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Take-Two's $12.7 billion purchase of Zynga is complete
'Words with Friends' and 'FarmVille' now belong to Take-Two.
TikTok has been testing minigames ahead of a 'major' gaming push
After entering into a partnership with Zynga last year, TikTok has been testing a pair of mobile minigames on its platform in Vietnam.
Take-Two is acquiring mobile game giant Zynga for $12.7 billion
PC gaming Giant Take-Two has announced that it's making a big move into mobile gaming with the acquisition of Zynga for a total price of $12.7 billion.
Snapchat will be home to the latest 'Among Us' clone
Zynga's 'ReVamp' is the app's first social deception game.
Zynga buys the studio behind 'Torchlight 3'
The studio was started by Blizzard North co-founder and Diablo series co-creator Max Schaefer after he left his previous stint at Runic Games in 2016.
Today is the last day you can play the original 'FarmVille'
The original 'FarmVille' shuts down today as the end of Flash support effectively ends the game.
‘FarmVille’ is shutting down for good on December 31st
FarmVille is closing its gates on December 31st.
‘Words with Friends’ spin-off ‘Word Pop’ pits you against Alexa
Zynga's new word game is voice-based.
Snapchat now lets you play live, multiplayer games with friends
Well, it looks as if the rumors were true: Snapchat is, indeed, launching its own gaming platform. Snap made the news official at its Partner Summit, which is taking place in Los Angeles. The company said that, starting today, it will begin rolling out a series of games made exclusively for Snapchat, including one it developed itself called Bitmoji Party. Snap says what makes its games service unique is that each title is designed for "high-fidelity, synchronous" gameplay, meaning you can you play them in real-time with your friends directly through the app.
Here's the 'Words With Friends' TV show you didn't ask for
Zynga's Words With Friends is one of those few smartphone games that has survived for far longer than many early mobile titles -- it still has a huge fan base (55 million active games at any one time) 8 years after its debut. And now, the developer wants to milk that ubiquity for all it's worth. It's teaming up with MGM Television on a Words With Friends game show that would translate the phone-friendly Scrabble-alike to the big screen. While the two aren't saying much about what the show will entail, they expect to draw on the "rich social experience" of WWF and integrate pieces of other With Friends games (Crosswords With Friends seems a natural fit).
'Dawn of Titans' shrinks an epic strategy game onto your phone
This year alone, 1.4 billion smartphones will be sold, giving more people access to gaming devices than ever before. But with more than 1,000 new apps flooding the App Store every day, it's increasingly difficult for new titles to make an impact. Every so often, a game like Pokémon Go comes along, proving that if you have the right "hook," you can find a massive audience. NaturalMotion believes technology is its hook. The British gaming studio started life creating animation engines, with its software used for everything from The Lord of the Rings movies to Grand Theft Auto V. It then packed that tech into mobile games like Clumsy Ninja that, thanks to their visual edge, quickly topped the App Store. That success led to the studio being bought for $527 million by casual-gaming giant Zynga. It's been nearly three years since the acquisition, though, and the pressure is on for NaturalMotion to deliver a fresh hit.
Zynga back in court over alleged insider trading
Social game developer Zynga is being dragged back into a lawsuit that claims select board members acted unfairly on inside information by selling shares before a stock price tumble in 2012. As Reuters reports, the Delaware Supreme Court is reviving a case that alleges co-founder Mark Pincus, and a group of his fellow board members, were aware of the company's lacklustre performance. It's said that Zynga had a rule prohibiting stock sales until three days after an earnings report. Those who stand accused were given an exemption, however, and sold 20.3 million shares for $236.7 million three weeks before the announcement.
The director of 'Madagascar' takes on the Wild West of VR
As the writer/director of DreamWorks Animation's Madagascar, a blockbuster that spawned five sequels and one TV show, Eric Darnell could've easily hung up his hat and basked in his Hollywood legacy. But, instead, Darnell departed the studio he made famous last year to explore the "Wild West" of virtual reality with Baobab, an animation studio he co-founded alongside Maureen Fan, the former VP of games at Zynga. At this year's Tribeca Film Festival, the two debuted their first effort, Invasion!, a VR short featuring a lovable, alien-thwarting bunny rabbit and a prologue narrated by Ethan Hawke. "He's a big fan of VR, it turns out," says Darnell of Hawke's involvement.
Zynga's new CEO was also its first
Zynga's attempt to restore its former glory by hiring an Xbox executive as its leader hasn't exactly panned out. The game developer has announced that CEO Don Mattrick is leaving, effective immediately, with founder Mark Pincus once again taking the reins. It's not clear what prompted the sudden exit, but Pincus swears to the New York Times that Mattrick isn't getting the boot. Reportedly, the two agreed that it was a time for the changing of the guard.
Zynga continues to hemorrhage cash for the third quarter in a row
Zynga -- the company that used to take all your cash before you started giving it to Class of Clans and Candy Crush Saga -- is continuing to be exceedingly generous by spending all its cash without making any back, according to its newly released earnings report. The company, which is responsible for your Words with Friends and Farmville addictions, lost $57 million in its most recent quarter, following losses of $62.5 million and $61 million in Q2 and Q1, respectively. Despite the discouraging numbers, Zynga CEO Don Mattrick was surprisingly upbeat following the report, noting that he is "encouraged by the results of the quarter" and promising that the transitional period the company is going through will eventually pay off. King -- which has yet to come up with an original game idea -- and Clash of Clans developer Supercell have been thoroughly wiping the floor with Zynga for a while now, and it seems the company is just beginning to realize that there is no winning that fight. Zynga is now pushing its Zynga Sports 365 franchise as an evergreen option that could bring the company back into the black, so we'll have to wait and see how that goes.
New Words with Friends lets you play solo even when you're offline
Still playing Words with Friends? Well, then Zynga's rewarding your loyalty with a huge update on the app's fifth birthday, complete with a redesigned interface and new features. The New Words with Friends (yes, it's been renamed, as well) doesn't only look flatter than its predecessor, it also comes with a new feature called Solo Mode, which lets you play on your own without internet connection. It's apparently the game's most requested feature, most likely by folks who spend a lot of time outside coverage area... or those whose friends have abandoned the game years ago.
Zynga Sports 365 is social dev's sports series, stars Tiger Woods
Zynga announced a new category of games in its catalog today, Zynga Sports 365. As indicated by the name, the "multi-game brand" covers new ground for the developer by introducing mobile sports games to its repertoire, starting with the football-themed NFL Showdown game and a golf game starring iconic golfer Tiger Woods. The development of the two games is being led by Zynga Orlando, which includes five Electronic Arts veterans: Mike Taramykin, Jason Shenkman, Jeff Luhr, Ian Cummings and Michael Cayado. Cummings previously served as creative director of EA Sports' Madden series. NFL Showdown, the beginning of a multi-year licensing deal with both the NFL and NFL Players Inc, will launch "globally before the NFL season begins." The game is currently being tested in select markets. Zynga described it as a "manager-style mobile-first simulation game" in which players act as coach, general manager and owner of their favorite NFL franchises.
King, a $7 billion company, doesn't seem capable of creating an original game
There's been a lot of talk lately about a new "tech bubble" that we may or may not currently be in. This label applies to a lot of different things, from the booming smartphone and tablet market to health tech and smart home devices. But while I personally think the risk of a catastrophic tech crash is a bit overstated, there's one company that is most definitely riding high on borrowed time. That company is King, creators of Candy Crush Saga. Candy Crush Saga first debuted on Facebook way back in early 2012 before eventually making its way to app stores later that year. As everyone knows, the game is a huge hit, drawing huge revenue from its in-app purchases and rabid fan base. The success of the game eventually became a problem for King, which delayed its IPO late last year over fears from investors that King was a one-hit wonder. The thing about Candy Crush Saga is that it's not King's own invention, it's simply a tile matching game that draws heavily from games like Bejeweled, which had huge appeal as far back as 2001. This was in no doubt one of the things investors were worried about regarding King, and they still should be. Without doing much to prove it has a future making hit games, King eventually decided to file its IPO in March 2014 anyway, to the tune of over US$7 billion. That's a whole lot of cash for a company that has yet to demonstrate it is capable of creating a game without using other established titles as their base. And I don't just mean being inspired by another game or genre -- these days a truly never-before-seen game is a rarity -- but literally lifting just about every game mechanic from a different game that has no links to King whatsoever. Here are King's current App Store titles alongside the games that the company has lifted significantly from: In roughly the past two years, King has "adapted" some of the most popular puzzle games of the past 20 years and republished them as its own. That is quite simply an unsustainable business model. How unsustainable? Well rather than branch out a bit, King also has two other newer games currently available on the App Store, Farm Heroes Saga (another match-3 puzzler) and Bubble Witch 2 Saga (an updated version of its Peggle clone). And King's next big release? Candy Crush Soda Saga, which is exactly what you think it is. There are definitely some parallels to be drawn between King and Zynga, the once-master of casual games which has since fallen on hard times once the appeal of its wares wore off. The company behind Farmville launched its IPO in 2011 with an initial share price of $10. After hitting a price in the low $2 range, the stock now trades at around $3 per share and is in danger of losing its listing entirely. Like King, Zynga is a big fan of rehashing game concepts we've all played and enjoyed for years, but even with 17 current mobile games to its name, it still hasn't met even a fraction of the expectations that were set for it. Rovio, another big name in casual mobile games, has held off on any IPO chatter while adapting its hit Angry Birds franchise into a variety of genres from racing to role-playing. But even with high profile crossovers with other popular IPs like Star Wars, the company's 2013 profit was less than half of what it was in 2012. This is bad news for a $7 billion app company that has yet to prove it's capable of truly creating something gamers want from the ground up, rather than simply borrowing established ideas and giving them a new coat of paint. So if you're looking for a bubble pop, keep an eye on King, because it's riding on the biggest one in the land.
Joystiq Weekly: VR walker Omni, Hitman Go review, Mario Golf's season pass and more
Welcome to Joystiq Weekly, a "too long; didn't read" of each week's biggest stories, reviews and original content. Each category's top story is introduced with a reactionary gif, because moving pictures aren't just for The Daily Prophet. Okay, we have to admit that the Omni, a motion-tracking platform that associates real-life walking with in-game movement, is kind of ridiculous, right? Yeah, we do and we will - as long as we can also acknowledge how interesting the concept is. Sprinting in reality to hurry down a virtual hallway probably won't be as quick as strafing with arrow keys, but the tradeoff sounds worthwhile. Pairing Omni with the Oculus Rift would bring us closer to the hectic deathmatch action of games like Halo 4, but we could also do rhythmic leaps through stages of Runner 2 or wildly-dangerous imitations of Mirror's Edge's parkour. Hmm ... maybe Omni should be bundled with life insurance. We can ponder the benefits of treadmill controllers together, but if your brain needs a break from all that, there's plenty of gears to switch to after the break. Between a glimpse of the new Ace Attorney game, reviews for NES Remix 2 and Hitman Go, and an exploration of morality systems like those found in the Infamous and Mass Effect series, there's lots to think about beyond how physical our video games could be in a few decades.
Zynga founder Pincus steps down, Xbox Live GM to head Zynga Studios
Zynga Co-Founder Mark Pincus is stepping down as Chief Product Officer of Zynga, the social gaming company announced alongside its first quarter 2014 financial results today. Pincus will continue to serve in a non-operational capacity as Zynga's Chairman of the Board, a role he held in addition to company CEO until Don Mattrick was named CEO in July 2013. Additionally, Alex Garden was announced as President of Zynga Studios in the report. Garden departs Microsoft as the general manager of Xbox Live and Xbox Music, Video and Reading. Prior to that, he was CEO of Nexon Publishing North America. Garden will report directly to Mattrick, much like Zynga's new chief financial officer David Lee, who was hired this month as well. Zynga also added visual effects artist Henry LaBounta as the developer's chief visual officer. LaBounta worked with Electronic Arts and Microsoft Studios, and previously was visual effects supervisor at DreamWorks on the films Minority Report and A.I. Artificial Intelligence. [Image: Zynga]
