News broke late yesterday that Lance Tokuda is stepping down from his role as chief executive of social game- and app-maker RockYou. Coming barely more than a month after the company announced substantial layoffs, we started wondering where RockYou is …
Ah, newlyweds.
Cross platform social gaming platform Scoreloop is still going strong in its six-month lucrative partnership with smartphone Android, announcing today that is taking in over 18 million score submissions a week as consumers eagerly snatch up gaming apps …
Zynga may be darling of the social game industry, but Big Fish Games has been selling casual games for eight years now and doesn’t want to be forgotten.
The Seattle-based company is expanding overseas today with five localized language portals …
John Doerr, the legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist, gave high praise to Zynga, the leading social game company, saying it was one of the best investments his firm had ever made.
Doerr’s firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, has invested …
About a third of the top grossing apps in the Apple App Store are now making their money through the sale of virtual goods within the application after being free to download, according to research done by tech blog GigaOm.…
Social game companies such as Zynga owe much of their success to Facebook. But they’ve learned the lesson in recent months that they should diversify beyond the fast-growing social network. Recognizing the need for diversification, they are creating their own …
Social Game Universe is announcing today a new cross-promotion tool that will help indie developers drive traffic to their social games.
The Toronto-based company says its “cross-promotion bar” will go by the name IGAPI (short for Inter-Game Applications Programming Interface). …
Company: Scvngr
Location: Boston
Founded: June 2008
Founder: Seth Priebatsch
Funding: $4.8 million
Employees: 50
Scvngr founder Seth Priebatsch — who prefers the title “chief ninja” to “CEO” — took the idea of checking in to a location to …
LOLapps got knocked for a loop last month when Facebook abruptly shut down all of the company’s apps, which collectively draw more than 100 million monthly active users. So perhaps its no surprise to see today that the company is …
If you want to increase your revenue for a social game, you can put a game inside an existing game. That’s what BringIt, a tournament gaming startup, did for social game firm RockYou.
BringIt inserted its platform for tournament-style mini-games …
Let’s take a break from all the serious discussion about violent video games for a second and look at casual games startup OMGPOP, which could raise up to $10 million in its current fundraising round, according to a report from …
Is social gaming upstart Zynga really worth more than traditional video game giant Electronic Arts?
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. …
Here’s our roundup of the week’s tech business news. First, the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last seven days:
Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook doesn’t make real profits, and that’s okay — Speaking at incubator Y Combinator’s Startup School event …
John Romero is the creator of the Doom and Quake games that have haunted the memories of a generation of gamers with over-the-top shoot-em-up violence. Now he is trying his hand at making a cute Facebook game called Ravenwood Fair.…
CrowdStar, a fast-growing social game company, believes it has created a next-generation Facebook game with its successful It Girl title. The game makes at least three times more money per player than any other game CrowdStar has released on Facebook.…
Zynga, the fast-growing maker of social games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars, has just posted a bunch of job openings for a social game studio that it will open in Seattle.
The company plans to hire a number of game …
Can Kontagent help David topple Goliath through better analytics?
Social game companies such as Zynga consider their analytics — the data they collect about user activity in their apps — to be a competitive advantage. They can take the data, …
Maybe offering three cents per aluminum can isn’t much of an incentive to recycle. Would a game on Facebook be a better motivator?
Recycling company Greenopolis, a subsidiary of trash services giant Waste Management, seems to think so. It’s bringing …
Japan’s hot social mobile gaming firm DeNA is reportedly considering buying iPhone game publisher Ngmoco for more than $400 million.
Techcrunch reported that it heard the rumors from multiple sources and that the price is above $400 million, although that …
CrowdStar is in the midst of a growth spurt as it expands its presence in the Japanese social games market and keeps growing on Facebook.
The social game company today launched two games (Happy Aquarium and Happy Island) on Japan’s …
