Games, Social 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.

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.

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?

Zynga offers free games through Facebook, then studies data on how its audience plays them. It uses its findings to fiddle with the games to get people to play longer, tell more Facebook friends about them and buy more virtual goods.

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.”

Japanese social games company DeNA is out to take down American rivals Facebook and Zynga.