Zynga’s Cityville Goes Hugely Successful; Company Tops over 45 Million Daily Active Users

Zynga's newest experiment of another game has just been astonishingly successful, as the new project picketed up not only 3 million daily active users at its first week only, but it also automatically gave the company an accumulated 45 million daily active users across all of its properties. This is obviously huge!

Taking advantage of this great response the company’s next target is to boost its activity in mobile users. David Ko, the new SVP of mobile department of the company, spoke publically on stage at the LeWeb conferences held in Paris, he complemented the company on the success of some of the company's current games as well as its expansion plans for mobile. He also made a worthy mention of Zynga's acquisition newest acquisition of Newtoy last week. The creators of Words With Friends and Chess With Friends have now been given the new name of "Zynga With Friends".

Zinga Expands Itself Acquiring Newtoy Inc.

Thanks to the hugely successful addictive games such as Farmville and Mafia Wars, firmly established third-party publisher Zynga has this week expanded its boundaries by acquiring development studio Newtoy Inc.

Newtoy was founded by two brothers Paul and David Bettner, who are also the contributes to the of real-time strategy Halo Wars, a game on Xbox 360, before they attempted to open the doors of their newborn studio in McKinney, Texas, in around 2008. Whereas, since then, Newtoy has really made a name for itself within the hugely competitive industry of popular ‘Games With Friends’ franchise, which large variety of games, including Scrabble-esque iPhone games such as ‘Words With Friends’ and ‘Chess With Friends’.

Zynga Expresses Its Desire to Prosper Beyond Facebook

Mark Pincus, the co-founder and CEO of Zynga

When Facebook first introduced its open platform for developers, Zynga was among the first few companies to take advantage three years ago. Beginning with social games such as CafeWorld, Mafia Wars and FrontierVille, Zynga has now more than 320 million users across the community of 500 million users. Zinga is allegedly valued for above $5.5 billion, as more and more people start living their lives progressively more online, they want to do each and everything with their friends in one place together.

Phrases Beats Farmville for the Throne of ‘Top Facebook App’

FarmVille has now apparently stepped down from its  throne, as its as the app with maximum active users on Facebook, has been over take by another app called Phrases, which is an app developed by Takeoff Monkey.

Phrases is an application which lets the users to select from a wide variety of content to their walls, the list usually includes items like quotes, pictures, and quizzes. Whereas, on the other hand, FarmVille has slightly laid down after remaining at the peak for a long while, with once having almost 84 million monthly users. But the key factor to understand in this analysis is to keep in mind that Phrases has only managed to barely eclipse FarmVille, as it ground around 54.4 million monthly average users. FarmVille number is of about 53.9 million monthly players, which is just around the corner.

Zynga Announces Another Social Game, Called CityVille

Zynga is one of the best game-making companies today, it already has games which allow users to grow crops on their own farm, run a crime family, or even start their own café. This Wednesday the Zynga announced the launch of a completely new game, called CityVille, in which players can build and manage their dream metropolis.

Sean Kelley, CityVille's general manager, said while announcing the game that "CityVille is where Monopoly meets Main Street," and also added that “Instead of harvesting crops, you're harvesting your neighborhood, instead of clearing your friend's frontier you're working on a friend's franchise."

In this new game, the player acts as the city's manager of his own dream city. Players will be allowed to be able to build infrastructure, map out roads, plan schools, and start businesses. They will also be incharge of all the commerce in their city. To make it more social, the user will also be allowed to import and export goods, bring in items from other cities across the globe, and trade with other players as well.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Hits The Stores

This Tuesday, on November 9th, Activision launched Call of Duty: Black Ops for all three major consoles; the PC, Xbox 360 and Nintendo DS.

New ‘Call of Duty: Black Ops’ puts the player in various roles as soldiers "behind enemy lines.” Mark Lamia, head of Activision's Treyarch Studio, declared that “Players can also play co-op with zombies.” Obviously all the fan players expect it to be picking up from where the previous version of the game ‘Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2,’ left off. But upon inquiry, Lamia only promised an "incredibly deep" experience for gamers.

A video game retailer, GameStop, reported today that this game "set a new record with reservations,” as the launch of Call of Duty: Black Ops continues, although it is reported to be going very well up till now. Bob McKenzie, GameStop's senior vice president of merchandising, said that Black Ops has outdone "any other title in GameStop's history."

EA & Facebook Together For Five More Years – Contracts Singed.

This Tuesday, Electronic Arts and Facebook Credits signed a five-year deal that stated that Electronic Arts would only use Facebook Credits to use as the only accepted method of payment for its games on the social networking site. In-depth of the deal, it is settled that EA receives 70% of revenue from Facebook Credits and Facebook gets the other 30%. Consumers use the credits to play games and buy virtual goods within the apps.

Playfish, an app maker EA bought last fall, has created Pet Society and Restaurant City, which are two of the top 10 games on Facebook, as measured by daily active users. Including this, EA itself has a quite impressive catalog of games at Facebook.

The senior vice president at EA Interactive, Barry Cottle said: "Gaming has emerged as the most popular category of applications on Facebook, The natural step is for EA to broaden its relationship with Facebook."

This deal is thought to be very beneficial for Facebook, as it makes a big push for newly launched Facebook Credits. Facebook has been trying to formalize and re-establish relationships with gaming companies. As also earlier this year, Zynga was reportedly threatening to pull its games off Facebook and start its own platform.

However, Later Zynga signed its own five-year deal with Facebook in September. It, like EA, will also receive 70% of revenue from Facebook Credits. Similar such five-year deals made with two other major social gaming companies: Playdom, which is now owned by Walt Disney and Crowdstar, all in this year, proves that Facebook is really concerned about the improving the gaming experience on its social website.

Update your Xbox 360 Dashboard Now!

Accoding to the scheduled time, the new Xbox Dashboard update was made available on the November, 1st 2010. Further this new Fall 2010 Xbox Live Dashboad update prepares for the for Kinect to release on November 4th (or November 10th in Europe). This update is now mandatory, it's not like you have a choice. You'll lose all Xbox Live functionality unless you comply.

The biggest change is the Xbox Dashboard, and also the welcome UI with its reviewed Customized Avatar screen. Your ‘Virtual Doppelganger’ now stands front and center as you go through the selection of wares and facial adjustments. The new ESPN Entertainment Hub means that now you can watch live sporting events and replays of anything ESPN have the rights to stream(Although that requires to have an affiliated ISP? You miss out on the live events and full replays, but all other clips and highlights will still be available).

The Netflix search, now means that searching the library would be much easier after the updates as even the results will update with each letter added. Another remedy of the problem that you still needed another device altogether to explore the library, as the software limited you to a pre-selected array of films (organized by category) and what was already added to your Instant Watch queue is included in the update.

Zune music got upgraded as Zune video got a handful of UI tweaks, and other exhilarating updates of Kinect and Wrap-up gave have give expectation to this update. 

Microsoft’s Growing Interest In Gesture Technology

Microsoft announced that it is buying Canesta, a small Silicon Valley company that specifically specializes in mastering the gesture-recognition technology, on Friday. Neither company has yet disclosed the financial terms.

It is noticed that this ‘gesture-recognition technology’ is been given much attention lately. This is due to its unique attributes, which include the authority to control computers and other devices through hand movements and other bodily gyrations. It is very similar to the systems rendered in many revolutionary films like “Minority Report.”

Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, shared his plans in brief interview. He said that the company is planning on upgrading the gesture technology well beyond video games. “I’m excited to be way out in front and want to push the pedal on that”, said Mr. Ballmer.

Canesta is known for making special chips. According to Herald Tribune, when these chips are attached with a digital camera, they give all manner of devices a sense of depth insight for the world around them, frankly explaining it lets them “see” in three dimensions.

Microsoft and its partners can now equip PCs, televisions, cars, cell-phones and other devices with possibly the best gesture recognition features, only if they decide to use Canesta’s technology.