1）据彭博社报道，继首席运营官John Schappert、《CtiyVille》总经理Alan Patmore、《Mafia Wars 2》总经理Erik Bethke及首席创意官Mike Verdu离职之后，Zynga副总裁Bill Mooney和Brian Birtwistle也在近日离开公司。

目前Zynga尚未正式公布这一消息，仅对AllThingsD表示，员工在公司IPO之后离职的现象并不令人意外。在本月初，Zynga曾宣布分发股票期权以挽留现有的全职员工。

2）据彭博社报道，EA Labels总裁Frank Gibeau在最近采访中承认，公司刚起步时并不顺利，他们在创建游戏开发技术方面犯下了一些错误。

frank-gibeau(from sociable.co)

他表示公司当时并没有适合制作出体面游戏的强大游戏引擎，但现在EA会确保不会再让这种情况发生。他们的专属引擎Frostbite主要针对下一代硬件而研发，EA已吸引之前的教训，并已开始针对下一代设备开发3-5个IP项目。

3）eMarketer分析师最近预测Facebook在2012年收益将降至50亿美元左右，低于2月份时预计的60亿美元（Facebook在上个月的财报会议中指出，公司第二季度收益为11.8亿美元）。

值得注意的是，eMarketer预计广告业务在Facebook收益中所占比例将缩小（但仍是Facebook主要收益来源），其余收益则来自Facebook支付服务等业务。Facebook广告收益仍将持续增长，但增幅将低于过去水平。

facebook-revenue(from venturebeat)

除了eMarketer之外，Pivotal和Wedbush也分别降低了对Facebook今年收益水平的预期，其范围介于49亿至53.7亿美元之间。

Facebook在过去6个月中的股票价值下跌49%，目前售价为每股19.18美元。

Facebook Price(from venturebeat)

4）据insidesocialgames报道，Facebook日前宣布更新一项平台政策，禁止平台上的游戏将用户直接引向第三方网站，也不允许非Facebook游戏与Facebook及其移动平台的游戏共享一个应用ID；开发者将不可在自己的Facebook游戏中添加其他网页游戏的推广链接。

facebook_logo(from insidesocialgames)

因为Zynga与Facebook之前已达成相关协议，所以该政策不会对Zynga游戏不利，但Kabam和King.com等开发商则无疑将受到影响。

5）据Techcrunch报道，Facebook市场营销公司Nanigans最近报告显示，目前Facebook Sponsored Results广告点击率比一般的Marketplace Ad高23倍，有些广告点击率甚至超过3%，而CPC（每点击成本）至少比后者低78%。除此之外，Facebook Sponsored Results所驱动的安装率也比后者高14%。

facebook-sponsored-results-zynga(from techcrunch)

需注意的是，3%点击率已达到上个世纪90年代一般网络广告的水准，当时正是互联网广告发展的黄金时代。而目前的网络广告点击率已经降至0.1%-0.3%的水平。

6）据彭博社报道，EA Labels总裁Frank Gibeau在最近采访中解释了PopCap不久前进行大规模裁员的原因。

他指出PopCap当中有一些业务同EA已开发的项目重叠，这会占用大量法务、运营资源，所以他们决定加速两者业务的整合，同时也希望加快从社交向移动游戏市场的转型，因此进行了一系列业务重组。

Pvz(from games)

Gibeau认为社交游戏市场已经趋于饱和（这也是Zynga等公司所面临的一大问题），EA希望PopCap成为手机游戏市场的佼佼者，因此不得不裁减一些PopCap社交游戏人才。

7）据insidesocialgames报道，EA将发布新款社交游戏《Jetset Secrets》（但尚未公布具体时间），这是一款融合冒险主题的寻物解谜游戏，玩家在其中要扮演一名侦探，寻找许多坏蛋的线索并拯救世界。从预告视频中可以看出，该游戏还将支持玩家与好友互动。

Jetset Secrets(from vg247.com)

寻物解谜仍是Facebook平台的一大热门游戏题材，但目前的流量已经有所下降。据AppData数据显示，Zynga的同类游戏《Hidden Chronicles》是目前Facebook第一大寻物解谜游戏，DAU为190万，远低于2月份高峰期时的740万。迪士尼Playdom旗下的《Gardens of Time》以及《Disney Animal Kingdom Explorers》目前DAU为72万左右。（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）Once again, Zynga loses more top staff – report

By Tom Curtis

Zynga’s list of former executives seems to have grown a bit longer today, as Bloomberg reports that company vice presidents Bill Mooney and Brian Birtwistle have both stepped down from their positions.

These two are just the latest in an ongoing string of executives to step down from the social game company in the last few months. Since its IPO in December, the company has lost employees including COO John Schappert, CityVille general manager Alan Patmore, Mafia Wars 2 general manager Erik Bethke, and chief creative officer Mike Verdu, who announced his resignation just yesterday.

Zynga has yet to formally acknowledge these two recent departures, but told AllThingsD, “it’s not at all surprising that some would move on and or retire post-IPO.” Since that initial public offering, Zynga has really struggled on Wall Street, and in its most recent quarter, its earnings fell well below analyst estimates.

Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that Zynga has been handing out stock options to keep its full-time employees from leaving. （source:gamasutra）

2）We won’t make the same mistakes next generation, says EA

By Mike Rose

“Frankly, we made a couple of mistakes in how we built our technology that was going to build all these games.”

- Frank Gibeau, head of labels at Electronic Arts admits that the company had a rather rocky start at the beginning of the current console generation.

However, Gibeau says that he has pinned the problems down to one point in particular – technology. The company didn’t have a powerful enough game engine in place to properly take its games to the necessary level, he says in the Bloomberg interview. With its proprietary Frostbite engine, EA is making sure this doesn’t happen again.

“[Frostbite] is tailor made for next-gen hardware, so we’re in really good shape from a technology standpoint, which is where we had our misstep last time,” he notes.

A rich and broad set of intellectual properties is also something EA was missing at the start of the current console cycle, says Gibeau, and again, this is something that the company is looking to rectify come the next generation.

“We’ve already started three to five IPs that we’re going to launch in those first 24 months of the next generation,” he says. “EA Sports is there with all of its power, and you also see some really big brands like Battlefield coming out.” （source:gamasutra）

3）Analysts lower their expectations for Facebook revenue by $1B for 2012

Jolie O’Dell

In yet another financial PR blow, Facebook’s revenue estimates from analysts at eMarketer have dropped to around $5 billion for 2012. Previously, the firm forecast revenues of $6 billion for the year.

In its first-ever earnings call last month, the social network posted $1.18 billion in revenue for the second quarter of 2012.

“In February, eMarketer predicted that Facebook’s total revenues would surpass $6 billion this year, but after the company underperformed market expectations in both Q1 and Q2, eMarketer’s forecast—an analysis of hundreds of data sets on Facebook ad revenues, impressions, usage and other factors collected from dozens of third-party sources—has been revised downward,” we read in the firm’s release on the news.

EMarketer reps said in a statement on the revised forecast that analysts’ lowered expectations “[follow] a trend evident from most other firms that have looked closely at Facebook’s revenues over the past year.”

Interestingly, eMarketer expects advertising to account for a smaller (but still majority) share of revenues, with products such as payments making up the rest of Facebook’s income.

Ad revenues will continue to grow, the firm said, but at an overall slower rate than in the past. The analysts involved in the forecast noted that Facebook’s mobile advertising (especially internationally) and advertising exchange are still nascent and expected to pick up their pace in the coming years.

Other firms are also revising estimates of Facebook’s revenue, with all estimates posted after the company’s Q2 earnings call ranging between $4.9 and $5.37 billion for 2012.

While the company is still getting its revenue game together, its publicly traded stock has continued to slip. In the past six months, Facebook stock has lost 49 percent of its value and is trading at $19.18 as of this writing.（source:venturebeat）

4）Facebook updates platform policies, limits games on third-party sites

Mike Thompson

Yesterday, Facebook announced a platform policy update for games on third-party websites, limiting the access these titles will have to users’ friends and additional permissions.

The update was announced on Facebook’s developer blog. Developers will no longer be able to cross-link or promote their web games from within the games they have on Facebook canvas. That said, users will still be able to use Facebook Connect to login to a game and have that game publish back to Facebook. While this doesn’t affect Zynga because of pre-existing contractual agreements, it will affect other developers like Kabam and King.com.

We’re told by sources that the change is due to Facebook re-allocating resources toward canvas and mobile, and games using Facebook Connect haven’t seen the same kind of traffic that titles on Facebook canvas and mobile platforms have.

This might also be related to Facebook’s current payments policy. The company requires canvas games to use Facebook Payments (formerly known as Credits), of which it takes a 30 percent fee. Games off-Facebook do not have to use this payment system, even though they have been able to use all the same APIs as canvas games.

Not only that, but if users are spending time on third-party sites, that’s less exposure they’re getting to Facebook advertising. It would be hard for the company to make a case for continuing to support web games that don’t help it monetize. Although Facebook doesn’t yet make money off of iOS or Android games that integrate Open Graph or Single Sign-On, that area is growing more rapidly than desktop web games and likely needs more internal resources.

Here’s the official wording from new Facebook platform policy that affects developers using Facebook Connect for games:

Special provisions for games:

a. Desktop web games off of Facebook.com may only use Facebook Login (Authentication, excluding user connections such as friend list), Social Plugins and publishing (e.g., Feed Dialog, Stream Publish, or Open Graph). When authenticating, these games may not request additional permissions other than age, email, and our Publishing Permissions (effective December 5, 2012).

b. Games on Facebook.com and mobile must not share the same app ID with desktop web games off of Facebook.com. You must not use Canvas apps to promote or link to game sites off of Facebook, and must not use emails obtained from us to promote or link to desktop web games off of Facebook.com (effective December 5, 2012).

We’ve reached out to a few developers for comment but have yet to hear back or have been told they have no official comment.（source:insidesocialgames）

5）Party Like It’s 1990: Some CTRs On Facebook Sponsored Results Ads ‘Exceeding 3%’

Ingrid Lunden

Early numbers for Facebook’s Sponsored Results, the ads launched last week that run alongside Facebook searches, could be an encouraging sign that Facebook’s strategy of building new ways of advertising to its users is working.

Nanigans, one of the Facebook performance-based marketers selling against the new unit, says that click-through rates on the ads so far have been about 23 times higher than regular marketplace ads, with some click-through-rates actually exceeding 3%, and cost per click (CPCs), at this point at least, some 78% lower than they are for Marketplace Ads.

On top of that they appear to be driving more actions, with a 14% higher install rate compared to Marketplace Ads.

That 3% CTR figure, it turns out, was the average that online ads were getting in the 1990s, a great heyday for ad-funded dot-coms.

Those numbers for the wider internet, of course, are now down to 0.1%-0.3%.

The question is whether Facebook over time will follow the same curve, and if it does, if it can keep enough scale in its operation to sustain a strong business anyway.

On the other hand, if they sustain, the numbers point to Facebook’s growing ads business, and perhaps a greater focus on its search window in the future.

There are already a number of features in Facebook’s search window: in addition to links to people and pages in Facebook, a Microsoft Bing integration gives Facebook users results from the wider web as well.

Sponsored results look similar to organic search results on Facebook, with the exception of being flagged as “Sponsored.”

As with other ads on Facebook, and as with search ads on other sites like Google, advertisers are able to buy against specific keywords. Early looks showed companies already using this to effect to appear when people searched for their competitors. The extra twist with Facebook is that advertisers can also buy against the profiles of people that will be viewing the ads, with the ads coming up based on a person’s demographic group or Facebook interests.

Nanigans says its network gets some 2 billion impressions per day and drives 2 million “performance events” like installs, registrations and purchases per day.（source:techcrunch）

6）Bejeweled Blitz maker PopCap to scale back its social games push

by Joe Osborne

It looks like the Facebook games wave isn’t taking PopCap as far as owner EA would like. President of EA Labels Frank Gibeau gave some background on recent layoffs that struck PopCap to Bloomberg in a video interview. Gibeau explained how EA handles recent acquisitions, and then went into the real reasons behind cutting the fat at PopCap.

“So with PopCap, what we found is that there are some areas inside PopCap that were duplicative of what EA was doing; a lot of central resources, legal, business affairs those types of things so we accelerated the integration there,” Gibeau told Bloomberg. “We also looked at pivoting a little bit harder towards mobile and away from social so we made some adjustments.”

As a result, PopCap was forced to let go of staffers at its North American and Dublin studios. Gibeau believes that the social games market is flattening out. With that, EA looks to leverage PopCap as a major player in its stab at a larger piece of the mobile games pie, which sadly meant lots of lost jobs for talented folks in PopCap’s social games divisions. Gibeau’s explanation:

“We’re pivoting hard toward mobile because it is the fastest-growing segment of the interactive games business right now and it’s certainly probably pulling most of the activity off social, and that’s why you see the flattening in social right now, and frankly where the problem is that Zynga’s encountering.”（source:games）

7）EA’s next social title is the hidden object game Jetset Secrets

Mike Thompson

Electronic Arts’s next social title is going to be Jetset Secrets, a hidden object game with an adventure-focused theme.

Jetset Secrets looks like it’ll be feature standard hidden object gameplay, but a huge part of the marketing is based around the game’s style, which is based on 1960s spy thrillers. Players take on the role of a detective who travels the globe, accompanied by their “world-class crew.” Along the way, they’ll uncover the plots of various villains and save the world. On top of that, hidden objects will provide players with wealth, which it looks like they’ll be able to use to establish a base of operations, based on early screenshots. The game’s trailer also promises players will be able to play with their friends, but doesn’t go into detail about how this mechanic will work.

Hidden object games are still popular on Facebook, but they aren’t seeing the high traffic they used to. Our traffic-tracking service AppData reveals Zynga’s Hidden Chronicles is the leader of the genre with 1.9 million daily active users, a far cry from its February peak of 7.4 million DAU. Disney Playdom’s Gardens of Time and Disney Animal Kingdom Explorers are currently tied with 720,000 DAU. Based on EA’s user base of 4.1 million DAU, promotion under the company’s banner might very well place Jetset Secrets at the top of the genre.

Exactly when EA plans to release the game hasn’t been revealed, but the official app page promises the game will launch soon. For more information about Jetset Secrets, check out the game’s official Facebook page.（source:insidesocialgames）