Social games publisher Jolt Online brings Playboy to Facebook – “don’t tell your girlfriend” Is there no escape from the Playboy franchise? Jolt Online, the Ireland-based social games publisher that was acquired by GameStop last December, has unveiled its latest Facebook game: Playboy Party. Described as featuring “pretty much all the things that you can imagine from a Facebook Playboy game” – I haven’t a clue what that means – the accompanying press release assures us that you’ll “find it entertaining”. “This is our Christmas present to the Internet”, proudly boasts Dylan Collins, Chairman of Jolt Online Gaming. “We almost went blind developing this game but we think that Playboy Party will keep you entertained anywhere you can access your Facebook account”. Ooh err. If you’re of the social gaming type, you can swap farm animals for Playboy bunnies by visiting apps.facebook.com/playboyparty or search for ‘Playboy Party’. Still tempted? Social Gaming: an engagement opportunity for news publishers.
Last week in Paris, Social Media Club France hosted an event titled "Audience Engagement and Monetisation: Social Gaming, a model to follow? " where the crème-de-la-crème of France's fast-emerging social gaming sector partook in a fascinating panel discussion. Presenters included notables such as KRDS, one of only two agencies in France to be included in Facebook's Preferred Developers Consultant Program, and IFeelGoods, which is the first platform that lets retailers provide Facebook Credits as marketing incentives.
Moderated by Benoit Raphael, co-founder and former editor-in-chief of Le Post.fr, the discussions covered the elements of success for social games and Facebook apps, as well as the enormous potential for virtual credits to revolutionize the way money is exchanged online. Highlights of the panel discussion can be found here, what this post is about is how this lesson in game dynamics can be applied to news sites. Badges, badges, badges...and MORE badges! Engagement Analytics. Peter Relan On How CrowdStar Plans To Take On Zynga, EA And Playdom In 2011. With 45 million monthly active users on Facebook, CrowdStar is now the second largest social gaming network behind Zynga (which has 275 million monthly active users). Second in line in the social gaming race isn’t bad for a startup that has received only $100,000 in funding and is one-tenth the size of Zynga in terms of employees.
And with a new CEO at the helm and a fast growing set of popular games, CrowdStar is gearing up for a big 2011 to help the company grow in terms of users and games. We sat down with Peter Relan, newly appointed CEO of CrowdStar to talk about how he plans to move the company forward in 2011. Relan is also the chairman of the incubator YouWeb (where CrowdStar first received funding), but stepped into the CEO role recently. CrowdStar, which is best known for producing Facebook social games Happy Aquarium, It Girl, Happy Pets and Mighty Pirates, is currently seeing 50 percent of its traffic coming from international markets. FarmVillains - Page 2 - News. One of the Internet's greatest success stories in 2010 can be found in a former potato chip factory on Vermont Street in Potrero Hill.
This is the original office of Zynga, the S.F. -based creator of online "social" games — FarmVille, a simple application in which participants plant and harvest crops, is the company's best-known product — that in three years has gone from scrappy startup to the toast of Silicon Valley. Since launching its first Internet game in 2007, Zynga has grown rapidly. The company's true earnings are unknown to outsiders, but industry observers estimate that its annual revenue could now be $500 million or more. In light of Zynga's phenomenal rise, one former senior employee recalls arriving at the company eager to discover what new business practices were driving its success in a market where other popular Web 2.0 ventures struggled to make money. Jim Wilson/The New York Times/Redux Joseph Schell Alex St.
Related Stories More About It's tough to argue with success. Why The Gamification Of Everything Is A Bad Thing | Product Management Meets Pop Culture. “Gameification” is a hot topic right now. From business to health care to life itself, the idea of using the techniques of game design (especially meta game design) to get consumers more interested in non-game products and services has taken on a life of its own.
Image source: Gameify It’s easy to see why. Good games are highly engaging, with the potential of helping you connect with players in meaningful and lucrative ways. But the gamification of everything is a bad thing. Let’s be honest Some people in the gaming community have dismissed certain kinds of popular games (particularly the Facebook games popularized by Zynga) as Skinner boxes that are essentially playing the consumer rather than the consumer playing a fun game. I don’t necessarily agree or disagree with that sentiment. However, in the conversations around “gameification”, you could substitute the word “reward” with “trick” and get a much truer sense of what’s really grabbed hold of every marketer’s attention.
New Around Here? CityVille Is Now Bigger than FarmVille. Facebook game developer Zynga has proved once again that it knows exactly what it needs to do to keep millions of Facebook users happy and occupied. In less than a month, its latest game CityVille has become the most popular application on Facebook, surpassing Zynga's previous hit FarmVille in all areas. According to AppData, CityVille now has 16.8 million daily active users, compared to FarmVille's 16.4 million. Looking at monthly active users, CityVille is also ahead with 61.7 million users, while FarmVille trails behind with 56.8 million users. Zynga's FrontierVille and Texas HoldEm Poker also round out the top five: put those four apps together (we'll disregard the fact that many of those users overlap for a second) and you have a very impressive number: 184 million active users across four games.
[via All Things Digital] Inside Social Games - Tracking Innovation at the Convergence of Games and Social Platforms. OpenFeint - The coolest thing since sliced awesome. Intel investit dans le jeu social sur mobile. PopSugar + FarmVille = Retail Therapy | Marketing Virtuel. Face au succès gigantesque de Farmville, de nombreux éditeurs se lancent dans la course et proposent une armée de clones comme Country Story ou We Farm. Différents déclinaisons ont également été faites en reprenant les mêmes mécaniques de jeu (pirate, restaurant, hôtel, pionniers…). Mais tout récemment, c’est un concurrent inattendu qui est rentré dans la dance : PopSugar, l’éditeur de la galaxie de sites feminins avec un social games de gestion de boutique de fringues : Introducing PopSugar’s Retail Therapy Game on Facebook!.
Le principe de ce jeu est d’ouvrir et de gérer une boutique de prêt-à-porter. Le fonctionnement est assez classique dans la mesure où vous utilisez votre compte Facebook pour vous identifier et que vous commencez par la création de votre avatar : Première constatation : Les marques sont ouvertement présentes dans le catalogue de fringues proposées (GAP, Banana Reopublic…). Ensuite vient l’étape d’aménagement de votre boutique (décoration, mobilier, agencement…). Playfish. Chugulu. Controversies Swirl Over Purity Of Social Games, Microsoft’s Jab At ‘Nerds’ « Digital Connections – 360i Blog, Digital Marketing Agency. Earlier this month, Microsoft hosted several press events to introduce its Kinect motion control product to fashion and lifestyle press and bloggers, aiming squarely at the casual set to sell its $200 competitor to Nintendo’s profitable domination of the casual console market.The message Microsoft wanted to send was that Kinect was for the cool kids, and decidedly not its core gamer audience.
AtomicPC was at the event, and reported that Microsoft’s director of entertainment and devices, David McLean, quipped to his audience “Gaming’s not just for sweaty thirty year olds in Metallica t-shirts,” among other digs at “basement-dwelling nerds” and “impenetrable control schemes.” The core gamer community’s reaction has been extremely negative. Atomic PC’s writer on the scene said “It’s a doubly galling revelation. It’s nothing about Zynga that hasn’t been said before, but this time, Gamasutra’s Nicholas Lovell laid into the exposé’s author, accusing him of elitism. “You know what I think. Ngmoco:)