1）美国全国运动汽车竞赛协会网站（NASCAR.com）近日推出其首款社交游戏《NASCAR Pro Championship》（由Sprint公司出品），并将通过Facebook热门赛车游戏《Car Town》（游戏邦注：其独立访问用户约900万）进行推荐和宣传。

car-town-facebook-nascar-sprint(from games.com)

NASCAR.com业务运营高级总监Justin Williams表示，他们认为这款游戏与《Car Town》的合作，有利于借助后者的人气，在吸引NASCAR粉丝的同时，能够虏获更多喜欢玩《Car Town》的赛车发烧友。而《Car Town》开发商Cie Games也称他们有意与NASCAR这类品牌进行更深层次的合作。

2）7Seas Entertainment公司最近在旗下两个门户网站发布了一个社交游戏平台，支持玩家组队结盟参与游戏体验，或在门户网站上使用Facebook帐号体验社交游戏。该公司总经理L Maruti Sanker表示，他们网站与同Facebook功能绑定，支持用户与他人分享游戏内容或在游戏中对决。该公司已推出500多款游戏，并已通过多个第三方门户网站获取大量用户。

3）据AppData数据显示，Zynga新游戏《Empires & Allies》已成史上MAU发展最快的Facebook游戏，在短短十天内MAU已逼近1000万（游戏邦注：在6月11日当天的MAU是960万，DAU是690万，该游戏最初发布时表现平平，直到6月10日当天其用户数量才开始飙升）。

Empires & Allies--MAU DAU(from AppData)

观察者称，《Empires & Allies》的用户增长模式与Zynga前一款热门游戏《CityVille》发布头30天的情形颇为相似。当时Zynga在2010年感恩节前发布了《CityVille》，在头两周并没有多少用户访问该游戏，但12月11日时，这款游戏的MAU突然猛增至1290万，DAU也达到850万，其MAU在2011年1月份达到1.01亿的峰值，DAU的峰值则是2010年12月末的2150万。

CityVille---MAU DAU(from AppData)

《Empires & Allies》的强势增长与《CityVille》的影响有关。首先，《CityVille》发布初就推出五种语言版本，推动该游戏获取大量用户，Zynga在《Empires & Allies》中更将这种方法推向新高度，头天发布就推出12种语言版本。另外，《Empires & Allies》的发布日期吸取了《CityVille》的教训，没有与可能影响Facebook用户上网活动的节假日撞车；最后，《Empires & Allies》综合了《CityVille》的多种元素，并以好友邀请等交叉推广功能，作为吸引用户的重要手段。

Top Gainers This Week-Games(from AppData)

4）Mob Science公司日前针对索尼PS3游戏《inFamous 2》推出了一款Facebook配套游戏《inFamous Anarchy》，据AppData数据显示，该游戏目前的MAU是5万5826，DAU是2万5507。Mob Science联合创始人Michael Witz表示，由于《inFamous 2》现在已经广受好评，所以他们打算针对《inFamous Anarchy》推出一些长期发展计划，在社交游戏中植入更多可用于掌机版游戏的解琐内容。

inFamous Anarchy(from insidesocialgames.com)

据他所言，他希望《inFamous Anarchy》能够自成体系，成为可独立体验的社交游戏，但目前遇到的最大障碍就是，会来体验这款游戏的硬核玩家，之前已经为掌机版游戏消费60美元，他们可能不太愿意再次在社交游戏中进行微交易活动。

5）继与《FarmVille》成功推出品牌营销活动之后，Farmers Insurance公司最近又将合作项目延伸至《CityVille》、《Cafe World》和《Mafia Wars》这几款Zynga游戏。该公司将于未来四个月推出相关营销活动，支持这三款游戏玩家以全新方式与Farmers品牌进行互动，并从中赢取奖励。

Farmers-Insurance-FarmVille(from windmillnetworking.com)

据Farmers电子商务副总裁Marc Zeitlin所称，公司之前在《FarmVille》农场中植入的Farmers飞船，成功与向该游戏玩家展示了数十亿次的品牌形象，并在推广活动的首周就让公司增加了10万以上的Facebook粉丝，他们希望在今后四个月中也能延续这种成功。

6）CrowdStar和Sibblingz公司于去年7月份推出了《Happy Island》的iPhone和iPad版本，但这个售价0.99美元的游戏却基本无人问津，原因是多数用户更情愿直接登录Facebook免费体验游戏。虽然该游戏后来设置为免费版本，但却因为太多漏洞和程序崩溃问题而被App Store移除。

island-tycoon(from blog.games.com)

最近该游戏开发商重新对其进行调整，推出了新版游戏《Island Tycoon》，保留了原来的玩法机制、画面风格的声效，支持iPad和iPhone用户免费下载该游戏，付费购买道具装扮自己的小岛。尽管该游戏的用户界面并非十分理想，但至少可流畅运行，目前还不支持玩家从中登录Facebook帐号，或添加好友、访问对方小岛等功能。

7）即将发布的《The Sims Social》日前在其Facebook粉丝页面推出了宣传活动，承诺如果“Like”该页面的用户达到一定数量，该游戏就将为玩家解琐一系列免费赠品。目前该游戏官方粉丝页面已收集15万个以上的“Like”，为这些用户解琐了一个BBQ烧烤架、一个键盘和一个美术画架。假如该页面集满100万个“Like”，这款游戏还将解琐一个现代书架、一个壁炉等更多道具。

the-sims-social-like-rewards(from games.com)

8）跨平台游戏搜索服务TeePee Games近日发布了一款Facebook应用，利用其Geronimo搜索引擎的功能，以个性化方式助玩家找到所需游戏，或推荐其感兴趣的游戏内容。用户如果拥有一个与电子邮箱绑定的Facebook帐号，就可在该网站注册，然后选择自己喜欢的游戏类型，TeePee就会根据用户最初的搜索结果推荐新游戏。

teepee(from games.com)

用户每点击一款游戏，系统都会显示与该游戏相关的更多内容，用户可点击“play now”或“save game”，自主决定是即时体验游戏，还是先保存随后再玩游戏。

9）《Top Seven》是一款由塞尔维亚开发商Nordeus推出的Facebook足球游戏，据AppData数据显示，该游戏目前的MAU已达287万，打败了EA旗下的《FIFA Superstars》（游戏邦注：MAU为280.1万），成为Facebook最热门体育类游戏（据称这款游戏每日用户为20万）。

Top Seven(from games.com)

与FIFA游戏类似，《Top Seven》也是一款要求玩家管理足球队的游戏，但它主要侧重于赞助活动等与运营有关的元素和功能。该游戏仅比FIFA提前一天问世，现在每周新增用户已达7.9万，而后者每周新用户却仅为7000左右。

Nordeus工作室由一些前微软成员组建，在南斯拉夫贝尔格莱德、塞尔维亚、爱尔兰都柏林和以色列特拉维夫均设有办事处。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

1）NASCAR.com Launches Its First Social Game

By George Winslow

In a notable example of how sports are working to use social media to more closely engage NASCAR fans, NASCAR.com has launched its first social game, the NASCAR Pro Championship presented by Sprint. The free Facebook game will be featured within Car Town, an automotive and motorsports game on Facebook that attracts about 9 million unique visitors.

NASCAR.com is managed by Turner Sports, which has been aggressively developing digital properties for various sports, leagues and associations, including NASCAR, the NBA, and the NCAA.

As part of that strategy, Turner has generally pushed to bundle sponsorships across both broadcast and other digital media. The NASCAR Pro Championship game will be promoted in the broadcast on TNT of NASCAR events and Sprint will be heavily integrated into the game, which will run through the conclusion of the Sprint Cup Series on November 20th.

To launch the game NASCAR.com decided to partner with an existing game rather than build its own because of the popularity of Car Town game and close with between NASCAR fans and the auto enthusiasts that play Car Town, notes Justin Williams, senior director of business operations for NASCAR.com. Cie Games, the developer of Car Town, was also willing to work closely with an outside brand.

Williams notes social games are very different than console games. “It is not virtual racing like a console game,” he explained in an interview. “This is more about the social aspect of completing activities and gaining points and experience through the social interaction.”（source:broadcastingcable）  

2）Social gaming platform

Hyderabad, June 13:  7Seas Entertainment Limited launched a social gaming platform on its gaming two portals that allows gamers to form leagues and play games as teams. They could also play games on the portals using their Facebook accounts.

“We have integrated ourselves with Facebook. Besides allowing them to play games using their accounts, they can share gaming content, challenge others to join a particular game,” Mr L Maruti Sanker, Managing Director of 7Seas Entertainment Limited, said.

The company created over 500 games and gave access to users through various third party portals.“The social gaming platform would bring in a new set of users and help like-minded gamers to come together,” he said here in a statement. （source: thehindubusinessline） 

3）Empires & Allies Launches Strong Thanks to CityVille’s Influence

By AJ Glasser

Zynga’s newest Facebook game, Empires & Allies, got off to a strong start in monthly and daily active users, landing at the top of our fastest-growing games by MAU within 10 days of launch. This is easily one of Zynga’s fastest-growing Facebook games to date.

Note: All figures in this analysis are collected from our social game traffic tracking service, AppData.

When Empires & Allies launched June first, Facebook experienced some reporting delays that obscured the very early launch picture. Even when traffic number reports came back online, the game appeared sluggish in growth for the first full week of June 2011, not quite breaking 1 million MAU. It wasn’t until the weekend of June 10 that the game took off, reaching its present-day levels of 9.6 million MAU and 6.9 million DAU as of June 11.

Empires & Allies’ growth pattern is like an abbreviated version of CityVille’s first 30 days of life on the Facebook platform. CityVille soft launched just ahead of the Thanksgiving 2010 holiday, giving it not much of an audience to connect with in its first two weeks. By early December, however, the game officially launched and found traction, shooting up to 12.9 million MAU and 8.5 million DAU by December 11. CityVille only kept growing from there, reaching its all-time highs of 101 million MAU in January 2011 and 21.5 million DAU in late December 2010.

Though Empires & Allies technically had the stronger launch, it’s clear that the game benefits from several key CityVille influences. For one thing, CityVille launched in five languages on day one, which clearly gave the game an early growth advantage. For Empires & Allies, Zynga upped the day-one language launches to 12, increasing the game’s overall reach. For another, Empires & Allies did not launch ahead of a major holiday that would take regular Facebook users off-platform. Lastly, and perhaps most significantly, Zynga made a point to capitalize on the similarities between CityVille and Empires & Allies as a means of attracting new users — something its never been able to do before between any of its games.

In Empires & Allies, players build up an island town to supply military units that go into battle against other players and against AI-controlled opponents. In the latter, players construct metropolises that largely supply their own flow of goods and services in exchange for virtual currency. The citybuilding mechanic between the two games is identical, something that’s not lost on the developer. Zynga made it a point early on to introduce CityVille players by using Empires & Allies’ gifting and friend invite mechanic with a CityVille Friends filter that the game still defaults to even today.  As yet, there is no Empires & Allies Friends filter in the gifting or friend invite menus.（source:insidesocialgames）  

4）inFamous Anarchy Looks for Life on Facebook Beyond Console Game’s Launch

By AJ Glasser

Console game developers and publisher are getting more confident about releasing social game tie-ins for their blockbuster products. The latest entry in this type of social game to see launch is inFamous Anarchy, a tie-in game developed by Mob Science in conjunction with Sony Computer Entertainment for the PlayStation 3 game, inFamous 2, which launched June 7. inFamous Anarchy  is off to a slow start in traffic and cross-game promotion thanks to a security breach that took Sony’s PlayStation Network offline for a significant period of time in the weeks leading up to inFamous 2’s release.

According to our traffic tracking service, AppData, inFamous Anarchy currently has 55,826 monthly active users and 25,507 daily active users.

Though the future of inFamous Anarchy is directly tied to the health of inFamous 2 through consistent downloadable content releases for the console game, Witz says the goal with Anarchy was to create a social game that had “legs of its own.” This is challenging, as many players attracted to the social game will have already spent up to $60 on the console game and therefore be reluctant to spend more money on microtransactions.

“The only way we can justify people spending money [in Anarchy] is if we give them a benefit for it with fun gameplay,” Witz says. “That’s what we’re trying to achieve.”（source:insidesocialgames）  

5）Farmers Launches Multi-Game Interface With Zynga
 
After a successful integration with Zynga’s FarmVille, Farmers Insurance is working again with the social games company on a multi-game integration with CityVille, Cafe World and Mafia Wars that will take place over the next four months.

Last fall, Farmers launched an in-game promotion with FarmVille, offering players “wither protection” by placing the Farmers Airship on their farm. A promotion offering visitors to Farmers’ Facebook page a chance to enter for a ride on the Farmers Airship for “liking” Farmers accompanied the partnership.

“Millions of Farmers Airships were placed on FarmVille farms,” said Marc Zeitlin, Vice President of e-Business for Farmers Insurance. “FarmVille players were exposed to the Farmers brand billions of times, raising our Facebook fan base by more than 100,000 in the first week of the promotion. It was one of the most successful things we’ve done from a branding perspective.”

As a follow-up to the initial integration, over the next four months, players in FarmVille, Mafia Wars, Cafe World and CityVille will have the chance to interact with the Farmers brand in new ways and have opportunities along the way to win prizes. （source:prnewswire） 

6）Happy Island Facebook game comes back to iPhone/iPad via Island Tycoon

by Brandy Shaul

Almost a year ago (July of 2010, to be exact), CrowdStar and Sibblingz launched a paid version of Happy Island on iPhone and iPad. The game cost $0.99 and sold (expectedly) poorly due to the fact that players could simply log onto Facebook and play the game for free (that and it was riddled with bugs). Skip forward to October of last year, and the game was finally made free to download and play, but as it still suffered from bugs and crashes, it was eventually pulled from the App Store altogether.

Skip forward to now, and we see a resurrection of the Happy Island experience with a twist. The new version of the game is called Island Tycoon, and while it doesn’t link to your Facebook account (meaning you’ll have to start your island over from scratch), it retains the gameplay, graphics, and even soundtrack of its inspiration. You’ll be able to download Island Tycoon for free for either iPad or iPhone, and can then start the process of rebuilding the best tourist attraction that you can using a multitude of food stalls, cultural attractions, decorations and so on.

The same basics from Happy Island are retained here, in that your businesses and attractions will gain coins over time and must be cashed out for profits. You can then use those profits to upgrade your businesses to produce more funds over time, or to simply purchase additional items and decorations for your island. While the user interface isn’t incredibly appealing (with very simplistic font and a lack of theme retention), at least this game runs fairly smoothly.

In fact, through our time to level 10, I only experienced one complete app crash, when trying to place a food stall that gave me enough experience points to simultaneously go up a level.

Sure, any crashing is bad, but no app is perfect, and Island Tycoon has definitely come a long, long way.

Again, you won’t be able to connect to your Facebook account, so you will need to start over with this version of the game, and it also doesn’t appear as though you can add friends or visit others’ island yet either. Island Tycoon has only been around for less than a month, so that very well may be added in the future. In the meantime, you can download the game for either your iPad or iPhone right from iTunes. （source:games）  

7）Like the Sims Social Facebook page to unlock in-game rewards

by Brandy Shaul

While the simple fact that the Sims is finally coming to Facebook is enough to send players like myself into a virtual tizzy (ok, maybe a real world tizzy too), try this bit of news on for size: If you become one of the thousands of players that “Like” the Sims Social official Facebook fan page, you’ll help all players (including yourself, of course) unlock some exclusive freebies in the game at launch.

So far, the fan page has gained over 150,000 Likes, and we’ve unlocked three new items for our trouble: a basic BBQ grill, a keyboard and an artist’s easel. If the fan page can reach a million Likes, we’ll unlock three more items along the way: a modern bookshelf, a white marble fireplace, and a blue claw foot tub. Want some more? There are spaces for three additional prizes, but we don’t know what they are just yet. What do this mean? Simple: ask every man, woman, child, and heck – even animal – in your social circle to Like this fan page! We just can’t wait to see what these new prizes can do!（source:games） 

8）Discover new Facebook games with the TeePee Games Facebook app

by Joe Osborne

A Facebook games discovery service is useful in it’s own right these days, but when that service exists within Facebook its usefulness surely reaches over 9,000 by some measure somewhere. This is exactly why (minus the terribly nerdy reference) TeePee Games launched a Facebook application today that essentially does what its web service provides: an intuitive way to find new games.

The app uses TeePee’s Geronimo, a discovery engine that becomes more effective as you play more games from within the app. For instance, if you tend to play more simulation games like FarmVille over time, TeePee will begin to recommend more games like it and, in theory, games you would be hard-pressed to find otherwise. Not to mention that it, thanks to Facebook, displays the games that your friends have played or are playing and allows you to invite those friends to new games you find.

Using the service is fairly simple. Just create a log-in based on the email address attached to your Facebook account and a new password, and then select the game genres you play the most frequently. Then, the service will begin to recommend games to you that it think you might be interested in based on your initial answers. Finally, clicking on any game will provide more context as to what it’s all about, and provides a link to play the game and to save it for later play.

“At TeePee Games we want to make the process of discovering high quality digital games as simple as possible, for as many people as we can,” TeePee Games CEO Tony Pearce said in a statement. “Facebook attracts more than 500 million active daily users, with 56 million of those individuals playing games on the platform every day, so developing an application for it was the ideal way for us to expand.” In fact, we’d say it was only logical.（source:games） 

9）Top Eleven shuts out EA’s FIFA Superstars as top Facebook sports game

by Joe Osborne

Oh, how the mighty hath fallen. If there is one major success EA has enjoyed on Facebook, it’s owning the top sports game on the platform, FIFA Superstars. Unfortunately, that heavyweight title now belongs to Nordeus, the Serbian developer that created Top Eleven. The soccer–ahem, football–game attracts 2.87 million monthly players compared to FIFA’s 2.801 million players, according to AppData. A win by an incredibly small margin, but a win nonetheless. (However, the Top Eleven does house nearly 200 thousand more daily players.)

The game tasks players with managing their own football team, just like in FIFA. However, Top Eleven follows teams across 28 day-long seasons and features a heavy focus on finance management including sponsorship deals and new facilities. In an AppData chart provided by Nordeus, it’s displayed that Top Eleven has been around for just a day longer than FIFA, though it has recently enjoyed welcoming 79 thousand players weekly. EA, on the other hand, has most recently only reigned in 7 thousand new players a week.

“We’re stunned to see our company overtake one of the world’s biggest third-party games developers to create Facebook’s most played sports game,” Nordeus COO Tomislav Mihajlović said in a statement. “Top Eleven has been live for just a year, but already we’ve passed this significant milestone and added millions of players. The final whistle’s not been blown yet, so we’ll continue to innovate and add to what we, and our users, think is already a great game.”

Ooh, they sound like fightin’ words to me. (Polite words, but fightin’ words regardless.) The studio, comprised of some ex-Microsoft employees and now with offices in Belgrade, Serbia, Dublin and Tel Aviv, has likely caught the ire of EA. That said, the developer has quite a bit of work on its hands if it wants to maintain its title. If anything this shows that Facebook games aren’t just doing well in the states and areas like Western Europe and Asia, but even in Eastern Europe and other areas around the globe. But what will be even more interesting to see is how EA, who could be beaten by Zynga any day now on Facebook, responds to the taunt.（source:games）