1）据insidesocialgames报道，英国社交游戏开发商Playdemic日前宣布完成一轮融资，但并未透露具体融资金额，仅表示其中有300万美元来自IBM创始人Watson家庭。

该公司计划利用这笔资金扩展开发及发行业务，并在年底前至少再推出四款新游戏。

Playdemic-Logo(from realwire.com)

Playdemic曾是RockYou旗下独立运营的子公司，但在2011年11月份又回售给原先创始人。目前该公司在Facebook推出《Gourmet Ranch》及《Crossword Buddies》这两款游戏，据AppData数据显示，《Gourmet Ranch》发布于今年4月份，今年6月份DAU达到峰值13万，但目前仅为9万。而《Crossword Buddies》目前DAU仅为1万。

2）Adobe公司日前推出Flash Player 11.4以及AIR 3.4版本，这两个更新版本将为开发者提供更优质的硬件加速功能。

据其游戏解决方案企业产品营销经理Diana Helander所称，这两个更新版本可为移动及网页游戏开发者创造更良好的跨平台环境。其支持技术包括面向iOS、硬件加速视频及Stage 3D视频卡/网络摄像头开发。

Flash Player 11.4 & AIR 3.4(from flashdaily.net)

虽然Adobe在去年11月宣布Flash Player不再向移动平台提供支持，但该公司仍向移动开发项目推出了AIR包装技术。该公司在上周宣布将不再支持Android设备安装Flash Player，但开发者可通过AIR将Flash游戏投放到手机平台，从而降低Flash Player脱离移动设备对开发者所造成的影响。

Helander表示在Facebook前25名热门游戏中，仍有24款MAU超过10万的游戏采用Flash技术；中国9大热门Flash游戏每月收益甚至达到7000万美元。

3）据Famitsu报道，Zynga日本工作室主管（前Tecmo Koei总裁兼首席执行官）Kenji Matsubara在最近采访中表示，虽然他们目前在日本发展战略是对Zynga现有游戏进行本土化处理，但他认为工作室未来目标是将Zynga游戏推向全球，并且这也是他加入Zynga团队的原因之一。

Zynga Japan game(from games)

4）据serkantoto报道，GREE日前宣布成立一家新子公司，专门负责制作和销售基于公司社交游戏的实体周边产品。

这个新公司暂定名称为“GREE Entertainment Products”，计划于下个月开业，将由Taisei Yoshida（GREE媒体业务开发高级副总裁）主导新公司运营事务。

5）CyberAgent日前宣布旗下热门虚拟世界Ameba Pigg（在日本海外名称是Ameba Pico）在7月份用户已达1310万，该平台于2009年2月上线，2011年9月时的用户为1000万，2012年4月份时达1200万。

ameba-pigg-ameba-pico-pigg-cafe(from serkantoto)

该平台支持用户使用已有的Ameba帐号（游戏邦注：Ameba是一个拥有2200万以上用户的日本大型社交及博客平台）登录Ameba Pigg，并在其中体验社交游戏。

6）腾讯波士顿团队与Stomp Games日前宣布《Robot Rising》已入驻Facebook平台并进行公开测试。这款RPG游戏主要目标用户是乐衷于体验富有深度，充满战斗元素的传统游戏粉丝。

Robot Rising(from games)

7）据insidesocialgames报道，在本周DAU增长最快的Facebook游戏榜单上，FreshPlanet游戏《SongPop》持续居首，新增20万DAU，增幅达5%；Social Point游戏《Dragon City》位居第二，新增20万DAU，增幅为4%；Tetris Online游戏《Tetris Battle》新增DAU为10万，增幅为4%。

Top gainers this week-DAU(from AppData)

Zynga上榜游戏是《ChefVille》和《Ruby Blast》，前者目前位居第四，新增8万DAU，增幅达57%；后者排名第五，新增DAU为7万，增幅达15%。

值得注意的是，基于热门主机游戏的克隆Facebook版本《Super MariO》也新增1.6万DAU，增幅达400%；《GTA-San Andreas》新增1万DAU，增幅为100%。（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）Playdemic secures new funding round, $3 million from IBM’s founders

Mike Thompson

UK social game developer Playdemic announced today that it completed a major funding round to support its efforts of leading the charge on “second-generation social gaming.”

The exact amount of the fundraising round wasn’t revealed in Playdemic’s announcement, but it did disclose that $3 million came from the Watson family (the grandchildren of Thomas J.

Watson, founder of IBM). The company is also bringing David Watson onto its board, as a non-executive director. The studio also says it’s planning to use the money to expand both development and publishing efforts and launch a minimum of four new games by the end of the year.

It’s been a while since we’ve heard anything from Playdemic, the last time being when it partnered with Zynga as a publishing partner back in March. Before that Playdemic was an independent subsidiary of RockYou, but it was sold back to its founders in November 2011.

Currently, Playdemic has two games on Facebook: Gourmet Ranch and Crossword Buddies. Our AppData traffic-tracking service reveals Crossword Buddies doesn’t have much of a presence on the social network, with only 10,000 daily active users. Gourmet Ranch, however, is still bringing in 90,000 DAU, but it launched in April with 120,000 DAU and peaked in June with 130,000.（source:insidesocialgames）

2）Adobe updates Flash Player and AIR, continues to expand support for game devs

Mike Thompson

Today, Adobe is rolling out an update to both Flash Player (11.4) and AIR (3.4); both updates are designed to better provide developers the ability to utilize hardware acceleration. We sat down with Diana Helander, the Group Product Marketing Manager  for Gaming Solutions at Adobe to talk about how the updates are only part of how Adobe’s continuing to support game developers on all platforms.

The updates will likely be useful to developers looking to take their games cross-platform, both onto mobile devices and the web. These include  more support for iOS (like push notifications and AIR direct deployment without iTunes), hardware-accelerated video and Stage 3D video card/webcam development. Developers will also find support for transparent images with Stage 3D, the ability to leverage hardware resources with concurrency and SWF size reductions.

In fact, the updates mark the continuation of Adobe’s plans to increase its presence in the game development sector and get Flash Player adopted on a wider scale. Helander explains that a big part of Adobe’s growing presence in the industry comes from its continued support of developer communities, something that it’s actively working to expand. Case in point: Adobe’s gaming team is appearing at both the Unity Unite conference in Amsterdam and CEDEC in Japan. At Unity Unite, Adobe will be showing off the Premium Features for Flash Player and showcasing Madfinger’s Shadowgun and Nickelodeon’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (both of which were created using a Unity workflow). Meanwhile, GREE will be talking about how it developed Monpla Smash, the company’s first mobile social game built with Flash.

Although Adobe announced last November that it wouldn’t continue to invest in Flash Player for mobile platforms, the company’s been pushing its AIR packaging technology for mobile development while web application developers continue to use Flash technologies. Last week, Adobe said it would disable new installs of Flash Player on Android devices. However, Adobe’s been working to make sure Flash’s departure from mobile platforms doesn’t affect developers, since AIR creates a new path for Flash games to be delivered in the format they want for a mobile device. Some developers are even using the new technology to go back and release popular Flash games for mobile platforms, as was the case with Amanita Design’s Machinarium and State of Play’s Lume (which you can watch the trailer for below).

Adobe’s penetration isn’t dropping off, either. Flash Player 11.2 shipped four months ago with a silent auto update feature, which 400 million people have opted into. There are also approximately 25,000 AIR apps today on mobile markets, across iOS, Google Play and the Amazon Appstore.

For desktop-based gaming, though, Flash is still widely used in both social and casual games by developers like Zynga, GREE and Amazon. Helander says 24 of the top 25 Facebook games with more than 100,000 monthly active users and the highest user satisfaction scores are delivered with Flash. Likewise, Helander also tells us the top nine Flash games in China generate $70 million a month.

“Gaming is a holistic story,” Helander explains, “but Flash tends to dominate the conversation in terms of money being made and maturity.”（source:insidesocialgames）

3）Zynga Japan wants its original releases to see the world

by Joe Osborne

In the ’90s, Japan all but dominated the video games world between Nintendo, Sony and Sega. But today, the scale isn’t exactly tipped in their favor with American companies like Microsoft and Apple in the game. Zynga Japan, however, wants to see its homeland flex its already-large gaming muscle with social games that reach a global audience, according to Famitsu.

Zynga Japan head (and former Tecmo Koei president and CEO) Kenji Matsubara gave Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu the whole story on his move to join the social game giant. But perhaps more important than his transition story–and Zynga Japan’s current strategy of localizing existing Zynga games for the Japanese audience–are his ambitions for the future of the company’s Japanese arm.

“I think it’s important that we take the original titles we create and get them out to not just Japan, but the rest of the world,” Matsubara told Famitsu. “Getting our stuff out to the world is another one of the reasons I joined Zynga Japan–that hasn’t changed, and it’s a challenge that we’re still tackling here. We want to build experience expanding our operation with Ayakashi Onmyoroku and extend that to releasing games simultaneously in Japan and elsewhere worldwide.”

Ayakashi Onmyoroku is the developer’s first original game, a social trading card game centered around traditional Japanese spirits currently available on iOS for Japanese players. But Zynga Japan doesn’t want to stop there, it seems, so expect more where that new came from. Could this mean that we’ll see Montopia in the U.S? One can dream, folks … one can dream.（source:games）

4）With New Subsidiary: GREE Starts Merchandising Business [Social Games]

by Dr. Serkan Toto

This is a pretty smart move: GREE announced that they will establish a wholly owned subsidiary that will do nothing but create and sell physical goods based on their social games.

Dubbed “GREE Entertainment Products” (tentative), the new company is set to start operations next month. It will be led by Taisei Yoshida who is currently GREE proper’s senior vice president of media business development (here‘s an interview with him from last year).

The plan is to not only explore a new field of business but to also reach out to new customers the company hasn’t been able to sign up for their gaming platform so far.

GREE has quite a few first-party games that I can see are suitable for this merchandise business, first and foremost mega-popular social card battle game Doliland (Driland outside Japan).

However, it’s also entirely possible that GREE will produce merchandise based on IP coming from third-party games in the future, too (I can actually think of a ton of games that might be suitable).

Using social game IP for certain products isn’t new (there are now several anime and manga based on titles from GREE, Konami, and others, for example), but this is the first time a social gaming company in Japan is making a serious effort to create a new business out of it.

Rovio is said to make $400 million in 2012 with merchandising alone.（source:serkantoto）

5）Ameba Pigg: Japan’s Top Virtual World Hits 13 Million Users, Launches New Social Game [Social Games]

by Dr. Serkan Toto

Popular virtual world Ameba Pigg hit 13.1 million users in July, maker CyberAgent announced today (the number was actually revealed in the Q3 report already). Ameba Pigg, which is known as Ameba Pico outside Japan, had 10 million users in September 2011 and 12 million in April 2012.

It launched in February 2009.

One of the main reasons why the virtual world took off is that users can use their existing Ameba accounts to log in (Ameba is a large social and blogging platform with over 22 million users in Japan).

Ameba Pigg users can also play social games inside the virtual world. The newest one is Pigg Café – as the name suggests, it’s a café management simulation.（source:serkantoto）

6）Robot Rising is finally ready to show what Facebook games can do

by Joe Osborne

That’s the idea, at least. Publisher Tencent Boston and developer Stomp Games announced that Robot Rising has entered “open beta” on Facebook. Or, as we’ll put it: This action RPG has gone live. Robot Rising is an ambitious effort to prove to the traditional game fans of the world that explosive, action-packed games with deep, exciting combat are possible on Facebook.

You know, the same place that’s home to FarmVille and Bejeweled Blitz? Based on what we’ve seen (and played) of Robot Rising, this RPG certainly looks the part, and there’s no denying that it packs more explosions than the next dozen social games in line. According to Stomp Games VP and GM Jeff Goodsill, its approach seems to be working already.

Gallery: Robot Rising on Facebook

“We have been thrilled at the response to the fun and quality of Robot Rising by game players of all types as well as our industry peers,” Goodsill said in a release. “The ability to immediately get into high-velocity combat with just a few browser clicks has really resonated with people. Then, after just a short time the depth and diversity of the game takes over, and the player excitement jumps as the strategy and social features are discovered.”

However, what will likely be most challenging for Stomp Games is to surmount the enormous stigma Facebook suffers from as a destination for casual players–that it simply can’t handle the kind of game that the core audience craves. But don’t be one of those people, and have an open mind. You might actually end up liking what you see.（source:games）

7）SongPop stays on top of this week’s fastest-growing Facebook games by DAU

Kassi Murray

This week’s top three growing games had a small percentage gain but still grew substantially in terms of daily active users. FreshPlanet’s SongPop continues to hold the No. 1 spot with a 5 percent gain of 200,000 DAU. Social Point’s Dragon City stays at No. 2 with 200,000 DAU and a 4 percent increase. Tetris Online’s Tetris Battle had 100,000 DAU gain and a four percent increase making it No. 3.

Zynga’s  making the list with its newer games ChefVille and Ruby Blast. The recently-released ChefVille is at the No. 4 slot with 57 percent gain of 80,000 DAU. Ruby Blast takes the No. 5 spot with 70,000 DAU and a 15 percent increase.

Six games saw gains greater than 100 percent, including what appear to be illegal clones of popular console titles. Best Arcade Game made a 2,400 percent increase with 19,200 DAU. King of the Web made a 567 percent increase of 34,000 DAU. Super MariO increased 16,000 DAU with 400 percent. Both Pow Games’ Seaside Hideaway and Row Sham Bow’s Woodland Heroes gained the exact same DAU amount with a 150 percent increase and 12,000 DAU. GTA – San Andreas (obviously based on Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto – San Andreas) gained 10,000 DAU and increased by 100 percent.（source:insidesocialgames）