1）EA PopCap日前宣布由ZipZapPlay团队开发的《Baking Life》将于1月31日下线。《Baking Life》曾是Facebook人气游戏之一，在2010年8月时的MAU曾高达670万，但随后流量逐步下滑，去年4月PopCap收购ZipZapPlay时该游戏MAU为220万左右。

baking life(from insidesocialgames)

目前尚无从得知EA收购PopCap是否是该游戏下线的影响因素，据AppData数据，《Baking Life》当前MAU为76万，DAU是10万，虽然用户规模急剧下滑，但仍有13%以上的用户留存率。

2）分析公司Cowen and Company最近声称如果Zynga想保证其DAU数量，就得先保证新游戏能够“迅速”虏获大量新用户。

分析师Doug Creutz指出Zynga最新游戏《Hidden Chronicles》和《Scramble With Friends》现在所取得的成就远不及公司之前发布的游戏。《Hidden Chronicles》在Facebook上线12天的DAU仅71万，而《CastleVille》、《Empires & Allies》上线后同一时间段的DAU已超过500万；《Scramble With Friends》在苹果App Store甚至无法跻身前20名之列。尽管这两者有可能稳步发展，但“这并非Zynga以往新发布游戏所走的路线”。

hidden-chronicles(from blog.nothingbutsoftware.com)

他称在过去两年中，Zynga发布至少三个月的游戏DAU季度下滑率平均为18.4%，假设2012年Zynga游戏DAU季度下滑率为20%，那么Zynga新游戏每季度必须增加900万-1000万新用户方可维持稳定的DAU水平。

3）韩国网游公司Nexon最近获得Unity Technologies游戏引擎授权，将使用后者工具创建内容。

nexon-unity(from massively.joystiq.com)

Nexon游戏已有12亿注册用户，在首尔总部、日本/欧美分部已有3000多名员工，之前已获得Unreal Engine和Valve工具Source等游戏引擎的授权。

4）休闲游戏公司PopCap日前宣布向Mac、PC平台推出寻物解谜游戏《Vacation Quest Australia》更新版本，该游戏含有Vacation、Unlimited和Match 3 Bonus三个模式，其中含有七个文字搜索、连线消除、“找碴”型谜你小游戏。

Vacation Quest Australia(from games)

5）在本周DAU增长最快的Facebook排行榜上，《Words With Friends》和《Hidden Chronicles》分列前两名，EA最新游戏《Rish:Factions》位于第16名，Playdom寻物解谜游戏《Gardens of Time》则列位第12名。

Top Gainers This Week(from AppData)

（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 PopCap sunsetting Baking Life after 22 months

Kathleen De Vere

EA PopCap has chosen to sunset ZipZapPlay’s Baking Life, announcing to players that the game will go offline on January 31.

The move is not surprising — while at one point Baking Life had been one of the bigger hits on Facebook, peaking with more than 6.7 million monthly active users in August 2010, traffic for the game has been in slow decline ever since. When PopCap acquired ZipZapPlay last April, the future of the game was still being decided, even though it had more than 2.2 million MAU at the time. It’s unknown at this point if EA’s acquisition of PopCap in July had any effect on the decision to sunset the game.

When asked about the decision, Garth Chouteau, PopCap’s VP of communications sent this statement to Inside Social Games: “Unfortunately, we had to make a very difficult decision to shut down the game. The Baking Life player numbers have dropped in such a way that Baking Life is no longer performing well enough to justify continued support. As such, we are reallocating resources to games that we are developing for future release.”

It’s pretty much the same story ZipZapPlay has told before when sharing its previous experiences on the Facebook platform in trying to balance a game’s lifetime value of users (LTV) against cost per install (CPI). For EA PopCap, however, the decision puts PopCap in an awkward position with regards to its social games portfolio. Although Bejeweled Blitz and Zuma Blitz have done well, they are both based on existing PopCap franchises. Development on PopCap’s Pig Up! has been frozen and ZipZapPlay has not released any new titles since its acquisition, so its not clear what the company’s next move on Facebook will be.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, Baking Life currently has 760,000 MAU and 100,000 DAU. Although the game’s user base has declined significantly, it still enjoys retention above 13 percent.（source:insidesocialgames）

2）Analyst: Zynga needs ‘significant’ number of new users to stay afloat

by Mike Rose

Analyst group Cowen and Company has stated that social games giant Zynga must continue to gain new users from new releases at a “significant rate” if it wants to keep its DAUs count afloat.

The group initiated coverage of Zynga’s initial public offering with a ‘Neutral’ rating last month, noting that it had “significant concerns” regarding whether Zynga will be able to maintain its growth and justify the current valuation.

In the company’s latest report, analyst Doug Creutz explained that Zynga’s most recent releases, Hidden Chronicles and Scramble With Friends, have nowhere near achieved the success of past games from the company.

Facebook game Hidden Chronicles reached 710,000 DAUs in 12 days — in comparison, both CastleVille and Empires & Allies from 2011 were well past 5 million DAUs at the same point.

Elsewhere, mobile title Scramble With Friends is “well outside” the top 20 rankings in Apple’s App Store, said Creutz. He noted that, while both games have the potential to steadily grow in user numbers over time, “that has not been the general pattern for Zynga’s launches over the past year.”

As a result, Creutz suggested that Zynga must continue to add a significant number of new users from games released later this year if it wishes to keep its DAU count constant.

“The quarterly rate of DAU decline for Zynga’s titles that are at least three months old has averaged 18.4 percent per quarter for the last two years,” he explained.

“Assuming Zynga averages a 20 percent quarterly rate of decline for titles beyond their launch windows in 2012, the company must add 9-10 million DAUs per quarter from new games just to keep total DAUs constant.” （source:gamasutra）

3）Nexon picks up Unity enterprise license

by Eric Caoili

Newsbrief: Korean online game developer and publisher Nexon has licensed Unity Technologies’ game engine with the intent of adopting the platform “on a massive scale” across all of its global subsidiaries.

With this broad agreement, Nexon — which has over 1.2 billion registered users playing its tremendously popular free-to-play games like MapleStory, Kart Rider, and Dungeon Fighter Online — can access and modify all of Unity’s products, including its source code.

The publisher employs more than 3,000 workers across its Seoul headquarters, branches across Japan/U.S./Europe, and various development houses (e.g. NDoors, GameHi, Neople). It has previously licensed game engines like Epic’s Unreal Engine and Valve’s Source.

Unity says this deal “marks a step forward into wide adoption of the Unity development platform by large publishers,” and will help it make in-roads into Korea’s developer community through Nexon-sponsored events, conferences, and educational seminars. （source:gamasutra）

5）PopCap’s new hidden-object game takes a Vacation Quest down under

by Joe Osborne

In the middle of January, who wouldn’t want to go south, but about way south? Everyone knows that hidden-object games are hottest thing under the sun right now (again), and PopCap was right there with them in their heyday. The Seattle-based casual games maker announced Vacation Quest Australia, the second iteration of the franchises available for Mac and PC now.

This next edition of Vacation Quest doesn’t appear to be terribly different from the first, or any hidden-object game, for that matter. At any rate, PopCap promises 28 brand new hidden-object scenes packing over 2,200 objects. Based on the trailer below, it looks like players will have to unlock extensions to their Australian vacation by skillfully playing through three game modes: Vacation, Unlimited and Match 3 Bonus.

Vacation Quest Australia also contains seven mini-games to help break the inevitable monotony of finding hidden objects in various scenes. These mini games include word searches, match-three games, scene comparisons and more. Since a number of social game companies like Playdom and now Zynga have hopped on the hidden-object bandwagon on Facebook, PopCap couldn’t have better timing releasing a new game.（source:games）

5）Words With Friends, Hidden Chronicles lead this week’s list of fastest-growing Facebook games by DAU

AJ Glasser

Words With Friends and Hidden Chronicles top this week’s list of fastest-growing Facebook games by daily active users.

Interesting activity is showing up farther down the rankings this week as EA’s newly-launched Risk: Factions begins its climb and Kixeye’s Facebook favorite Backyard Monsters sees a resurgence in traffic thanks to an expansion rolled out in the game last week. We’re also seeing a bit of movement from Gardens of Time, which may or may not have anything to do with Zynga and Vostu’s recent entry in the hidden object genre.（source:insidesocialgames）