1）据gamesindustry报道，EA日向美国加州北部地区法院提起诉讼，声称Zynga游戏《The Ville》侵犯《The Sims Social》版权（游戏邦注：《The Sim Social》于2011年8月上线，《The Ville》发布于今年6月）。

The Sims Social vs The Ville(from gamesindustry)

EA指出Zynga通过雇佣EA高管而获取了《The Sims Social》的机密信息，其中包括与该游戏有关的设计、开发和战略信息。这些加盟Zynga的高管包括前EA首席运营官John Schappert（现已在Zynga降职），前EA Play执行副总裁Jeff Karp（现为Zynga首席营销官）以及前EA Interactive高级副总裁Barry Cottle（现为Zynga公司及业务发展执行副总裁）。

The Sims Social vs The Ville (from gamesindustry)

而Zynga则加应称他们致力于开发最具趣味性和创新性的社交游戏，《The Ville》是Zynga旗下的Ville系列最新游戏，引进了一系列新社交功能及游戏机制。Zynga同时还反指EA游戏《SimCity Social》与自己的《CityVille》也极为相似，EA显然对版权概念缺乏了解。

2）据games.com报道，EA首席运营官Peter Moore在最近采访中以罕见的措辞来形容Zynga当前处境。他表示这就好比是参加奥运会，EA与Zynga同时参加马拉松，如果EA输了还有其他9个项目有望夺冠，而Zynga就只能指望马拉松这场比赛。

peter moore(from linkrandom.blogspot.com)

也就是说，如果EA无法在社交游戏领域中获胜，那么他们还可以转向其他多个业务。

3）据The Guardian报道，Zynga首席执行官Mark Pincus在最近采访中表示，他不介意游戏行业对Zynga有什么成见，他只关心用户对Zynga的看法。

mark-pincus(from forbes.com)

他声称用户对Zynga的看法与公司自我看法相同，都将Zynga视为促进有意义社交互动的服务商。Zynga在过去5年中的所言所行一直如故，唯一改变的是行业对Zynga的看法。曾经有人声称《FarmVille》并非游戏，但Zynga从不会以媒体或行业中的议论来看待自己，只要用户不对他们抱有偏见，他们无所谓被行业误解。

但时至今日，业界仍存在一些针对Zynga的消极看法，Pincus认为这种偏见否定了Zynga对游戏行业的贡献，但Zynga将始终因扩大了游戏用户规模而自豪。

4）据福布斯报道，约有1500万Facebook用户购买虚拟商品，虽然这一群体在Facebook的9.55亿用户群体中仅占比1.6%，但其消费投入却高达12.6亿美元。Facebook通过30%抽成可从中盈利3.78亿美元。

facebook(from capoliticalreview.com)

5）据Techcrunch报道，截止2012年6月，Facebook平台已有9.55亿月活跃用户，美国以外的国际用户占比81%，每月玩Facebook游戏的用户超过2.3亿。｜

Facebook产品管理总监Doug Purdy最近表示Facebook现在面临的一大挑战是通过API为第三方开发者打造一个稳定可靠的平台。

据其所称，Facebook平台已发布7000多款Timeline应用，远超过3月份时的3000款应用。Facebook已成为将用户导向新应用的一个重要渠道，在过去30天中已向App Store和Google Play引入近1.5亿人次的用户。（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 sues Zynga over Sims Social copyright infringement

By Mike Williams

EA accuses Zynga’s The Ville of being a complete clone of Sims Social

ZyngaElectronic Arts has filed a lawsuit against Zynga for infringing on copyrights related to The Sims Social. In EA’s complaint filed today in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, the publisher has accused Zynga’s The Ville of standing as willful copyright infringement. The Sims Social launched in August of 2011, while The Ville launched in June of 2012.

In the complaint, EA alleges that Zynga gained access to confidential information on The Sims Social by hiring high-level EA executives for key Zynga positions. This includes former EA chief operating officer John Schappert, who recently left a position as Zynga COO; former EA Play excutive vice president Jeff Karp, who is Zynga’s chief marketing officer; and former EA Interactive senior vice president Barry Cottle, who is currently Zynga’s executive vice president of corporate and business development.

“Thus, by early 2012, Zynga had target and hired away three of EA’s top executive who had access to the most sensitive design, development, and strategic information about the Sims Social,” reads the complaint.

A comparison from EA’s complaint.

“Zynga’s design choices, animations, visual arrangements and character motions and actions have been directly lifted from The Sims Social. The copying was so comprehensive that the two games are, to an uninitiated observer, largely indistinguishable. Scores of media and bloggers commented on the blatant mimicry,” said EA Maxis general manager Lucy Bradshaw in a blog post that has since been removed.

“This is a case of principle. Maxis isn’t the first studio to claim that Zynga copied its creative product. But we are the studio that has the financial and corporate resources to stand up and do something about it. Infringing a developer’s copyright is not an acceptable practice in game development. By calling Zynga out on this illegal practice, we hope to have a secondary effect of protecting the rights of other creative studios who don’t have the resources to protect themselves.”
Zynga has responded to a number of outlets with a boilerplate statement of intent.

“We are committed to creating the most fun, innovative, social and engaging games in every major genre that our players enjoy. The Ville is the newest game in our ‘ville’ franchise – it builds on every major innovation from our existing invest-and-express games dating back to YoVille and continuing through CityVille and CastleVille, and introduces a number of new social features and game mechanics not seen in social games today,” said Zynga’s statement.

“It’s unfortunate that EA thought that this was an appropriate response to our game, and clearly demonstrates a lack of understanding of basic copyright principles. It’s also ironic that EA brings this suit shortly after launching SimCity Social which bears an uncanny resemblance to Zynga’s CityVille game. Nonetheless, we plan to defend our rights to the fullest extent possible and intend to win with players.”

This is going to be a knockdown, drag-out fight between the two companies. GamesIndustry International will keep you posted on how it goes and who wins when the smoke clears. （source:gamesindustry）

2）EA COO: Zynga ‘just hit the wall and dropped to their knees’ [Video]

by Joe Osborne

The Sims Social maker’s slap battle with Zynga continues. If you’ve read our debate on the state of Zynga, then you’ll know that things aren’t looking so hot for the company at the moment.

During a Bloomberg video interview, EA COO Peter Moore had some harsh words to describe the FarmVille maker’s current situation.

“To use, if you will, an Olympic analogy, we’re competing in the decathlon and if we miss in one event, we’ve got nine others we can make up on. Zynga is running a marathon,” Moore quipped.

“They just hit the wall and dropped to their knees.”

Moore does have a point: If this whole social gaming thing doesn’t pan out, then EA has a bunch of other businesses to turn to. What’s even more interesting is that Moore made the comment unprovoked, without any question as to his thoughts on Zynga’s status.

It goes to show that the gloves are off, at least as far as EA is concerned. We wouldn’t be surprised to see Zynga, perhaps even former EA COO John Schappert, slap back. (Though, Moore was kind enough not to comment on Schappert’s recent pseudo-demotion.) But maybe that’s more wishful thinking than anything. Can someone bring back Celebrity Deathmatch and retool it as “CEO Deathmatch” already?（source:games）

3）Pincus: It’s okay to be misunderstood, but not by your customers

By Matthew Handrahan

Zynga CEO believes critics forget the company’s role in creating the social games market

Zynga CEO Mark Pincus is unconcerned by the games industry’s view of Zynga, as he believes it doesn’t chime with the perception of the company’s consumers.

In an interview with The Guardian, Pincus claimed that the Zynga user-base perceives the company in the same way that it perceives itself: as a facilitator of meaningful social interaction.

“If you look back at what we’ve said and done over the last five years, we’ve always said and done the same thing – what’s changed is how the industry talks about us and perceives us,” he said.

“I think that people see what they want to see. People who wanted to see us in a certain light were able to build their case”

“I think we’ve been a disruptive presence. For a while they were saying that FarmVille wasn’t a game. We’ve just never defined ourselves by the way we’re written about or by how the industry talks about us. It’s okay to be misunderstood, as long as you’re not misunderstood by your consumers.”

The interview took place before Zynga’s recent financial results pushed its share price below $3, and before the ensuing allegations of insider trading against Pincus and several high-ranking employees.

However, the industry’s view of Zynga prior to recent events was still broadly negative, which Pincus regards as a form of confirmation bias, disregarding the company’s contributions to the games business.

“I think that people see what they want to see. People who wanted to see us in a certain light were able to build their case. But here’s what’s ironic: we really have helped define and build an industry – we’ve made it bigger for everybody. It’s bigger for EA, it’s bigger for other publishers … we’re proud that we’ve helped expand the audience for gaming.

“We really take a blue ocean view – we don’t think anyone else has to lose for us to do better.” （source:gamesindustry）

4）Less than 2 percent of Facebook users spent over $1 billion on virtual goods — Forbes is reporting that roughly 15 million Facebook users spent money on virtual goods. Although that only accounts for 1.6 percent of the network’s 955 users, it turns out this group spent $1.26 billion, based on Facebook’s 30 percent cut of $378 million.（source:insidesocialgames）

5）Facebook’s Big Challenge: Building A Stable Platform For Developers While Maintaining User Experience

Rip Empson

Today at The TC CrunchUp at the Fox Theater in Redwood City, a group of founders and entrepreneurs took the stage to talk about the future of Facebook’s platform, where it’s been and where it’s going as a result. Although the company’s stock has been limping of late, Facebook continues to be impossible to ignore — by the end of June, for example, the platform was seeing 955 million monthly active users, with 81 percent of those coming from outside the U.S., and more than 230 million people playing games on Facebook.com every month.

Although it may seem like Facebook has plenty on their plate in terms of stock downturns, ad monetization strategies and more, Facebook Director of Product Management Doug Purdy said that a big challenge facing Facebook today is building a solid and stable platform for third-party developers via its APIs.

Purdy had earlier made it clear that the company has launched over 7,000 timeline apps, which has grown since 3,000 in March — clearly developers are keen to get it on the social bump, the alley-oop coming from the Social Deathstar. Facebook has become an important channel to drive users to new apps they discover in their news feed. In the past 30 days, for example, Facebook has driven people to the App Store and Google Play nearly 150 million times.

The Head of Facebook Product Management said that Facebook recognizes they can’t build all the social experiments, but they’re “all about extending that virality” to different verticals.” There are many businesses we’re not getting into, and we want third-parties to do that for us.

The difficulty, Purdy said, is in balancing priorities, specifically between developers and users (with some advertisers in there as well), because at the end of the day, if they don’t have either, they don’t have a business.

Founder and CEO of BranchOut, Rick Marini, Airbnb Product Lead Joe Zadeh, and FreshPlanet co-founder (publisher of SongPop) Mathieu Nouzareth also joined in on the conversation, which was especially relevant as each company they represent has seen big benefit from building on the Facebook platform. Airbnb recently announced that 10 million nights have been booked, while Facebook-connected guests in particular make 85 percent more bookings on average.

Songpop, meanwhile, has grown from zero to 12 million-plus monthly active users in the last three months, while 65 percent of its mobile users log in with Facebook, and Facebook users are spending 35 percent more time and money than those who don’t login with Facebook.

Marini himself said that BranchOut made a commitment to analytics in December, using a mixture of Mixpanel and Optimizely to make the experience better, trying to harness some of the power of its 400K-to-12M user growth. User acquisition shot way ahead of retention, and BranchOut has since turned its focus to harnessing that. Facebook, he said, helped give the company access to a new demographic, specifically to international users in Indian and Brazil — reach that they wouldn’t have been able to find otherwise.

In the meantime, Nouzareth said that the Open Graph had been instrumental in helping SongPop grow, with users sharing five or 6 times in a minute, although it was a constant worry campaign over whether or not Facebook’s algorithm would be putting those posts from the app into users’ news feeds.

At that point, Josh (who moderated the panel) coaxed Purdy into saying that, in fact, Facebook was not referring to its algorithm as EdgeRank (although the rest of the industry does), and nodded his head as Nouzareth said that they can’t worry about controlling that, they really have to just focus on making a good game and great user experience.

That’s where Purdy again chimed in to encourage developers to just focus on building a great gaming or app experience, and to use Facebook as the amplification tool to give them that extra boost. Purdy said that the better the apps are that end up in the news feed, and the more relevant the notifications and posts, it helps drive success for Facebook itself, and make their ads far more relevant — good for the bottom line.

“Build an awesome app, plug in Facebook and success will happen,” Purdy quipped.

Josh also asked about Facebook’s Face.com acquisition, and whether we might be able to expect a Facial recognition API anytime soon. “We have no plans for that at present,” Purdy said, although he did hint that if they saw enough interest from developers, it’s something that they would consider.（source:techcrunch)