1）据games.com报道，《FarmVille》以及《CityVille》开发者Mark Skaggs在最近的GDC Online 2012大会透露，自己并未接手Zynga新款续集游戏《CityVille 2》开发任务，该游戏主要由Brain Reynolds操刀。

brian-reynolds(from games)

这款游戏出自Reynold以及Zynga East团队之手，据Skaggs所称，Brain将把故事及探索元素引进这款Ville游戏，《CityVille 2》有可能体现出该团队开发游戏的风格，即含有更多叙事内容（类似于《FrontierVille》的做法）。此外，这款游戏的参与开发人员约为《FarmVille 2》团队的3倍。

2）据games报道，Zynga旗下有5款游戏获得了本届GDC Online大奖提名，《Draw Something》摘获最佳社交游戏桂冠；Playdom设计副总裁Raph Koster个人则获得网络游戏传奇人物奖（Online Game Legend Award）。

gdc online awards(from games)

Raph-Koster(from games)

本届GDC Online获奖名单如下：

最佳社交网络游戏：《Draw Something》（Zynga）

最佳网络游戏设计：《星球大战：旧共和国》（Bioware）

最佳社区关系奖：《英雄联盟》（Riot Games）

网络名人堂大奖：《魔兽世界》（暴雪）

最佳网络游戏音效：《暗黑破坏神3》（暴雪）

最佳网络视觉艺术：《星球大战：旧共和国》（Bioware）

在线创新大奖：《Journey》（That Game Company）

网络游戏传奇人物： Raph Koster（Playdom）

大众奖项：《英雄联盟》（Riot Games）

最佳网络技术：《星球大战：旧共和国》（Bioware）

最佳即时游戏：《英雄联盟》（Riot Games）

最佳新款在线游戏：《星球大战：旧共和国》（Bioware）

3）Zynga设计师Steve Williams及特约撰稿人Jonathan Myers在本届GDC Online大会上指出，《Adventure World》在植入《Indiana Jones》元素之前，主要以故事元素为核心。

indiana-jones-adventure-world(from games)

据他们所称，社交游戏玩家通常都是时间及注意力有限的用户群体，这就要求《Adventure World》只能采用有限的故事结构。但二人最终还是想出用小段故事传达长篇叙事内容的方法。值得注意的是，他们还透露在与LucasArts合作之前，Zynga实际上就已经有意涉足游戏故事题材，当时开发团队也已经为这款游戏备足了一个月的故事内容。

4）大型儿童PC游戏《Webkinz》开发者Ganz最近发布新款Facebook游戏《Tail Towns Friends》，这款游戏虽带有儿童风格，但主要面向35-65岁的女性用户群体。

tail-towns-friends(from games)

该游戏支持玩家管理一个果园，并对其进行装饰；其故事内容将通过文本窗口以及可爱的美术内容呈现出来。

5）分析公司Beevolve最近分析来自3600万个Twitter资料的数据并发现，多数Twitter用户是来自英语国家的年轻iPhone用户。

twitter-gender(from beevolve)

女性Twitter用户多于男性，女性在Twitter上主要发布与家庭、时尚有关的内容，而男性主要发布与科技、体育有关的内容；女性资料页面多选择紫色背景，而男性择多选择深色系背景。

followers_count_distribution(from beevolve)

25%的Twitter用户从未发贴，平均每名用户的粉丝数量为208个，但有81%的用户粉丝不足50个。

6）在本周DAU增长最快的Facebook游戏榜单上，Zynga新作《FarmVille 2》位列第一，新增126万DAU，增幅为19%。King.com的Saga系列游戏同样表现不俗，《Candy Crush Saga》名列第二，新增20多万DAU，增幅为5%；

Top gainers this week–DAU(from AppData)

《Bubble Witch Saga》排名第三，新增16万以上DAU，增幅为4%；《Pyramind Solitaire Saga》位居第四，新增14万以上DAU，增幅为10%；FreshPlanet游戏《SongPop》排名第五，新增12万以上DAU，增幅为3%。（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）FrontierVille creator Brian Reynolds takes the reigns of CityVille 2

by Joe Osborne

With only two images available and a short announcement, next to nothing is known about the successor to one of the fastest growing Facebook games of all time, CityVille 2. But during a chat after his session at GDC Online 2012 in Austin, Tex., FarmVille and CityVille creator Mark Skaggs let slip an interesting detail: He has little to nothing to do with it.

Who exactly at Zynga is responsible for CityVille 2? It’s Brian Reynolds (pictured right), the main man behind FrontierVille (and Civilization). “That’s being done … in Baltimore, the FrontierVille guys, Brian Reynolds,” Skaggs points out. “They had the idea of, ‘How would we do a city game?’ And it kind of evolved into this, which is awesome.”

Residing in Zynga East, Reynolds and his team will more than likely take a similar approach to CityVille as they had FrontierVille. “Brian and his group, they brought the idea of stories and quests to Ville games. That is their nature: ‘Let’s do funny stories, let’s do interesting stories, let’s bring a certain kind of nice, light humor,’” Skaggs explains.

“So, if you subscribe to the idea that the products are the reflection of the team, you go look at FrontierVille and see that as a reflection of the team. You could imagine, if you move the mirror over to CityVille 2, [you'll see] the reflection of the team as well.”

It’s likely that CityVille 2 will see more narrative content than the original, but that might not necessarily be the focus. According to Skaggs, CityVille 2 is more about the threefold approach that the team behind FarmVille 2 employed.

“[Zynga releasing CityVille 2 is] no different than EA saying, ‘Hey, you know, we did Medal of Honor. Now we’re doing Medal of Honor 2,’” Skaggs says. “It’s not quite the same as, say, Madden, but it’s very that same thing. Take what people love, improve the stuff that was broken and come up with new and interesting things.”（source：games）

2）The Game Developer Choice Awards 2012: Star Wars, League of Legends feel the love

by Libe Goad

At this year’s Game Developer’s Choice Online Awards, League of Legends, Bioware and Blizzard were a prime target for awards, while Zynga was the prime target for jabs from the evening’s host, Rebel Entertainment’s Mike Goslin.

“Did you hear that Zynga is getting into real money gambling? I’m not talking about their IPO,” Goslin says as the audience chuckled along.

Despite that, the house that built FarmVille had five games nominated in various caregories and its Draw Something, a game acquired when the game maker acquired to the NY-based OMG Pop, won the award for the Best Social Network Game.

Playfish, Wooga, PopCap, Playdom and Kabam also received nominee nods, but Bioware, and League of Legends were the two big winners of the night.

Playdom Design VP Raph Koster was honored with the Online Game Legend Award. Koster offered a few words of advice to developers which included “Listen and lean, especially from players,” “love what you do” and a heartfelt “love your family more.”

The complete list of award winners for the evening are as follows:

Best Social Network Game: Draw Something, Zynga

Best Online Game Design: Star Wars The Old Republic, Bioware

Best Community Relations: League of Legends, Riot Games

Online Hall of Fame Award: World of Warcraft, Blizzard

Best Audio for an Online Game: Diablo III, Blizzard

Best Online Visual Arts: Star Wars the Old Republic, Bioware

Online Innovation Award: Journey, That Game Company

Online Game Legend Award: Raph Koster, Playdom

Audience Award: League of Legends, Riot Games

Best Online Technology: Star Wars The Old Republic

Best Live Game: League of Legends, Riot Games

Best New Online Game: Star Wars The Old Republic（source：games）

3）Zynga: Indiana Jones Adventure World was all about the story

by Joe Osborne

Story had been at the center of Zynga Boston’s Adventure World well before Indiana Jones came along. During a talk on social game narrative at this year’s GDC Online in Austin, Tex, Zynga designer Steve Williams and staff writer Jonathan Myers made a point of that fact, and went well into detail on their process for crafting story-heavy content on a weekly basis for the game.

Myers and Williams touched on the fact that social gamers are either time-strapped or attention-strapped, which lends games like Adventure World to a constrained narrative structure. But some of the best work is finished under constraints, no? The two, fortunately, figured out a way to deliver long form narrative in smaller chunks, stringing players along on a series of quests.

Ultimately, the duo decided that the meaty chunks of narrative should be optional, but the general gist of a given story should be told through gameplay. Which is arguably how a majority of mainstream console games operate–few come without the option to skip cut scenes. What was most interesting to hear from Myers and Williams was that Zynga was interested in narrative before LucasArts was involved, and the Boston team had about one month’s worth of story content at the ready.

The focus on story in Adventure World is so apparently strong that the team even once included a choice for players that directly affected their story. This is something normally exclusive to traditional role-playing games, like Mass Effect. However, it hasn’t been seen since in Zynga Boston’s work. Is that it for such interesting narrative power in social games? Not according to Myers and Williams, but it’s unlikely we’ll see it in future Zynga games.（source：games）

4）Webkinz creator switches target from kids to moms with new Facebook game

by Brandy Shaul

Ganz, creator of the massively popular children’s PC game Webkinz, has released a new Facebook game that may look a bit childish, but is actually targeted at a much more mature audience. Aimed at women ages 35-65, Tail Towns Friends follows a community of friendly talking mice, as you’re given control of an orchard and are challenged with providing the community with fruit and other items in order to stop an evil conglomerate that looks to put everyone out of business.

As players begin in Tail Towns Friends, their orchards are sparse, but can be filled with a variety of trees, decorations, storage buildings and more. Throughout it all, the soap-opera inspired storyline is presented via text windows and lovely artwork, and Ganz is apparently already planning to continually update the market with themed content so that each player can have an orchard that’s as unique as they are.

With Tail Towns Friends, Ganz is looking to recreate its past success with Webkinz by once again combining the worlds of real world products and virtual codes, only here, players can collect hand-painted mouse figurines that will offer virtual codes for items within Tail Town Friends, instead of plush animals as was the case with Webkinz. Interested gamers can use the game’s helpful store locator to find locations near them that offer these figures, but there are very few locations, regardless of state, that have already started to carry them.

We’ll bring you more complete thoughts on Tail Towns Friends in the near future, but if you can’t wait to start a new life with some new mouse friends, you can now play the game for free on Facebook.（source：games）

5）The typical Twitter user is a young woman with an iPhone and 208 followers

By Jeff John Roberts

Twitter’s endless funnel of data is producing an equally endless series of studies — including on Twitter itself. The latest study offers fun tidbits about who is using Twitter and why.

In “An Exhaustive Study of Twitter Users Around the World,” analytics firm Beevolve claims to have crunched data from 36 million Twitter profiles. What they found probably corresponds to what you suspected: most Twitter users are young iPhone users from English speaking countries.

Fond of gender stereotypes? The study has you covered: women tweet more than men; gals tweet about family and fashion while guys tweet about tech and sports; women like purple backgrounds while men prefer dark ones:

The most useful part of the study, however, is that it provides a good view of how ordinary people use Twitter. For instance, it reveals that 25 percent of Twitter users have never tweeted, the average number of followers is 208 and that 81 percent of users have fewer than 50 followers:

This is a good reminder that most people don’t use Twitter in the same way as those of us in the media-politics-tech-celebrity-sports bubble. It also appears to confirm BuzzFeed’s John Herman’s theory that “Your Twitter followers aren’t fake, they’re just shy.”

It will be interesting to see how Twitter reaches out to this passive population going forward. I’ve tried to persuade family and friends that Twitter is simply a great news service but they’re skeptical. They think, understandably, that Twitter is a club for loud mouths and ask me, “what would I tweet?”

As for the study, Beevolve CEO Goldee Udani said by email that the firm was “curious about the demographic make up of Twitter user base, topics that Twitter users found interesting at a macro level and how dense was the Twitter social graph compared to known statistics about Facebook.”（source：gigaom）

6）FarmVille 2 continues to top the fastest-growing Facebook games by DAU

Mike Thompson

Zynga’s FarmVille 2 continues to pick up speed and maintain its hold on the top spot of this week’s fastest growing Facebook games by daily active user, this week picking up 1.26 million DAU for a 19 percent gain.

King.com’s “Saga”  games did well this week. Candy Crush Saga took the No. 2 spot with 205,656 DAU for a 5 percent increase. Bubble Witch Saga snagged the No. 3 position with 162,981 DAU, a 4 percent gain. Pyramid Solitaire Saga brought in 145,993 DAU, a 10 percent gain that let it take the No. 4 spot. Finally, FreshPlanet’s SongPop came in at No. 5 with a 3 percent gain of 145,993 DAU.

Two other games on the list had traffic gains greater than 50 percent. Diggle was up by 313 percent with 98,539 DAU, while Smeet Communications GmbH’s Lost Legacies took in 66,868 DAU for an 80 percent increase.（source：insidesocialgames）