1）根据LinkedIn资料显示，Zynga前总经理Jeremy Verba现已转身变成约会网站eHarmony首席执行官。Verba于2009年12月至2011年6月在Zynga任职，他在Zynga实现10亿美元IPO的计划之前离开，这意味着他很可能放弃属于自己的Zynga股票。

Verba曾负责运营《Tresure Isle》项目，该游戏于2010年4月上线，在高峰期时的MAU曾达到2800万，但现在已经下滑至570万左右，在今年7月至8月间流失了100万MAU，据称这款游戏的虚拟商品交易表现也很不理想。

Zynga热门游戏《FarmVille》至今仍是Facebook六大应用之一，其最近MAU是3300万；新游戏《Empires & Allies》的MAU约4400，另一款游戏《CityVille》的MAU则是7700万。据AppData数据显示，后两者的用户都在下滑，《CityVille》在今年7月至8月间流失了10%的MAU，《Empires & Allies》的情况与此相同。

其他的Zynga游戏运营表现几乎都优于《Tresure Isle》，例如《FrontierVille》最近的MAU超过1100万，《Texas Hold ‘Em poker》MAU也达到3500万左右。

2）Experian Hitwise最新追踪数据显示，Google+发布六周后，其用户主力军已从年轻群体转向中年人。Experian Hitwise使用“Mosaic USA”系统调查发现，在Google+上线早期，该社交网站主要吸引年轻单身群体、在校大学生等年轻群体，这些用户访问Google+的频率比一般网民高4倍。

但六周之后，这些用户Google+的兴趣开始下降（游戏邦注：但单身用户访问Google+的频率仍是一般网民的2.5至3倍左右），而中年已婚并且有儿有女的群体，以及老年群体的用户数量开始上升。目前该网站的大学生用户访问Google+的频率已经低于一般网民，仅占Google+访问用户的0.3%。

3）Zynga日前发布《FrontierVille》的衍生产品——《The Poineer Trail》这款新游戏，支持玩家驾驶马车探索Beaver Valley、High Plains和Avalanche Pass三个不同的地图以到达终点Fort Courage。

该游戏故事主线是一个名为Ezekiel的小男孩被绑匪劫持，玩家的任务就是将他从Fort Courage中解救出来。其玩法与游戏剧情联系紧密，玩家将随故事发展逐渐开启更多新线索。

据Zynga所称，这款游戏的规模比之前的Zynga游戏大五倍左右，也是首款支持玩家在多个地图间切换的游戏。

4）据venturebeat报道，Google+日前也宣布将推行谷歌实名制政策，在该平台使用假名或昵称注册的帐号将被冻结。Google+项目经理Saurabh Sharma发布消息表示，即日起凡使用假名注册信息的用户，都应该在4天时间内将其修改成真实资料，逾期则将被冻结。

5）针对Google+近日添加社交游戏平台一事，Facebook游戏主管Sean Ryan称开发商应该都了解哪个平台最具盈利性，所以Facebook无需担心这一点。

对于Facebook与Google+营收分成上的极大差异（游戏邦注：Facebook向游戏开发商抽成30%，而Google+目前仅抽成5%），他的看法是Facebook确实值这个价钱，而Google+的抽成更低那是因为“他们还没有多少用户”，开发商最终都会明白，究竟是从大批用户中获取玩家更容易，还是从一小部分群体中获取玩家更可行。

Ryan还指责谷歌“既当裁判又当运动员”的做法，他认为谷歌既是社交游戏开发商投资者，又是社交游戏平台运营者，他们很可能会对个别开发商有所偏袒。

他称Facebook并没有像谷歌那样向Zynga、Kabam投资，Facebook就是一个开放性平台，其政策会向所有开发商公平开放，绝不会向个别开发商倾斜，并否认了Facebook更偏爱Zynga的这种说法。

6）最近有不少评论认为Facebook游戏已经今不如昔，不少游戏都在走下坡路，Facebook游戏主管Sean Ryan针对这种说法回应称，这并非Facebook平台的问题，而是游戏本身的问题。

他称特定游戏总有一定的生命周期，Facebook是一个开放性平台，他们通过添加更多病毒传播功能，以及类似亚马逊或网飞的游戏推荐功能，致力于让开发商的游戏获得更多曝光度，让用户获得良好游戏体验。

至于评论称Facebok仍未更新游玩家数量（游戏邦注：“2亿”玩家已是两年前的说法，但Facebook一直没有更新这一数据），这表明Facebook游戏用户并未增长的说法，Ryan则承认这种情况属实。他称新增玩家数量庞大，但总体上并不是特别理想，原因是一年前的游戏病毒式传播遭到不少用户投诉，Facebook不得不关闭该渠道，但这种手段带来的副作用就是游戏用户增长速度也开始放缓。

不过他指出，Facebook现在新添加了许多游戏功能，支持开发商更有效地利用病毒传播渠道，并确信Facebook可以在提升游戏DAU的同时，不会给用户带来消极影响。

7）Facebook硬核游戏开发商Kabam旗下作品《亚瑟王国》因技术故障问题，将大批付费虚拟商品（需用真钱购买的道具）设置成了免费赠品，结果导致大量投机玩家连夜疯狂收取这些免费赠品，其影响波及200万游戏用户。

Kabam立即创建了一个新脚本将这些玩家获取的免费赠品回收，但同时也造成7万名无辜付费玩家的道具也被无故取消，最后导致成千上万名不幸遭殃的玩家愤怒退出该游戏，甚至在许多论坛和Facebook页面发贴抵制Kabam及其游戏。

为挽留忠实玩家以免流失用户，Kabam在上周末向这些玩家推出了“Divine Inspiration和Obsidian Rune两件大礼”，并收获了立杆见影的效果，在8月8日当天，该游戏DAU迅速回升，有许多玩家重访游戏查看自己是否收到礼物。

观察者称平均每名Facebook玩家每天游戏时间是15分钟，而《亚瑟王国》平均每天游戏时间长达3小时，玩家登录比例达到90%，而且付费愿意也极为惊人，从Kabam迅速回应平息事态就可以看出这一点。

8）Facebook于昨日宣布推出一系列旨在加强游戏曝光度的新功能，为了避免游戏消息干扰用户好友，Facebook将添加新的用户隐私设置，支持用户根据实际情况设置将与哪位好友分享相关游戏消息。该设置默认将游戏消息将向“好友”开放，但用户可以选择屏蔽news feed中有关游戏搜索、使用情况、游戏成就等消息。

9）在本周的MAU增长最快Facebook游戏榜单上，《Premier League Fantasy Football》位列第一，其次是《ESPN Sports Bar & Grill》，而iWin推出的两款电视节目题材的新游戏《1 vs 100》和 《Deal or No Deal》分别位列第五和第六，仅次于Kabam新游戏《Edgeworld》。得益于《Smurfs & Co. 》的交叉推广作用（游戏邦注：这款育碧新作的MAU已超过100万，因此不在本榜单之列），育碧游戏《Castle & Co. 》也跻身第15名。

注：由于分类失误，Playdom游戏《GnomeTown》没有出现在本榜单，但实际上本周新增MAU是42万5982，增幅达到123%，应该排在榜单第二名，目前MAU总共77万3079。

10）BuySellAds.com和Column Five最近发布Twitter Vs.Facebook信息图表指出，80%的Facebook用户会使用该网站与品牌产品进行互动，但Twitter用户的同一比例仅占6%。但却有37%社交网络用户认为Twitter更能促使他们采取消费行动，仅有17%的受访者认为Facebook具有相同的作用。

Facebook目前女性用户占54%，男性比例为46%；Twitter的女性用户为52%，男性用户是48%；年龄介于23至35岁的Facebook用户比例为33%，Twitter的同一用户比例是34%；将近27%的Twitter用户每年收入约7.5万美元。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

1）Zynga exec departs on the eve of IPO to run eHarmony

Matthew Lynley

Former Zynga general manager Jeremy Verba has left the company to become chief executive officer of dating site eHarmony after working at the social gaming company for 19 months, according to his LinkedIn profile.

His departure comes shortly before Zynga’s planned $1 billion initial public offering, and means that he is likely giving up a substantial portion of his equity there.

Verba was responsible for Treasure Isle, a Zynga game launched in April 2010. It took off quickly, hitting around 28 million monthly active users at its peak, but began to decline quickly after that. The game now only has around 5.7 million monthly active users and lost around 1 million monthly active users between July and August.

Zynga is mostly known for its major hits on Facebook. That includes the likes of Farmville, which is still the sixth most-used app on Facebook with 33 million monthly active users. Its latest game, Empires & Allies, has around 44 million monthly active users and its city-building game Cityville has 77 million monthly active users.

Both games are losing users after an initial pop in monthly active users, but that’s pretty normal for a game company. Cityville gradually lost around 10 percent of its monthly active users between July and August, while Treasure Isle lost nearly 18 percent between July and August. The number of monthly active users for Empires and Allies fell around 10 percent too, but the number of monthly active users has leveled off for the past several tracking periods, according to AppData.

The company has a lot of games that aren’t as huge as Cityville and Empires and Allies, but even those games have large player bases when compared to Treasure Isle. Frontierville, a Farmville spinoff, has more than 11 million monthly active users while Texas Hold ‘Em poker has around 35 million monthly active users.（source:  venturebeat）

2）Six weeks after birth, Google+ is already middle aged

by Steven E.F. Brown

When Google Inc. launched its Google+ social network to compete with Facebook six weeks ago, young and single people signed up quickly. But since then their interest has peaked and tailed off, and Google+ users now have more gray hair.

Experian Hitwise, which tracks this sort of thing, released an analysis of the audience for Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) social network. Bill Tancer wrote in a company blog that “in just over six weeks, we’ve moved from innovators to early adopters to early mainstream users.”

College kids and habitués of cafés signed up early for Google+ but since then their involvement has plummeted to below the interest of the typical Internet user.

Experian Hitwise used its “Mosaic USA” system to analyze the population visiting Google’s social network, focusing on people in four general groups: Colleges and Cafes, Kids and Cabernet, Status Seeking Singles, and Full Pockets Empty Nests.

In the early days of Google+ interest was very high from Colleges and Cafes (“young singles and recent college graduates living in college communities”) and from Status Seeking Singles — people from both those groups were about four times more likely to visit the site than the average Internet user.

But tempus fugit, and just six weeks on those groups have both dropped off (though the singles group is still 2 1/2 or 3 times more likely to visit Google+ than the average Internet user) and visitors from Kids and Cabernet (“Prosperous, middle-aged married couples living child-focused lives in affluent suburbs”) and Full Pockets Empty Nests have both jumped. People from the college crowd are now less likely to visit Google+ than the average Internet user. They now make up only 0.3 percent of visits to Google+ says Experian Hitwise.（source:techflash）

3）After Frontierville, Zynga Channels The Wild West Again For Facebook Game The Pioneer Trail

Leena Rao

In a first for the social gaming giant, Zynga is actually launching an spinoff of one of its hit Facebook games, Frontierville. Today, the company is announcing the debut of The Pioneer Trail (which will go live today), a brand new Facebook game where players outfit wagons and travel across three distinct maps – Beaver Valley, High Plains and Avalanche Pass – all while trying to reach a single destination—Fort Courage.

As with most Zynga games, the social game mechanics are similar but with different themes and storylines. For The Pioneer Trail, the story revolves around a young boy who has been kidnapped, named Ezekiel, by the notorious Gratchett Gang and as a player, you are on a quest to complete the trail and rescue Ezekiel from Fort Courage. The plot is a bigger part of this game than any others, and The Pioneer Trail places a pretty big emphasis the story-based gameplay. The story unfolds gradually as players come across new clues.

You basically start the game by building a cabin, but instead of centralizing the whole game around this action, it only takes around five minutes to put together your homestead in the game. After your build your cabin, you load up your conestoga, staff your crew (with the hunter, doctor and carpenter) and start your way down the trail.

As you make your way down the trail you complete missions, and earn points. There are many unique aspects to The Pioneer Trail, but one of the most interesting features is a social matchmaking feature. For the first time in a game, players can opt in to be matched with other players who they may not be friends with. Based on characteristics of existing groups, players can opt in for The Pioneer Trail to match them with players outside of their core group of Facebook friends. This feature won’t be live at launch, but should be available soon after.

Zynga is also changing things up in terms of the social mechanics. Instead of accumulating as many friends as possible throughout the life of the game, players can actually select an small group of three friends to help them along the trail. It becomes a strategy games because players whose friends are more active will progress faster throughout the game.

Another differentiating feature in this game is that it is an intelligent, choose your own adventure layout with several different ways to progress in the story. The choices that players

make within the game determine how they’ll fair as they journey across these mysterious and treacherous lands on the trail. After players play through a certain map, they can play it again and receive an entirely different outcome.（source:techcrunch）

4）Google+ pseudonym accounts: You have four days until suspension

Tom Cheredar

Anyone using a pseudonym instead of their real name on Google+ is now at risk of account suspension, the company announced today.

In the past few weeks, there has been much debate about Google’s Real Name Policy, with some calling it revolutionary and others labeling it an abuse of power.

The suspension measure is aimed at cutting down on spam, according to the company. But, ensuring that the majority of those accounts are real, living, breathing human beings also makes it a far more effective advertising platform. It also raises questions about the added privacy concerns associated with storing personal information on a platform designed to share with various social circles.

In response to the feedback, Google has announced that accounts currently using a pseudonym or nickname won’t be immediately suspended.

“We’re listening, learning and iterating to give our users the best experience possible. Starting today, if we find that your profile name does not adhere to our policy, we’ll give you a 4 day grace period to fix your profile name before we take further action,” said Google+ project manager Saurabh Sharma in a note posted on Google+ yesterday. “During this period, you can continue to use Google+ as usual. We’re hoping that most affected users will be able to quickly fix their profile name while continuing to enjoy all that Google+ has to offer.”（source:venturebeat）

5） Facebook: ‘We Don’t Spend A Lot Of Time’ Worrying About Google+

by Frank Cifaldi, Brandon Sheffield

Many saw Google’s recently-launched social gaming platform as a threat to the 200 million monthly players Facebook has amassed, but according to Facebook’s director of games partnerships Sean Ryan, the two can peacefully co-exist.

“Developers should go where they think they can make the most money,” he said at a Gamasutra-attended roundtable at Facebook’s corporate headquarters on Friday. “We don’t spend a lot of time worrying about them, we worry about us.”

Ryan addressed criticism on the two platforms’ wildly divergent revenue splits (Facebook takes a 30 percent cut, while Google takes only 5 for the initial period) by saying that that Facebook’s platform is simply worth more, saying that Google is only taking a small cut because “they don’t have any users!”

“We believe through our distribution, our audience, and our virality, that that’s worth a certain revenue split,” he said. “At the end of the day, it’s whether [developers get] a certain percentage of a large number, or a certain percentage of a small number.”

“We see competition around the world. What I’d say is in classic fashion Google has emulated our system, which is what they’re inclined to do,” Ryan added. “And we just need to be better as a platform. At the end of the day, people will go to what they thing is the right platform. So revenue split is one of those factors. We’re the leader, there’s no question. But we can be better.”

Ryan also criticized Google for being an investor in social game makers, implying that the company could show favoritism to those it has a stake in.

“We’re not an investor in Zynga like Google is, or like Google is in Kabam, or an owner of Slide. We’re not. We’re an open platform. We run the most open platform around,” he said, adding that Facebook doesn’t “favor developers over other developers. We’re not there to grow specific developers.”

Ryan denied previous reports of an exclusivity deal that favored Zynga, saying that all of its developers are treated equally.

“We’re not an investor in the company. Google is,” he said. “Where do you think the favoritism is going to be?” （source:gamasutra）

6）Facebook’s Ryan Admits ‘Slowed Growth’ In Number Of Players On Platform

by Brandon Sheffield

Recently there has been criticism that Facebook games are declining faster than they used to, with games like Diner Dash shuttering this month. At a Gamasutra-attended press conference, we asked Sean Ryan, director of games partnerships for Facebook, whether he thinks the recent changes to the game side of the platform addresses this issue. On the whole, Ryan sees this as less of a platform problem, and more of a game-by-game issue.

“As certain games hit lifecycles, do you expand, do you sequelize?” he posed. “What you see in general is that some games decline, and a bunch of games increase dramatically … We’re an open platform, and we really believe that people should make whatever games they want to make, and we should do a better job of putting that in front of the right people.”

With the new, more intelligent virality Facebook is implementing, including a games ticker and Amazon or Netflix-style recommendations to game players, “we’re there to make sure if you love a game you can find that game,” says Ryan. “We’re trying to make sure we’re better at surfacing games.”

More than worrying about declining numbers, he says Facebook worries about “what are the types of features we need to enable … what types of games currently aren’t possible on the platform that we can enable by new features?”

“We still have a ways to go with breadth of content,” added Ryan, saying that diverse game types was key to future growth.

Another criticism that’s been levied against the platform recently is the continued use of the “200 million users” number, which was released last year, and never updated. Ryan was asked by the panel whether, since they weren’t updating the number, this means growth has slowed. He confirmed in the affirmative.

“The game growth with the changes we made last year definitely slowed,” Ryan admitted. Changes included less viral “spamming” on users’ walls, and things of that nature. He says that growth was large, but not positive overall. “A year ago, game spam was one of the top areas that was brought up by people unhappy with Facebook,” he added. “It doesn’t even show up anymore. The good news is we’ve addressed that in a way where we don’t see that for users anymore. The bad news is the growth has slowed.”

But with the new features, subtle though they may be, he feels developers have a better in to more intelligent virality. Ryan concluded, “I feel confident where we are now that we can grow the DAU in a way that doesn’t negatively impact the users.” （source:gamasutra）

7）Kingdoms of Camelot players quit by the thousands in protest

by Jenny Ng

Kabam, a Facebook game developer dedicated to providing hardcore titles, has had some mixed success these past few weeks — they were accused by rival Kixeye of copycatting games, won a technology award, was written up by the Los Angeles Times as a Zynga contender, and was the first Facebook developer to put a game (i.e. Edgeworld) onto Google+ Games.

But last Friday, Kabam screwed up big time with their strategy title, Kingdoms of Camelot, when its engineers accidentally turned a bunch of premium virtual goods (the stuff you buy with real money) into free, giftable items. Opportunists quickly spent the entire night amassing “astronomical” amounts of these freebies, thus wrecking the power balance between the 2 million players of the game.

Kabam fixes this problem by creating a script that takes all the illicit freebies away from its players, but this unleashes havoc as 70,000 innocent players also have their premium virtual goods taken away. And then a separate problem emerged, when other players lost access to their inventory. Since these troubles started, angry players have quit playing Kingdoms of Camelot by the tens of thousands, while others have created forum threads and Facebook pages calling for a boycott of the game and Kabam.

In an attempt to reward loyal players and prevent more from quitting, Kabam offered “two huge gifts: A Divine Inspiration and an Obsidian Rune!” during that weekend. The sudden spike in daily traffic on August 8 is from players checking in to see if those gifts made it to their accounts that day.

An average Facebook gamer might spend 15 minutes per day on a game, but a Kingdoms of Camelot player would spend an average of 3 hours with a 90% log-in rate. They also open up their wallets for more premium items too. Kabam understands deeply, how much it’s hurt a very dedicated and profitable player base. Hopefully, they can clean up this mess soon.（source:games）

8）Facebook Adds Game Stories to the News Feed, Privacy Settings to Limit Them

By Josh Constine

Facebook yesterday announced several changes to how games work on the Platform, including that stories about game may be published to the news feeds of a user’s friends, including non-gamers, when the play a game for more than 15 minutes or complete an in-game objective. Depending on their prevalence in the news feed, game usage and achievement stories could help developers gain new users for free, but could also clutter the news feeds of people who don’t care about games.

To help users avoid annoying their friends, Facebook will add a new privacy setting that allows them to define on an app-by-app basis who an app can share with. The setting will default to “friends” but users can select to prevent the publishing of game discovery, usage, and achievement stories to news feed and the new Games Ticker.（source:insidesocialgames）

9）Premier League Fantasy Football and ESPN Sports Bar & Grill Top This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Games

By AJ Glasser

Premier League Fantasy Football rockets up to the top spot on this week’s list of emerging Facebook games with ESPN Sports Bar & Grill not far behind. Both titles offer sports fans meaningful ways to interact with their sport and team of choice, such as with a Game Predictor that ESPN just launched.

iWin’s two newest TV game show titles, 1 vs 100 and Deal or No Deal, turn up back to back on this week’s list just behind Kabam’s just-launched Edgeworld. Way down at No.15, Ubisoft’s Castle & Co. turns up, perhaps riding a wave of cross-promotion from the recently released Smurfs & Co. (which broke 1 million MAU a week ago, classing it out of this list).

ETA: Due to a miscategorization, Playdom’s GnomeTown was left off this list in error. It should appear at No.2 with a gain of 425,982 MAU for a total of 773,079 MAU at 123% growth in the last week.（source:insidesocialgames）

10）Twitter Vs Facebook: Which Is More Valuable For Brands? [Infographic]

By Megan O’Neill

These days more and more brands are turning to social media, hoping to spread the word and attract loyal customers.  But on a limited time and budget, it can be hard for small brands to cover the entire social network spectrum and engage with fans on Twitter and Facebook.  With this in mind, BuySellAds.com and Column Five bring you Twitter Vs. Facebook: Where The Brand Loyalty Is, an infographic that pins the two big social networks against one another to help you determine which offers more value for your brand.

The infographic compares Twitter and Facebook based upon a variety of criteria, including age, gender and education distribution, networking power and more.  The infographic reports that 80 percent of Facebook fans use Facebook most to connect with brands, while only 6 percent use Twitter.

That being said, Twitter has its advantages as well.  37 percent of social networkers agreed that Twitter was more likely to drive purchasing among users, compared to 17 percent that believed as much about Facebook.  The number of loyal customers that are following brands on Twitter is also on the rise, up by 6 percent from last year.

Check out the full infographic below to find out more and let us know, which social network do you think is more valuable for brands?  Facebook or Twitter?（source:socialtimes）