1）据路透社报道，社交游戏开发商Zynga在即将进行IPO之前将其股票定价为每股10美元，公司估值达70亿美元，超过了EA等大型视频游戏巨头。

Zynga将通过出售1亿只股票筹资10亿美元，使其成为自谷歌上市以来（游戏邦注：谷歌于2004年上市时筹资17亿美元），IPO筹资数额最大的美国互联网公司。

Zynga IPO(from bloomberg.com)

Zynga将在本周五于纳斯达克上市，股票代号为ZNGA，原先的股票定价为每股8.5至10美元。

2）据gamasutra报道，EA最近将其原来的纳斯达克股票代号“ERTS”更改为“EA”，更改的股票代号将于12月20日上午开盘时生效。

3）据Zillow报道，Zynga首席执行官Mark Pincus最近准备出售他在旧金山的两橦房子，其中一橦位于Cole Valley，售价为197万美元，另一橦则位于Presidio District，出价高达895万美元。

The Cole Valley house(from games)

据称位于Cole Valley的房子（如上图所示）外观并不高档，但室内装修极为豪华，其主卧面积堪比影院放映室。

The Presidio District house(from games)

位于Presidio District的房子（上图）内外装修都很上档次，被称为具有“黄金标准”的楼房，一共拥有6个卧室（Pincus一家有四口人），这两橦房子的装潢材料均来自女主人Alison Pincus的公司One Kings Lane这个高档家具网站。但Pincus一家从来没有住进那橦8950万美元的房子。

4）MMO游戏发布网络Pando Networks最新数据显示，从2009至2011年，该平台游戏玩家下载的免费游戏已增长450%，自2009年以来，下载免费游戏的用户超过7000万（这里不包括1100万的《魔兽世界》玩家）。

从2009年10月至2011年10月，美国免费游戏下载量从480万次增长至1260万次（增幅达162%），而拉美免费游戏下载量增幅达595%，而英国则高达1025%。

土耳其免费游戏下载量增速极为明显，下载免费游戏的玩家数量已超过500万（占总人口的14%以上），增幅达534%。法国免费游戏玩家也已从2009年的13.9万增长至2011年的260万；波兰同一时期的免费游戏玩家也增长至150万。

PopCap在11月委托Informations Solutions Group执行的调查结果曾显示，超过1.18亿的英美用户每周至少玩一次社交游戏，8100万用户每天至少玩一次游戏（在社交游戏玩家中占比68%），更重要的是，目前有3100万玩家经常在游戏中消费，这一数据比去年增长86%。

5）在本周DAU增长最迅速的Facebook游戏榜单上，Zynga游戏《CastleVille》、《Worlds With Friends》和《Adventure World》包揽前三名。

Top Gainers This Week-Games(from AppData)

居于第十名的是Digital Chocolate《Galaxy Life》（同时在Facebook及其公司网站运营）这款科幻题材的策略战斗游戏，支持玩家以PvP或PvE模式进攻其他的太空殖民地。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

1）At $10 A Share, Zynga To Raise $1B In Friday’s IPO

by Frank Cifaldi

On the eve of its IPO, social gaming company Zynga has priced its shares at $10, placing them on the high end of its target.

The price (reported by Reuters) puts a valuation of approximately $7 billion dollars on the FarmVille and CityVille maker, giving the company a higher pricetag than other video game giants including Electronic Arts.

The company will raise $1 billion in capital tomorrow based on the 100 million shares being offered. This makes it the largest IPO from a U.S. internet company since Google went public in 2004 and raised $1.7 billion.

Zynga’s targeted share prices when it filed with the SEC last month were between $8.50 and $10.

The company will be listed on NASDAQ Friday under the ticker symbol “ZNGA.” （source:gamasutra）

2）On Wall Street, EA Will Be Referred To As ‘EA’

by Frank Cifaldi

Newsbrief: Market watchers take note: Electronic Arts has changed its Nasdaq ticker symbol to ‘EA.’

The ticker symbol more clearly represents the company than its previous one, ‘ERTS.’

The change will become effective when trading opens on the morning of Tuesday, December 20. （source:gamasutra）

3）Today on Games.com Cribs: Zynga CEO Pincus’s homes up for grabs

by Joe Osborne

That is, if you’re packing at least $1.97 million. Zillow reports that Zynga CEO Mark Pincus put his two San Francisco, Calif. homes on the real estate market just before the FarmVille maker is expected to hit the stock market on Dec. 16. One house, located in Cole Valley, is going for a cool $1.97 million, while the other in the classy Presidio District is asking for a mind-boggling $8.95 million.

Well, mind-boggling for folks like us that think $1 million is filthy rich–this dude is likely a billionaire. Both homes are enough to be featured on some special video game-themed episode of Cribs. The Cole Valley house (pictured above) looks low key from outside, but its interior screams, “I have enough money to take napalm to this place and build it again.”

Seriously, the master bedroom doubles as a projection room.

The Presidio District pad above looks richie rich both outside and in. According to Zillow, this home is being billed as the “Gold Standard” of homes. The building features not one, but two front-facing balconies over the street and six bedrooms. (The Pincus’s are a family of four.) Mrs. Alison Pincus decorated both homes using pieces from her own business, One Kings Lane, a high-end home furnishings website.

According to what Zillow’s heard, the Pincus family never lived in the $8.95 million dream house due to scares from Vera Svenchina. A former stripper-turned-amateur filmmaker, the Russian women reportedly threatened Pincus and his family, driving the CEO behind CityVille to file for a restraining order. For what it’s worth, enjoy the depressingly beautiful eye candy right here.（source:games）

4）New Data From Pando Offers A Glimpse Into The Massive Global Growth Of Freemium Gaming

Rip Empson

Well, it looks like hardcore gamers would like to have a word with you, social and casual gamers. Yes, the stories in the media of late have been all about Rovio’s Angry Birds skyrocketing past half a billion downloads, or Zynga and its ilk overtaking social games. Both casual and social games have been growing like gangbusters, but the latest data from Pando Networks reveals some fairly serious growth in the free-to-play gaming industry across the globe.

Free-to-play games, just another way of saying “freemium games” are, to clear up any confusion, any game that is free to download and monetized by in-game purchases. Today, in mobile and web apps (and really the consumer web), we are seeing the coming of age of the freemium model and, as a result, advertisers and developers are being forced to find new ways to create revenue and monetize their games, whether that be by way of mobile advertising, virtual goods, avatars, in-game rewards, or incentivized installs.

Today’s data from Pando Networks, a game delivery network for free-to play massively-multiplayer-online (MMO) games, is showing that free-to-play games are growing exponentially, right alongside their casual and social game bretheren. For example, the company’s data shows that the number of gamers downloading free games has grown 450 percent from 2009 to 2011, as more than 38 million people will download an online game using Pando in 2011 — and over 70 million people have downloaded free games since 2009. (And that’s not including the 11+ million playing Blizzard’s World of Warcraft.)

Again, this hockey-stick growth has resulted from an industry-wide transition from a paid to freemium model, as can be seen in online gaming by the likes of both Turbine’s Lord of the Rings Online and WoW, which have both taken to the land of the free — along with newer, popular games like League of Legends (by Riot).

And, in case it still needs hammering home, the explosive growth in free-to-play games is far from an American-only phenomenon. According to Pando, from October 2009 to October 2011, downloads in the U.S. have grown from 4.8 million to 12.6 million (an increase of 162 percent), while Latin America has seen downloads increase by 595 percent, compared to the U.K., where growth has shot up by a whopping 1025 percent.

Furthermore, developing nations like Turkey are gobbling up an increasingly significant share of downloads, considering over the last year, the number of gamers in Turkey downloading free-to-play games today sits over 5 million — an increase of 534 percent since 2010 (and more than 14 percent of the country’s total population).

As Turkey’s infrastructure and connectivity continues to expand, the country’s freemium gaming market has exploded right in tandem, and currently shows no sign of slowing down. Surely, this is a great sign for freemium games and the international gaming market, but it does make on worry about Turkey’s overall productivity. Here’s to hoping GDP doesn’t slip at the hands of widespread MMO gaming adoption.

Compared to the size of population, Turkey certainly has one of the fastest growing freemium gaming markets, compared to, say, France, which has seen its freemium gamers grow from 139K in 2009 to 2.6 million in 2011, and Poland, which grew from 145L to 1.5 million over the same period. While it’s been clear for some time now the extent to which mobile and online platforms are being used by the ever-increasing gaming population in Asia, there hasn’t yet been such a clear picture of the extent to which the freemium model is being adopted in other global regions.

And, again, turning to other sources, Pando’s data also seems to be clearly in support of PopCap’s November study (via Informations Solutions Group) of the growing social gaming market in the U.S. and the U.K., which found that more than 118 million people now play social games once per week, and 81 million people play at least once a day (which is 68 percent of all social gamers). Of course, that’s nice, but what’s really important is that today 31 million players have purchase in-game currency, up 86 percent from the previous year.

Not only that, but Flurry blogged back in September that freemium games are leading all of the app revenue models in the iOS and Android app economies, as they now account for more than 65 percent of app revenue.（source:techcrunch）

5）Digital Chocolate’s Galaxy Life Debuts on This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Games by DAU

AJ Glasser

Zynga games are showing gains across the board on this week’s list of fastest-growing Facebook games by daily active users, with CastleVille, Words With Friends, and Adventure World occupying the top three spots.

At number 10 is Digital Chocolate’s new game, Galaxy Life, which runs both on Facebook and on the developer’s own website. It’s a science fiction-themed strategy combat game where players build up military units to attack other space colonies in a mix of player versus player and player versus environment gameplay. The open web version of the game allows players to remain anonymous in-game, which might have an impact on the PvP aspect.（source:insidesocialgames）