1）据venturebeat报道，Zynga最近起诉其热门游戏《CityVille》前总经理Alan Patmore，声称后者离职前“窃取”了公司包括许多敏感信息的文件，这些文件所包括的信息如下：

Alan Patmore(from vator.tv)

*Zynga确定游戏及机制是否会获得成功的方法；

*关于《CityVille》每项功能的评估详情；

*Zynga对于优化《CityVille》的新功能计划；

*Zynga之前针对该游戏的盈利计划以及未来的盈利理念；

*某款尚未发布游戏的设计文件；

*Zynga收益及员工报酬信息；

*Patmore本人的电邮收件箱。

Patmore已在8月份离职并加入Kixeye公司，担任该公司产品副总裁，但Zynga此次并未起诉Kixeye。

2）据pocketgamer报道，Spry Fox日前宣布与6waves达成庭外和解，并获得后者游戏《Yeti Town》IP（游戏邦注：Spry Fox曾在今年1月份起诉6waves游戏《Yeti Town》抄袭《Triple Town》），《Yeti Town》目前已被停止销售。

Yeti-Town-vs-Triple-Town(from android.appstorm.net)

3）据gamasutra报道，Foundation 9最近宣布关闭旗下休闲及儿童游戏工作室ImaginEngine，将有约25名员工被裁员，其中包括该工作室主管Randall Sanborn。在本次裁员之前，Foundation 9招聘了近450名成员。

ImaginEngine(from gameinformer.com)

Foundation曾在2011年8月将旗下工作室Griptonite Games（代表作为《Shinobi 3D》）出售给Glu Mobile，并于上周针对旗下另一开发团队Backbone Entertainment进行裁员，据称Backbone不久也将面临关闭。

该公司首席执行官James North-Hearn表示，由于传统主机游戏市场需求下降，公司不得不进行业务调整以适应当前市场趋势。

ImaginEngine成立于1994年，已面向PC、主机及移动平台发行近200款游戏，曾发行原创及授权游戏，例如《Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader》系列。

除了Backbone，Foundation 9现在还有另外其他三家工作室Double Helix Games（《寂静岭5：归途》）、Pipeworks（《鬼泣：HD合集》）和Sumo Digital（代表作为《索尼克与世嘉全明星赛车：变形》）。

4）据gamasutra报道，Funcom Montreal旗下MMO游戏《The Secret World》测试大获成功，收获50万以上玩家，但发售时销量却仅为20万份，其创意总监Craig Morrison针对此现象表示，其中主要原因可能在于，玩家对游戏期望值过高，他们希望你一开始就声势巨大，但如果游戏销量仅有100万份，那么玩家就会认为这款游戏是失败之作，并对其丧失兴趣。

the secret world(from scoop.it)

他指出CCP游戏《EVE Online》是从小规模用户成长起来的成功之作，如果玩家能够对游戏产生合理的期望值，那么MMO游戏就能够从较小用户规模起步，并根据用户反馈调整设计，并逐渐吸引更广泛的群体。

5）据venturebeat报道，Piper Jaffray最近针对7000名美国青少年的调查结果显示，Facebook是这些青少年最重要的社交网络，其次是Twiiter，第三是Instagram。

teens(from venturebeat)

这一结果与Pingdom在两个月前的调查情况截然相反，Pingdom调查显示Facebook用户平均年龄为40.5岁，而Twitter用户平均年龄则是37.2岁。

Beevolve最近针对3600万Twitter用户的调查则指出，将近三分之一的用户在Twitter所公布的年龄介于15-25岁，尽管在5亿多Twitter用户中，多数用户并不会公布自己的年龄，但这一数据仍可反映出Twitter年轻用户的确规模庞大。

6）在本周MAU增长最快的Facebook游戏榜单上，Zynga新作《FarmVille 2》持续领先，新增1350万MAU，增幅为40％。

Top gainers this week–MAU(from AppData)

《Diggle》排名第二，新增42万MAU，增幅为105％。ArcadeMonk游戏《Bubble Pirates》位居第三，新增38万MAU，增幅为200％。Twiitch在线赛车游戏《KartWorld》位于第四，新增37万MAU，增幅为161％；Ooblada游戏《Bubble Bunny》位居第五，新增34万MAU，增幅为131％。（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）Zynga suing former employee for stealing trade secrets

Jeffrey Grubb

Zynga filed a lawsuit against its former CityVille general manager for the “theft” of its data.

The San Francisco-based studio alleges Alan Patmore, the aforementioned Cityville GM, backed up 760 Zynga documents online before quitting the developer. In the legal filing with the Superior Court of the State of California, Zynga claims Patmore’s allegedly stolen documents contained sensitive information about Zynga’s operations.

The lawsuit contains a list of the type of the data that composes Patmore’s documents, including:

How Zynga determines which games and mechanics will be successful.

A detailed assessment of every feature in CityVille.

Zynga’s plans for new features to strengthen CityVille.

The company’s previous attempts to monetize the game as well as its ideas for future monetization.

The design documentation for an unreleased game.

Zynga’s revenue and employee compensation information.

Patmore’s entire email inbox.

In August, Patmore left Zynga to join one of its rivals, Kixeye, as the vice president of product. The Farmville developer did not list Kixeye as a defendant in this case.

On Friday 12, Zynga successfully filed a temporary restraining order on Patmore, which places a legal obligation on him to not disclose or use the data in any way.（source：venturebeat）

2）Spry Fox’s Triple Town triumph sees studio pick up Yeti Town IP

by James Nouch

Spry Fox has announced that it received ownership of the Yeti Town IP as part of the out-of-court settlement reached with publisher 6waves last week.

“We have amicably settled our lawsuit with 6waves. We are very happy with the outcome and glad to be finished with this matter,” explained Spry Fox CEO David Edery, posting on his blog.

“The full terms of the settlement are confidential, but I can disclose that as a consequence of the settlement, ownership of the Yeti Town IP has been transferred to Spry Fox.”

As expected, Yeti Town has now been pulled from sale.

Some context

This suit, launched by Spry Fox in January 2012, alleged that 6waves’ Yeti Town was little more than a barely-disguised clone of Spry Fox’s Triple Town.

What’s more, since Spry Fox had approached 6waves to publish Triple Town to iOS – and given the company early access to the game through a closed beta – Edery came to believe that 6waves had used confidential information to build its clone and beat Triple Town to market.

“It’s bad enough to rip off another company,” said David Edery when his company filed the complaint. “To do so while you are pumping them for private information […] is profoundly unethical by any measure.”

In the beginning

Indeed, while the conclusion may have been amicable, its beginnings certainly were not.

“Unfortunately, it is our opinion that 6waves has behaved in a reprehensible and illegal manner, and we can not, in good conscience, ignore it,” explained Edery at the time.

“Yeti Town, as launched by 6waves, was a nearly perfect copy of Triple Town. We’re talking about tons of little details, from the language in the tutorial, to many of our UI elements, to the quantities and prices of every single item in the store.”

U-turn

For its part, 6waves Lolapps (as it was then known), seemed supremely confident that its actions had been entirely above board.

“Lolapps is disappointed that David Edery has chosen to file a lawsuit, and believes his claims are factually inaccurate,” read the company’s statement.

“We respect others IP and did nothing to violate any contracts our team had in place. The copyright infringement claims are unjustified.” （source：pocketgamer）

3）Foundation 9 shuts down kids game studio – report

By Eric Caoili

Foundation 9 has closed ImaginEngine (Apples to Apples), its studio dedicated to casual and children’s games, adding to layoffs announced just last week at another of its internal developers, Backbone Entertainment.

Around 25 employees have been laid off from Boston-based ImaginEngine, including studio head Randall Sanborn, according to a report from GamesBeat. Prior to its recent layoffs, Foundation 9 employed nearly 450 workers.

The multi-studio developer has made efforts to scale back its operations lately, selling off Griptonite Games (Shinobi 3D) to Glu Mobile in August 2011. Then last week, Foundation 9 reduced its headcount at Backbone (Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix), and some have claimed that the studio’s closure is imminent.

“Due to a lower demand for conventional console development, the studio has made some difficult but necessary adjustments in both its capacity and services, with the goal of matching the changing needs of today’s market,” Foundation 9 CEO James North-Hearn told Gamasutra last week.

Founded in 1994, ImaginEngine has shipped nearly 200 games for PC, console, and mobile. It released both original and licensed titles, focusing on family-friendly games like the Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader series.

Along with Backbone, Los Angeles-based Foundation 9 owns three other studios: Double Helix Games (Silent Hill Homecoming), Pipeworks (Devil May Cry: HD Collection), and Sumo Digital (Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed). （source：gamasutra）

4）The problem with player expectations and MMOs

By Staff

“A lot of the hype is actually generated by the players. They want you to start huge, and if you don’t sell a million copies it’s suddenly, ‘Oh, you’re a failure. I don’t care about that game anymore.’”

- Funcom Montreal creative director Craig Morrison

Though Funcom’s MMO The Secret World had a highly successful beta, with over 500,000 players, the game sold just 200,000 copies on release. Whether this was due to middling reviews, poor quality, or increased competition in the genre, it’s not entirely clear.

Funcom Montreal creative director Craig Morrison thinks that audience expectations are starting to handicap the MMO genre from its true potential, as he told Gamasutra in a new interview.

“I think we need to get people out of that mindset, so that a game can start at like 100,000… And then we need the gamers to not react with, ‘Oh, well. That’s a worthless game then, because it’s not going to have a million users.’ We need the users to be, ‘Oh cool, this game appeals to me in my niche and my interests, and I want to see this game succeed, so I’m going to support it.’”

Morrison points to CCP’s EVE Online as a successful title that grew from a small audience to hundreds of thousands of users — instead of starting with a huge number of players and gradually going downhill, as has been the pattern for most big-name MMOs that have launched in the last several years.

The model is viable — if expectations are correctly set, he argues. “I think you saw it outside of the MMO genre, with games like League of Legends,” says Morrison. “They started with that same kind of smaller user base, build it up, continue to invest, tweak it based on the feedback from the users they get, and they didn’t try and change what they were to appeal to a broader market.”（source：gamasutra）

5）Facebook, Twitter, and teens: who’s winning the youth war

John Koetsier

Sure, Facebook is the world’s largest social network — and the one currently ranked highest by teens. But don’t count the little blue bird out yet: Twitter just might be winning the youth numbers game.

A recent Piper Jaffray survey of 7000 U.S. teens ranked Facebook first in importance to teens. Twitter came in second, and Instagram — owned, of course, by Facebook — came in third.

Detailed results, including how big the differences are, were not released, but Gene Munster, a Piper Jaffray analyst, said that Facebook is well positioned to stay top dog in social networks for teens.

That, however, contrasts with a mammoth social media demographics study completed by Pingdom just two months ago.

In that survey, which analyzed social media use at 24 different social networks, the average age of Facebook users is 40.5 years, while the average age of Twitter users is slightly younger, at 37.2. And when Pingdom compared the results to a previous study, the website performance monitoring company found that while the average age of Facebookers has increased by two years since 2010, the average of Twitter users has decreased by the same amount.

All of which correlates well with statistics way back from 2009 which showed Facebook users aging and Twitter users growing younger.

And it matches up with Beevolve’s recent survey of a whopping 36 million Twitter users. In Beevolve’s study, almost three quarters of users who disclose their age on Twitter are aged 15 to 25. That needs to be taken with a big fat grain of salt, as most of Twitter’s 500+ million users don’t disclose their age on the site, but is still an interesting indicator of a sizable youth contingent on Twitter.

A possible explanation?

Facebook has more than double Twitter’s users. At over a billion daily active users to Twitter’s perhaps 550 to 600 million total users, there’s a massive size advantage. Take into account the percentage of monthly active users out of Twitter’s total userbase — about a third — and the difference becomes even more apparent.

Daily active Facebook to Twitter users is probably about a five to one ratio … a billion to maybe 200 million. And that’s even before you take Instagram into account.

Which means that even if the average age of Twitter users is young, and perhaps on a percentage basis Twitter has more teens than Facebook, Facebook still easily has Twitter beat.

But that may yet change in the future, if the current demographic trends on social network continue.（source：venturebeat）

6）FarmVille 2 still sprouting like crazy among fastest-growing Facebook games by MAU

Mike Thompson

Zynga’s FarmVille 2 continues to dominate social games, taking the top spot on our list of fastest-growing Facebook games by monthly active users with 13.5 million MAU for a 40 percent gain.

Diggle took the No. 2 spot with 420,000 MAU, a 105 percent traffic increase. ArcadeMonk’s Bubble Pirates debuted on our list this week at the No. 3 position with 380,000 MAU, a 200 percent gain. Twiitch’s online kart-racing title KartWorld came in at No. 4 with 370,000 MAU, up 161 percent. Ooblada’s Bubble Bunny finished out the top five titles on our list, up 131 percent with 340,000 MAU.

Three other games on our list saw traffic growth greater than 100 percent. Syfy Monster Island was up by 270,000 MAU for a 193 percent gain. Social Point’s 2010 bubble shooter Bubble Paradise surged this week, gaining 270,000 MAU for a 104 percent jump. Finally, iEvoGames’ Gold Slots was up by 123 percent with 160,000 MAU.

This week’s list shows bubble shooters are still popular among social gamers, as five of the twenty titles listed fall under that genre.（source：insidesocialgames）