Social Media, Games | featured news

A year ago, OMGPOP CEO Dan Porter sold the games-maker to Zynga for $180 million-plus, and became the head of the company's New York outpost. Now he’s out. Porter’s departure isn’t a huge surprise, given both his timing (presumably long enough to hit certain employment and/or earn-out goals) and the fact that Zynga ended up writing off at least half of its OMGPOP deal a few months after it closed.

Zynga reports a sharp drop in its losses in the last three months of 2012, as revenues at the designer of games including Farmville stabilised.

Many businesses are using gamification to get people hooked on their products and services — and it is working, thanks to smartphones and the Internet.

Facebook Inc. and Zynga Inc. are changing the rules of their relationship. In a bid to become less reliant on Facebook, Zynga disclosed in a filing on Thursday that it has amended the terms of its relationship with the world's largest social network so that it can now host its Web games outside of Facebook's platform, among other things. The new agreement also leaves the door open for Facebook to produce its own games and become a direct competitor to Zynga.

We're going to feel a little guilty if this news gets you fired. But you can now play "Angry Birds" on Facebook.

Zynga is poised to harvest some cold hard cash in its initial public offering. Who knew that selling virtual cows and digital corn on Facebook would create a $7 billion company?

MySpace has launched a new initiative to invite social game developers like Playdom, Zynga

While some of us might be willing to pay to make Facebook games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars go away, it appears that Wall Street has other ideas.