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Zynga crowns Lady Gaga as FarmVille's newest cash cow
What better way to market a game that isn't really a game than with an artist who isn't really an artist? Such was the rationale, apparently, behind Zynga's recent decision to partner with Lady Gaga, the freshly anointed face of FarmVille. As of May 17th, FarmVille users will be able to take a much-needed break from wasting their lives and visit GagaVille -- a neighboring but equally fake farm full of unicorns, crystals and terrible life decisions. There, visitors will be able to listen to unreleased tracks from Gaga's forthcoming album, Born This Way, which they can also download for "free," once they've dropped $25 of their parents' hard-earned cash on a Zynga gift card. The campaign will mercifully come to an end on May 26th, but not before Diet Madonna extends her corporate leviathan to every corner of Zynga's gaming universe, including Words With Friends, Mafia Wars and anything else your pre-teen cousin spends far too much time playing. Gaga will win. Zynga will win. The human race, on balance, will lose. If you haven't slit your wrists yet, the PR after the break should do the trick.
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.
The best iOS apps I used in 2010
After looking back over Mac and Mac/iOS hybrid apps, it's time to look at the best iOS apps of 2010. As before, this list comes from my particular experience over the past year with these apps. 1) iCab Mobile (US$1.99, universal) is a replacement for mobile Safari. While it is hindered by the fact that iOS doesn't have anywhere to set a "default browser," and therefore most URLs that you open from the Springboard or email/Twitter/etc... will open in Safari, iCab offers plenty of features that make it worth the effort. It is the first app on my dock, and I much prefer it over Safari. Although it uses the same rendering engine as Safari, it comes with a host of features that Safari doesn't have. iCab Mobile will let you download files, which you can either offload to your computer later or upload to Dropbox from right within the app. Tap and hold an image, and you can save it right to your Dropbox. iCab on the iPad also does "real" tabs, with a visible tab present (it will auto-hide when not needed, if you want). You can set it to open links in new tabs, or open only links to different domains in new tabs. It has content filtering built-in, as well as module support for things like Instapaper, viewing HTML source or even downloading videos from YouTube. It also has a forms manager and a kiosk mode, and as Mike pointed out in November it supports VGA mirroring for presentation use. Web browsing is one of the primary uses of my iPad, and iCab Mobile is well worth the minimal asking price. Find out more at iCab Mobile's website. See the rest of my choices below.
Apple reveals 2010's most popular iOS games
Do not adjust your computer monitors, friends -- you might think they're acting up, considering how many times the words "Angry Birds" are about to be repeated after the jump. It's not a deja vu-like glitch in the Matrix; Rovio's poultry-flinging casual game made its way into nearly every category of Apple's recently released rankings for the most popular iOS games of the year. These lists are split into the most downloaded free apps, top selling paid apps and top grossing paid apps on the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad -- check them all out after the jump. Unfortunately, these lists are ranked alphabetically instead of by actual downloads, but considering some of the repeated victors include Plants vs. Zombies, Bejeweled 2+ Blitz and Words with Friends, we think we can accurately fudge the numbers: They were all downloaded a spajillion times.
Zynga buys Newtoy, studio rebranded as Zynga With Friends
Well how about this -- Facebook and social game giant Zynga has bought up iPhone developer Newtoy, makers of the popular Games with Friends apps, including Words with Friends and Chess with Friends. Newtoy has now been rebranded as Zynga With Friends, and will apparently be working on new titles for Zynga in their own style. There's no word on what kind of money changed hands, unfortunately, but Zynga is worth around $5.6 billion, so it has plenty to spend. This is that company's seventh such deal in as many months. As deals for iPhone devs go, this is a big one -- Newtoy previously also worked on the We Rule title for Ngmoco, so the studio has extensive experience in social mobile gaming and monetizing those experiences. Zynga is the company behind Farmville, the most successful social game out there, with its own deep roots in the social gaming field. So this will be an interesting combination to be sure. We just chatted with Newtoy's David Bettner at the Austin GDC a little while ago, and he'll be stepping into the position of studio director, with his brother Paul Bettner becoming a Zynga VP and GM of the new studio. Bettner also told us that the company was working on "at least three prototypes that were up and playable," but it's not clear whether those titles will continue to be made or whether Zynga will have their own products for the former Newtoy devs to work on. If nothing else, this is a big vote of confidence in the App Store yet again -- Words with Friends has been a runaway hit for Newtoy, and clearly Zynga sees potential in the "with Friends" brand.
Words With Friends HD for iPad gets a free version
While the paid version of Words With Friends HD has been enjoyed by iPad owners who are willing to spend US$2.99 for quite some time, those of you looking for the free version are now in luck. Touch Arcade says that, just like its iPhone cousin, this version (released by Newtoy) is supported by in-game advertising, and does almost everything that the paid version is able to do; it even has the ability to play up to 20 simultaneous games. Since this game seems to take up a good chunk of my day, being able to get it for free is just an added bonus for an already great game. And really, who minds the little ads when the app is free? With more than two million daily users, I am guessing that not too many people do.
GDC Online 2010: Interview with Newtoy's David Bettner
Last week, during GDC Online in Austin, Texas, I saw a panel run by Newtoy's David Bettner. Later in the week, Bettner himself met up with me to talk about the company and its popular Games With Friends titles for the iPhone. Though the company is doing great with its own App Store games (Words With Friends has over 10 million downloads and a surprisingly active user base), the first game that I asked about was actually We Rule. Newtoy designed that one for Ngmoco, and it's become one of the pioneering "freemium" titles on the App Store, using in-app purchases to fund a free-to-play Farmville-style game. Bettner told me that We Rule was the product of two companies, not just a work-for-hire. "It was a fun collaboration with Ngmoco," he said. "It was not the typical publisher/developer kind of a relationship. It was more of a collaboration of ideas." The idea for "mojo," the in-app product that pushes We Rule's gameplay forward, actually drove the whole project, both from a design and a monetization standpoint. "It was a fantastic sort of thing where as soon as you use mojo on a crop, you're like oh, I get this now, " Bettner said. "It's this magic thing that I can do to speed things up." Players have been split on the use of microtransactions in App Store titles like that, but Bettner said the model very much appeals to iPhone developers -- "the total lack of friction" on in-app purchases makes it easy to sell items in-game.
iPhone dev cheers short development, quick patching at GDC Online
Vijay Thakkar is the technical director at Newtoy, the company responsible for iPhone hit Words with Friends, as well as a former developer on Star Wars: Galaxies and at the late Ensemble Studios. He took the stage at GDC Online 2010 this morning to run a panel about how to embrace mobile gaming, and while extolling the virtues of Apple's mobile platform and its constant online connectivity, he took aim at the traditional game industry's long development times and buggy releases. Thakkar railed for a bit on a bug found recently in the latest title of his "favorite gaming franchise ever," Metroid: Other M. When the save-breaking bug appeared in the game, Thakkar recounted, Nintendo couldn't use the Wii's internet connectivity to patch the game. Instead, Thakkar pointed out, the company had to "ask players to 'send us your memory card.'" "That's awful," Thakkar added. It's 2010, he said, developers should have ongoing access to update and patch their games when necessary, and he pointed to the iPhone as a platform where games could be released and patched quickly. "At Newtoy, we've completed full games in less time than it took me to design systems for older triple-A titles." This agility means that developers can not only fix bugs quickly after launch, but they can also prototype new ideas ridiculously fast (Thakkar said that Newtoy had created one internal test game in just two workdays). Plus, this business model lends itself to filling in and growing features according to player demand after release -- something that a lot of big, lumbering developers haven't figured out how to do yet.
GDC Online 2010: Newtoy and Words with Friends' 10 million downloads
Newtoy is the company behind the popular Games With Friends brand on the App Store, featuring Chess With Friends and the extremely popular Words With Friends. If you're on Twitter, you probably already knew that Words With Friends was popular (it's all over the service), but you might not have realized just how popular. Newtoy's own David Bettner took the stage here at GDC Online 2010 in Austin, Texas for a panel and said that the game has had 10 million downloads so far. That's allowed him, his brother Paul, and their cousin to take Newtoy from a company of three people working on laptops in a library (though they admittedly had a lot of good experience as developers at Age of Empires dev Ensemble Studios) to a 30-person game studio with a bright future in what Bettner calls "turn-based asynchronous mobile gaming." And that stat isn't the only interesting one that Bettner shared. Of those 10 million downloads, half have played the game in the last month. The Words With Friends app has two million daily active users and five million monthly active users. And of those users, 60% were brought in to the game by their friends (which makes for a very viral cocktail), and a whopping 40% play the app ten times or more per day.
TUAW's Daily App: HexaLex
HexaLex is a new title from developer Nathan Gray that offers up an interesting twist on the online Scrabble phenomenon. HexaLex has the same basic rules as most other word games (Words with Friends being probably the most popular iPhone title so far), with one big change: instead of squares, you use hexes to mark out the words. That creates a few interesting gameplay effects, including that you get a "bye" of two nonsense words per turn. If you can use the hexes to spell out multiple words, though, you can build up your score that way, too. Other than that, things aren't too different; you have a number of tiles to choose from, you can shuffle or exchange them as needed, and there's a full online complement to the game, complete with push notifications and nice options to brag or send messages back and forth. Unfortunately, the online service requires an account, which is something that probably would have been an obstacle for me if I was just checking out the game on my own. That's the main issue with a game like this -- if all of your friends are already playing Words with Friends, you'll be hard pressed to get them all to switch. Still, if you're a big wordsmith or if you have a few fellow players who are ready for a new variation on word games, HexaLex is worth a look. You can check the game out for US $2.99.
iPad game announcements out early and often
The trickle of iPad games released last week has now become a flood of iPad software news. Everybody is climbing over themselves to get the word out there about launch titles. Mobile Entertainment has what's probably the biggest news: another new swarm of titles has been found in the App Store's database, including iPad versions of the popular Fieldrunners and Flick Fishing games. Fieldrunners is a little more expensive than the iPhone version, at US$7.99, while Flick Fishing is one the few iPhone games keeping its price, logging in at $2.99. Words with Friends HD has also been announced, and it looks excellent -- big, bright, and beautiful on the iPad's screen. The extra space also gives a little more breathing room for chatting while playing with friends. There's not a lot of actual information about the game out yet, but we presume that you will be able to play with friends still using the game on their iPhone. Doodle Blast HD was announced as well, and it looks good. There's no doubt at this point that the iPad's App Store will have plenty of titles ready to go on day one.
Our favorite iPhone games of 2009
The first full year of the App Store is coming to a close, and so let's take a look back at our favorite games of 2009. Note that these aren't best-selling, most important, or even the best games of the year -- we'll leave those lists to other sites. But these are our favorite games -- the games we played this year that we feel stand out as our favorite experiences on the App Store. The list begins after the read more link below, and be sure to agree, disagree, or share your own favorite games as usual in the comments.
