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Zynga's Pioneer Trail is like The Oregon Trail without the typhoid
Zynga has finally released The Pioneer Trail, the long promised sequel to FrontierVille on Facebook. Those familiar with The Oregon Trail will be right at home here but there's no indication as yet that you can die of dysentery. The game abandons many of Zynga's social gaming trademarks; rather than doing anything related to farming, players must instead journey across one of three maps. The creators claim that each one of these maps is five times larger than any of the outfit's previous games. Significantly, you can only play the game with three friends, as each player is awarded specific skills necessary to reach "Fort Courage" at the finish. The company hopes that by forcing four players together it will create "intimate gaming" experiences (translation: you can't give up if you get bored, friends are relying on you). Each map is said to take three weeks of hard pioneerin' to complete and if that still leaves you cold, remember: there's always that history textbook waiting in your app queue.
Zynga and Lady Gaga partnering up once more, opening GagaVille
Back in March, the ridiculously named pair of Lady Gaga and Zynga formed a union to donate funds for Japanese disaster relief; a goal they accomplished to the tune of $3 million. Yesterday, they announced a new partnership to raise money for Lady Gaga and Zynga, which entails the May 17 opening of "GagaVille" -- a neighboring region to FarmVille that features unicorns, crystals and an early chance to listen to unreleased tracks from the stylish songstylist's upcoming album, "Born this Way." Other promotions include a free download voucher for the album included with every $25 Zynga gift card sold at Best Buy, a Words with Friends contest to snag Gaga merch, and a handful of Gaga-themed items added to the RewardVille storefront. Now, if you don't mind, we're going to print off this article, throw it in a time capsule and bury it in our yard, because in 50 years we're pretty sure most of the words we've used so far are going to be hilariously nonsensical.
What is Zynga doing to that sheep? Brian Reynolds on the power of innuendo
During a presentation at SXSW Interactive yesterday, Zynga chief designer Brian Reynolds shared an emergent game feature that the team discovered when making Frontierville, one designed to appeal to juvenility. The "tutorial" mission in Frontierville involves finding a lost sheep and bringing it back, he explained. Because it's a Facebook game, you get the option to post when you've done so, which shares a little blurb about your achievement and a picture of a cartoony character struggling to pull a stubborn sheep. But that's not what players' friends saw. "What is she doing to that sheep?" was a common refrain from people who saw that post, Reynolds said. "The look on the sheep's face kind of sells it." But this wasn't a problem, as it turned out. That pseudo-scandalous sheep image "has our highest post rate and our highest clickthrough rate," he explained, with many more replies to those posts creating increased visibility, and thus inadvertently promoting Frontierville. And so Zynga went forward with innuendo-laden status messages, more examples of which you can see above. At the end of the presentation, Reynolds answered a question about his reaction to Satoru Iwata's GDC keynote, during which Iwata pretty clearly denounced social and mobile games in general. "I don't understand why they'd feel threatened," he said, suggesting that social games and console games can coexist. "Maybe that person thinks a lot about console games," but not about mobile games.
Rumor: Google invests $100+ million in Zynga, preparing to launch gaming platform
Google has "secretly" invested an undisclosed amount of money (estimated to be between $100 million and $200 million) in virtual Ville creator Zynga Games, TechCrunch claims. Why would one highly profitable company dump such a large amount of duckets into another successful company's coffers? TechCrunch believes that it's part of a strategy to partner with Zynga Games in the forthcoming launch of something called "Google Games." The service is said to use Google logins and will presumably run the Zynga titles popularized by Facebook, albeit with a different payment system (allegedly Google Checkout rather than PayPal). Though these claims are still unsubstantiated -- neither Google nor Zynga have officially confirmed the report -- a recent Google job listing for a "Project Management Leader, games" seems to lend the idea some credence.
Zynga's Frontierville already has 5 million daily active users
Zynga recently learned a very profitable lesson from the launch of its newest casual networking game -- people aren't obsessed with Farms, as it turns out. What they can't get enough of are Villes. The player base for Frontierville, a browser-based family-raising (and, yes, farming) sim set in the Wild West, is evidence of this assertion -- Zynga emailed us earlier today, announcing the game has racked up over 5 million "daily active users" since going live June 9. Now that we know the keyword capable of attracting millions of potential consumers, we're wondering how we can cash in on its potential. We know we just went through a pretty major relaunch, but we're wondering if its too late to rebrand our humble news site as 'Stiqville. We'll talk to the people upstairs.
