1）据MCV报道，Zynga内部人士在公布表现不济的财报之前两个月就抛售了价值5.16亿美元的公司股票，最近有律师宣布将介入调查Zynga股票交易的情况。

Zynga公布2012年第二季度亏损2280万美元的财报结果之后，其股票售价就下跌了40%。但有评论员认为，Zynga成员有可能早在两个月前就预料到公布财报后，Zynga股票价值势必下跌，因此提前做好准备并售出了4300万支股票。

高级律师Jeffrey Norton表示，从时机上看这些Zynga内部人士选择在两个月前出售大量股票的举动很可疑（Zynga高层都在那一时期出售了股票）。

2012年3月份Zynga股票售价为14.69美元，但目前已跌至3.06美元。

2）Spry Fox首席创意官Daniel Cook在最近的Causual Connect大会上宣布，公司下一款原创游戏是《Hoppington》（暂定名称）。

Daniel Cook(from blog.games.com)

该游戏采用创造性的协作玩法，要求玩家组队寻找资源并获得大量积分。其独特性就在于，玩家会在现实世界的7天当中经历游戏的开始、高潮和结束。在此期间玩家及临时队友将穿越一个大型区域，全力建设相互连接的小路，并以“制造站点”连接这些路径，以便产生更多积分。

Spry Fox联合创始人David Edery称这款游戏仍处于初期执行阶段，其玩法和风格融合了《文明》、《Lemmings》以及《Space Chem》游戏元素。

3）据games.com报道，韩国社交游戏发行商Neowiz及开发商LIFO Interactive最近推出以奥运会为主题的Facebook游戏《Olympic Games City》，支持玩家在其中建设自己的奥林匹克公园，玩家在游戏中可以根据自己的喜好建设赛场、摊位、公寓等内容。

Olympics Games City(from games)

4）据Eurogamer报道，Avalanche工作室主管Christofer Sundberg（游戏邦注：其代表作是《正当防卫2》）在最近采访中呼吁开发者不要执拗于制作可下载内容（DLC），因为“如果游戏制作精良，就不一定需要用DLC留住玩家”。

christofer-sundberg(from weeabooswithcontrollers.com)

他表示多数开发商通过制作DLC以延长玩家对游戏粘性，但让游戏获得长期成功的真正要诀却是制作一款让玩家刚接触就舍不得罢手的游戏。

据其所称，他们会制作允许玩家探索并获得乐趣，同时又不会过度关注结局的游戏。Avalanche工作室也针对《正当防卫2》制作了DLC，但Sundberg发现这个DLC实际上不会发挥长远作用。虽然有不少单人游戏通过添加多人模式延长玩家关注度，但他也不认为这就一定是合适的解决方案，因为将多人模式强塞入单人游戏中可能只是浪费开发预算，并且不会给游戏带来任何附加价值。

5）据venturebeat报道，社交营销公司Semiocast最近报告指出，今年6月Twitter用户已达5亿（游戏邦注：Semiocast分析了5.17亿Twitter用户资料，以及10亿条以上的公开推文）。

其中美国Twitter用户达1.4亿，巴西用户位居其次（超过4000万），但并非所有Twitter用户都处于活跃状态。约有三分之一注册用户每月都登录Twitter帐号，日本Twitter活跃用户比例较高。

Top 20 countries(from Semiocast)

在Twitter帐号数量前20名的国家中，日本位居第三，紧随其后的分别是英国和印度尼西亚。

Top 20 cities(from Semiocast)

在发布推文数量最多的前20名城市中，印度尼西亚的雅加达位居榜首，第二名是东京、第三是伦敦，第四名是圣保罗，第五名是纽约。

值得注意的是，阿拉伯Twitter用户增长迅速，阿拉伯语已经成为Twitter上第六大语言，在所有公开推文中占比2.8%。

6）在本周MAU增长最快的Facebook游戏榜单上，Zynga新作《The Ville》位居第一，新增MAU达1640万，增幅为102%。

top gainers this week-MAU(from AppData)

EA新游戏《SimCity Social》排名第二，新增MAU为360万，增幅为51%。Social Point游戏《Dragon City》位列第三，新增MAU为150万，增幅为29%。FreshPlanet新《SongPop》MAU增长110万，增幅为12%。Zynga游戏《Ruby Blast》（发布于上个月底）MAU增长87万，增幅为105%。

乐元素中文RPG游戏《我的传奇》新增34万MAU，增幅为69%；《Temple Ruin》这款克隆Imangi工作室iOS热作《Temple Run》的游戏MAU也增加13万9159，增幅为27%。（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）Legal investigation into Zynga share sales

by Ben Parfitt

Company insiders sold $516m shares shortly before poor fiscal report.

Lawyers have announced an investigation into Zynga’s share dealings.

The company experienced a huge 40 per cent drop in its share price following disappointing recent financials that revealed a $22.8m loss for its fiscal Q2.

However, some commentators have asked questions about a flash stock sale around two months prior that saw top-level company insiders sell off 43m shares, worth around $516m.

Had that sale occurred after the financial report, their value would have been considerably less.

Senior attorney at law, Jeffrey Norton told The Register: “The timing of these insider sales two months before is suspect. Zynga insiders at the highest level all sold shares at that time.”

As of March 2012 Zynga’s shares were trading at $14.69. Today they are trading at just $3.06.（source:mobile-ent）

2）Spry Fox’s next original game, tentatively titled Hoppington, will be played over 7 real-time days

By Eli Cymet

One of my favourite talks at this year’s Casual Connect was given by Spry Fox (Triple Town) Chief Creative Officer, Dan Cook, about designing completely original games. He feels a great place to start is at the root, with the core assumptions of how we play. Mario runs and jumps, and we control that. What if we didn’t control the running part? Canabalt is what. A fitting chat, it seems, considering what this indie duo has up its sleeve.

In addition to a long-awaited sequel to their plane combat hit Steambirds, and a Facebook and mobile version of their wordplay title Panda Poet, Spry Fox is turning the tables on the classic idea of “game length” with their most ambitious original IP yet: Hoppington. And even though the name is still temporary, the concept has me hopping for joy. (And no, I’m not sorry I did that.)

Centered around innovative cooperative play, Hoppington will group players together in a quest for resources, and – of course – lots and lots of points. The catch? Games will start, peak, and finish within seven actual real-life days. During that time, you and your impromptu team will guide groups of “hoppers” through a large mass of territory, working together to establish connective pathways, efficiently forage for raw materials, and combine them at “crafting stations” to yield the most points possible.

If it all sounds a little confusing for now, don’t worry: everything’s still in the early phases of implementation. Even Spry Fox’s other half, David Edery, told me in a chat we had during Casual Connect that the team acknowledges how bad it is at targeting easily sellable archetypes. In a befuddling tit-for-tat, I tried to wrangle the game’s genre by offering up the idea of Ticket to Ride meets Settlers of Catan, only to have Edery counter that they’d been thinking of it more as Civilizationmeets Lemmings by way of Space Chem.

Elevator pitches aside, one thing the duo is great at is the creation of games that are instantly accessible, which defy convention. I have complete faith that – if nothing else – Hoppington will make good on Cook’s thesis of reevaluating core conventions and doing something compelling with them. In the mean time, stay tuned to Gamezebo for updates about Hoppington, and our full interview with David Edery, in which he goes in-depth about Spry Fox’s mission to unite people through play.（source:gamezebo）

3）The official Olympics Facebook game looks less athletic than expected

by Joe Osborne

Walk, don’t run–in fact, just click your lazy butt into the Olympic Games Stadium in London this week. With Korean social game publisher Neowiz and developer LIFO Interactive behind the scenes, players can now build their own version of Olympic Park in the official Facebook game for the Olympic Games, aptly titled Olympic Games City.

Structured like any good city builder on the network, Olympic Games City lets players create their very own take on the Stadium and its surroundings replete with competition areas, newsstands, apartments (or flats, as those across the pond call them) and more. But wait, wouldn’t players want to, oh, I don’t know, actually compete in the Olympics in any game based around the event?

At any rate, Neowiz and LIFO have clearly taken copious notes from the countless city-builders on Facebook in making Olympic Games City, which will hopefully serve the game well this week. The fact that the 2012 Olympics even has a Facebook game is a milestone in and of itself, so revel in that while you give this one a shot.（source:games）

4）Keeping players playing without adding DLC

by Tom Curtis

“DLC is not needed to keep players engaged if the game is well executed.”- Avalanche studios head Christofer Sundberg urges developers not to get too hung up on producing downloadable content in an interview with Eurogamer.

The Just Cause 2 developer explains that while most developers produce downloadable content to prolong user engagement, the real trick to long-term success is to make a game that players don’t want to put down in the first place.

“We create a game allowing players to properly explore and have fun and not focusing so much on the actual end goal of the game,” he says.

Avalanche experimented with its own DLC for Just Cause 2, but Sundberg found that the content just didn’t make much of an impact in the long run. And while plenty of other single-player games have added multiplayer to better hold players’ attention, he’s not sure that’s the answer either.

“The big thing now is to force multiplayer into games that are really single-player games just to combat second hand sales and that makes absolutely no sense as it just consumes budget and does not add any value except on the back of the box.”

But adding so-called “value” to a product is a vague pursuit, to say the least. With so many factors at play, is there a magic formula for making a game stick? Perhaps there’s something developers can do to make their DLC or multiplayer efforts more worthwhile? （source:gamasutra）

5）Twitter reaches 500M users, 140M in the U.S.

John Koetsier

Twitter reached the 500 million user mark in June, says social marketing firm Semiocast.

By analyzing 517 million Twitter profiles and over a billion public tweets, the company was also able to determine that 140 million of those users are in the U.S., with Brazil coming in second at just over 40 million Twitter users. But not all users are active.

“Our estimate is that about a third of all registered users connect monthly,” Semiocast representative Paul Guyot told VentureBeat. “But the activity rate really depends on the country — Japanese users tweet more, for instance.”

Twitter was widely reported to be reaching the half-billion mark in February of this year, but the company stayed mum and others were skeptical. One challenge in reporting Twitter users is that spam accounts are easily and frequently created — more easily than on Facebook.

Semiocast’s numbers seem more credible because the company is also analyzing tweets from those accounts, and geolocating users via clues in language, time zone, user profile data, and GPS coordinates where available.

The top 20 countries are led by the U.S. and Brazil, but Japan is still third, with the UK and Indonesia rounding out the top five.

The list of op cities is also interesting. Jakarta, Indonesia takes top ranking among tweets that could be geo-located. (Bandung, at number six, is also an Indonesian city.)

Based on Semiocast’s study, Tokyo, London, and Sao Paulo were second, third, and fourth. Even though the U.S. is the top country, the first American city came in at number five: New York.

And check out number 10: Riyahd, Saudi Arabia. Echoes of the Arab Spring and the role social media played are still in the air, and this is an indication that Twitter is still growing fast among Arabic speakers; Semiocast reports that Arabic is now the sixth most popular language on Twitter, used in 2.8% of all public tweets.（source:venturebeat）

6）Zynga’s new titles top this week’s list of fastest-growing Facebook games by MAU

Mike Thompson

Zynga’s two newest games appeared at the top of our list of fastest-growing Facebook games by monthly active users. The developer’s latest game, The Ville, took the No. 1 spot with 16.4 million MAU for a 102 percent gain now that Zynga’s turned on cross-promotion for the game.

EA’s SimCity Social came in at No. 2 with 3.6 million MAU, a 51 percent increase. Social Point’s Dragon City took the No. 3 spot with its 1.5 million MAU, a 29 percent increase. FreshPlanet’s SongPop continues to enjoy steady growth, up by 1.1 million MAU for a 12 percent gain. Finally, Zynga’s Ruby Blast (released late last month) grew by 870,000 MAU for a 105 percent increase.

Five other games on this week’s list showed gains larger than 25 percent. Soft Reklam’s Super Texas Holdem Poker was up by 350,000 MAU for a 583 percent increase. Happy Elements’s Chinese-language RPG 我的傳奇 (“The Legend”) grew 69 percent with 340,000 MAU. Qublix’s Jewel Kingdom took in 300,000 MAU for a 27 percent increase. Product Madness’s Hollywood Slots was up by 210,000 MAU for a 38 percent gain. Finally, Temple Ruin, which seems to be a clone of Imangi’s iOS hit Temple Run, grew by 27 percent with its 139,159 MAU.（source:insidesocialgames）