Online Games, Social Games | featured news

Zynga posted first quarter 2013 earnings that beat analysts expectations, but shares are trading down after-hours on future outlook.

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.

Pangalore offers up a unique approach to social gaming with a free-to-play model that doesn't break the game.

Possibly trying to hide the grim news by announcing it during Apple’s event, we’ve just independently confirmed that Zynga has shut down its Boston office and laid off 2/3s of the employees in its Austin office, including cuts to The Ville and Bingo teams. We’ve now confirmed the initial report from Justin Maxwell. We’ve also just heard Zynga may have an all-hands meeting this afternoon.

How time-wasting video games escaped the arcade, jumped into our pockets and took over our lives.

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.