你知道FarmVille用葡萄牙语怎么说吗？

在巴西，FarmVille似乎可以翻译为Mini Fazenda，这是一款由美国新兴公司Vostu开发的网上点击游戏，游戏中玩家可以在虚拟的田地上进行耕种，体验巴西式的田园生活。

Vostu公司的社交游戏Mini Fazenda类似于Zynga公司开发的FarmVille。每个月FarmVille在社交网站Facebook上拥有6200万活跃用户，而据Vostu公司的数据显示，这款Mini Fazenda游戏目前每月的活跃用户数则为870万。

随着巴西Mini Fazenda和Vostu公司其他游戏的玩家增多，我们可以预见拥有6400万网络用户的巴西即将为国外网络服务提供一个庞大发展市场。谷歌旗下的社交网络公司Orkut就是一个成功的例子，他们在这片异国土地上取得了如同Facebook在美国的人气。

Mini Fazenda

Vostu公司的合伙人兼首席执行官Daniel Kafie说，巴西玩家十分愿意现金购买诸如农具或种子之类的虚拟商品用来经营自己的虚拟农田。他还指出巴西的网络市场容量与印度不相上下，此外，巴西还拥有印度无法比拟的信用卡优势。

与Facebook一样，总部设于纽约的Vostu公司是由Kafie和自己的两位哈佛同学创办的，目前这家公司开发的社交游戏在巴西社交网站Orkut上拥有庞大的用户基础，这一状况雷同于Facebook中的zynga游戏。

随着最近几个月的两次大型收购，社交游戏行业的发展步伐骤然加快。这两次收购分别是：去年艺电有限公司（EA）以4亿800万美元的价格并购了社交游戏开发公司Playfish；之后迪士尼公司也在今年七月以7亿6300万美元的高价收购了Playdom。

包括出生于洪都拉斯的Kafie，Vostu的其他两位创建者都并非来自巴西。然而他们开发的社交游戏Mini Fazenda就好比巴西风格的FarmVille。游戏玩家可以在亚马孙河上种植各种奇花异果或与朋友们一起建造狂欢节彩车。此外，该公司还有一款主题餐厅游戏Café Mania ，游戏中玩家可以烹调巴西佳肴feijoada，类似于豆子熏肉炖饭。

现在据Vostu公司的首席执行官Kafie称，该公司旗下的所有游戏总计拥有2000万月活跃用户，公司年收入达上千万美元。最近，该公司还获得了Intel和General Catalyst公司的1500万资金，并有不少公司开始寻求与其合作。

目前为止，社交游戏开发公司Vostu在巴西的优势地位还未受到Zynga的影响。除了最近出售的中文版德州扑克外，其他大部分的zynga游戏仍然以英文为主。

How do you say Farmville in Portuguese?

In Brazil, at least, the phenomenon seems to translate as Mini Fazenda. The hit online game, from a U.S.-based startup called Vostu, lets players till fields on a virtual fazenda, or farm, and otherwise experience the life of a Brazilian farmer.

Vostu’s Mini FazendaMini Fazenda is Vostu’s answer to Farmville, the virtual farm game by closely-watched game startup Zynga that has nearly 62 million active monthly users on Facebook. Mini Fazenda has 8.7 million active monthly users, according to Vostu.

The audience for Mini Fazenda and other Vostu games is a sign of Brazil’s emergence as a big market for Internet companies with an online audience estimated at more than 64 million, the fifth-largest online population after China, the U.S., Japan and India. Brazil is also a market that can be eccentric in its acceptance of foreign Internet services: witness the success of Orkut, a social network owned by Google that has achieved Facebook-like appeal in Brazil and relative obscurity in most other parts of the world.

Daniel Kafie, the CEO and cofounder of Vostu, says Brazilians have shown a big appetite to pay real money for virtual goods, like agricultural equipment and seeds, to customize their virtual farms. Brazil has an Internet market comparable to the size of India’s, Kafie says, “but it has all the credit cards that India doesn’t have.”

Vostu, headquartered in New York, has piggybacked on the popularity of Orkut in Brazil, just as Zynga has with Facebook, which has helped games spread through the social connections between users. Kafie created the company with Joshua Kushner and Mario Schlosser, two classmates from Harvard University (where Facebook originated too).

The business profile of such social games companies has shot up in recent months after two big acquisitions in the category. Last year, Electronics Arts acquired Playfish for up to $408 million, while Walt Disney Co. in July agreed to pay as much as $763 million for Playdom.

While none of the co-founders are from Brazil, Kafie–who grew up in Honduras–says Vostu has given the Farmville concept a distinctly local flavor. Players of Mini Fazenda can grow exotic fruits from the Amazon and build a carnival float with friends. The company also has a restaurant themed game called Café Mania in which players can cook virtual dishes such as feijoada, a bean and meat stew.

Vostu has a total of 20 million active monthly users for all of its games. Kafie says the company has revenue in the high double-digit millions of dollars and is “very profitable.” He says Vostu has raised $15 million from Intel and General Catalyst and that other parties have been “approaching us left and right talking to us about our financing strategy.”

So far, Zynga hasn’t challenged Vostu in Brazil. All of Zynga’s games are in English except for a recently launched Chinese-language version of its Texas Poker game for Taiwan and Hong Kong.  （Source：WSJ.com）

声明：本文中文为游戏邦翻译，英文原文采用wsj，转载请保留版权信息，谢谢！