1）据games报道，CEGamers网站最近又通过Zynga的一项用户调查问卷的宣传内容发现，Zynga下一个新游戏项目可能是《Pirate Island》（游戏邦注：另一个名称可能是《Rogues & Royals》，其调查问卷意在征求玩家对两个游戏名称的意见）。

pirate island(from games)

rogues and royals(from games)

该调查问卷对这个项目的描述如下：

“……踏上你的加勒比海历险之旅，与好友结盟一起揭开小岛神秘的面纱吧。你可以把自己的小岛建成宏伟的热带天堂，或者混乱的海盗乐园……”

CEGamers指出该游戏宣传画的美术风格与《CastleVille》较为相似，这个项目可能出自Zynga Dallas工作室之手。

2）据AppData数据显示，King.com游戏最近在Facebook平台的DAU已达944万，超过了EA的940万。目前玩家每月玩King.com游戏超过25亿次，而去年则是3亿次。

king_game(from gamedp)

3）谷歌首席执行官Larry Page在最近的第一季度财报电话会议中表示，目前已有1.7亿用户的Google+是谷歌的“社交主心骨”及社交终点站，它连接了所有的谷歌产品。但Page拒绝透露Google+的具体活跃用户及用户粘性等数据，仅表示Google+发展迅速。

4）EA日前通过腾讯Qzone向中国市场推出热门游戏《The Sims Social》中文版《模拟时光》。

模拟时光(from games)

这个中文版本由EA Playfish北京团队开发，采用了本土化图像、家具、服装和技能等元素。

5）EA Games label执行副总裁Patrick Soderlund在最近媒体采访中，针对人们认为EA这种大型企业缺乏创新性的看法表示，EA工作室中有数个被称为“实验室”的创意团队，他们可能同时投入5、6个项目中，团队中可能有5人、10人甚至是20多人没有明确的发展方向。

他认为必须让团队成员尝试并测试新想法，这些成员的任务就是落实并测试想法，以便公司决定是否要保留项目。一般来说，每10个或15个想法中才会有一个不错的游戏理念，有许多EA产品就是来源于这种运作方法。（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）Zynga to set sail for Pirate Island … or Rogues & Royals [Rumor]

by Joe Osborne

Big time social game maker Zynga looks to be on a tear with new projects. This time, CEGamers has found promotional art and text within one of Zynga’s infamous surveys for a game known as either Pirate Island or Rogues & Royals. The survey asks players for their impressions of both names associated with these images, and what they think a game with ether name would play like. Then, however, Zynga provides the following teaser:

Set sail for your own Caribbean paradise in a world of intrigue, pirates, and romance. Your island will become home to a cast of exotic characters who need your help in their quests for adventure, glory, and affairs of the heart. Team up with your friends as Crewmates and uncover the island’s many mysteries. The choice is yours: will you build your island into a stately tropical paradise? Or a rough-and-tumble pirates’ haven?

Other than that, little to nothing is known about this game that Zynga is testing the waters with. (Perhaps Zynga has learned a thing or two from The Sims Social?) The artwork in the image looks strikingly similar to CastleVille, as CEGamers points out. That said, it’s possible that Zynga Dallas is the studio that will handle Pirate Island/Rogues & Royals should it survive these surveys. （source:games）

2）King.com now third biggest game developer on Facebook, surpassing EA

by Mike Rose

Newsbrief: As King.com launches its latest casual game via Facebook, the company has revealed that it is now the third biggest game developer on Facebook in terms of DAUs, having now surpassed Electronic Arts.

As of this morning, King.com has 9.44 million daily active users across all its Facebook games, compared to EA’s 9.40 million, according to tracking website AppData, while over 2.5 billion King.com game sessions are now played each month, compared to 300 million year-over-year.

The company launched Candy Crush Saga this week, the sixth title in its Saga franchise, with which it is anticipating further rapid growth on Facebook. The studio currently offers over 150 games via its main website.（source:gamasutra）

3）Larry Page: Google+ Is “Social Spine” With 170M Users, “Healthy Growth” and “Impressive Engagement”

Frederic Lardinois

During its Q1 earnings call today, Google’s CEO Larry Page called Google+ the company’s “social spine.” With about 120 Google+ integrations across Google’s portfolio, Page said, Google+ is now what connects all of Google’s products. He also stressed that there are two aspects to Google+: the social spine (which, as Google had already announced earlier this week, currently has about 170 million users) and the social destination site. Google, for a while now, has refused to release any numbers about the actual number of people who regularly visit the Google+ homepage and how engaged they are. While quite a few pundits hoped that this would change with this call, Page did not announce any new numbers today.

Page did note, however, that Google+ “is growing quickly” and that the company is seeing “impressive engagement” and “fast growth.” He also stressed that this is a new community and that he himself is seeing a lot of high-quality feedback.

Page’s comments about Google+ are quite typical for how Google now prefers to talk about its social network. Instead of talking about how many users actually visit the “social destination” side of Google+, Google is more interested in talking about how many Google+ users also use other Google products like search, Gmail or Google Docs. In the company’s view – or at least in its public statements about Google+ – these numbers are more important, as Google argues that Google+ is simply part of the whole Google ecosystem and not just a stand-alone product. Given the public perception that Google+ is a bit of a “ghost town,” though, the calls for the company to disclose at least some numbers for engagement on the Google+ destination site have increased over the last few weeks.

Update: During the Q&A session after the call, Page was asked why the company is investing so much into Google+. In Page’s view, the most amazing thing that Google can now do that it couldn’t do before having Google+ is understanding your social connections when you search and hence show you the right results when you search for a common name like “Ben Smith.” Being able to share things, Page also noted, should be a “basic utility” in all of Google’s products.（source:techcrunch）

4）The Sims Social launches in China via Tencent’s Qzone

by Mike Rose

Newsbrief: Electronic Arts has launched its popular social game The Sims Social in China via Tencent’s Qzone social network, as a means of expanding the game’s audience.

The Chinese version of the game, known as Mo Ni Shi Guang, was developed by EA’s Playfish Beijing studio, and offers localized images, furniture, clothing and skills.

The original version of The Sims Social launched on Facebook last year, putting a social spin on the classic The Sims franchise. The game quickly became popular with 50 million active users in its first month, overtaking Zynga’s Farmville in daily active users.（source:gamasutra）

5）’Strange Ideas’: EA’s strategy for fostering innovation

by Kris Graft

When running a publicly-held video game mega-publisher made up of around 7,700 employees, executives at Electronic Arts have the daunting task of trying to foster innovation within a giant machine that cranks out video games, one after the other.

Patrick Soderlund, EVP of the EA Games label, which houses major brands like Battlefield and Mass Effect, recognizes that in these huge corporations, there is sometimes the need for more of a creative outlet. After all, video games are the product of human creativity, and once that is snuffed out, there’s not much left.

That’s why about a year ago, EA decided to pay closer attention to small groups of developers within the company that were coming up with interesting new ideas; bubbles of innovation that were emerging within the belly of EA.

“We have to come to a point, and we are at that point now, where we can actually afford to experiment,” Soderlund recently told Gamasutra. “We have several ideation teams at our studio — we call them ‘labs’ — that may be working on five or six things at one time. And there may be five, ten people, or maybe even 20 people, who won’t even have a direction.

“I firmly believe that you need to let people experiment and test things and come up with strange ideas,” he continued. “We may present a larger problem to them. For example — a rather bad example — ‘We’re missing a character-based action game’ or something. They’d make a ton of things, and show us the results. The idea is to test things and either continue them, or kill them early.

“Most ideas probably won’t be the right ones. But then, one out of 10 or 15 ideas will be the right one. And that’s the one that we’ll say, ‘We like that, continue.’ Then we’ll start funding it.”

Small experimental teams within larger publishing bodies are not unique to EA. But the fact that EA is now paying attention to and investing time in innovation in such an organized manner might be a surprise to those who view EA as a monolithic video game factory.

“When you have a company this big, you’ll have these [small groups] form naturally, because there’s so many people,” Soderlund said. “We just said, ‘It’s kind of happening anyway, so let’s take control over it, and make this okay to do — let’s make sure that people can work with us.’

“We’ve been doing it in a controlled form for a little over a year within our label,” he added. “We started small, with one team, then we tested and saw some good results with it. A lot of the things you see today in our products come from these ideas. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a new product. Maybe it’s a way to make better animations, or a way of making cooler destruction.”

Soderlund, one of the founders of EA-owned Battlefield studio DICE, said the seed for these idea labs was planted at DICE during the development of the experimental downloadable online shooter, Battlefield 1943.

“That [game's development] was basically a way for us to control ups and downs in our production cycles,” he said. “Normally, people would go into a production too early, or they would basically get transferred to an existing game team. Instead we said, ‘Do whatever you want. We’ll put you in this pod, do whatever you want.’

“And they said, ‘Hey do you want to do Battlefield back in World War II again?’ So they kept working on that. That kind of started something. Now we do it in all our studios.

“I think it’s important that we enable our people to innovate, and to be able to come up with new ideas. Because frankly, that’s what our audience wants.”

Gamasutra will have more from Soderlund in a wide-ranging interview in the near future.（source:gamasutra）