The Future of Social Games is Mobile: Tech News « Japanese social platform maker DeNA is snapping up mobile game maker Ngmoco, in a deal worth up to $403 million. The acquisition reflects the growing interest in social gaming companies and underscores how mobile is the future of social gaming, much like it’s the future for all web services. Ngmoco, an iFund company funded by Kleiner Perkins, has had a string of hits such as We Rule, Rolando and Topple on the iPhone and is now poised to begin selling apps on Android after a reported investment from Google.
DeNA, which runs a popular social platform called Mobage Town, has bought a number of social gaming companies, including Gameview and AstroApe and also invested in Aurora Feint. The company is looking to compete with Facebook game maker Zynga, which is branching out into mobile, and companies like Disney, which recently bought Tap Tap Revenge maker Tapulous and social game maker Playdom in July. Google has also gotten into the act, buying SocialDeck in August. Zynga Buys Conduit Labs; Social Gaming Giant’s Footprint Now Includes Boston. Wade Roush8/17/10 [Updated, see page 2] San Francisco-based Zynga, continuing the acquisition spree enabled by the massive success of its social games for Facebook, MySpace, and the Apple iPhone, has acquired Conduit Labs, the three-year-old music gaming company based in Cambridge, MA. Zynga announced the acquisition in a press release. Conduit, headquartered in the Barron Building at 614 Massachusetts Avenue in Central Square, will now be known as “Zynga Boston” and its team will be “immediately integrated into Zynga’s workforce,” according to the announcement.
Zynga isn’t saying how much it paid for the startup. Conduit Labs was formed in 2007 by Nabeel Hyatt, formerly chief operating officer at MIT spinoff Ambient Devices. Backed by $8.5 million in venture financing from Charles River Ventures in Waltham, MA, and Prism VentureWorks of Westwood, MA, the startup first gained notoriety for Loudcrowd, a casual gaming community launched to the public in March 2009. Zynga’s FrontierVille Hits 20 Million Monthly Users.
People sure love clobbering virtual snakes. Social gaming powerhouse Zynga has just released the latest stats for its new game FrontierVille, and it’s clear that it’s off to a solid start: around five weeks after launching, the game is now up to 20 million monthly users, with around 6 million Daily Active Users (DAUs). That’s up from 5 million DAUs on June 22, when the game had around 12 million monthly users. Zynga has also released the following stats about what people are actually doing on their virtual frontiers: 6.3 million people have built their frontier cabins 3.3 million people have built a general store 2.3 million people got married 1.1 million people have had a kid 10 million people have clobbered a snake (snakes were clobbered 252 million times) 3.6 million people have scared away a bear (bears were scared away 128 million times) So why is this significant? How Google’s Investment In Zynga Helps.
This post is written by Guest Author Byrne Hobart, a marketing consultant at NYC-based Blue Fountain Media. Blue Fountain Media helps clients with website design & development, online marketing, graphic & logo design and more. A few months ago, it would have been fair to treat Zynga as a partially-owned subsidiary of Facebook. The big question for investors was how much Facebook ‘owned’. Since Facebook was Zynga’s platform—their sole source for new customers, and the only way existing customers worked with them—Facebook could theoretical “tax” Zynga, demand a change in strategy, or even shut it down.
But in the last few months, that situation has changed completely. It started in May: Zynga had an all-hands meeting in which they prepared to leave Facebook entirely. Days later, they announced a settlement: Zynga will use Facebook credits, and Facebook will give them free advertising. But at the same time, Zynga was pushing those new users into interactions outside of the site:
Zynga CEO Mark Pincus: “Frontierville Is The Most Successful Lau. With a massive membership of more than 230 million gamers, one of the biggest challenges that social game company Zynga faces is keeping up its growth. One of the secrets to its success is the ability to use its existing hits (Farmville, Texas HoldEm Poker, Mafia Wars, etc.) to cross-promote new games and help launch those games. Its other advantage is that so many people now play its games that new games now get free a ton of press and blog coverage. Last week, Zynga introduced its latest game, FrontierVille. Speaking at the Wired Business Conference today, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus reports, “FrontierVille is the most successful launch we’ve ever had.” Zynga spent more money developing FrontierVille than any other game so far. In other words, Farmville and other Zynga games will behave more like virtual economies, with trade centered around specialization.
The other big opportunity is to link the virtual goods in the games with real-world goods or e-commerce goods via affiliate marketing. Zynga Raises Massive $147 Million Investment From Japan's Softba. Zynga’s FrontierVille Breaks 5 Million Daily Active Users. On June 9th, social gaming powerhouse Zynga launched its latest creation: FrontierVille. The game takes many of the gameplay elements found in Zynga’s smash hit Farmville and adds some of adventure and spontaneity (not to mention a Wild West theme) to help spice things up.
Today, less than two weeks after launch, the company says that it has 5.2 million daily active users. To give some context to that stat, it was only eight days ago that Zynga CEO Mark Pincus announced that the game had over 1 million DAUs. Zynga’s Farmville (which just had its one year anniversary) has around 18 million daily active users according to Inside Network’s AppData leaderboard. So why does this matter? Some other interesting stats about the game so far: Zynga’s FarmVille Now Rolling Out To The App Store. Earlier this month at Apple’s WWDC keynote, Steve Jobs invited Zynga CEO Mark Pincus to show off a new iPhone application: FarmVille. The smash hit, which until now has been available exclusively on the web (mostly Facebook) is finally coming to the iPhone, and it’s going to make a killing.
As MacStories first noticed, the game is now available in the New Zealand App Store, and appears to be propagating to other countries worldwide — expect it to go live in the US later this evening. Upon launching the game, users are asked to enter their email address to join FarmVille Mobile. You’re then asked to log in via Facebook Connect (so you can access your existing farm and friends), and whether or not you want to enable push notifications so you can get immediate alerts whenever you have crops ready to harvest (addicts will love this). The game is free, and will probably make a killing on in-app purchases. I give it 24, tops, until it’s the number one app on the App Store.