EA’s The Sims Social has stolen a lot of players from Zynga

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published by kontiki on Thu, 10/13/2011 - 01:07

Electronic Arts came out of nowhere when it launched The Sims Social on Facebook. The social game that simulates human life took off like wildfire, surpassing Zynga’s big games such as FarmVille and closing in on Zynga’s most popular game, CityVille. Now Raptr, the social network for gamers, has revealed some interesting data about just who is playing The Sims Social. As suspected, many of the players came from Zynga.

The majority of The Sims Social’s user base are Zynga players, according to data collected from Raptr’s 10 million people on its gamer social network. EA’s own social games and The Sims 3 accounted for only 15 percent of the total players of The Sims Social. Zynga players, on the other hand. account for 50 percent of all of The Sims Social players. About 30 percent came from other social games, and 5 percent came from World of WarCraft.

Zynga unveils Zynga Direct, its new way of distributing games

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published by kontiki on Wed, 10/12/2011 - 15:54


Social gaming company Zynga today unveiled Zynga Direct, its new online distribution service. It will give Zynga a way to deliver its games to players on computers or mobile devices, without having to go through Facebook.

“It’s a platform for a direct relationship with consumers whether on the web, or on mobile, to give you a whole sandbox and create socialness about the games and not just within the games,” Zynga chief executive Mark Pincus said today at the company’s Unleashed event in San Francisco.

Non-Facebook social games to hit $5.6B in revenue by 2014

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published by kontiki on Tue, 10/11/2011 - 17:18

Facebook isn’t the only platform where social games are booming. Revenue from non-Facebook social games is expected to grow from the current amount of $3.2 billion to $5.6 billion by 2014, according to estimates released today by social app platform Viximo and SuperData Research.

Top 25 Facebook Games for October 2011

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published by kontiki on Tue, 10/11/2011 - 17:16

Auckland developer Outsmart scores $1.8 million (by Leigh Harris)

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published by Marina on Mon, 10/03/2011 - 04:28

Gameplanet is reporting that Outsmart, developer of browser-based Small Worlds, has received NZD$1.8 million in government funding.

Small Worlds, originally launched in 2008, is a 3D environment played inside your browser which presents content from web and media sources, online games and more.

Outsmart is promising that the funding will be used to double its internal staff from 20 to 40, and increase the scalability of the service.

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Unite 11: Unity Aggressively Upgrades Its Engine For A Flexible Future (by Christian Nutt)

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published by Marina on Mon, 10/03/2011 - 04:27

[At the Gamasutra-attended Unite 11 conference, Unity execs outlined major upgrades to the development tool to ensure its relevance to big and small teams across a variety of platforms, and Gamasutra analyzes these moves. ]

If there were two threads running through the Unite 11 keynote today in San Francisco, it's these. The engine provider is gunning to scale up the quality of the games that can be created with the tool by including new tools to support bigger, more elaborate titles at better performance on today's mobile devices.

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Unity: Piracy Driving Huge Growth In Asian Regions (by Mike Rose)

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published by Marina on Mon, 10/03/2011 - 04:26

Unity Technologies said this week that its revenue intake is up 258.7 percent year-on-year in the Pan-Asia region, noting that piracy is helping to drive demand for the Unity tools.

Speaking to Edge during Unite 11 in San Francisco, Unity general manager of Asia John Goodale explained revenue growth in the region has been helped along by piracy of the software.

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Zynga Continues Google+ Push With CityVille Release (by Mike Rose)

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published by Marina on Mon, 10/03/2011 - 04:25

Zynga today brought its popular city-building social game CityVille to the Google+ network, marking the second game to be released on the service from the social gaming giant.

Social games for Google+ originally launched back in August with 16 titles available, including Zynga Poker, Rovio's Angry Birds and PopCap's Bejeweled Blitz.

Now Zynga has followed its poker title up with another of its popular Facebook apps. When CityVille originally launched on Facebook last year, it saw over 290,000 users in the first 24 hours.

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The Future of Unity: 3.5 and Beyond (by Dan Miller-Schroeder)

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published by Marina on Mon, 10/03/2011 - 04:24

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - Unity announced a major set of feature updates for their game engine this morning at their Unite conference. They also gave some numbers for their popular Asset Store and announced their "AAA Initiative" aimed at providing support for larger, high-quality game projects. For developers looking to ramp up on this tool, design3 hosts over 40 hours of Unity training videos.

New Features

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OpenSim drops barrier to devs (By Maria Korolov)

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published by Marina on Mon, 10/03/2011 - 04:22

Viewer developers are no longer restricted from working on OpenSim server code, OpenSim core developer and Overte Foundation president Justin Clark-Casey announced Friday.

Previously, viewer developers had to wait six months after working on viewer code before they could work on OpenSim.

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