The Sims Social Message Board

#zyngavsea EA and Zynga have been tied up in mutual lawsuits over their Facebook games The Sims Social and The Ville since last year, but All Things Digital is reporting that today both cases were dismissed in California court. The companies issued the statement that "EA and Zynga have resolved their respective claims and have reached a settlement of their litigation in the Northern District of California." I would hazard a guess that some simoleons changed hands. More »

#gamescom Last week we had Van Helsim and Lady Grey around to help us out in The Sims Social. Unfortunately, this week, we're left to fend for ourselves. And to top it off, we seem to have attracted some unwanted attention. Apparently, Edward Sullen has forged papers claiming he's the heir to the Midnight Grove castle outside of Littlehaven. More »

#zynga Zynga has aggressively responded to EA's lengthy copyright lawsuit claiming that Zynga's The Ville ripped off EA's own The Sims Social. More »

#lawsuits This little exchange yesterday on Twitter says a lot about why Electronic Arts is suing the Facebook gaming giant Zynga, and how the publishing giant really sees itself in doing so. More »

#theville This week Zynga released its The Sims Social clone The Ville on Facebook. This morning I started up the game with the intention of doing some quick impressions. I logged into Facebook, got to the character creation screen... More »

John Earner, London vice president and general manager of EA's social-games subsidary, Playfish, has left to join venture capital Accel Partners. Playfish runs EA's Facebook offerings, including The Sims Social, FIFA Superstars and Restaurant City, all of which Earner oversaw development of. Earner will serve as an entrepreneur in residence at Accel, one of Playfish's investors.

Playfish lost two of its co-founders in March 2011 -- although both still serve as consultants to EA -- and EA Interactive's Barry Cottle was picked up by Zynga earlier this month.

You'll excuse our baffled aghast, but we just saw Facebook's most played games of 2011 list and were mesmerized by this list of stuff we've never heard of. Also, that Disney-owned Playdom sits at the top of the list with Gardens of Time, while Zynga's myriad "Ville" offerings, "... with Friends" games, Empires & Allies, and Adventure World were instead scattered throughout the bottom nine.

Also of note, EA's The Sims Social edged out Zynga as well for the number two spot, though neither Playdom nor EA could compare to Zynga's four entires on the top 10. According to Facebook, the list is put together by "looking at the top games on Facebook with more than 100,000 monthly active users and giving priority to those games with the highest user satisfaction scores." Thusly, it stands to reason that Facebook users are quite satisfied with their Gardens of Time experiences.

EA's social-interaction-simulator-within-a-social-interaction-simulator The Sims Social has surpassed casual-gaming monolith Farmville in daily active users, according to Gamasutra. So far this month, The Sims Social has seen an average of 9.3 million active users per day, which play three-ish times a day in 15 to 20 minute increments.

Farmville's figures hover slightly lower at a still-bewildering 8.1 million, but Zynga's Cityville still holds the top slot with 13.9 million active users per day. The only Facebook app that sees more traffic than Cityville is Windows Messanger Live, which was a surprisingly explicit text-based role-playing game, last time we checked. What? Oh... oh.

#thesims EA's designated Zynga-killer, The Sims Social just toppled FarmVille from its No. 2 perch in "daily active users," the key stat describing a Facebook app's popularity, according to app-watching site AppData. More »

EA "officially" launched The Sims Social on Facebook yesterday, but it's been in open beta since August 9. That enabled EA to achieve the seemingly impossible task of having almost 5 million "monthly active users" listed on the game's release date. Nice trick!

In addition to that achievement, EA is launching its creepy, creepy game bolstered by a Gamescom award. The shadowy cabal of "independent experts" awarded The Sims Social with its "best browser game" award. We suppose there wasn't a "best browser game with which to proposition your Facebook friends" award.

#thesims I'm not much for Facebook games; I've played FarmVille a bit, but it's never quite gotten its hooks into me. Part of the reason for is that most of my friends didn't play either, and so I've never felt the social pressure that contributes to the game's addictiveness. You know: "Dang, David's barn is so sweet. I wish I had a sweet barn like that." More »

#rumor Some URL sleuthing by the domain-watching site Fusible revealed that the domain familyville.com has changed hands and hosts in a manner similar to URLs for Zynga properties like Cityville. More »

Few E3 moments provided bone-chilling waves of creepiness quite like the announcement trailer for The Sims Social during EA's press conference. You can now watch the Facebook title's first look after the jump -- just get ready to get really, really uncomfortable.

Play with lols and OMGs in this social Sims experience.

The Sims expand with their new focus on social media as seen at the EA Press Conference of E3 2011.