Brian Reynolds recently left his post as chief game designer at Zynga. He wrote this exclusively for GamesBeat.

Just under four years ago, I took a flier on a very young company called Zynga. My old studio had just been sold out from under me – an epic tale in its own right, but anyway it happened – and the strategy genres that I’d worked in for most of my career had fallen on grim times. I thought perhaps I was all washed up as a game designer and started looking around for something “quiet” for what I figured would be the “fading away” down slope of my career.

But boy, was I fascinated by Facebook, which was still very new to us non-Millennials, and, among other things, I found myself playing a Zynga word game with Bing Gordon (the former chief creative officer at Electronic Arts and current partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers), who a decade prior had produced so many great ideas for Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri that we’d given him a design credit. “Hey, you should come on out. I know this guy. I’m on the board” goes my vague recollection of the conversations. And that’s how, in March 2009, I got introduced to Mark Pincus.

Serendipitously, Mark listed Rise of Nations (created by my studio Big Huge Games) as his favorite game. We hit it off. The prototype-and-iterate method of game design I’d learned from Sid Meier seemed like it might fit with the completely new watch-metrics-and-tune methods that Zynga had been perfecting (Mark told me Michael Lewis’s book, Moneyball, about the use of analytics in managing the Oakland A’s baseball team was required reading). It also dawned on me that a whole new area of the industry was taking off and there weren’t many experienced game designers doing it yet.  So I signed on, and what a wild and great ride it’s been!

In the early days I’d hear a lot of traditional developers saying things like Zynga games “weren’t even games,” but my own experiences playing them made it very clear they were. At Zynga we were making games for the true mass market, and it seemed pretty obvious to me that games for the mass market would be quite different than games for the hardcore gamer. Nobody would confuse a summer blockbuster with an art film or period piece, either, nor a best-selling novel with Moby Dick – and yet there are a lot of people out there who crave that kind of entertainment. And the challenge of creating game experiences with “perfectly rounded edges” – smooth and friendly for the masses – has been one of the most interesting challenges of my career.

I think my favorite part, throughout the whole Zynga experience, has been the sense that we were writing new rules for a new industry. It felt strange, but awesome, to make an arbitrary decision in April and then by August see the entire social games industry doing exactly that same thing. And the social games space was so young (and initially a bit primitive). It moved so fast that being a game designer in it felt like traveling back to the late ’80s “knowing everything you know now” and then recapitulating the ’90s and ’00s at hyperspeed.

Fortunately, the capability to absorb and adapt to change quickly is one of the great strengths of Zynga’s culture – the true meaning of the motto and occasional battle cry “Zynga Speed!” Time and time again, I’ve seen Zynga teams pull together and surprise everyone with their nimbleness and productivity.

Mark also has a talent for surrounding himself with the best and the brightest, and the chance to work with so many industry luminaries – so many of whom used to be my direct competitors – really took my game up a notch or two. I especially looked forward to our annual game design summits, which featured an incredible collection of talent the likes of which I’d never seen pulling the same oar before. It was fun to watch the transformation as the Command & Conquer Generals guy (Mark Skaggs) became the FarmVille guy, the Age of Empires guys become the Words With Friends and CastleVille guys, the guy I remembered from Infocom games helping plan FrontierVille’s story, and so on. The same thing goes on in the engineering group, the analytics group, and so many other places – Zynga is very good at hiring the best, and one of my greatest regrets at leaving Zynga is missing out on all that talent and creativity.

But after almost four years (and longer than I was ever at Firaxis, if you can believe it!), I’m ready to shift into a different gear. I miss getting to write code personally and make fun “with my own hands.” And suddenly, the tablet and mobile world look like they might be on the verge of a strategy games renaissance – hey, I used to be good at making those! – and free-to-play is leading the way. Not that Zynga isn’t willing and even eager to have me do that, but I even miss, in a funny way, the day to day panics of being somewhere small and new and vulnerable, and the excitement of owning a small company. I want to experiment more than might be appropriate for a publicly traded company, and I might want to do something that would be “off strategy” for Zynga or otherwise too risky.

So I’m getting that itch, and though I need some time to think about exactly what I want to do next. I suspect that “starting a little studio with a few wingmen” — for the fourth time in my career — is likely to be on the menu.

So thank you, Zynga, for taking me on when my genre was disappearing. Thank you for showing me that there’s still a lot for game designers to do and we still need to be training the next Sid Meier, Will Wright, Gabe Newell, etc. Thank you for pretty much inventing game analytics and giving us an amazing new tool to apply real data and statistics to answer questions for which we could previously rely only on our gut. Thank you for the chance to work in social media and really master the free-to-play model. Thank you for unlocking a true mass market audience to game designers for the very first time ever – for letting me make games that more people played in a single day than had played all the games I’d made in the last 20 years combined. Thank you for Zynga Speed and the amazing teams I got to work with. Can’t wait to see what you do next – see you round the industry.

Brian Reynolds was until very recently the chief game designer at Zynga, where he headed the Zynga East studio in Baltimore and worked on titles like FrontierVille and CityVille 2 and advised all of the game teams. He also founded Big Huge Games and created titles such as Rise of Nations. He cofounded Firaxis Games with Sid Meier and worked with him both there and at MicroProse, creating games such as Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri and Civilization II.

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Brian Reynolds has a booming laugh, but it won’t be heard in the halls of Zynga anymore. The company’s chief game designer has resigned, according to games news site Polygon.

Zynga has confirmed the departure, which is a blow to Zynga since the company has suffered a brain drain in the past year as high-level executives move on to greener pastures. It started in August after the company was hit by weak second-quarter results and chief operating officer John Schappert resigned.

Reynolds (pictured above at our 2010 DiscoveryBeat conference) joined Zynga in 2009 and brought instant credibility to the company. He was previously creative director and chief executive at Big Huge Games and made hits such as Rise of Nations and Alpha Centauri (while working as a designer at Firaxis Games). But he had an open mind about casual titles, such as Zynga’s FarmVille, and joined Zynga to learn about how to bring gaming to a larger mass market.

“Brian has a long history in the game industry and has been a great partner to the creative leaders at Zynga,” Steve Chiang, president of games at Zynga, said in a prepared statement. “I want to thank him for his leadership of the Zynga Baltimore studio in the design and development of FrontierVille, which brought many innovations to social gaming. We appreciate Brian’s contribution, and we’re proud of the deep bench of creative leaders who are leading the next wave of game innovation at Zynga. We wish Brian the best in his next chapter.”

Reynolds headed the Zynga East studio in Baltimore and created titles such as FrontierVille and CityVille 2 at Zynga.

Among the other departures are chief creative officer Mike Verdu, chief security officer Nils Puhlmann, chief technical officer of infrastructure Allan Leinwand, OMGPOP chief revenue officer Wilson Griegel, and Words With Friends co-creators David and Paul Bettner. Zynga chief financial officer David Wehner also left on Nov. 13.

Zynga reports its earnings on Feb. 6. Michael Pachter, analyst at Wedbush Securities, believes the company will beat consensus earnings with revenue of $275 million (compared to $212 million for consensus) in the fourth quarter ending Dec. 31. He expects earnings per share of a loss of 3 cents. Pachter said in a research note (issued before today’s departure news) that said that the promotions of current executives are reinforcing the management team. Zynga recently appointed Mark Vranesh as chief financial officer. It moved David Ko, Barry Cottle, and Chiang into bigger roles.  Those changes, he said, should restore investor confidence.

But maybe Reynolds will ruin that party.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Video game publisher Zynga is on a bit of a roller coaster. In recent weeks, the social gaming giant dealt with news good and bad. But most industry analysts agree that the San Francisco-based studio can put most of its difficulties behind it with some new hits. Zynga launched CityVille 2 today on Facebook as its first attempt to reverse its recent ill fortune.

Zynga East, one of its first external studios, developed this latest social game. Traditional gaming veterans Brian Reynolds (Civilization III) and Mark Nelson (The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning) led the team with a goal of producing a city-building game with vast appeal.

“CityVille was a runaway hit that brought players a truly social and fun city building experience. It quickly catapulted to the number one most-popular social game, and it stayed in that spot for more than a year after it launched, reaching 100 million monthly players at its peak,” CityVille 2 director of design Mark Nelson said. “Drawing inspiration from the original CityVille as well as FrontierVille, CityVille 2 immerses players in a storyline peppered with quirky and interesting characters while also delivering a beautiful 3D town where players can compete with or play with friends as they build their unique city.”

The new standout feature in CityVille 2 is the “whodunit” storyline. Early in the game, a house fire sets into motion a series of events that lead the player through a mystery narrative. Nelson said he really wanted to bring the type of engrossing plots he worked on in Oblivion and Kingdoms of Amalur to a genre that usually glosses over that kind of storytelling.

Other new features include:

• Fully 3D visuals
• A full day-night cycle
• Timed minigames
• Unexpected events
• A perk system

When I saw CityVille 2 in action, I was most interested in the timed minigames and the perk system.

The minigames add a sense of kinetic energy to a genre that is otherwise often static. In most social games, players wait around, click a button, and watch something happen. CityVille 2 borrows from developer Intelligent Systems’ Paper Mario platforming franchise by asking players engage with timing games that increase the effect of an action when performed properly.

The perk system fosters customization through active and passive effects. It’s like the perk system in any role-playing game. Nelson described a particular perk that would allow one of the city’s shoppers to go on a shopping spree which would boost the area’s economy by a certain percentage.

Zynga wants players to approach CityVille 2 like a bag of toys. It’s designed to work well for different kinds of players. Players that want to re-create their city can do that. Others that want to solve the game’s mystery can do that. And anyone else that just wants to mess with their in-game citizens can do that.

Will CityVille 2 reverse Zynga’s recent slide? I don’t know, but I actually want to give this game a try.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Zynga is the most recognizable name in social gaming. Facebook members and iPhone owners alike have seen Zynga’s games continuously rise and fall from the top of the charts over the past few years, and with CastleVille’s launch earlier this month, it is unlikely that will change any time soon. The company is likely to go public soon and raise a ton of money, so we thought we would show this primer on Zynga’s social games so everyone can see what the fuss is all about. These simple, time-consuming titles have taken the  world by storm, bringing in hundreds of millions of users internationally since Zynga’s beginning in 2007.

CastleVille

Let’s begin with the most recent, and fastest growing, Zynga game – CastleVille, released on November 14, 2011. CastleVille follows closely in the footsteps of the other graphical ‘Ville games, focusing on maintaining a kingdom while fighting off monsters called Beasties and exploring the overwhelming Gloom that has swept over the land. The only way to advance into the Gloom is by increasing your Castle Level, which requires actions such as building protective walls. As your character levels up, more buildings, tools and perks become available.

Given its medieval oeuvre, CastleVille feels a little more like an RPG than previous outings, which might draw in some of the social game detractors and those who have tired of the repetitive formula of Zynga’s recent games. CastleVille aims to be yet another resounding success for the prolific company, and as we have reported previously, this title has surpassed CityVille as the fastest growing launch for a Zynga game yet. As of Dec. 12,  CastleVille has 30 million monthly active users on Facebook, according to AppData.

Mafia Wars 2

If any of the Zynga Facebook games warranted a sequel, it had to be Mafia Wars. Mafia Wars 2 launched on October 10th, and this follow-up to one of the most infamous of Zynga’s arsenal of games completely overhauls the text- and menu-based original to keep it in line with the current generation of graphics and combat-fueled ‘Ville games. Of course, the sentiment is the same: make money, expand your turf, earn street cred and don’t get shot (too much). The Bone Yard is a nice addition for those feeling the need to take out their aggression on tiny avatars of other players.

The recent Zynga games (like many of the older Zynga games) have a specific formula to them, which might be why a game about gangsters feels strikingly similar to a game about medieval kingdoms and another game about a burgeoning empire on a group of islands. Regardless, Mafia Wars 2 is still bringing in over 11.3 million users a month, hanging in there as one of Zynga’s 10 most played games on Facebook.

Empires & Allies

Empires & Allies is one of the first of the genre-specific Facebook games by Zynga, and was released on June 1 of this year. It follows in the footsteps of CityVille and FarmVille in terms of resource management, but the story and combat are reminiscent of real-time strategy games. Players must lead an army against the villainous Raven to regain the glory of their nation. You are initially given a small island in which to militarize and begin your siege on the enemy, but expansion is encouraged as more islands open up. It’s the first real Zynga game where combat is the core game mechanic. But the cartoon style is meant to appeal to more than hardcore gamers.

This military-centric ‘Ville also offers a relatively robust player vs. player option for those looking to show off their impressive armies. You can choose to invade other players’ islands in order to take over some of their production and gain extra cash. Empires & Allies maintains 18.2 million members, all of whom can’t help but continue the battle.

CityVille

Happy birthday to Zynga’s CityVille. Released on Dec. 2, 2010, the title is Zynga’s most popular game, consistently bringing in the most users of any Facebook game. In CityVille, players start off with a small plot of land to populate with houses and farms, growing in level and collecting rent until they can expand their land and their city alike. As you can tell from the screen above, investment in CityVille certainly pays off visually, with sweeping skyscrapers and crowded streets covering the terrain.

This socialized SimCity might not have quite as many gameplay elements as Empires & Allies or CastleVille, but the scope of progression and the grandeur of the cities has clearly grasped millions of players and refuses to let go. Even a full year after its release, CityVille receives over 49.7 million players every month. In other words, this is the biggest Facebook game of all time, and that title won’t be wrested from CityVille’s hands easily.

The Pioneer Trail (FrontierVille)

Another ‘Ville in the vein of FarmVille, FrontierVille, released on June 9, 2010, plops players in the midst of the Old West, tasked with fending for themselves among the wilderness. If you weren’t paying close enough attention, you might have mistaken this for FarmVille with a slightly anachronistic paint job, and you wouldn’t be too far off. Players farm, plant crops, raise animals, and basically complete FarmVille tasks in a new setting.

Lo and behold, over a year after its launch, Zynga decided to revamp FrontierVille with a new plot, new gameplay elements, and even a new name. The Pioneer Trail was born. This time, although the core FarmVille mechanics remain for those who prefer the Wild West to a modern farm, there is a fully fleshed out adventure players can embark on with three friends (NPCs or other players). This mode breaks the mold of Zynga’s other social games, with cutscenes, non-player characters, and even an ending, but it doesn’t stray too far from its roots in terms of actual gameplay. The Pioneer Trail is still inhabited by over 5.6 million monthly users.

Words With Friends

Possibly usurping the Wars and the ‘Villes as the most recognizable Zynga property, Words With Friends was not actually designed by the company. Newtoy, Inc. was bought by Zynga after the release of both Chess With Friends and Words With Friends, released in July 2009. But Words fits rather well here in the middle of rundown considering Zynga’s very first title, Zynga Poker. Zynga’s acquisition of the With Friends series complements their original poker title perfectly, even more so now that Zynga Casino is on the way.

Words With Friends is basically online Scrabble with fantastic Facebook integration and simple asynchronous gameplay. Players can start a game with a random opponent or with a friend, either by username or Facebook handle. The game can be played at whatever pace the players choose, and multiple games can be played at once. The game still brings in over 12.3 million users a month. Earlier this year, Zynga With Friends (formerly Newtoy, Inc.) released their third title Hanging With Friends, another iOS success.

FarmVille

If FarmVille succeeded in anything (other than making gobs of cash), it helped break down the wall between gamers and non-gamers. Nearly everyone with a Facebook account planted some corn and raised a few chickens since FarmVille’s release on June 19, 2009, regardless of gender or age. Plus, the basic farming mechanics of FarmVille have appeared in several of the more recent Zynga games, further proving the basic formula’s longevity. FarmVille was Zynga’s first break0ut hit.

FarmVille might be the most simplistic of the ‘Villes. Players own a small farm in which they must plant crops, raise animals…and that’s pretty much it. As players complete these tasks, their level increases and more animals and crops become available to purchase. If you have any neighbors, you can visit their farms and help fertilize their crops and harvest the milk from their cows. Incredibly, FarmVille still rakes in a crowd of over 30 million farmers a month, right behind its graphically superior successor, CityVille. FarmVille recently passed up The Sims Social to become the second-largest game on Facebook again.

YoVille

The father of the ‘Villes, YoVille, launched in May 2008, took a page from The Sims’ book and gave us a home to decorate and reside in, along with a static town to explore. This is yet another of Zynga’s purchases, one that later spurred them to continue the top-down, avatar creation, social games such as FarmVille and CityVille. YoVille is much simpler than Zynga’s successive games, mainly focusing on being social with other players’ avatars rather than reaching certain goals.

With all the new properties Zynga has introduced over the past few years, YoVille shows its age. The graphics and lack of any real gameplay might turn off new players, but the game still brings in over 2 million users a month, quite an impressive feat for a game as old as this.

Mafia Wars

Mafia Wars is the social game that started it all. No Facebook user has managed to escape at least one or two requests to join the Mafia since this game’s launch in early 2008. Mafia Wars, unlike most of Zynga’s more recent titles, including Mafia Wars 2, is a browser based game as opposed to a graphics based one. Players have a limited amount of rechargeable health, stamina, and energy with which to complete tasks and fight other players. Fighting stats are another factor determining which player is more likely to win in a fight.

Throughout its lifetime, Mafia Wars has increased in size by adding cities, which serve as expansion packs of sorts. Some of these cities have remained a permanent part of the game, but others, such as Moscow and Bangkok, were only around for a limited time. The original Mafia Wars, despite the introduction of its sequel, still has over 3.2 million users a month.

Zynga Poker

Of course, before Zynga invaded our social networks and mobile phones with farms, mafias, cities and castles, there was Zynga Poker, launched in July 2007. To this day, it remains one of the most played Zynga apps, with almost 29.6 million users every month. This is one of the most popular online poker games of all time. It functions like most other Texas Hold ‘Em games, but as with most of Zynga’s titles, players have the ability to level up. Leaderboards allow friends to compete for better rankings and everyone has the option to send gifts to their friends as well.

The game is available in a multitude of languages across nearly every platform imaginable, and it was recently announced that Zynga Poker would become part of a bigger Zynga franchise: Zynga Casino. All we know for now is that Zynga Poker and Zynga Bingo will be included in this package.

Conclusion

Zynga is a dominating force in today’s social gaming market. Despite the controversy and the shrinking profits, no one can deny the effect Zynga has had on gamers and (previously) non-gamers alike. These might be 10 of the most recognizable Zynga titles, but here are some of the others which still garner millions and millions of fans every month, including Zynga’s latest mobile titles:

Adventure World, Blackjack, Café World, Dream Zoo, Drop 7, FishVille, PetVille, Scramble, Treasure Isle, Vampire Wars, Chess With Friends, Mafia Wars Free, CityVille Hometown, Word Scramble, Hanging With Friends, Drop 7, and Word Twist.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The add-on to Frontierville, a spinoff of the company’s smash hit Farmville, gives players the chance to travel on the “pioneer trail” in search of a kidnapped child. While Frontierville’s traditional goal is to build up your homestead and brag to your friends, Pioneer Trail has a very clear mission — to survive and advance.

“The world is much bigger than a typical homestead by about five times, and we’ve also replaced blue sky and ether with an actual surrounding territory to really immerse the player,” Frontierville general manager John Osvald told VentureBeat. “The real special thing about Frontierville and Pioneer Trail is that we consider it a story game.”

When they begin, players get a note that someone was kidnapped and immediately hit the trail. They can add up to three friends to their team of trailblazers, each fulfilling a different role. For example, one is a hunter that you send off to find food. Like other Zynga games, players have a reserve of energy. They can add to that energy (called rations) if they get friends to join.

Pioneer Trail is similar to a core game in the sense that it has a lot of traditional gaming features compared to Zynga’s other social games — like Farmville and Cityville. Frontierville’s Pioneer Trail features special music and is much more cinematic than the company’s other games. The levels are much larger and are much more vibrant, and there are many more ways to interact with the environment than on your typical homestead. The game also features certain events that require the player to make a decision on what to do. And there’s definitely a wrong answer to some of them — like mowing down a butterfly with a hail of gunfire (I was scolded for picking that one).

Pioneer Trailblazers don’t actually have to add their own Facebook friends to their team in Pioneer Trail. Instead, Zynga is giving players the option to add random people that they don’t know on Facebook to their team and will give them the same bonuses they would get if they added their Facebook friends. It’s a new step for Zynga that encourages more asynchronous play — basically letting gamers play a game together at different times of the day.

“Instead of a neighbor bar that’s just an infinite number of possible neighbors, we want a deep social interaction between you and a bunch of your friends,” Osvald said. “You can make it all the way through Frontierville using the in-place characters, but it’ll be much faster with friends.”

There are a bunch of missions to complete on the trail. As you finish them, your wagon gradually moves down the path. Once you reach the end of the path, you move on to the next level in the trail. At launch, there are four “levels” — the High Plains, the snowy Avalanche Pass, Beaver Valley and the final destination Fort Courage. Players get prizes when they complete the trail, and they can start playing again if they feel like playing it.

“As you get to the end there’s no penalty as to why you wouldn’t want to start it again,” Osvald said. “This is probably a couple weeks of play to get to the end of the trail.”

Players will still need help on the trail, such as when they have to put out a big fire. They can ask their friends on Facebook for help, as in other Zynga games like Farmville and Cityville. When someone agrees to help, their avatar will actually show up in the player’s game and start helping out, even though the game is based off asynchronous play.

Frontierville has more than 11 million monthly active users, according to AppData. That’s small compared to its other major hits like Cityville, which has around 77 million monthly active users, and Empires & Allies, which has around 44 million monthly active users. Farmville still has 33 million monthly active users.

Osvald said if the first Pioneer trail is a hit with gamers, the company will probably design more trails within the game. He wouldn’t say whether the company would carry some of the newer features — like mission-styled gameplay or grabbing random friends instead of Facebook friends — to Zynga’s other games.

“This is another new social mechanic — it’s a gigantic social mission rather than just a typical homestead,” Osvald said. “It’s a brand new map, all the art is new, everything is new and we think our players are gonna have a lot of fun with this one.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Garriott doesn’t make empty promises. If anyone poses a threat to Zynga — which has more than 276 million monthly active users on Facebook — it is a veteran of video games like Garriott. What the industry’s old-timers bring is their knowledge of game mechanics — the elegant, creative, quirky details that make a game fun — to bear on social games. Zynga is busy acquiring talented game designers — including Garriott’s friend Bruce Shelley, now a contractor for Zynga — but it hasn’t locked up all the talent yet. There are huge stakes for whoever wins this talent war, since the best days of social gaming are likely still to come.

Garriott is no stranger to ambition. He has soared into the heavens, literally — all the way to the International Space Station as an astronaut. He has plummeted to despair with the launch and failure of one of the game industry’s biggest online games, Tabula Rasa.

Now he is trying to launch the “third age of video games” through his new company, Portalarium, which we wrote about a year ago.

What were those ages? For those of you who didn’t grow up playing games, it may help to know that Garriott was present for the first age of video games, with the debut of great single-player games such as Ultima, which was followed by many sequels. In 1997, under his alter ego Lord British, Garriott extended his role-playing fantasy world to the online multiplayer game Ultima Online. Garriott considers the rise of Internet-connected games to be the second age of video games. The third age began with the explosive growth of simple, quickly played social games like Zynga’s FarmVille on Facebook.

In an interview at the Dice Summit game conference in Las Vegas, Garriott said he knows he is late and the gold rush into social games has happened without him so far. Portalarium launched two simple casino games on Facebook so far in order to test the company’s theories about player engagement, or the trick of getting gamers to play games for a long time. Within a month or so, Garriott says Portalarium will unveil its first social game on Facebook, Hi5, and other social networks.

This game won’t be an act of “plagiarism,” Garriott said, alluding to charges some have laid against Zynga that the social games maker’s success derives from mimicking other social games. Plagiarism has proven to be a very lucrative business model, Garriott said. (Zynga begs to differ, of course, since it has created successful original games such as FrontierVille and CityVille. CityVille won the award at the Interactive Entertainment Awards for best social game. Even so, some point to the inspiration CityVille apparently took from the early city-building game SimCity.)

Garriott isn’t describing his new game now because he worries that someone will take the idea and plagiarize it. (Copyright and trademark law are not as clear-cut in video games as they are in other media, which makes this a real risk.) That’s one difference between social games and traditional console games. While traditional game marketers tease their games early and dole out the details far ahead of a launch to build buzz, social game companies launch their games quietly and then tweak them until they start taking off like wildfire. Then they announce them.

Garriott says he feels he arrived two years late in the new social game era. And he warns his colleagues in traditional games that they had better join into the gold rush or find themselves in a very difficult position, as revenues for traditional games will likely go down even as budgets soar.

“It’s time for game companies to act,” Garriott said. “The first age of games took 10 years to mature. Online games took five years. Social games may mature much more rapidly. The door is closing quickly.”

Those who make the jump to social games will discover how to make money with casual, bite-sized titles, he said. With each new age of gaming, the audience size grows by a factor of 10, Garriott said. Women, men and pretty much all demographics can now count themselves as gamers.

“This is a particularly exciting period for the game industry,” he said. “We are about to begin a new time of invention.”

Garriott’s last game, Tabula Rasa, required the work of hundreds of game developers and it had a huge budget. The game launched in 2007 but it failed to unseat rival World of WarCraft in the massively multiplayer online game market. Publisher NCSoft shut it down in 2009, just after Garriott returned from his Space Adventures trip to the space station. Garriott spent $30 million of his own personal fortune for the space trip. But he won a $28 million judgment from NCSoft because it fired him without awarding him promised stock.

Garriott was very far removed from the programming process in Tabula Rasa. But at Portalarium, he can now get involved at that level.

“I once felt like I had mastered every byte of the Apple II as a programmer,” he said. “It’s been a decade since I have worked at this level in a game and I am truly enjoying it.”

The game mechanics won’t be something familiar like running a pet shop or a farm or a town, Garriott said.

“I looked at FarmVille, but it was too simple for me as a player,” he said. “The user interface was awkward and the game play was not rewarding. When FrontierVille came out, it was much more interesting. But now with CityVille, there is way too much going on. So now we have bracketed this new experience. One is too simple, and one is too complicated.”

Eventually, Garriott promises that he will move on to “Lord British’s brave new world, or a spiritual successor to my previous work.”

Garriott said that Portalarium has built a suite of tools to make it easier to build games that can “break down the barriers between games.” That is, he thinks it is too hard right now to promote a game to a person who is playing another game. You should, he said, be able to easily find out what your friends are playing.

Is there a tiny bit of bluster in Garriott’s words? Sure. Should Zynga be scared of a puny company in Austin, Texas? Not yet. But objects in the rear view mirror may be closer than they appear to be. Yes, Zynga may look over its shoulder and find that one day Lord British is gaining on them.

Check out our video interview with Garriott below.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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There’s a specter hanging over the traditional video game industry, and you can see it in the image above. Social game companies such as Zynga and mobile games on the iPhone are grabbing players by the tens of millions. The traditional video game industry isn’t growing like it once was.

But the star designers of traditional games aren’t running scared. In a panel at the Dice Summit, which gathers 700 of the game industry’s elite in Las Vegas from today through Friday, game industry veterans said that they’re used to the constant chaos, change, and adaptation that has to happen in the industry. Companies such as Zynga, maker of CityVille, and Rovio, maker of Angry Birds, have disrupted the game industry and the industry veterans think that’s a good thing.

The game veterans pictured above said they continue to work on hardcore console and PC games that they always have. But they’re playing games from the new guys. As a group, these game designers are looking to learn what they can from social and mobile.

The social and mobile game companies are crashing the party at Dice and at the larger Game Developers Conference coming in San Francisco later this month. But it was still surprising to see a panel with no social and mobile game makers sing the praises of that new segment of the game industry.

Mike Morhaime (pictured right), head of Blizzard Entertainment, said he plays Words With Friends, a Scrabble-like word game on the iPhone, so that he can connect with old friends.

Greg Zeschuk (far right), co-founder of Electronic Arts’ BioWare division, said he pulled someone into his office to show off CityVille on Facebook. “Come take a look at the future of games,” he said. He said game designers can now reach so many users so fast with games that are accessible and easy to play; CityVille grew to 100 million users in less than two months on Facebook.

“We have never had a chance to reach so many people so fast with something so easy to play,” Zeschuk said.

Bruce Shelley,  co-founder of the now-defunct Ensemble Studios and maker of Age of Empires, was so enthralled with Zynga’s FrontierVille (made by his friend and game veteran Brian Reynolds) that he decided to start work on Facebook games himself.

“This [game] had engagement,” said Shelley (pictured right). “It was a real game. It meant that game design had been brought to a new space where it had never reached before.”

Shelley is now a contractor working on a game design project with Zynga. He is offering tips to Zynga’s neophyte game makers, who in turn are offering him tips about how to operate in the fast game design cycles that Zynga follows.

Shelley co-founded his game studio in 1995, a great time to get an independent game studio together to make high-end PC or console games.

“I thought you would never be able to do that again,” he said. “But today, there has never been a better time to start a game studio. I have this vision of a dam breaking and all of this opportunity rushing downhill.”

Now at Zynga, Shelley said it is remarkable how fast the company can move. “I’m just asked to make the games more fun,” he said.

Mark Cerny (pictured right), a freelance game designer who has worked on many blockbuster games with Sony, said, “Bruce will be able to create a game faster than it will take us to get a lawyer assigned to create a contract.”

Ray Muzyka, co-founder of BioWare, said that the game industry feels like it is in the middle of an S-shaped curve, meaning it’s about to see another huge wave of growth.

“A lot of existing players are going to have to adapt in order to thrive and survive,” he said. “New players are going to come into this market and surprise the heck out of us.” However, Muzyka also said it was still refreshing to see outstanding hardcore games surface, such as RockStar Games’ Red Dead Redemption, an epic Western game that has sold 8 million units on the consoles.

Cerny said he was happy to see original indie games such as Flower, a downloadable game on the PlayStation 3 that let gamers play the wind in the dream of a flower in the middle of a dilapidated city. Games like that one aren’t huge money makers, but they earn enough to make their money back and more.

The city simulation game has drawn in more than 26 million users since it debuted on Dec. 2. In just 12 days, the Facebook game has broken all previous records, adding 4.5 million users on Tuesday alone. In the past seven days, the game has added 24.9 million users, according to market researcher AppData. For Zynga, that’s important because the San Francisco company often sees big fluctuations in its player base as fickle gamers move on from one game to the next. CityVille has surpassed the initial growth wave that FarmVille, Zynga’s biggest game, saw in 2009.

“This feels fun,” said Mark Skaggs, the Zynga vice president in charge of CityVille. “It’s like reliving the fun and excitement of the FarmVille launch. We are buzzing with energy about how to keep it going.”

CityVille comes at an important time for Zynga, which is trying to show that it can keep churning out hit after hit, by following a recipe that focuses on watching its gamers closely and tweaking games so that there are no barriers for adoption. If Zynga can keep turning out the hits, it can replace lost gamers and keep a commanding lead in social games industry. According to AppData, Zynga has more than 222 million monthly active users (those who play in a month). Just a couple of weeks ago, Zynga had only 198 million users, which is far below its peak from the spring, when it had more than 260 million users. Zynga lost a lot of users because Facebook shut down some of the most popular game communications (which were viewed by non-gamers as spam).

Founded in 2007, Zynga has become one of the largest gaming companies in the world, with more than 1,300 employees. Legendary investor John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers said Zynga was easily the best investment that his firm has ever made. The social networking game maker is already the largest app developer on Facebook. And some recent valuations show that Zynga is actually valued above $5 billion, larger than Electronic Arts, one of the largest video game publishers in the world.

Zynga is trying to regain its numbers of users by expanding to other platforms such as mobile games in Japan. It is also expanding its social games to non-Facebook web sites and translating its games into other languages. The company has been buying about a company a month to get more talented game developers. But the No. 1 thing it has to do to keep growing is to commission new games like CityVille.

Skaggs said that the CityVille team was formed from scratch in the spring and that 95 percent of the people had never worked on a game before. There were a few game industry veterans who were new to Zynga, and a few crusty Zynga veterans like Skaggs, who previously developed games for Electronic Arts. The team started with established play practices that had been successful in other Zynga games, such as picking up rewards, or loot, upon achieving something. Then it focused on what would be fun to do in a city game. The result is a lightweight city simulation that can be played in a matter of minutes — but which players feel compelled to return to on a daily basis.

CityVille has 11.5 million daily active users — that’s the number that play during one day. The new game went through a slow climb in its first five days and then suddenly took off exponentially. Skaggs didn’t disclose exactly what Zynga did to make that happen. But he said the company has an established process for game launches where it turns on features that make the game more viral. It also opens up its cross-promotion and advertising spigots as well.

Other Zynga titles have taken off fast as well. FrontierVille saw a rocket ride this summer before settling at around 30.5 million monthly active users. FarmVille hit 83 million monthly active users this spring and is now at 55.3 million. Skaggs said that FarmVille had a tougher start because the development team itself had to watch the computing infrastructure and make sure that the growing load wasn’t too much for the servers. That meant that nobody slept. Now Zynga has a team dedicated to managing the load.

On the surface, the game resembles SimCity. You run a town, building homes and stores and roads. Your friends can help your town thrive by visiting your stores and working as staff in your city hall. You can also set up franchises of your own in the towns of other players. In that sense, CityVille is far more social than the original SimCity titles. Skaggs said the vision was to create a game that felt like you were actually controlling a city in real time.

But everyone knows Facebook has its limitations. The game does not reproduce the kind of sophisticated 3D graphics animations that disc-based games such As SimCity can do.

And while CityVille has some interesting new game play, you can’t really say that it is original. There’s a whole genre of city games on Facebook, including Digital Chocolate’s Millionaire City and its sequels. Playdom’s Social City was also a hit at one point. But CityVille has already eclipsed those titles. Now it has to prove that it’s not just a fad. Zynga’s game designers are hard at work on increasing engagement, or the amount of time that users spend with a game. If a game is more engaging, it can generate more audience loyalty and eventually lead to better revenues. Zynga games are free for users to play but they generate money when users pay real money for virtual goods.

Zynga had previously said that the game took off faster in a single day than all of its previous games, getting 290,000 users in its first 24 hours. Zynga also launched the game in multiple languages at the outset so that it could grow in multiple regions at once. The game was almost ready to go on Nov. 16, when Zynga briefed the press about the game. But Skaggs said the company held back the launch because it needed to fix bugs and polish it. The team had released the game to all Zynga employees, who discovered things that the team had to fix before moving forward. That delayed the game a couple of weeks. By Dec. 2, at 1:22 am, Zynga opened up the game and the staff drank champagne.

Since the launch, Zynga has made some significant changes to the balance of the game and released a lot of new items and buildings. There have been a couple of small outages, but nothing major that has interrupted the addition of new players.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The deal follows on the heels of a similar arrangement with American Express. With as few as 600 Thank You Rewards points, users can purchase physical gift cards or virtual currency to be used in Facebook games such as FarmVille, FrontierVille, Mafia Wars and Café World.

The deal is good for Citi because it has a lot of users who don’t participate in its rewards program because they don’t have enough points to spend on anything. By creating low-cost items with Zynga, Citi can make those users more active and motivate them to use the program more. It also encourages the users to give gifts to friends.

Citi started the Thank You Rewards program in 2004. Members can earn points from across a range of Citi businesses, from checking accounts to everyday banking. Zynga has more than 215 million monthly active users playing its games, mostly on Facebook.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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That’s important to the company, which is the largest app publisher on Facebook, as it constantly needs to add new players in order to make up for those who stop playing its games. Past Zynga games that have had good launches have gone on to having tens of millions of users.

Zynga’s previous biggest launch was FrontierVille, which had more than 116,000 players in its first day. Now, more than 6.5 million people play FrontierVille every day. So far, more than 2.7 million homes have been built in CityVille. Residents have created 500,000 bakeries and laid down 5 million sections of road, and 25 percent of players have set up franchises in their friends’ games. It looks like Zynga has another hit on its hands.

The company certainly needs the hits. Back in the spring, it had more than 260 million monthly active users on Facebook, according to market researcher AppData. Now the company has 193.8 million users. That’s due in no small part to the fact that Facebook has shut down a channel that many game makers were using to virally spread word of their offerings (non-gamers had complained that these communications were spam). Zynga is still No. 1 on Facebook by far, but it needs games like CityVille to keep refreshing its audience. FarmVille is still Zynga’s top game with 53.8 million monthly active users, which is down from its peak at around 83 million.

AppData reports that CityVille has 916,799 monthly active players so far, including 251,860 gained today. It has a long way to go before it hits the top 15 on Facebook, where the lowest game has 12.8 million monthly active users.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Lisa Marino, chief operating officer at RockYou, said in an interview that the move will position the company to launch a number of next-generation games on Facebook in 2011. RockYou is shifting its focus to make higher-quality games and believes that Facebook users are moving in that direction too. That’s why the company is bringing in new talent via the TirNua team.

Most games on Facebook are simple, two-dimensional games based on Flash, which is limited in its ability to display 3D animation. But TirNua worked on its 3D game engine, a tool that can be used to make games, for 2.5 years. Its first game, also called TirNua, was a Facebook virtual world where you can learn to live in a green fashion. The game wasn’t a hit.

But RockYou believes its 3D engine can be used to create synchronous games, or those that can be played in real time, or with instantaneous reactions. Real-time games are popular on the PC and on consoles, but they often run too slow on Facebook. That was the case for City of Eternals, a real-time vampire game published by Ohai earlier this year.

Still, Marino said that the audience is demanding more sophisticated games, and she believes that Facebook will step up so that its platform can run them. By the second half of next year, for instance, 3D synchronous games will probably find a much bigger audience on Facebook, she said.

“This is one of our major bets,” Marino said. “We believe we can make multiple games on TirNua’s engine.”

Ohai is still betting it can succeed with a real-time engine. And startups such as Rocket Ninja are also betting on 3D real-time games based on Flash.

TirNua’s 10-person team will join RockYou’s in Redwood City, Calif. Full told, RockYou will now have about 157 employees. The company has had layoffs recently, and its chief executive Lance Tokuda, stepped down from his post to handle special projects. But Marino said the company will continue to move aggressively even while it hunts for a new CEO. Greg Kearney, president of TirNua, will become vice president of engineering at RockYou.

Besides buying TirNua, RockYou has been building up its game design talent. Founded in 2005, RockYou started in the early days of Facebook, competing with Slide to produce virtual gifts and lightweight quiz apps. It evolved to make social games such as Zoo World and created a big ad network as well. The ad network has more than 220 million users, while RockYou’s social games have more than 21 million monthly active users.

While RockYou will keep operating the ad network, which produces most of the company’s revenues, it will also invest heavily in games, which are becoming more expensive to make and market on Facebook as user tastes become more sophisticated. RockYou will not keep investing in its older legacy apps, which explains its recent layoffs.

Marino said that the pace of social gaming has picked up in the past six months. “In 2010, we have seen a big flight to quality” with games such as Zynga’s FrontierVille and LOLapps’ Ravenwood Fair, Marino said. “Those games have more advanced story lines, self-expression, and a tighter economy where it’s easier to monetize the audience.”

RockYou has raised $127 million to date. Its investors include Sequoia Capital, Partech International, Lightspeed Venture Partners, DCM, SK Telecom Ventures and SoftBank.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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In this future world, Zynga’s games won’t be tied to just a single platform such as Facebook. They will be wherever users want them to be. As you can see in the image at right, Pincus believes you will have a bunch of apps that you can launch in order to get your favorite branded experience, whether it’s Zynga for social games, CNN for news, or Twitter for instant communication.

Zynga matters right now because it has grown to an estimated $500 million in annual revenue and more than 1,200 employees in just three years. It makes social games on Facebook that are played by many of the social network’s 500 million users, but it is also busy expanding to new platforms from the iPad to Android phones.

Pincus, speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco today, had a short speech and didn’t really explain what he meant on the topic of the conference, Points of  Control. But he said, “The future is not about points of control (where companies control what users see). It’s about user control. Users will have services that they feel will be basic, like a dial tone. It’s always there. It’s annoying if it’s not there.”

Of course, for a company to make it into the shortlist icons in the image, it will have to have indispensable services for lots of people. Pincus said that more than 320 million people have played Zynga games such as FarmVille. As many as three million people play Zynga games at the same time on any given day.

Zynga’s goal is to get people to play the company’s games during their break times for 10 minutes at a time, Pincus said. “It’s for when you don’t have time to watch movies or TV or console video games.”

To get to a larger number of users and keep growing, Pincus said Zynga is focusing on providing “bold beats.” Those are the key mechanics in games that keep people coming back. In FarmVille, for instance, the bold beat is crafting cottages or creating “buildings that matter.” In FrontierVille, it’s the ability to get married to another player. (Pincus noted that there are more than 650,000 same-sex marriages in FrontierVille, something that the game’s designers didn’t anticipate at all.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Zynga is currently valued at $5.27 billion on SharesPost, a secondary market, where Zynga employees can sell shares that they own in the private company. Redwood City, Calif.-based EA is worth $5.24 billion in public trading on the Nasdaq stock market. The SharesPost listings are thinly traded compared to EA’s stock, but it is perhaps the only real measure of the value of Zynga’s stock at any given moment. Many hope that Zynga will go public, but it hasn’t done so yet.

Serial entrepreneur Mark Pincus (pictured in center) started Zynga four years ago to make Facebook applications. Starting with Texas Hold Em Poker, Zynga managed to grab lots of users on Facebook and figured out how to make money from a small percentage of them. Adopting the “virtual goods” business model pioneered by South Korea’s Nexon for online games, Zynga charged real money to players for virtual currency, which was used to buy poker chips and other virtual goods in Zynga games. Now, thanks to virtual goods sales, Zynga is expected to grab roughly a third of the $1.6 billion market for virtual goods in the U.S. in 2010, according to Inside Network.

Zynga really took off in the middle of 2009 when it launched FarmVille, which is still the No. 1 game on Facebook with 57.4 million monthly active users, according to AppData. With such popular market-leading games, Zynga can cross-promote its titles and advertise them as well, allowing it to turn lots of its games into huge hits. In addition to FarmVille and Texas Hold Em Poker, FrontierVille, Mafia Wars, Cafe World, Treasure Isle and PetVille all have more than 10 million users. Overall, Zynga has 214.5 million users.

CrowdStar is a distant No. 2 at 54.2 million monthly active users, and EA is No. 3 at 44.7 million users. These numbers fluctuate dramatically and are all down since Facebook cracked down on game message spam in the spring. EA bought Playfish for $400 million in the fall of 2009, but it hasn’t been able to close the gap against Zynga, which has been No. 1 for a long time.

EA’s market value has dropped this year. The company lost its title as the largest independent maker of video games to Activision Blizzard, which has titles such as World of Warcraft to fuel its growth. But EA is no slouch when it comes to online games. Digital online businesses at EA are expected to generate $750 million in revenue in the current fiscal year, or around 20 percent of overall revenue. That means EA’s online game revenue is significantly bigger than Zynga’s online game revenue (which, of course, is all of Zynga’s revenue).

Yet the market values Zynga as equal to EA in market share? Does this mean the market discounts the rest of EA’s nearly $3 billion or so in traditional video game console and PC game revenues? If so, then Zynga is truly overvalued.

It’s also interesting to compare Zynga’s value to one of its arch rivals in the social game market, Japan’s DeNA. DeNA has come on strong in the Japanese social mobile game market. It recently outbid Zynga to buy iPhone game publisher Ngmoco for $400 million. DeNA’s market capitalization in Japan is around $3.6 billion. But the company says its revenue run rate is currently around $1 billion. So DeNA’s revenue is likely bigger than Zynga’s (Zynga does not disclose its number). So Zynga’s stock is overvalued by that comparison as well. Yet another comparision: Activision Blizzard is valued at more than $13 billion.

Does that mean Zynga isn’t worth the current price people are paying on the secondary market? Perhaps. But there’s no question Zynga is at the center of the storm and has one of the most enviable positions in the game market today. That’s a remarkable achievement, considering EA is more than 28 years old and Zynga is less than four. Zynga’s valuation is not based on current revenues alone, but on its momentum in a fast-growing market. EA doesn’t have that momentum. And DeNA has momentum in the fast-growing social mobile game market in Japan, but it is only getting starting in social games in the U.S.

[photo credit: Fortune]

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Unlike Zynga’s previous games, FrontierVille was put together by the company’s new Zynga East team, which consisted of more traditional game designers and was under the leadership of Reynolds, whose background was in traditional PC strategy games.

Reynolds was speaking at VentureBeat’s DiscoveryBeat 2010 conference in San Francisco. Before joining Zynga, Reynolds led design on classic games like Civilization II and Alpha Centuari (you can tell they’re classics because all of VentureBeat’s writers were basically squealing with excitement when he took the stage). So he might seem like an odd fit with Zynga, which is well-known for being less focused on creativity and traditional game design and more on user growth and retention than on traditional game design qualities (to the point where critics say Zynga is just a ruthless, unoriginal copycat).

One thing that helped with the transition, Reynolds said, is the fact that he wanted to work at Zynga. He wasn’t dragged in through an acquisition — he had already become interested in social games and Facebook, and he wanted to learn the new tricks of social game design.

“If you don’t like Facebook games, I would say, don’t make them,” he said.

Plus, some of the ideas that Reynolds learned from legendary game designer Sid Meier still apply at Zynga, he said. Meier liked to build a prototype as quickly as possible, then improve it based on what users do, and it’s the same at Zynga. At the same time, in both traditional design and social design, it’s important not to overvalue with users say they want. In the case of the Civilization games, for example, if the designers followed every player request, the games would have become overloaded with features and forced players to micromanage the game in a way that became tedious.

Reynolds was put in charge of a new team, Zynga East, which included more traditional game designers than the rest of Zynga, and which was focused on creating Frontierville. Executives viewed that melding of the Zynga approach with traditional game design as something of a test that might or might not get exported to the company as a whole.

Not everything went smoothly, Reynolds acknowledged. When Frontierville launched, it saw a lot of user traction right away, but then usage flattened out. The problem was that the team didn’t have an analyst focused on looking at user data, so there were basically a bunch of designers flying blind. Then, when Zynga finally put a full-time analyst on Frontierville, usage started taking off again. Now it has 30 million users, making it one of the company’s biggest games.

Reynolds said those numbers make Zynga say, “Cool, that works. Let’s do it some more.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The social-gaming juggernaut, responsible for some of the most popular social games on Facebook like FarmVille and Mafia Wars, is responsible for handling a deluge of traffic from the roughly 10 percent of the world’s Internet population who play its games. Zynga can add up to 1,000 new servers each week and has begun expanding into both public and private cloud storage and infrastructure to cope with the massive amount of traffic, Lee said.

“It’s millions of people clicking their mouse as fast as they possibly can,” Lee said. “And there are 3 billion neighbor connections amongst our users.”

One reason Zynga sometimes finds itself adding a tremendous number of new servers in a single week are traffic spikes as a result of promotions or special events. When Zynga launched a “superberry” farming promotion in FarmVille, more than 700 million berries were planted and Zynga saw a huge traffic spike, Lee said.

The challenge for Zynga is unique compared to other large sites that are “read-only” or “input-only,” such as photo-sharing sites like Flickr or e-commerce sites like Amazon.com, Lee said. Zynga instead faces an environment that is constantly updating, with each new crop planted or fertilized and each message left on a friend’s farm.

The FarmVille site is currently raising money for an educational charity, L’École de Choix, in Haiti, a country for which it has conducted several fundraising drives. That required new functionality within the game.

“We have to be able to deploy something like the Haiti fundraising drive and do it fast,” Lee said. “We need to be able to let users try it out and have that sort of freshness all the time.”

According to recent data from NPD Group, about one in five Americans play social networking games like FarmVille. It comes as no surprise that Zynga’s estimated 215 million users generate quite a bit of data.

Zynga puts a lot of machines to work, but it has also added humans: It now employs 1,200 people across 13 studio locations.

DiscoveryBeat 2010 is an event focused on the “secret recipe” for application discovery and monetization. Due to its success in 2009, the conference has expanded to a full day event and will be held on October 18th at The Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. Get your tickets here.

For publishers or app developers, the promise of the mobile and social revolution is compelling. However, new players like Google’s Android are throwing out the early rules and creating new challenges in the ecosystem. How do you get discovered when there are 250,000 other publishers and applications fighting for users across diverse devices and interfaces, such as the PC, social networks, mobile phones, and tablets?

Here are our latest speakers:

Brian Reynolds will give an afternoon fireside chat on the topic of design and the role that the developer plays in making content easier to discover. A 19-year game design veteran, Reynolds is chief game designer at Zynga, the hot social gaming company that has more than 221 million unique monthly users on Facebook alone. Reynolds is a seasoned video game designer who switched fields and dove into social gaming. His first major project for Zynga is FrontierVille, a Western-themed game with more than 33 million unique monthly users on Facebook. He joined Zynga in June, 2009. Honored by PC Gamer magazine as one of twenty-five “Game Gods,” Reynolds played a key role founding two successful video game studios: Big Huge Games and Firaxis. At Big Huge, he was responsible for real-time strategy games such as Rise of Nations. He also worked as a game designer at Firaxis Games, where he was involved in such titles as Alpha Centauri and Civilization II. And he worked at pioneering computer game developer MicroProse. Reynolds’ videogames have sold over 6 million copies worldwide. He works in the Zynga East studio in Baltimore, Md.

One way to discover content is to get something smart to do the sifting. Norman Winarsky leads SRI’s ventures, licensing and strategic programs. He plays a key role in partnering with the venture capital community in spinning out early stage investment opportunities from Silicon Valley’s renowned research laboratory. Winarsky has helped found more than 20 ventures, has published more than 50 papers, and holds a number of patents. He helped spin off Siri, which created a voice-activated app technology that serves as a virtual assistant for mobile phone users. Siri was based on artificial intelligence technology that was built from years of research on the CALO project, which focused on smart virtual assistants. Siri was sold to Apple earlier this year for an undisclosed price. but SRI has other ventures related to virtual assistance, which is a new avenue for getting content discovered. Winarksy will talk about advances in AI and how it can be used to wade through the sea of content to find what you really need to know.

Tim O’Brien is vice president of business development for Disney Mobile, a division of the Disney Interactive Media Group. He oversees all business development and sales deals with carriers, device manufacturers, and partners including Apple, Samsung, Verizon and Google. He manages worldwide content and licensing partnerships for Disney Mobile with some of the biggest music brands in the world, including Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Linkin Park and Metallica. He was a founding member of the executive team at Tapulous, which Disney purchased. He has played a key role in building Tapulous’ relationship with both Apple and record labels that provide content for Tap Tap Revenge, and he also created innovative marketing programs that reach Tap Tap Revenge’s 35 million players. Now he has the strength of Tapulous’ social mobile game designers and the brands of Disney to make sure that people notice his company’s content. Prior to Tapulous, he held business development roles at Gydget, building the innovative social media app company from the ground up, as well as StubHub, a leading online ticket marketplace.

Arjun Sethi is CEO of social game startup LOLapps, which has quietly amassed more than 100 million users on Facebook. Starting with simple gift and quiz apps, LOLapps has built its way up the food chain. As CEO, Arjun is responsible for setting the overall strategic vision for LoLapps and guiding the development of fresh, high-quality social products. Prior to Lolapps, Arjun was CEO and founder of ROFLplay, a social gaming startup which was acquired by LoLapps in July 2009. Arjun initially served as the Head of Business and Corporate Development for LoLapps and was named CEO in March 2010. Previously, Arjun held various management roles with the Carlyle Group and Saset Healthcare. In 1999, he also co-founded Advanced Tuning Products, a manufacturing company within the automotive industry.

We have previously announced speakers as follows: Sebastien DeHalleux, co-founder of Playfish and vice president business development & strategic partnerships, EA Interactive; Si Shen, chief executive of Papaya Mobile; Marc Gumpinger, chief executive of Scoreloop; Peter Relan, chairman of YouWeb; and Peter Farago, vice president of marketing at Flurry.

Getting content noticed is a challenge for everyone making apps. We’ll cover the topic at DiscoveryBeat 2010. Startups and big companies alike should consider entering our Needle in the Haystack discovery business idea competition. Early bird discounts are available until September 22. VentureBeat would like to thank the industry leaders thank those supporting DiscoveryBeat 2010, including Flurry as co-host and Offermobi as an exhibitor. Unique sponsorships are still available. For more information contact sponsors@venturebeat.com. To buy tickets, click on this link.

Social game publisher Zynga said today that its Wild West pioneer-themed game FrontierVille has soared to more than 20 million users since it was launched on Facebook on June 9, 36 days ago.

The game is now the company’s third largest, after FarmVille (62 million users) and Texas HoldEm Poker (28 million users).

As we noted before, FrontierVille is critical for Zynga if it’s going to stay on the treadmill of gaining new users even as its older games lose users.

In the game, the most popular activities include the creation of a virtual family with a customized virtual spouse. Also, the social element of hiring your neighbors to help you work on your homestead has been very popular. Clearly, the game is helping to generate a collective sigh of relief at Zynga’s San Francisco headquarters. Zynga has experienced a decline recently as its core games, including FarmVille, saw drops in users.

Zynga has had a remarkable rise to the top as the largest social app publisher on Facebook with more than 213 million monthly active users. But that number is down from 252 million on April 20, according to AppData. Zynga is trying to reach new audiences by expanding in Japan, publishing on the iPhone, and spreading its games to portals such as Yahoo, Google and MSN. But the core of its effort is to make better games.

Much like the company’s flagship title, FarmVille, the FrontierVille game is a light casual game that you play with your friends. It has a frontier theme where you go out to create a homestead in the wilderness and grow it into a bustling frontier town. Since it’s a family game targeted at everyone, it’s a lot more about tending crops and livestock than it is about shooting guns and scalping your neighbors.

The game is the debut title for Zynga East, the company’s new game studio in Baltimore. Its design was headed by chief game designer Brian Reynolds, a veteran from the traditional game industry who created big titles such as Civilization, Alpha Centauri and Rise of Nations before joining Zynga last year.

Reynolds is as hardcore as they come. He used to delight in setting off nuclear bombs in his game demos. But now Reynolds is going to be essential to Zynga’s mission in raising the bar and attracting new audiences. Zynga has been criticized for copying its way to the top and creating games that — while they are very social — lack deep game play.

“My job is to see what good game design techniques I can bring to bear on social games and to do new, innovative stuff,” Reynolds said in an interview in June.

Zynga said that, so far in FrontierVille, 6.3 million players have built their frontier cabins; 3.3 million have built a general store; 2.3 million people have gotten married; 1.1 million people have had a kid; 10 million people have clobbered a snake (snakes were clobbered 252 million times); and 3.6 million people have scared away a bear.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Social game publisher Zynga said today that the company has garnered more than 5 million daily active users in its new FrontierVille game that was launched just 13 days ago.

The Wild West pioneer-themed game is the company’s latest bid to remain the dominant provider of social games on Facebook, where Zynga has hundreds of millions of users. FrontierVille is critical for Zynga if it’s going to stay on the treadmill of gaining new users even as its older games lose users. Zynga launched the game on June 9.

In the game, the most popular activities include the creation of a virtual family with a customized virtual spouse. Also, the social element of hiring your neighbors to help you work on your homestead has been very popular. Clearly, the game is helping to generate a collective sigh of relief at Zynga’s San Francisco headquarters. Zynga has experienced a decline recently as its core games, including FarmVille, saw drops in users.

Zynga has had a remarkable rise to the top as the largest social app publisher on Facebook with more than 211 million monthly active users. But that number is down from 252 million on April 20, according to AppData. Zynga is trying to reach new audiences by expanding in Japan, publishing on the iPhone, and spreading its games to portals such as Yahoo and MSN. But the core of its effort is to make better games.

Much like the company’s flagship title FarmVille, the FrontierVille game is a light casual game that you play with your friends. It has a frontier theme where you go out to create a homestead in the wilderness and grow it into a bustling frontier town. Since it’s a family game targeted at everyone, it’s a lot more about tending crops and livestock than it is about shooting guns and scalping your neighbors.

The game is the debut title for Zynga East, the company’s new game studio in Baltimore. Its design was headed by chief game designer Brian Reynolds, a veteran from the traditional game industry who created big titles such as Civilization, Alpha Centauri and Rise of Nations before joining Zynga last year.

Reynolds is as hardcore as they come. He used to delight in setting off nuclear bombs in his game demos. But now Reynolds is going to be essential to Zynga’s mission in raising the bar and attracting new audiences. Zynga has been criticized for copying its way to the top and creating games that — while they are very social — lack deep game play.

“My job is to see what good game design techniques I can bring to bear on social games and to do new innovative stuff,” Reynolds said in an interview earlier this month.

The depth of FrontierVille is in its social game play. In FarmVille, your friends could help you tend your crops and you might never pay them much attention. But helping others is key to the game play of FrontierVille. You can help your friend tend crops, feed animals, chop trees and revive withered crops. You raise your family, tend crops, chase varmints off your land, add neighbors and raise your reputation by helping others.

“In this game, you can see who is helping you more easily,” Reynolds said. “What I was taught was to take a lot of simple pieces and have them interact in deep ways. The goal is to improve the quality of the social experience. ”

Like the other “ville” games created by Zynga, it’s a simulation of your own little world. But this one is more like a living world, where things change over time. Weeds can grow on your farm and you have to clean them off. Little trees grow into big trees. You have to chase bears away. These are things that are relatively new in social games, where interactivity has been pretty limited.

Reynolds acknowledged that this game is fresh territory and that Zynga isn’t copying anyone here. He describes it as “Oregon Trail meets Little House on the Prairie meets FarmVille.” (In video games, if you copy two or more things, it becomes an original idea).

Doing original work and helping to get traffic growing again is part of Reynolds’ charter. FrontierVille is the first major game since Zynga launched Treasure Isle, which saw rapid growth and now has 21.5 million monthly active users.

Reynolds said the studio in Baltimore has 16 employees and the team worked on the game for a number of months. That’s a bigger investment than Zynga used to make in games a couple of years ago, and Reynolds said he expects the investments to grow over time as the quality bar goes up.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Game maker Zynga hopes to halt a decline in its traffic on Facebook with the launch today of its newest social game, FrontierVille. It’s one of Zynga’s most elaborate titles to date, but it’s aimed at the same mass market Facebook audience that has flocked to the company’s games by the hundreds of millions.

As we noted earlier this week, Zynga has had a remarkable rise to the top as the largest social app publisher on Facebook with more than 216 million monthly active users. But that number is down from 252 million on April 20, according to AppData. Zynga is trying to reach new audiences by expanding in Japan, publishing on the iPhone, and spreading its games to portals such as Yahoo and MSN. But the core of its effort is to make better games.

Much like the company’s flagship title FarmVille, this game is a light casual game that you play with your friends. It has a frontier theme where you go out to create a homestead in the wilderness and grow it into a bustling frontier town. Since it’s a family game targeted at everyone, it’s a lot more about tending crops and livestock than it is about shooting guns off and scalping your neighbors.

The game is the debut title for Zynga East, the company’s new game studio in Baltimore. Its design was headed by chief game designer Brian Reynolds, a veteran from the traditional game industry who created big titles such as Civilization, Alpha Centauri and Rise of Nations before joining Zynga last year.

Reynolds is as hardcore as they come. He used to delight in setting off nuclear bombs in his game demos. But now Reynolds is going to be essential to Zynga’s mission in raising the bar and attracting new audiences. Zynga has been criticized for copying its way to the top and creating games that — while they are very social — lack deep game play.

“My job is to see what good game design techniques I can bring to bear on social games and to do new innovative stuff,” Reynolds said in an interview.

The depth of FrontierVille is in its social game play. In FarmVille, your friends could help you tend your crops and you might never pay them much attention. But helping others is key to the game play of FrontierVille. You can help your friend tend crops, feed animals, chop trees and revive withered crops. You raise your family, tend crops, chase varmints off your land, add neighbors and raise your reputation by helping others.

“In this game, you can see who is helping you more easily,” Reynolds said. “What I was taught was to take a lot of simple pieces and have them interact in deep ways. The goal is to improve the quality of the social experience. “

Like the other “ville” games created by Zynga, it’s a simulation of your own little world. But this one is more like a living world, where things change over time. Weeds can grow on your farm and you have to clean them off. Little trees grow into big trees. You have to chase bears away. These are things that are relatively new in social games, where interactivity has been pretty limited.

Reynolds acknowledged that this game is fresh territory and that Zynga isn’t copying anyone here. He describes it as “Oregon Trail meets Little House on the Prairie meets FarmVille.” (In video games, if you copy two or more things, it becomes an original idea).

Doing original work and helping to get traffic growing again is part of Reynolds’ charter. FrontierVille is the first major game since Zynga launched Treasure Isle, which saw rapid growth and now has 24 million monthly active users.

Reynolds said the studio in Baltimore has 16 employees and the team worked on the game for a number of months. That’s a bigger investment than Zynga used to make in games a couple of years ago, and Reynolds said he expects the investments to grow over time as the quality bar goes up.