Apps, Games | featured news

Zynga is trying to provide some answers for its controversial acquisition of "Draw Something," a mobile game that was released only six weeks earlier and has since lost popularity.

The Finns behind Angry Birds seek global domination... “We think we can hit a billion downloads by the end of next year,” Vesterbacka says, casually. Then, almost as an aside: “We think we can be the leading entertainment brand in China by 2012.” Excusez-moi? “We think we can be bigger than Disney in China,” he clarifies. As growth projections go, this sounds absurd. Rovio grossed $20 million (the company is profitable) in the first three months of 2011. Disney will spend that amount every ten days for the next five years building its 1,000-acre theme park in Shanghai.

The hit game is one of the unlikeliest pop-culture crazes of the year — and perhaps the first to make the leap from cellphone screens to the mainstream.

This is a historic moment for social games. “FarmVille,” the hit Facebook game among all hit Facebook games, is no longer the top app on the social network. For the first time since claiming the top spot more than a year ago in August 2009, FarmVille has fallen to second place in terms of monthly active users on Facebook, according to AppData.com. Coming in at no. 1 now is the app “Phrases.”

The Kindle is no longer an ebooks-only device; developers have just released two Kindle-ready games, thanks to the Kindle Development Kit (KDK).

More parents are handing their smartphones to their young children in restaurants or on car trips to keep them entertained. That may be why almost half the top-selling iPhone apps are games for kids.

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.