zynga正式收购Challenge Games公司继续扩张社交游戏业务，Challenge Games位于德克萨斯州的奥斯汀市，具体收购条款并没有对外公布。至此，zynga已经在奥斯汀、旧金山（总部）、巴尔第摩、洛杉矶、印度班加罗尔和中国北京分别设立办公室。据称该收购金额最少也要2050万美元。Challenge Games曾两轮获得Sequoia Capital, Globespan Capital Partners和其他风险资本1450万美元的投资。

Zynga-Logo

Zynga has acquired Challenge Games, a casual games maker, and is renaming the studio to Zynga Austin.  Zynga will add Zynga Austin to their existing offices in San Francisco, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Bangalore and Beijing.  Challenge Games is best known for Warstorm, a card game and Ponzi, a tycoon game.  Zynga will continue to grow the office, which currently has 35 employees and will also import their games into the growing Zynga catalogue.

法国育碧软件公司在facebook推出酿酒游戏葡萄酒庄,这可能是农场类游戏衍生出来的很有情调的首款葡萄酒酿制游戏。该游戏名称为Vineyard Country（葡萄酒庄），在这里你可以种植葡萄，但所有的一切不是为了挣钱，而是为了让人愉悦的上好葡萄酒。该游戏拥有相当精妙的酿制过程，不仅仅是游戏战略，更重要的是加入你个人的一些观点喜好，相当吸引人。

It may have been the first wine-based derivative of the farming genre, but now Metaplace My Vineyard has company — Ubisoft.The large game developer has launched a new title called Vineyard Country, and like so many of its kind, this farm-like sim has you planting crops until the day is done; only this time, it’s not for ears of corn, but for some delightful aged wine.The app has a wonderful wine-making mechanic that not only has strategy and a bit of personalization behind it, but fantastic, decorative, and almost city-building-like features coupled with a sea of social elements that desperately strugge against some obtrusive optimization issues.

社交网络游戏正在形成一个数十亿美元产值的产业链，并且它的增长趋势是爆炸性的。现在的社交游戏一般是基于某些受欢迎的平台而使玩家在玩游戏的时候可以互相交流。它有自己严格的组织程序可以保证游戏玩家保留自己独立的空间的同时还可以和其他的玩家在一定的规则下进行互动交流，社交游戏的特征必定是多人互动的。

And it is interesting to know who is playing social games. A recent survey found that 55% of social gamers are female and 45% are male. Females are more avid gamers, too; 38% of females said they play multiple times a day, but just 29% males said the same. Women are more likely to play with people they know (68% vs. 56% for males), and men are more likely to play with strangers (41% vs. 33%) than women are.But what are social games? Why are they growing so rapidly? Nick O’Neill, in an article in socialtimes.com, looks at social games in general. He thinks that social games may be the next big thing on social networks. And his reasoning for this is that social games different from other games. He identifies what factors he believes differentiate social games from the others。

facebook发布了针对开发者的最新公告，公告要求所有开发者必须通过facebook的标准账号核对程序才能够再次上传他们的应用程序，不管这些程序属于什么类型都需要开发者账号率先验证才能发布到facebook平台上。

All developers will need to verify their accounts through Facebook’s standard account verification procedures before being allowed to create new applications on the platform, Facebook announced today in a blog post.