1）据insidesocialgames报道，EA在近日的E3新闻发布会上宣布将向Facebook推出《模拟城市社交版》（SimCity Social），该游戏由EA Playfish与EA旗下工作室Maxis共同开发，将采用《模拟城市》的核心玩法，支持玩家在其中扮演一个新兴小城的市长，处理城市中的犯罪率、不同地产需求，以及电力供应等问题（游戏邦注：EA尚未公布《模拟城市社交版》具体发布日期，但游戏已进入内测阶段）。

SimCity Social(from insidesocialgames)

该游戏的社交功能包括支持玩家访问发不动产城市，并与其定居地进行互动。EA上一款“模拟”品牌的Facebook游戏是《模拟人生社交版》，最高峰时的DAU达到1120万，曾对Zynga头号热门游戏《CityVille》构成威胁，但现在DAU已降至300万左右。从DAU流量来看，EA目前已经降为Facebook第四大游戏开发商。

观察者指出，《模拟城市社交版》的最大阻力在于，Facebook用户对城建类游戏的兴趣日趋下降，《CityVille》在2011年3月的DAU曾一度高达2100万，但今年已降至490万。在《CityVille》问世之后，没有其他同类题材的游戏DAU超过100万。目前的Facebook第二大城建游戏是Playrix作品《Township》，最近通过与6waves的发行合作才使其DAU增长至27万。

2）据techcrunch报道，Zynga最近收购了Buzz Monkey公司（游戏邦注：该团队有50名成员），但Zynga并未公开这一消息。

rinth-island(from venturebeat)

Buzz Monkey由四名前Dynamix成员创立于2001年，但值得注意的是，这是一家锁定大型掌机游戏市场的公司，代表作包括《Army of Two：40th Day》以及《Tomb Raider》系列，最近才转向智能手机游戏市场并推出了《Rinith Island》、《Fluid Monkey》以及《Block Rogue》等作品。

3）据《华尔街日报》报道，Facebook将推出新政策允许未满13岁儿童在家长监管下使用Facebook服务。

facebook-kids(from venturebeat)

Facebook现在正研究新机制以实现这一目标，计划将孩子的Facebook帐号与家长帐号绑定，以便家长查看孩子在Facebook平台的活动，并控制子女可使用的Facebook应用。

据称目前推出Facebook for Kids服务的最大障碍仍是用户隐私问题，但Facebook表示他们正与相关人士和其他决策制定者对话以解决这一问题，以便为孩子创造一个良好而安全的在线环境。

safety on facebook(from minormonitor)

实际上已经有不少未满13岁的孩子在使用Facebook，据MinorMonitor数据显示，在Facebook所有少儿用户中，13岁以下群体占比高达38%。

4）据彭博社报道，有知情人近日透露Twitter广告销售额十分可观，Twitter内部人员据此预测公司收益有可能在2014年达到10亿美元（游戏邦注：在此之前，业内普遍认为Twitter到2016年方有望实现这一目标）。

twitter-one-billion-revenue(from venturebeat)

但Twiiter发言人拒绝回应此事，因此暂时无法确认这一传闻的可信度。Twitter成立于2006年，采用多种商业模式，于2010年4月推出了自己的广告服务。

5）据games.com报道，《The Ascend: New Gods》这款第三人称角色扮演动作游戏日前在Xbox的E3新闻发布会上亮相，该游戏的独特之处在于采用了Facebook游戏异步玩法机制，支持玩家与好友异步作战而无需同时在线。

ascend dark blessing(from games)

此外，该游戏还采用了连网移动元素，允许玩家在手机上玩游戏，从中赢取可用于掌机版游戏的积分。（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） EA reveals SimCity Social for Facebook

Mike Thompson

Twenty-three years after it established the city-building genre in the video game industry, the SimCity franchise is coming to Facebook with SimCity Social. Electronic Arts announced the title today during its E3 press conference.

SimCity Social is being co-developed by EA Playfish and EA subsidiary Maxis. The game will feature the same core gameplay of SimCity, which is a management sim where players are cast as the mayor of a newly-established town. Players are encouraged to build their cities in an open, nonlinear manner and have to deal with issues like rising crime rates, demand for different types of properties and making sure the city has enough power to keep everyone’s lights on. EA is promising the game will deliver a deep gameplay experience, but it will have a simplified user interface to ensure the game is simultaneously appealing to both core and casual gamers.

The game will include the usual social feature for city management titles where players can visit their friends’ cities and interact with parts of these settlements. However, this feature can provide a kind of light player-versus-player mechanic where users can negatively impact others’ cities. Playfish VP of Global Studios Jami Laes tells us players visiting other cities will be able to trigger events like the iconic disasters from the mainstream games. Laes also says some of the events included in the game will be based on real-life events — much like how SimCity 2000 included the Oakland Hills Fire — but won’t say much else about this feature.

The last time EA brought one of its “Sim” titles to Facebook was with The Sims Social, which proved a major hit on the social network. At its peak, the game had 11.2 million million daily active users and was giving Zynga’s CityVille competition for the largest title on Facebook. Traffic’s fallen off since then and The Sims Social is currently treading at 3 million DAU.

EA, meanwhile, is struggling to maintain its presence as a social game developer, has recently shut down titles like Dragon Age Legends and Restaurant City and now sits at the No. 4 spot on our Facebook game developer leaderboard by DAU. SimCity Social may very well get lightning to strike a second time for EA, based on how well-known the SimCity brand is: the original SimCity launched in 1989 and 13 sequels have been released for PC, Mac, consoles and iOS devices and the series became one of EA’s best-known series.

The biggest obstacle facing SimCity Social, though, is that interest in city-building games seems to be waning. CityVille peaked in March 2011 with just over 21 million DAU, but that number’s dropped to 4.9 million in the year since. After CityVille, there aren’t any other titles in this genre with over a million DAU. The next largest English-language city-builder on Facebook is Playrix’s Township, which recently has been gaining traffic and is up to 270,000 DAU now that it’s published under 6waves’s banner. While SimCity is known to mainstream gaming audiences, it’s likely that many CityVille players have no familiarity with Maxis’s series and may not be interested in another city-builder.

SimCity Social doesn’t have a launch date yet, but EA says the game is in closed beta and promises it will arrive on Facebook soon. In the meantime, interested users can check out the game’s official Facebook page for trailers and screenshots; Liking SimCity Social will unlock special content when the game launches.（source:insidesocialgames）

2）Zynga scoops up video game maker Buzz Monkey

Ricardo Bilton

And the Zynga acquisitions just keep on coming.

Weeks after picking up Wild Needle and two months after acquiring OMGPOP, Zynga is making another big buy with Buzz Monkey, TechCrunch is reporting.

As part of the deal, Zynga is picking up fifty new employees along with Buzz Monkey’s Eugene, Ore. office. Zynga hasn’t officially announced the acquisition yet, so there’s no word on how much it paid for the company. We do know the acquisition price was low enough that Zynga didn’t need to disclose the buy to the SEC.

Started in 2001 by four former Dynamix employees, Buzz Monkey is a bit different from Zynga’s previous acquisitions. Unlike, say, OMGPOP, Buzz Monkey isn’t known for creating mass market, free-to-play games. The company is better known for larger console titles like Army of Two: 40th Day and the Tomb Raider series. More recently, Buzz Monkey moved into the smartphone gaming space with titles like Rinith Island, Fluid Monkey, and Block Rogue.

While it’s not likely that Zynga will shed its free-to-play roots, it’s become increasingly clear the company is on the verge of expanding into new territory. Last week, it hired Gears of War 2 writer Joshua Ortega as “senior narrative designer,” signaling Zynga’s interest in more narrative-driven experiences.

Given that Buzz Monkey has experience working on Facebook games, including smartphone titles and more ambitious console games, the company will be a major complement to Zynga’s ballooning stable of developers.

We’ve reached out to Zynga and Buzz Monkey and will update when the companies respond.（source:venturebeat）

3）Facebook’s new strategy for boosting user growth? Facebook for kids

Tom Cheredar

Facebook wants to start letting kids, ages 13 and under, use the giant social network under parental supervision, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

The company is currently working on new mechanisms to accomplish this goal, which could include linking a child’s Facebook account to their parent’s account. This would give the parent the ability to see all of their child’s activity, as well as allow them to control what applications they use and how they’ll allowed to use them.

The social network giant’s current policy bars users under the age of 13 from signing up, which is mostly to protect the site against laws related to online child protection laws and restrictions.  However, there are plenty of reasons why the company would want to change this policy. Adding children under 13 would provide a nice boost of user growth for the site, which translates to higher advertising revenue. It’ll also help solidify Facebook as a casual gaming platform, since children of that age are likely to be drawn this aspect of the site.

But there are also plenty of hurdles Facebook would have to jump through before regulators, parents, and lawmakers would be OK with a “Facebook for Kids” — with most of them being related to privacy issues.

“Recent reports have highlighted just how difficult it is to enforce age restrictions on the Internet, especially when parents want their children to access online content and services,”Facebook told the WSJ. “We are in continuous dialogue with stakeholders, regulators and other policy makers about how best to help parents keep their kids safe in an evolving online environment.”

Various reports have also been done showing that young children are already using Facebook, despite the company’s policy. For instance, MinorMonitor recently did a study showing that 38 percent of all children on Facebook are under the age of 13.

When you look at it from the perspective of it already happening, the smart move for Facebook would be to figure out how to legitimize it, make it safe, and then turn a profit on it.

Otherwise, Facebook is just leaving money on the table.（source:venturebeat）

4）OH: Twitter’s revenue may soar to $1B by 2014

Jolie O’Dell

Twitter wasn’t expected to hit the $1 billion revenue mark until 2016, but new sources are saying that number could come a good two years earlier than expected.

Super secret sources for Bloomberg say the microblogging network’s ad sales have led to internal forecasts that reflect a much rosier picture: $1 billion in sweet, sweet ad money by 2014.

This makes sense given the startup’s recent expansion into international advertising, which is likely bringing global brands and a very long tail of non-U.S. SMBs into Twitter’s fold.

Twitter also launched a self-serve ad platform earlier this year — a nice way for the startup to passively collect long-tail revenue from SMBs, local shops, and mom-and-pop businesses.

Twitter reps declined to comment on this news, so we can’t officially confirm the rumors are true. In fact, pretty much all the reports we’ve heard about Twitter’s revenue have been based on estimates or bold-faced speculation; what we do know for sure is that Twitter’s revenue plans are still very much in their infancy.

Still, Twitter execs are vague but confident on the company’s financial future.

“The health of the business is great,” said Twitter CEO Dick Costolo to VentureBeat reporters at a company event late last year. “I don’t think there’s anything else we need to do to make more money; the advertising business will sustain us.”

Still, that ad business has been fairly minuscule compared to what online giants Google and Facebook are pulling down. “I don’t think Twitter is in competition [with Google and Facebook for advertising budgets] — yet,” said eMarketer analyst Debra Williamson in a call with VentureBeat a few weeks ago. “It’s so much smaller in terms of the number of users. I see agencies primarily using Facebook and experimenting with Twitter as an adjunct.”

The one-billion mark is still a ways off for Twitter. By contrast, longtime heavyweight Facebook showed display ad revenue in the multiple billions for 2011 during its recent IPO filing, and Google showed more than $10 billion of mostly-ad-derived revenue for a single quarter alone last year.

But if Twitter is internally seeing a significant uptick in ad revenues and forecasts, we can likely point to big-name brands as the sponsors of Twitter’s success.

“Twitter’s revenue is going to need to come from the big advertisers, with a smaller base from small and mid-size advertisers,” said Williamson. “But [SMBs] are not what’s going to make Twitter ultimately successful.”

Twitter, which was founded in 2006, kicked around multiple business models, including analytics and enterprise products, before settling on advertising as its primary source of income. The company announced its ad suite just two years ago in April 2010. But the company wisely took its time in testing and rolling out its promotional products; for example, promotional tweets didn’t start rolling out in users’ timelines until last fall.

“The message we hear from brands and small businesses is they’re paying attention to Twitter as a marketing platform due to the level of engagement,” said Costolo. “And publishers are seeing that we’re driving a huge volume of traffic.”（source:venturebeat）

5）Ascend: New Gods: Facebook-style asynchronous gaming comes to Xbox

by Libe Goad

The Ascend: New Gods trailer below looks nothing like a Facebook game, but one of the more compelling things about this third-person action role-playing game — not that fact that it looks like God of War for the Xbox — but that there an asynchronous multiplayer component. That means you can play games with your friends, but it doesn’t have to be at the same time. Play when you want, a la Words with Friends or, dare I say, FarmVille.

This unique “parallel online action” wasn’t detailed during the game’s announcement at today’s Xbox Press Conference at E3 2012, but the game’s official website says that you will be able to play “with AND against other gamers over Xbox LIVE as you each journey through your own private yet parallel paths to Ascension. As you advance through your own single-player game, you’ll see other players adventuring in their own identical worlds.”

Ascend: New Gods also contains a connected mobile component where you can build up your stats on the go, similar to how you were able to build up your Galactic Readiness score by playing Mass Effect Infiltrator or Mass Effect Datapad when forced to spend time away from your gaming console of choice.

There wasn’t much very casual or very social about Xbox’s big announcements this year, but this game in particular seemed to be giving a (bloody, violent) nod to the exploding mobile and social gaming scene. Ascend: New Gods will be available on Xbox Live later this year.（source:games）