5 million "daily active users" since going live June 9.
Now that we know the keyword capable of attracting millions of potential consumers, we're wondering how we can cash in on its potential. We know we just went through a pretty major relaunch, but we're wondering if its too late to rebrand our humble news site as 'Stiqville. We'll talk to the people upstairs.
Zynga's newest social game FrontierVille, cousin of FarmVille, reaches 5,000,000 player mark. Facebook users show they never tire of new ways to wall spam. More »
Zynga's newest social game FrontierVille, cousin of FarmVille, reaches 5,000,000 player mark. Facebook users show they never tire of new ways to wall spam. More »
