Sulake CEO discusses Niko, Habbo Hotel and the drive to move audiences across platforms
With over 10 million unique visitors a month, Habbo Hotel is the world’s largest game and online community for teenagers, with users in over 150 countries. With parent company Sulake releasing Niko, its second iOS (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch) game, this week, VentureBeat spoke to chief executive Paul LaFontaine, about his cross-platform strategy.
LaFontaine was named as Sulake CEO in September 2011, having previously been vice president of global distribution at Playdom. This appointment coincided … Continue Reading
Playdom looks to boost Spry Fox’s Triple Town numbers on Facebook
Playdom, Disney’s social games product group, has announced plans to team with developer Spry Fox to publish its latest social game, Triple Town, on Facebook.
Triple Town is a town-building puzzle game, functioning very similarly to a typical match-three in terms of gameplay, with a few clever twists. The small grid is slowly filled with grass, bushes, houses and churches that players set down, while trying to fend off or capture dangerous bears and … Continue Reading
Zynga launches Hidden Chronicles game in an untapped treasure-hunting genre
Your Uncle Geoffrey has been killed, and the secret lies in the elegant estate where he lived. Your job is to uncover the secrets hidden in every corner of the Ramsey Manor.
That’s the opening of Hidden Chronicles, a new Facebook game from Zynga that targets a market beyond anything the social gaming giant has gone after before. Hidden Chronicles is a “hidden object” game, where players obsessively click on an illustrated still image to … Continue Reading
Move over Farmville, Gardens of Time is Facebook’s most popular game
To the dismay of bosses and spouses everywhere, Facebook, by way of third-party social games, offered social networkers a daily distraction they could not go without in 2011. But no game commanded more attention or unrequited love than Disney Playdom’s Gardens of Time.
The hidden object game beat out Electronic Arts’ The Sims Social and Zynga’s Cityville for the title of the most popular game of 2011, Facebook revealed Wednesday.
In Gardens of Time, players … Continue Reading
How Zynga grew from gaming outcast to $9 billion social game powerhouse
Update: This article is now available as a 63-page e-book on Amazon’s Kindle bookstore.
Zynga has turned the video game world upside down in its short five-year history. As it’s poised on the verge of a massive initial public offering, the social game startup is now one of gaming’s great success stories.
But its success was never a foregone conclusion. In fact, most game industry veterans didn’t view it as a real game company. Mark … Continue Reading
Disney’s Playdom launches social game Gardens of Time on iPad
Gardens of Time, the most successful Facebook game created by Disney’s Playdom, is launching today on the iPad.
The launch is a major one for Playdom, since the Palo Alto, Calif.-based division is hoping to replicate the success of the social game on mobile platforms, which are expected to be a significant avenue of growth for social games. The game has been successful because it was the first major “hidden object” game on Facebook. In … Continue Reading
Zynga goes after hidden-object games with Hidden Chronicles (video)
Zynga showed it is open to moving into new genres as it launched its first game in the popular “hidden object” category yesterday with Hidden Chronicles on Facebook.
This genre has untapped potential on Facebook, according to Sean Ryan, head of game partnerships at Facebook. Back in July, Ryan said there were only two hidden object games on Facebook, while there were more than 100 such games on casual web sites frequented by female gamers. … Continue Reading
Brands finally succeed in social games on Facebook
Facebook gamers are finally embracing well-known brands in their social games. That’s one of the conclusions from a panel on social games at the f8 conference for Facebook developers yesterday.
Sean Ryan (pictured left), director of game partnerships, pointed out that Facebook as a gaming platform has evolved from a place where original game ideas initially prospered. Now that there are 800 million users on the social network, it’s only natural for brands to take … Continue Reading
Venture capitalist Tim Chang describes the white-hot landscape of game investments
The emerging landscape of games is attracting a lot of money, thanks in part to excitement about Zynga’s upcoming initial public offering and some recent acquisitions such as Electronic Arts’ $750 million purchase of PopCap Games. Tim Chang, a partner at Norwest Venture Partners, has kept his finger on the pulse of the game market for years and spoke about the opportunities in games at the recent Casual Connect game conference in Seattle.
Chang has … Continue Reading
OpenFeint recruits game developer to lead free-to-play focus
OpenFeint has hired a game development leader to help its customers focus on making free-to-play mobile games.
The move reflects the growing importance of free-to-play, the business model where users play for free and can purchase virtual goods with real money.
Burlingame, Calif.-based OpenFeint has hired Ethan Fassett, a former Playdom executive with expertise in free-to-play Facebook games. Fassett will lead the development of next-generation social networking features with distribution channels for free-to-play developers.
OpenFeint, … Continue Reading
Social games company MindJolt taps new mobile veteran
MindJolt, the social game company headed by MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe, has added a mobile veteran to its staff in a move to expand to mobile social games.
Ulf Waschbusch (pictured), who recently served as chief product officer of Garena, a company that runs electronic sports leagues and promotes video games, has joined the company to lead internal social mobile game development. He will lead the team under the Social Gaming Network studio, which MindJolt … Continue Reading
