#manners
Nobody likes a Facebook spammer. You know, those people who you went to high school with but haven't talked to in ten years who seem to do nothing but water their FarmVille crops and maintain their CityVille cities. They're the worst! More »
FarmVille: Just the name likely conjures up some vivid thoughts and opinions in the minds of gamers everywhere. As the flagship casual social game for both Facebook and Zynga, FarmVille can't help be a lightning rod for debates about gaming's audiences, game design, and the role that video games can and do play in our daily lives. Time labeled the game one of the "fifty worst inventions" of all time, but that hasn't stopped over 80 million people from logging on and doing some cow and crop clicking.
And now Zynga (which itself has attracted plenty of controversy recently) is going to try and recreate the game's success with a brand new version called, simply, FarmVille 2. Director of Design Wright Bagwell sat down to show Joystiq what the future of FarmVille's crops and farm animals looks like, how the game will reach out (but not too far) towards a more hardcore audience, and also how Zynga has plans to take the world's most popular and oft-hated casual and social game and make it even more casual and social.
#zynga
Zynga's stock has gone down, and gone down hard, plunging to $2.95 a share since late July, a drop that spawned a shareholder lawsuit and gave a top executive the heave-ho. Sensing that some employees might follow him out the door willingly, Zynga took the unusual step of offering free stock to everyone, Bloomberg reports. More »
#zynga
The turmoil swirling around social gaming giant Zynga just keep bigger and bigger. An epic stock price drop, EA suing them for copyright infringement and a high-profile executive exit have all made the last few weeks brutal for anyone with a stake in the company. If you're a hater of the kind of games that the company's cranked out in recent years, then you might be enjoying their woes. But, according to one nameless Zynga employee, it's been hellish of late. More »
#fifa
Everyone's got some genres they're not really into. For me, it's always been puzzle games and sport games. Puzzle games are good at making me feel frustrated if not stupid. Not a fan! And sports games, well, I usually figure I'd rather actually play the sport than watch it. More »
#zynga
Bad news just got worse for the makers of FarmVille. It looks like a whole lot of lawyers are about to pounce on one of gaming's biggest companies. More »
#zynga
Zynga CEO Mark Pincus dumped $200 million worth of stock this past April, three months before his company's stock suddenly tanked last night, according to a new report. More »
Zynga is working on Farmville 2, a follow-up to its most successful title of all time, Farmville, the company announced at Zynga Unleashed today. Farmville 2 is Zynga's first 3D game, a short teaser demonstrated.
#theville
Zynga has had a lot of success creating various types of what they refer to as "The Ville Genre." CastleVille, CityVille, FrontierVille, and the monster that started it all, FarmVille. More »
#breaking
At the close of the Zynga Unleashed press event in San Francisco, Zynga boss Mark Pincus left us with a trailer for FarmVille 2, with no release date, only a "coming soon" date. More »
#farmville
Zynga's next big Facebook game is an improved version of FarmVille currently beta testing under the name Big Harvest, reports TechCrunch. Their source says the game is being tested out in the Phillippines. More »
#farmville
Social gaming giant Zynga, the team behind FarmVille, is taking a French developer to court because it released a game called PyramidVille. More »
According to the resume of advertising man Alex Harvey, over the course of the past year he "Contributed concepts and copy for several new business presentations, including the successful Malibu Black and FarmVille 2 pitches". [Alex Harvey, via superannuation] More »
#zynga
The worst we normally get from irate psycopaths are angry/entertaining emails. For Zynga boss Mark Pincus, though, things are a lot more serious, to the point where he needs an absurd amount of security to ensure the safety of his family. More »
#zynga
Barely three months after the company's initial public offering are several Zynga insiders looking to get rich by selling off a hunk of their stock. That includes founder Mark Pincus, who will offer a wad of shares valued at more than $200 million. More »
We've already heard from Zynga how the company plans expand its scope a little bit from its very popular Facebook-only titles. Zynga founder Mark Pincus says in an interview with Om Malik that its policy extends to current tech being built to share saves across the cloud. "In other words, you can play a game on a computer and call it up on Xbox," Pincus says as an example, "and you resume from the point you left off, except the game play will now be customized for the Xbox controller." Game information will be shared, but the experience will be different.
That's already the case for Zynga's games on iOS -- they have a very different feel when played on mobile devices, and have even found different audiences. "Words for Friends doesn't do as well on Facebook as it does on the iPhone," for instance, "because they are a mobile first experience. Our poker game does well on the mobile as well."
This doesn't mean that Pincus is saying Zynga's working on Xbox ports of its titles. Instead, the company is building out the tech right now to extend these games out in various forms to even more platforms in the future.
#humor
This is Jason Baily, the CEO of East Side Games, with a mic in hand and some beef with Zynga, makers of Facebook games like Farmville. The world doesn't have much of it, but it could really do with more video game stand-up comedy. More »
Whoever said money can't buy friends? It certainly wasn't Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose company today filed for its initial public offering with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. According to the filing, Facebook seeks to raise $5 billion if and when the company goes public -- the filing is still pending approval from the SEC.
Also revealed in the filing was news that the social platforms biggest game developer, Zynga, accounts for "approximately 12 percent" of Facebook's revenue. Zynga had its own IPO late last year, which sought to raise $1 billion in going public.
That 12 percent is enough to have Zuckerberg and co. worried about going public, as the filing notes, "If the use of Zynga games on our Platform declines, if Zynga launches games on or migrates games to competing platforms, or if we fail to maintain good relations with Zynga, we may lose Zynga as a significant Platform developer and our financial results may be adversely affected." So, uh, here's hoping Google+ doesn't get into games, eh?
Last week, while game developers were howling that Zynga—creators of FarmVille—were the makers of a game called Dream Heights that maybe ripped off another hit game, Zynga didn't want to talk about it. More »
#zynga
Do you like playing Zynga's Facebook games? There's something wrong with you. Not because you enjoy them, what you do in your spare time is your business. Your problem comes in thinking they're games. More »
According to one financial analyst, Facebook gaming phenom Zynga is spending a massive $300 to acquire each new customer, who then goes on to give the company just $150 in return purchases...
Zynga's initial public offering (IPO) didn't exactly go swimmingly. It required assistance on its first day, and the stock currently sits below the initial $10 price. Speaking with the Wall Street Journal, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus tried to smooth over feelings about the overhyped and underperforming stock.
"Our goals were we want to raise a billion dollars. Through going public, we wanted to add some more great long-term investors to the company. All of that was successful," Pincus said, as the WSJ pointed out that the stock dipped on its first day of trading. "I don't blame anybody because from our standpoint, we think it was successful. It was many times larger than the other tech IPOs that had just happened recently. We think we're now well positioned to move forward in the future."
In discussing Zynga's allegedly harsh corporate culture, Pincus says the attrition rate for the company is a little over 3 percent, which he claims is lower than Silicon Valley's 14 percent average.
One thing that hasn't slowed is Zynga's company and executive acquisition train, which recently picked up EA Interactive's former head, Barry Cottle, who joins Zynga as executive VP of business and corporate development.
