每日观察：关注Playdom社交游戏发展情况（6.3）
1）Strategy Analytics最新报告指出，数字及在线运营模式将成为游戏行业的未来走向，并预测2012年北美数字及手机游戏零售收益将达108亿美元，而实物包装游戏的收益是90亿美元；即将在美国洛杉矶E3展会上亮相的下一代游戏控制器也很可能植入在线社交网络功能。
Strategy Analytics高级分析师Jia Wu表示，实体包装销售模式不会立即没落，但其收益在未来五年内仍将保持原来的水准，而数字及手机游戏收益则将在同期增加两倍左右。该报告还指出，北美游戏行业在2011年的总体收益将达184亿美元，比2010年增长5.8%；实体包装销售产品在今年的收益很可能下滑8%左右，而数字及在线游戏营收则将增长34%以上。
A Better World(from insidesocialgames.com)
2）《A Better World》是一款由ToonsUp公司开发的Facebook游戏，其主旨在于鼓励玩家在现实生活中多做善事，共同打造一个“美好世界”。据AppData数据显示，该游戏目前的MAU是10万1134，DAU是5992。这款游戏结合了城市建设玩法，以及其他传统社交游戏的农场、宠物元素，支持玩家自个化装饰自己的房子，在社区花园中种植作物，同时还植入了一些连线消除等迷你小游戏。它采用的是Facebook Credits虚拟货币系统，玩家可使用Credits购买游戏虚拟货币、装饰品和道具。
3）《Championship Manager:Rivals》是一款于6月1日才登陆Facebook的足球队管理模拟类社交游戏，由英国视频游戏行业的同名家庭电脑游戏改制而来。该游戏原版本之前主要锁定硬核运动游戏玩家，所以在进军社交游戏领域时为其开发商Jolt Online Gaming带来不少挑战。
Championship Manager ：Rivals(from insidesocialgames.com)
Facebook之前已有不少运动项目管理类游戏，例如EA Playfish的《FIFA Superstars》，但这些游戏往往难以实现传统社交玩法与模拟现实体育元素之间的平衡。不过据Jolt首席执行官Barnwell所称，这款游戏并不存在现实主义与可玩性难以兼容的问题，玩家可以选择模拟现实的游戏玩法，还可以选择以更休闲的方式体验游戏。
4）迪士尼旗下的Playdom日前宣布将继续推出新款原创游戏，并强调了其4月份发布的《Gardens of Time》这款寻物解谜游戏的成就。据AppData数据显示，该游戏登台不到两个月，目前MAU已达1280万，在Facebook热门应用中排行第12，并且是该平台人气游戏中的第五名。其最近DAU是268万，虽然DAU/MAU比值有所下滑，但目前仍保持在20%左右。从总体来看，Playdom目前所有游戏的MAU是2830万，DAU是451万。
Gardens of Time---MAU(fom AppData)
- Gardens of Time—DAU(from AppData)
5）日本南梦宫欧洲公司最近向Facebook平台发布了两个版本的《吃豆人》，一个是传统版游戏，几乎沿袭了其经典的游戏风格；另一个是玩法机制与《宝石迷阵闪电战》类似的改编版本，要求玩家在有限时间内吃到更多豆子以攀向积分排行榜前列，玩家可以使用方向键控制游戏，并由此获得无穷乐趣。
Pac-Man(from games.com)
6）英国ITV的热门肥皂剧《Coronation Street》的粉丝不乏其众，而根据该电视剧开发的Facebook游戏《Corrie Nation》却并未沾光，其最高峰时期的MAU也仅为8.8万，所以ITV只好宣布在今年7月份关闭这个游戏项目。不过ITV并不会放弃该游戏理念，而是试图通过与Enteraction中止合作，寻找一家新游戏开发商使该项目起死回生。
Corrie Nation(from games.com)
7）《华尔街日报》最近报道称谷歌、Facebook、Salesforce.com、Zynga等公司争先在西雅图设立工作室的原因包括人才资源及成本优势。
Mark Pincus(from techflash.com)
Facebook在西雅图办事处约有40名员工，而谷歌在当地则有800名成员，是该地区最大的工程师聚集地之一。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）
1）Strategy Analytics at E3: US Digital Game Revenues Will Exceed Discs For First Time in 2012
As E3, the world’s biggest video games event, prepares to open its doors in Los Angeles, CA, new forecasts published by Strategy Analytics’ Digital Media Strategies service confirm the industry’s coming transition to digital or online business models. The report, “Global Video Game Market Forecast: 2011,” predicts that North American retail revenues from digital and mobile games will reach $10.8 billion in 2012, compared to $9.0 billion from physical media (discs). The next generation of games consoles, beginning with the Wii’s successor, to be introduced at E3, are likely to feature improved online and social networking capabilities, more abundant online games content, as well as cloud-based gaming services, the report predicts.
“Despite the recent security breaches of the PlayStation Network, the role of an online and social game service remains paramount to any future games platform. We expect digital revenues to comprise a quarter of the entire console games business by 2016.”
“Discs are not dead,” notes Jia Wu, Senior Analyst at Strategy Analytics. “But digital is where the growth opportunities lie. Revenues from physical media will remain broadly flat over the coming five years, while income from digital and mobile games will nearly double over the same period.”
In the near term, Strategy Analytics predicts a positive outlook for the North American games industry. 2011 revenues are expected to reach $18.4 billion, a 5.8% increase on 2010. But the trend to digital is already well set: physical media revenues this year are actually expected to fall by nearly 8%, while the online/digital business is predicted to expand by more than 34%. （source:businesswire）
2）A Better World Social Game Encourages Real World Good Deeds, Punishes Lazy Players
By Carolyn Koh
A Better World is a Facebook game from developer ToonsUp that specializes in writing animated software that encourages players to perform good deeds in real life to create “a better world” where players feel good about themselves and make positive choices.
According to our data tracking service AppData, A Better World currently has 101,134 monthly active users and 5,992 daily active users.
A Better World combines city building with several other traditional social game genres like farming and pets as the core gameplay experience. Players can also decorate their homes, plant crops in a community garden and explore the world to find meditation grottoes where they can leave uplifting messages for other players to read. There are also mini-games like Threecycle, a match-three game featuring recyclable items, and Thump-a-Thought, which is essentially whack-a-mole. Playing the mini-games earns the player Do-Good-Gold to spend on in-game items that range from housing decorations to avatar customization, gifts for friends, pets and seeds to grow plants in a community garden.
The game monetizes through Facebook Credits, which can be used to buy Do-Gooder-Gold or premium decorations and gameplay boost or quest-completion items. Quests are themed towards the realization of a better world through doing good deeds in-game, like sending players to Gratitude Grotto to leave a message of gratitude, rescuing a cat to adopt as a pet or giving a friend a gift. In lieu of gifts, which the player must buy from the gift shop before giving away, A Better World allows players to send “positive thoughts” to other players for free.
A Better World takes some risks with gameplay by punishing lapsed or infrequent players. Upon returning to the game after a long absence, these players will find a gray raincloud over their avatars’ head that follows them around until they do enough good deeds to “work it off.” The plants in the community garden also die if you don’t water them, and we think that pets will run away if not tended to; however, the pet feature was only just introduced, so we haven’t been able to test this theory.（source:insidesocialgames）
3）Jolt Online Brings Famed Championship Manager Series to Facebook with Balance Between Realism and Accessibility
By Pete Davison
Championship Manager: Rivals is a social soccer management simulation that launched to the public on June 1, 2011. As the game is brand new, it’s not yet listed on our traffic tracking service AppData, but keep an eye out for it in the next 48 hours. Facebook currently lists the app as having 117 monthly active users at the time of writing.
Championship Manager: Rivals is based on the popular home computer game series of the same name. Championship Manager, or “Champman” as it is sometimes known, is one of the most recognizable sports game brands in the United Kingdom’s video game industry, having been around since 1992. In the past, the game has been regarded as a hardcore sports fan’s experience, which has presented developer Jolt Online Gaming with a number of challenges when adapting it to the social gaming space.
“We still have the tricky problem of the game naturally not being hardcore enough for the extreme football fans used to the old PC version, and maybe a bit too hardcore for the more casual social gamer,” says Richard Barnwell, CEO of Jolt. “However, I’m confident we’ve found the middle ground.”
There are a number of sports management and training games on Facebook. FIFA Superstars from EA Playfish is one of the largest and one of only a few that leverages real life teams and leagues that players can interact with. These sports games seem to struggle with straddling the divide between faithful simulation of the actual sport and traditional engaging social gameplay. Barnwell believes that Championship Manager: Rivals masters that tricky blend between realism and accessibility.
“This is the first football/soccer game that will give passionate football fans the game they are after,” he says. “Players choose real teams from real leagues and transfer real football stars. All of the footballers’ statistics are built from a huge team of researchers and as such the Rivals game allows players to get right into the detail of playing a simulation type of game, or if they prefer, playing in a more casual style.”（source:insidesocialgames）
4）D9: Disney’s Iger Says More Original IP Titles Coming From Playdom
By Eric Eldon
Going forward, Playdom will be introducing new games with original intellectual property, he said, not just with existing Disney IP. He highlighted the recent success of Gardens of Time, an original-IP hidden object game that Playdom launched in early April.
In less than two months, it has reached 12.8 million monthly active users, according to our AppData tracking service. That makes it the 12th largest app on Facebook, and the fifth largest game. Going by daily active users, its 2.68 million people make it the 13th and seventh-largest app. Although it has seen a normal post-launch decline in in its DAU/MAU “sticky” ratio, the number is still hovering above a healthy 20%.
The developer has also been pushing out smaller titles, like Deep Realms, that might not pull in the masses, but could still monetize very well with smaller serious-gamer demographics.
Disney bought Playdom for a variety of reasons, as we explored in this investigative piece last year. It wanted to get in on another area of gaming, as it struggled with console titles. It wanted a new distribution channel for promoting its existing IP. It wanted the experienced executives and metrics-driven product teams.
The focus on original IP today is a bit of a change from previous explanations of the deal. But as long as Playdom continues to build new games, and grow and make money, it’s going to be an important asset for Disney as it transitions its businesses to the web.
Today, Playdom has 28.3 million MAU and 4.51 million DAU. It’s still not close to market leader Zynga, but it’s continued to be one of the largest social game developers on the platform.（source:insidesocialgames）
5）Pac-Man chomps on Facebook with two social games from Namco
by Joe Osborne
Instead of ghosts, will Pac-Man gobble up the skeletons in your Facebook closet? Probably not, unfortunately (damn you, Internet), but Namco Bandai Europe has released the ever-hungry yellow circle on Facebook in two forms: plain old Pac-Man and Pac-Man S. The former is the straight up Pac-Man you’ve come to love over 30 years. The latter, however, takes a cue from games like Bejeweled Blitz by PopCap, challenging you to gobble as many dots in one or two minutes as possible to rank on a social ladder. Keeping true to its roots, the game is controlled with either the arrow keys or WASD keys, and all the familiar sounds come through your speakers with all the nostalgia you’ll ever need in a Facebook game. Give it whirl, and you’ll soon start to notice a direct relationship between ghosts eaten and minutes wasted. It’s science.（source:games）
6）Corrie Nation on hold: First-ever soap opera Facebook game breaks for makeover
by Jenny Ng
Last year, after roughly four decades on television, ABC canceled TV soaps “All My Children” and “One Life to Live”. Commentators were quick to point to Facebook games as the culprit, spear-headed by an April AdWeek report, with even earlier speculation supplied by GamaSutra a month prior. Then, “As the World Turns” ended in September, and it no longer felt like speculation. Everyone was running with it.
In this climate stepped “Corrie Nation”, a social game on Facebook to mark the 50th anniversary of the U.K soap opera, “Coronation Street”. Because obviously, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” seemed like a good call.
But for a show that brings in millions of viewers, the Facebook game only managed an all-time high of 88K monthly average users. Players have been falling since the launch, leading ITV to announce their taking down the game by the end of this coming July. But ITV hasn’t given up on the concept. They want a major rehaul over the summer, so they’re dropping their contract with Enteraction and will soon be in the market for a new games developer.（source:games）
7）Why Facebook, Google and Zynga are flocking to Seattle
Greg Lamm
It has nothing to do with the weather or the coffee. The WSJ catches up with the trend of Silicon Valley companies like Google, Facebook, Salesforce.com and Zynga opening offices in the Seattle area to tap the area’s talent pool.
The article coverers familiar ground, noting that many engineers here don’t want to move to the Silicon Valley because of sky-high housing prices. (Zillow.com sets the median home price in Seattle at about $260,000, compared to $446,000 in the Bay Area).
For Silicon Valley companies, Seattle is a logical site to recruit, given the potential to snap up talent fro Microsoft and Amazon.com, or to hire fresh talent from the UW. It’s also cheaper to hire an engineer here. The WSJ article says, according to Glassdoor.com, software engineers in the Seattle area earn an average base salary of about $78,000. In the San Francisco area they earn $86,000.
According to the WSJ, Facebook has 40 people working in Seattle, while Google employs 800, making it one of the biggest engineering centers in region.（source:techflash）
