1）旧金山初创公司Idle Games日前聘请Zynga游戏《CityVille》设计师Michael McCormick任公司游戏设计总监。

McCormick之前在Zynga仅任职一年，于2012年1月份离职，其带领开发的《CityVille》目前还有近4700万MAU，它发布一年有余仍稳居Facebook游戏榜单之首。McCormick拥有20多年游戏行业经验，此前曾在EA、Backbone Entertainment、Playfirst和HumaNature Studios就职。

Idle Worship(from techcrunch)

Idle Games由Playdom联合创始人Rick Thompson成立于2009年，目前拥有58名员工，已融资1900万美元，准备在未来两周向Facebook发布采用Idle Engine引擎开发的《Idle Worship》。

2）社交游戏开发商Playdom执行制作人Chia Chin Lee日前表示，新游戏《Marvel: Avengers Alliance》相关数据显示了人们对社交游戏的一些认知误区。例如，男性用户并非不喜欢在社交游戏中分享自己的活动情况。在这款主要锁定男性用户的游戏测试期间，该游戏的病毒传播安装率比大部分Playdom游戏高45%，而男性玩家在其中发送游戏信息的频率也比一般游戏多4-6倍。

marvel-avengers-alliance(from gamerevolution.com)

3）芬兰硬核社交游戏开发商Supercell（代表作为《Zombies Online》）日前称他们将执行“平板电脑优先”战略，将把平板电脑作为首要目标平台，并计划在下周展示其首款平板电脑游戏《Battle Buddies》。

battle-buddies(from gamezebo.com)

该工作室认为，平板电脑正成为玩家所选择的游戏平台，该设备独特的整合技术、界面、便携性和社交特点，为游戏开发创造了新的发展机遇。

4）新闻集团旗下社交游戏工作室Making Fun首席执行官John Welch在最近媒体采访中表示，公司团队并不打算在社交游戏领域沿袭Zynga路线，《Hidden Haounts》的目标不是成为最大的寻物解谜游戏，而是“最好的”寻物解谜游戏。

hidden haunts(from games)

该公司首席技术官Lee Crawford认为，作为一家新兴发行商，Making Fun不可追随大流，不可效仿他人，因为重走前人的老路并非成功之道。

5）在本周的Facebook新晋游戏（MAU不超过100万）榜单上，Solarc Consulting Inc旗下的《Lotto Ayeneh》跃居榜首（游戏邦注：这款博彩游戏尚无英语版本），而位居第二的则是中文角色扮演游戏《英雄远征》繁体版，《愤怒的小鸟》位列第四（其MAU一直在稳步上升）。

Top Gainers This Week-MAU(from AppData)

值得注意的是2月24日才发布的游戏《The Last Stand: Dead Zone》现在就已上升至第8名，它取材于多年前的热门Flash僵尸游戏。（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）Social startup Idle Games poaches CityVille lead designer

by Eric Caoili

San Francisco-based startup Idle Games has hired industry veteran Michael McCormick away from Zynga, where he was the lead designer for CityVille, to serve as its game design director.

Though he worked at Zynga for only a year before leaving in January, McCormick led the design team for the social game giant’s biggest title on Facebook — CityVille has nearly 47 million monthly active users on the social network, and has been the most popular game there for more than a year now.

McCormick has worked in the industry for some 20 years, designing games and leading teams at developers like Electronic Arts, Backbone Entertainment, Playfirst, and HumaNature Studios.

Idle Games, which describes itself as “the instigator of a holy war against social games that suck and/or aren’t actually social,” has brought McCormick in as it prepares to launch, Idle Worship, on Facebook in two weeks.

The game is built on the company’s Idle Engine, a distributed simulation platform designed to create “unsharded game worlds,” or worlds that don’t separate and distribute players across multiple servers, with patent-pending synchronous and asynchronous social game mechanics.

Established in 2009 by Playdom co-founder Rick Thompson, Idle Games has 58 employees, according to CrunchBase. Last October, the developer announced that it had secured $10 million in a second round of funding, bringing its total amount raised to $19 million.（source:gamasutra）

2）Playdom Says Marvel Superheroes Are Super Viral (Among Men)

Anthony Ha

Social game-maker Playdom officially launched Marvel: Avengers Alliance on Thursday, and executive producer Chia Chin Lee says the title already disproving some of the common assumptions about social games.

The big assumption: that men don’t like to share their activity in social games the way that women do. That could be a problem for Avengers Alliance, since a game about superheroes would probably skew male. But during the beta test period, when the game was played by tens of thousands of users, it actually saw 45 percent more viral installs compared to most Playdom titles, and in fact men were four to six times more likely to send in-game messages.

“At first we thought it was a logging error,” Lee says. “Honestly, that completely baffled us at first.”

Eventually, however, the team decided that the data was accurate. Lee’s conclusion? That men will embrace social game mechanics, as long as they’re built around “strong [intellectual property] and a game that people love.” Lee says that after the official launch on Thursday, the virality stats even improved (presumably because the marketing attracted a lot of serious Marvel fans).

The early results, Lee says, bode “extremely well for Disney, as they have whole strongest IP in the world.”

Avengers Alliance is also the first game that Playdom has built using intellectual property from its parent company Disney, which also owns Marvel. Lee says Playdom was actually developing the game before it was acquired by Disney, but the acquisition made it easier to align the game with other Avengers plans. For example, even though Avengers Alliance isn’t officially tied to the upcoming movie, Lee says his team coordinated with Disney to ensure that the game included elements that will also show up in the film.（source:techcrunch）

3）Social game developer Supercell adopts ‘Tablet-First’ strategy

by Eric Caoili

Finnish developer Supercell (Zombies Online), which builds core-targeted social games, has adopted a “Tablet-First” strategy, and is now building its projects with tablet computers as their lead platforms.

The studio believes tablets are becoming the platform of choice for gamers, which is why the company is shifting its focus away from online titles — less than a year ago, Supercell raised $12 million from investors to work on browser-based social games that appealed to core players.

“The unique confluence of technology, interface, mobility, and social packed inside these magical devices opens up brand new opportunities to create rich gameplay experiences designed specifically for the platform,” says Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen.

This announcement comes just a few days before Apple is set to hold a press event where it’s likely to announce the iPad 3, its latest tablet computer model. Supercell also plans to show off its first tablet title, Battle Buddies, at the Game Developers Conference next week.

Supercell has also revealed that it’s appointed game industry veteran Greg Harper as general manager for its North American operations. Harper was previously president at social game developer iWin, and business development VP at casual game portal Pogo.com (now owned by Electronic Arts). （source:gamasutra）

4）Making Fun: ‘We’re not going to beat Zynga by following in their shadow’

by Joe Osborne

The News Corp.-owned social game developer Making Fun didn’t get into social games to be a small fry. The game maker behind recent releases like Hidden Haunts and Noah’s Ark aims to beat out the big kahuna: Zynga. However, the 20-person game division of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire admits that it has to buck the trend in order to do well as a new player in the space.

“News Corp didn’t get into gaming to be small,” Making Fun CEO John Welch told IndustryGamers. “They didn’t want us to go and do a bunch of me-too stuff. We’re not going to beat Zynga by following in their shadow and nipping at their heels. We’re not going to get to where Zynga is by doing what they did,” Welch later continued. “If you look at Hidden Haunts, we’re not going to be the biggest hidden object game, but we’ll be the best. We’ll be more successful than all of the other ones.”

However, Hidden Haunts is now surrounded by not one, but two hidden-object Facebook games by Playdom, one from Zynga, another by Game Insight and who knows how many more. But moving forward, we’re likely to see far different releases from Making Fun, judging by Welch and CTO Lee Crawford’s sentiments.

“To compete as an emerging publisher you have to go to where the market’s going to be when the title comes out. You can’t follow, you can’t clone. That’s not a way to success,” Crawford said to IndustryGamers. “The gorilla can ape all he wants, that works fine, for the smaller guys it’s hard.” (If that’s the case, then Making Fun should probably avoid the casino game genre altogether.)（source:games）

5） Lotto Ayeneh tops this week’s list of emerging Facebook games

Mike Thompson

Solarc Consulting Inc’s Lotto Ayeneh shot to the top spot on our list this week, having doubled its monthly active users. Between the lack of an English mode and the suspicious nature of the app’s page, we weren’t able to check it out for ourselves, but chances are that it’s not that different from other casino games popping up on Facebook now that the market looks attractive.

Lotto Ayeneh isn’t the only non-English game topping the chart; the Chinese-language role-playing game Efunfun Hero is currently holding the No. 2 spot. Angry Birds’ presence at No. 4 t is unsurprising, since the game is gaining MAU at a steady rate.

Retro World has started gaining dramatic amounts of MAU. The game rose up to No. 7, likely thanks to recent media attention over its I Love Lucy content expansion. Somewhat surprising is the presence of The Last Stand: Dead Zone which launched on Feb. 24 and has already climbed to No. 8, since the game is based on a cult Flash game from several years ago. Looks like zombie killing’s popularity will never die.（source:insidesocialgames）