1）Zynga游戏《CityVille》最近在Facebook平台推出日文版本，它是Zynga进军日本市场推出的首个本土化游戏。在该游戏版本发布之际，Facebook日本用户刚好突破400万（平均每月增长率约为7%）。

CityVille(from asiajin)

据观察者所称，社交游戏其实并非Faceboo在日本用户面前自我推销的卖点，因为日本手机及社交游戏市场已经非常成熟，Facebook希望日本用户更关注它的社交功能，而不是像其他亚洲地区（例如台湾）一样，出现大量只为玩游戏而注册帐号的用户。

2）社交游戏开发商CrowdStar日前宣布将与俄罗斯发行商101XP合作，把热门游戏《It Girl》推向俄罗斯三大社交平台。该游戏目前已登陆Odnoklassniki.ru，随后将进军Vkontakte.ru和Mail.ru平台。

It Girl(from venturebeat)

《It Girl》最近在Facebook的MAU是2500万，该公司成立于2008年，现有140名员成员，今年初曾融资2300万美元，其投资者包括九城、英特尔、时代华纳。

3）据gigaom报道，Digital Chocolate最近也追随Zynga步伐，正创建自己的游戏云服务基础设施。

该公司全球iT和网络运营总监Alfred Tsai表示，公司过去完全依赖Amazon Web Services（游戏邦注：以下简称AWS）提供的技术支持，但现在打算把部分游戏的数据转移回公司内部进行处理，以降低运营风险。

他称AWS的数据库很强大，但后台网络速度偏慢，Digital Chocolate无法使用这些数据库服务器实现最大效能，因为现有网络无法处理庞大的交易量。Digital Chocolate目前仍在AWS框架下运营游戏，但会在公司内部处理最热门游戏的数据。

4）日本Yumemi公司日前宣布将与美国Booyah公司（游戏邦注：地理定位社交游戏《MyTown》开发商，该游戏用户已超400万）合作，在日本开发本土化版《MyTown》。

MyTown(from asiajin)

《MyTown》实际上是一种含有丰富游戏元素的地理签到型服务，已和迪士尼、MTV、Travel Channel、H&M、阿迪达斯、P&G等品牌进行合作，据称是美国最具盈利性的地理定位游戏。

Yumemi表示不会简单地将美国版《MyTown》直接处理成日本版，而是将针对日本市场的情况进行深度本土化处理，预计于今年秋季发布该游戏。

5）在本周的MAU增长最快Facebook游戏榜单上，居于首位的是《森の物语》（最近MAU为91万），第二名是《Megacity》（最近MAU是96万），第三则是《Collapse!Blast》（最近MAU是79万），Playdom游戏《ESPN Sport Bar & Grill》（最近MAU为35万）也跻身第四名。

Top Gainers This Week-Games(from AppData)

《模拟人生》社交版虽然仍处于内测阶段，但已位列第16名，其MAU几乎将突破100万（补充：由于分类失误，该榜单遗漏了iWin公司推出的《1 vs. 100》，这款游戏原应排在第六名，最近新增16万1167用户，增幅达34%，MAU总数为63万6676。

6）据insidesocialgames报道，正处于内测阶段的著名PC游戏《模拟人生》Facebook版本将于今年夏季正式发布。该游戏保留了原PC游戏的核心玩法和元素，要球玩家控制一个虚拟形象，满足它的社交、卫生、乐趣、睡眠等多种生活需求。

Sims(from insidesocialgames)

该游戏的盈利解决方案是支持玩家通过付费购买虚拟货币SimCash，跳过一些任务或完成建设项目；玩家可以通过赢取社交积分和收集物品，兑换一些装饰品和补充能量，另外也可以使用SimCash购买这些物品。

7）独立应用商店GetJar首席营销官Patrick Mork日前宣布离职，担任谷歌手机应用市场营销总监。

Patricks Mork(from intomobile.com)

但颇为耐人寻味的是，Mork之前曾主导了一项联合草根开发者反对保守应用生态圈的运动“The Open And Free App Movement”，其矛头指向的是苹果，谷歌也不例外。

Mork于2008年加入GetJar团队，将于9月初到谷歌上任。

8）GetJar应用下载量目前已突破20亿次，其中有相当部分的贡献来自Android应用，所以该公司打算向Android Market推出一个Android应用客户端GetJar Client。

getjar-logo(from getjar)

该应用由OpenView Mobile发行，但其产品描述只介绍GetJar，却没有说明该客户端本身的功能。观察者称GetJar在谷歌应用商店中推出自己的应用，实在是一个很值得玩味的举动。GetJar在今年初曾与Opera发生不快，原因是后者通过在GetJar发布的Opera移动浏览器中植入了自己的应用商店。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

1）Cityville Launches in Japan as Facebook Continues Steady Growth

by Dominic K. Gallello

The world’s biggest social game Cityville just launched in Japanese, available exclusively to the Facebook platform. This is the first time a localized version of a US Zynga game has been launched in Japan since their entry into the Japanese market. Zynga is currently rolling out their biggest IP around the world, with their recent partnership announcement with Tencent to launch the Chinese version on the game known in China as Zynga City. Zynga is pushing Cityville out around the world using a drop-down bar of different languages options (English, French, Spanish, Japanese), so users can all play the same base game. The potential for this is that people of different countries, cultures, and native languages can play together through Zynga games.

The game is launching just as Facebook Japan breaks the 4 milion user mark, fueled by months of steady growth (roughly 7% per month). While Facebook Japan is hestitant to flaunt their gaming catalogue as a selling point to Japanese users, it is important for them to have a vibrant entertainment ecosystem especially in a country that values mobile/social gaming so much. Their fear is experiencing “dummy growth” – that is, growth fueled by fanaticism over games that users end up creating empty or multiple accounts for the sole purpose of accessing games, which happened in other Asian countries like Taiwan a couple years back. Facebook Japan is on a delicate path trying to convince users to use Facebook for its social function , asking users to move away from anonymous pseudonyms and move towards publishing their real, juicy personal data. It is very interesting to note that the CPC & CPM for advertising has doubled within the past month for Facebook in Japan.（source:asiajin）

2）Social gaming firm CrowdStar moves into Russian market

Dean Takahashi

CrowdStar is living up to its strategic expansion plan as it announces today that it will launch its hit game It Girl on three different social networks in the fast-growing Russian market.

The expansion shows that fast-moving gaming companies are in a land grab, expanding overseas so they can stake out the fastest-growing social and mobile game markets around the world before their rivals do. CrowdStar hopes to expand on its current user base, which includes 25 million monthly active users on Facebook. And it knows it is in a race because rival Zynga has ten times more users and is also expanding overseas.

The It Girl game is a fashion-oriented title for girls and women. It is already live on one Russian social network, called Odnoklassniki.ru. Eventually, the game will be on Vkontakte.ru andMail.ru.

The international expansion was one reason that the Burlingame, Calif.-based company raised $23 million in its first round of venture capital funding earlier this year. Peter Relan, chief executive at CrowdStar, said at our recent GamesBeat 2011 that the company’s strategic markets include Facebook, mobile games and international markets.

The company has 140 employees and was founded in 2008. Rivals include Zynga, Disney-Playdom, and Electronic Arts. CrowdStar’s investors include The9, Intel, and Time Warner. CrowdStar’s big games include ”Happy Aquarium,” “Happy Island,” “Happy Pets,” CrowdStar’s “It Girl” and “Zoo Paradise.”

CrowdStar partnered with Russian distributer 101XP to bring It Girl new the new platforms.（source:venturebeat）

3）Like Zynga, Digital Chocolate pulls back from the cloud

By Derrick Harris

Tweet inShare34It looks like Zynga’s infrastructure strategy is rubbing off on social gaming startups. Digital Chocolate, purveyor of social games such as Millionaire City and Pro MMA Fighter, is following in Zynga’s footsteps of launching games in the cloud, then bringing them back in house when demand levels off. It doesn’t have Zynga’s much ballyhooed hybrid cloud infrastructure quite yet, but Digital Chocolate is working on its own flavor of the ideal gaming cloud.

Alfred Tsai, Digital Chocolate’s director of global IT and network operations, told me the company was operating entirely in Amazon Web Services, but decided to bring some games back in-house when performance issues got to be too much. AWS’s database servers were plenty robust, he explained, but the backend network was just too slow. Digital Chocolate couldn’t utilize the database servers to their maximum performance because the network couldn’t keep up with the transaction volume.

Big Games Come Home

Now, Digital Chocolate still launches new games on AWS, but it runs its most-popular games in-house. It relies on a 10 GbE network backbone, as well as storage appliances from a startup company called Tintri. Tintri’s VMstore appliance mixes solid-state and hard disk drives to balance performance and cost, and is designed specifically for virtualized environments. Tsai said Digital Chocolate is still experiencing performance levels around 50,000 IOPS with its Tintri boxes, despite the fact that it has yet to upgrade from the beta version of the product.（source:gigaom）

4）Yumemi To Develop American Location Game “MyTown” For Japan

by Chiho Komoriya

Yumemi has announced that they are joining forces with Booyah, maker of the American location information social game “MyTown” which has over 4 million users.  From now on, “MyTown” will be developed in Japan.

“MyTown” is a Check-in type of location based service with strong game components.  It is
tied to such corporations as Disney, MTV, Travel Channel, H&M, Adidas, P&G etc. and is said to be the most successfully monetized location game in America.

Yumemi is not going to simply localize the American version of “MyTown,” they are going to develop an evolved version exclusively for Japan.  The service is planned to be opened up this Fall.（source:asiajin）

5）森の物語, Megacity, Collapse! Blast Top This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Games

By AJ Glasser

Collapse! Blast stays strong but 森の物語 (Forest Adventure) and Megacity slip past it to take the top two spots on this week’s list of emerging Facebook games, while Playdom’s ESPN Sports Bar & Grill restaurant sim misses the top three by about 78,000 users.

Farther down the list are a handful of newer games, like S.O.S., Premier Fantasy League Football, The Island: Castaway (which we recently reviewed), Divinitz and Rocket Bird. The Sims Social makes another appearance at No.15 this week, having almost broken the 1 million monthly active user mark needed to graduate from emerging games rankings. The game is currently still in closed beta.

ETA: Due to a miscategorization, iWin’s 1 vs. 100 was left off this list in error. It should appear at No.6 this week with 161,167 new monthly active users for a total of 636,676 MAU for 34% growth.（source:insidesocialgames）

6）The Sims Social Steps Up EA’s IP Presence on Facebook

By AJ Glasser

The Sims Social is is a life simulation game based on one of EA’s oldest and most successful PC game franchises that runs on Facebook as an app. Built in collaboration between EA’s Sims Studio and Playfish, the game is currently in closed beta and planned for a summer 2011 release.

The game allows players to create and control a single Sim (read: avatar) living in a house that the player can decorate. True to the Sims’ roots, the primary gameplay objective is to keep the Sim happy by satisfying a set of basic needs such hygiene, fun, socialization, sleep, hunger, or bladder capacity. The Sims also have a base personality type (e.g. Creative, Romantic, etc.) that the player can choose to guide the Sim toward over the course of gameplay. Players meet these needs of a Sim by having the Sim interact with various objects that can be bought for the house or by having them interact with other Sims through dialogue trees.

Though the game is still in closed beta, the monetization methods for The Sims Social are clear: players are able to skip quests or complete building requirements by spending a premium currency called SimCash, which can be bought with Facebook Credits. SimCash can also be spent on premium decoration items and energy refills, although it is possible to earn certain premium decorations with Social Points and craft energy refills by collecting items earned through interactions (e.g. earning hearts from “Flirting”). Energy refills might prove a valuable revenue stream, as currently all social and currency-earning interactions in The Sims Social cost one energy, while satisfying basic needs like going to the bathroom or sleeping are free.（source:insidesocialgames）

7）Self styled ‘app guy’ Patrick Mork leaves GetJar to join Google as marketing director for mobile apps

by Jon Jordan

There are plenty of opinionated people in the world of apps, but few have the persuasion and insight of Patrick ‘Mad’ Mork.

Previously a veep at Glu Mobile, he moved to free app store GetJar as chief marketing officer in 2008, and now he’s off again, becoming marketing director for mobile applications at Google.

Righting wrongs

Interestingly, one of Mork’s final salvos at GetJar was the attempt to kickstart a grassroots initiative The Open And Free App Movement: an avenue for developers to reveal how the “increasingly closed app ecosystems” was affecting them.

The main target of his ire was Apple, but Google got splash damage too.

“Android was supposed to be FREE and open; yet developers can’t choose their billing solution,” he pointed out.

Out of the Gar

As for his current situation, Mork says, “After more than 3 rollercoaster years at GetJar, I’ve decided that the time has come for me to move on in search of new challenges”.

“As a shareholder and early employee I have every confidence the company will continue to succeed and thrive in the ever-changing apps environment and am really excited about some of the new products and improvements we’ll be introducing over the next few weeks and months.”

He starts with Google at the beginning of September.

“I’m an apps guy at heart and always looking for a good fight as you know,” he ends.

So let’s hope the appointment will see his passion for developers injected deep into the Android ecosystem.（source:pocketgamer）

8）GetJar gets native Android client

by Stuart Dredge

Two billion downloads down, the app store has its own app on another app store…

Android has been a key factor behind the growth of independent app store GetJar in the last year or two, helping the company pass the two billion downloads milestone.

Now it seems that GetJar is looking to capitalise on that by launching a native client for Android, and making it available in Google’s Android Market.

Titled GetJar Client and published by OpenView Mobile, the app’s description merely talks about GetJar rather than the functionality of the client itself.

While it sounds and looks official, it’s unclear whether the app has been released on Android Market quietly as part of a test or soft-launch: it appeared in the store last night and popped up on ME’s RSS feed of new Android apps.

It is ironic to see GetJar launching its own app store app on Google’s app store, though. Earlier this year GetJar had a spat with Opera, after the latter included an app store in its mobile browser that was distributed through GetJar.（source:mobile-ent）