1）据Eurogamer报道，EA首席运营官Peter Moore在最近采访针对Zynga裁员事件表示，他们为失业现象感到悲哀，并希望这些失业者能够早日找到工作。但他驳斥了最近一系列裁员现象预示社交游戏行业将走向末路的说法。

Peter Moore(from news.duowan.com)

他称社交游戏之前被过分炒热，现在其消亡命运则被过度炒作，他认为社交游戏仍然发展强劲，许多社交游戏正在转向移动平台，人们不应该因Zynga最近情况而过度解读行业趋势。

2）据insidesocialgames报道，Spooky Cool Labs日前宣布已从华纳兄弟互动娱乐获得经典电影《绿野仙踪》授权，将其改编为在线社交游戏。

《绿野仙踪》社交游戏(from kotaku.com.au)

该游戏采用了电影中的角色（游戏邦注：例如朱迪·加兰所扮演的桃乐丝）、音乐等元素，游戏目前已进入内测阶段。

3）据gamasutra报道，《失忆症：黑暗后裔》开发者及Frictional Games工作室主管Thomas Grip最近表示，他担心当前电子游戏极力迎合各年龄层大众用户的倾向，会导致游戏丧失更复杂和更成人化的深度。他认为电影、书籍甚至光盘等媒体都存在仅吸引成人群体的类型，为何电子游戏就一定要能够取悦所有玩家？

Thomas-Grip(from english.dadiu.dk)

Grip指出，推出老少皆宜的游戏并没有什么不妥，但如果每款游戏都遵循这种路线，那就存在一定的问题。他称即使是自己推出的《失忆症》和《半影》这类游戏，实际上也采用了“隐藏怪物和解决谜题”这种不甚成人化的核心理念，开发商不能只是以粗俗的语言、血腥的场景来包装这类简单的机制，而应积极探索更有深度和意义的游戏主题及理念。

4）据venturebeat报道，Facebook在日前新闻发布会上宣布，Facebook每月游戏玩家已达2.51亿，其中有8000万人玩街机泡泡射击游戏。

facebook-games(from insidefacebook.com)

Facebook团队成员Alex Schultz指出，Facebook平台上有些游戏起步时大获成功，但流量却会随着时间发展而下滑，而且些游戏则遵循稳定发展路线，逐渐积累成就。例如Kixeye游戏《War Commnader》虽然用户不多，但其付费用户比例达到10%，付费比例远高于一般游戏。

5）据venturebeat报道，Zynga目前市值已缩水至18.2亿美元，几乎相当于其现金及不动产总价值。

观察者分析称Zynga目前实际上的主要产品是三种游戏类型:《FarmVille》、扑克游戏以及With Friends系列。这三者均拥有广泛用户，但各自目标用户都有所不同，《FarmVille》主要针对中年妇女，扑克游戏是中年男子，With Friends则锁定30岁以下的高利润群体。

zynga(from techspot.com)

与之形成对比的是《愤怒的小鸟》开发商Rovio，该公司目前估值达90亿美元。《愤怒的小鸟》从许多方面来说相当于这一代移动设备上的《俄罗斯方块》，它实际上是单人模式，无需社交功能的传统游戏，它甚至也没有充分利用触屏功能。但Rovio之所以能够大获成功，原因在于它充分利用各种潜在渠道，将该游戏推向各个平台；而Zynga最热门的游戏却基本上局限于当前发行平台，《FarmVille》和扑克游戏仅对Facebook用户开放，With Friends系列游戏仅在移动平台受到热捧，没有一款游戏充分实现跨平台运营（游戏邦注：例如移植到Wii、Xbox和Playstation平台）。（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’s Peter Moore responds to Zynga layoffs, state of social games – “We always feel bad when people lose their jobs,” Electronic Arts’ COO Peter Moore told Eurogamer in an interview. “Our hope is certainly… those folks can get re-employed pretty quickly.” Kind words considering EA’s and Zynga’s ongoing legal dispute and public name calling. Moore also countered a lot of the doomsaying which followed the recent layoffs and departures at the social gaming giant. “I think [social gaming] just got a little overhyped. And now the demise is being overhyped the opposite way. I still think there’s a strong place for social gaming. I think a lot of social gaming is moving [to] mobile. We feel well positioned to take advantage of that. And people shouldn’t read too much into whatever is going on with Zynga.” Read the full Eurogamer interview here.（source：insidesocialgames）

2）Warner Bros. signs Spooky Cool Labs to develop Wizard of Oz Facebook game – Spooky Cool Labs announced it acquired the license from Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment to develop and publish an online social game based on the classic movie The Wizard of Oz. The license grants access to the film’s beloved characters, music and likenesses, including the likeness of Judy Garland’s (Dorothy), Margret Hamilton (the Wicked Witch of the West) and others. Closed Beta testing of the game is already underway. Interested players can Like the game’s new App Page to participate as testers.（source：insidesocialgames）

3）Do games really need to appeal to everyone?

By Tom Curtis

“Take just about any big game release and the core concepts of that game [are] something that a ten-year old can enjoy.”

- Amnesia: The Dark Descent developer and Frictional Games studio head Thomas Grip reflects on how even the most “mature” games often appeal to players of all ages.

Grip worries that video games might be missing an opportunity to explore more complex and adult-focused themes. After all, there are tons of movies, books, and even albums that only appeal to an older audience, and why should games be any different?

“There is nothing wrong with having games that are ageless. But when just about every game released is like this, I think it is a sign that something is wrong,” Grip said.

He added that even his own games like Amnesia and Penumbra are “mainly about hiding from monsters and solving puzzles,” which in the grand scheme of things aren’t very mature concepts.

Rather than making “mature” games that use simple mechanics dressed up in curse words, blood, and gore, Grip wants to see developers explore themes and concepts that are a bit more meaningful. （source：gamasutra）

4）80M people play arcade bubble shooter games on Facebook

Dean Takahashi

We have a very productive society. In fact, of the 1 billion people on Facebook, 251 million play games every month. And of those 80 million play arcade bubble shooter games. Probably during work hours.

Those are the sorts of details that Facebook’s game leadership team shared today at a press lunch at its headquarters. They offered a deeper dive into the symbiotic connection between Facebook and games, and the close connection with game companies such as Zynga.

Dan Rose, the head of partnerships at Facebook, acknowledged the importance of games to the social network through its history. It was the first part of the application platform to take off, with hits such as Zombies and Zynga Poker. Social transformed the game experience and helped Facebook win the social-network wars.

“Games are a huge and important part of what our users do on Facebook every day, and they are an important part of what they do on mobile,” Rose said.

Alex Schultz, (pictured at bottom) a member of the growth team at Facebook, said that the big change has been the increase of diversity of games, genres, and developers during the past year. He said the data shows that successes come in three categories.

Some games are hits that start big and dwindle over time. Other successful games stabilize and find a regular audience, like Kixeye’s War Commander, which continues to generate activity and revenue for the social game developer. War Commander doesn’t have a huge number of player, but 10 percent of them buy virtual goods, far more than usual. And then some games start big, dip, and then recover because players become constantly re-engaged with it as more friends play.（source：venturebeat）

5）Zynga is vastly undervalued

Peter Yared

Zynga’s stock has been in a freefall since its initial public offering, with tech pundits and press watching with gleeful schadenfreude as it continues to drop. Zynga is now worth essentially nothing: Its market capitalization of $1.82 billion is roughly equal to the value of its cash and real estate holdings, even with yesterday’s announcements of real money gambling and a $200 million stock buyback.

How can a company that brings in $1.2 billion a year, and recently cut costs in order to achieve profitability, be worth nothing?

It doesn’t make sense. Here’s why Zynga is undervalued — provided it does the right thing next.

Zynga is actually sitting on three widely-known and popular potential gaming franchises: Farmville, Poker, and With Friends. Each of these titles is well known, has broad distribution, and an audience at least willing to check out a new iteration on the franchise. For instance, Farmville 2 just garnered 50 million users shortly after its launch. And each of Zynga’s potential franchises targets a different audience: Farmville for middle-aged women, Poker for middle-aged men, and With Friends for the lucrative under-30 market.

What Zynga needs to do is expand its franchise strategy.

The gaming industry, much like Hollywood, is all about franchises. It is easy to churn out another Spiderman movie or Call of Duty title, because there is already an audience for the content, which is a huge part of the hurdle in terms of success. Once you have a guaranteed audience, you can focus on the content.

Rovio, the makers of the Angry Birds franchise, is worth a reported $9 billion. Angry Birds is a great, fun, casual game that has successfully implemented distribution onto emerging smartphone mobile platforms, but in many ways Angry Birds is simply the Tetris of this generation of computing. In effect, Angry Birds is a single-player, traditional game that doesn’t leverage the social graph, multiuser gaming, and advanced graphics. It barely even takes advantage of touch screens.

Still, it’s hugely profitable because Rovio has truly turned Angry Birds into a game franchise. Rovio has leveraged every possible gaming channel from iPhone to Android to even the Google Chrome App Store, added Star Wars editions, and signed cross-industry deals for everything from stuffed toys and lunch boxes to theme parks. Previous to Angry Birds, Rovio had 51 failed titles. It is now promoting Bad Piggies, a new title that is actually a spinoff of its Angry Birds franchise.

Franchises are not necessarily a guaranteed result, as titles can run over budget and fail at the box office. However, from a business perspective, it is a lot better to get a 50 percent headstart than starting fresh and rolling the dice with new content.

It is easy to see Zynga as a pure-play social gaming company that is struggling to shift into mobile, while social gaming becomes increasingly difficult to monetize. Yes, social channels have dried up after Facebook’s shift to Timeline stymied potentially viral newsfeed user acquisition (aka spam). And indeed the Zynga game playbook has gotten tired now that Facebook is no longer a new platform and expectations of game mechanics have matured.

But in reality, Zynga sits on three potential franchises, each of which could be huge.

Right now, Zynga’s most popular titles are stuck in their existing channels. Farmville and Poker are only available for Facebook users. With Friends games are only available on mobile.

Each of these titles could easily go cross-channel, to Wii, Xbox and Playstation. Why not play Zynga Poker on Xbox Live?

Building deep, franchise-driven titles for multiple platforms takes time and investment. However, it is a proven monetization model.

In addition, Zynga’s announcement yesterday of real-money gambling is also potentially lucrative, especially in context of its ability to deliver the gambling audience of its Zynga Poker gaming franchise.

The technology industry, particularly its intersection with Wall Street, can be very herdlike, and it is hard to shift the herd perspective on companies like Zynga that are in flux. Still, a herd mentality can be an opportunity for clever investors to make a bet against the crowd.

In the midst of writing this article, I was having dinner with a hedge fund manager in London, who usually invests in things like mines. He had just bought Zynga for his personal portfolio, despite the fact that Piper Jaffray, Credit Suisse, and BMO Capital all downgraded the stock. The pure hedge fund perspective is to bet against the market, especially when the market is not acting on fundamentals.

And while this hedge fund guy usually invests in physical mines, even he has noticed that Zynga is sitting on a potential gold mine — one that is definitely worth a whole lot more than nothing.（source：venturebeat）