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Bright Lights, Big City – CityVille Downtown Launches!

Beep, beep! Honk! Screech!  Hope you like the sounds of the city because CityVille is turning up the volume with its first ever expansion - CityVille Downtown!  What is a city without a downtown?  Manhattan has one, San Francisco has one, Chicago has one, heck every city has one. Now, starting today, CityVille players can have one too. CityVille Downtown is the ultimate place for players around the world to work, live and play.

 

Players above level 20 can travel from their city in CityVille to a whole new game board to build a budding metropolis.  Players can decorate a second game board with amazing new downtown exclusive buildings and decorations.  Businesses, amphitheaters, stadiums, and skyscrapers….oh my!  This is a whole new city with new quests, rules and characters where players add property value by placing cultural, art and leisure community buildings. Each building added increases the players’ property value and unlocks new features and expansions in the game.  Imagine creating your own skyline in your own CityVille Downtown.

Players will meet Harry Hipster, Rebecca Realtor, Susie Shopaholic, and Frank the Commuter as they play. Build a hot dog cart for the twelve o’clock lunch rush or a wine bar for after work happy hours.  Neighbors can help speed up quests and finish buildings so you can build the downtown of your dreams.  Help a neighbor by sending velvet ropes for their amphitheater opening or give press passes out to the downtown newspaper reporters.  Miss your old City? Just hop on the Subway to commute back and forth between your original CityVille gameboard and your new CityVille Downtown.

Zynga wanted to make sure our friends got a taste of the new CityVille Downtown expansion so hotdogs and sodas were delivered to our pals in the press box.  Hot diggity dog! Check out the fun pics below!

Play today at cityville.zynga.com. 

Hanging With Friends…high above the streets of LA?

Have you ever thought about what it would be like to actually suffer the consequences of a loss in Hanging With Friends and plummet after five wrong guesses? Hold onto your balloons because it actually happened. In March, Zynga partnered with Ford to make its mobile social gaming literally life size on the new “Escape Routes” reality show, which debuted earlier tonight on NBC.

In the premier episode, six teams of two kicked-off their road-trip competition with a real-life Hanging With Friends game. In place of the cute and cuddly avatars, one team member dangled high above the streets of LA with a five-letter word suspended above them from a building rooftop. With each correct guess from the other teams, one balloon popped and when the fifth and final lever was revealed the hanging teammate dropped out of sight into the street below. (Don’t worry - unlike the game, they had a harness and didn’t really fall into lava.)

For Zynga Mobile, one of our goals is to deliver the best mobile social gaming experiences for our players - regardless of platform.  Bringing Hanging With Friends to life above the streets of LA takes our game to heights we’ve never imagined and we’re excited to be a part of this real world experience.

Make sure to tune in to “Escape Routes” for the next five Saturday’s on NBC at 8:00 p.m. to see what other Zynga games will come to life next.

 

OMG, Zynga Welcomes a New Member to the Family

Put down your smartphones and iPads for just a sec. I’ve got some big news. Today I’m excited to tell you about a new addition to the Zynga family, OMGPOP. This New York-based developer of social mobile games has recently received a lot of attention for their smash hit Draw Something. It’s been downloaded over 30 million times. Every second three thousand people draw something in 84 countries throughout the world. By the time you finish this paragraph, there’s a good chance 30,000 drawings have been created – many of them LOTR or Star Wars related.

 

West Coast meets… East Coast

(credit drawsomethingart, Kotaku, and Draw Something’s Facebook Page)

Needless to say Draw Something is an amazing game; I think it’s one of the most social and expressive mobile games ever built. It’s intuitive and fun. It brings out creativity, a sense of nostalgia and child-like wonder. And most importantly, it’s inherently social. You learn about your friends and family as you play, and I love that the most requested feature to date has been people asking for the ability to save not just their own drawings, but those of their friends. Some games try to incorporate user generated content in creative ways; Draw Something IS user generated content in a fun and creative game wrapper.

While Draw Something might seem like an overnight success to many, I know in spending time with OMGPOP’s team that the massive attention they’ve recently seen comes from a deep rooted history in making great social games. Since OMGPOP’s inception in 2006, the company has made over 35 multiplayer social games, including Blockles, Puppy World, and of course my new favorite, Aim For The Nuts.

OMGPOP brings to Zynga an incredible team of industry veterans and a community of highly engaged players. It’s a great industry example of creating games around the ethos of giving people a place to play, meet and make friends. OMGPOP’s existing mobile and platform games will not change. We fully support what they’ve built to date, and we’re going to work hard to give Draw Something and all of their games the resources and tools they need to grow and flourish.

Dan Porter has built an amazing team and culture at OMGPop, and I can’t wait to see what that team builds next. We think we can amplify their efforts, and we’re going to work together to make sure that more players love more of their games, both in the current stable of titles, and new IP we’ll see in the future.

At Zynga we're committed to bringing play to everyone, everywhere, and part of this mission is to build the most fun and most social games for our players. I know that the OMGPOP team will be instrumental in helping us build play for the world, one hilarious drawing at a time. Welcome to the family, guys. I’d like to end this post with a direct note from Dan Porter, CEO of OMGPOP.

Why we partnered with Zynga

Making Draw Something has been a dream come true for me and for all the people at OMGPOP. To make a game that is so popular and has made so many people happy is totally overwhelming. Frankly the only word we could use around here is humbled. To make a game that is owned, created and shared by players themselves is amazing. And to be in an incredibly fun dialogue with players around words like RZA, Katniss and pop culture as a whole has been very fun.

One of our inspirations for the game, from the interface to the asynchronous play, has always been Words with Friends. Words with Friends really blazed the trail for what we have tried to do at OMGPOP - connect people through play. When we started talking to Zynga, our team was very excited about teaming up with the leader in the games and mobile space. After long discussions with the Zynga team, we came to understand that Zynga's interest was in giving us an amazing platform, in terms of resources and talent, to continue to build different, out-of-the-box social games like Draw Something. 

Zynga offered us a chance to focus on Draw Something. They know the power of the game and they planned with us how to let it keep rolling in the same fun, irreverent and social way that it has been. That was really important to us. And they are working with us on everything else --improving performance issues in the game, planning for new games, finding even more developers to work on the game and more. For us, as a small game studio in New York City, which is not at the epicenter of gaming, to find a partner to help us bring our special brand of fun to even more people, is an incredible opportunity.

So to players of the game, don't worry. Nothing’s changing and now all the features you want -- chat and sharing and galleries and more – will come even faster. Thank you for everything. And to all future players, you are going to love the things that OMGPOP and Zynga are cooking up together.

Just like Draw Something is a cooperative game where two players work together and have a lot of fun, we hope to replicate that same feeling with OMGPOP and Zynga, It's going to be drawsome ;)

Dan Porter

CEO

OMGPOP

David Ko, chief mobile officer, Zynga & Dan Porter, CEO, OMGPOP

Zynga Receives Top Awards From Tencent: Excellent Partner and Top 10 App for Zynga City

Less than a year after announcing its partnership together, Tencent has honored Zynga with two prestigious awards: Excellent Partner and Top 10 App for Zynga City.  The two awards are a milestone for Zynga, which is one of the first international social game developers to launch a game on the Tencent Open Platform.

 

Zynga launched Zynga City beta on the Tencent platform in the autumn of 2011, and is Zynga’s first game created uniquely for the Chinese audience both in language and culture.  Zynga City is a localized version of the globally popular CityVille with brand new features such as decorations and architecture that resonate with the Chinese audience.  Currently, Zynga City is operated on the Tencent Pengyou and QZone platforms.

 

The awards were announced at a ceremony during Tencent’s Open Platform New Year Conference in Beijing today, which Tencent hosted to celebrate the top partners and developers that have made the Tencent Open Platform a success over the past year.

 

Today is a day to celebrate with Tencent and with our players who have been building, harvesting and connecting with their friends in Zynga City over the past months. We love that our players have been busy in their cities - since launching, more than 63 million residential buildings have been built, more than 64 million street peddlers have been sent to friends’ cities, and almost 7 million crops are harvested each day in Zynga City. 

 

Check out the Zynga City infographic below, which celebrates some of the game’s key milestones over the last year. Yes, this IS in Chinese, but we thought you would have fun matching the below facts with the pictures. Answers at the bottom – no peeking! 

Android Fans Get Into the Mix – Scramble With Friends Comes to Android Devices

The wait is over! We’ve listened to the demands, the pleas and gentle reminders; Scramble With Friends is now available for Android devices on Google Play.

 

The competition just got a little more “inspiring” with Scramble With Friends now available on multiple platforms, and we’re proud to open this mixed-up word warrior game to more players. We’re also humbled by the response from players to date – more than16 million rounds are played on the iOS platform each day, and, in just few a months, players have found more than 26 billion words. Tolstoy would be proud, because that’s enough words to fill up 46,428 copies of War and Peace*. While this is quite impressive, there is still work to do and scrambling to master – since the launch on the iOS platform players have missed over 184 billion words.

 

Scramble with Friends is social, fast, and bonus-packed, and takes Zynga’s original Scramble game to a new, enhanced level of social word play.  Scramble With Friends opponents compete against each other (and the clock!) to find as many words as possible throughout three fast rounds of play. Newbies, don’t be scared, stay cool. Players are taking full advantage of the in-game boosts and have used the freeze power up more than 400 million times since launch.

 

Players already familiar with the “With Friends” series of mobile social games will find some of their favorite key elements such as the in-game chat function and the same dictionary. Scramble With Friends is among the growing portfolio of mobile social games created by Zynga, and is the fourth game in the ‘With Friends’ franchise of games, which include Words With Friends, Hanging With Friends and Chess With Friends.

 

Scramble With Friends is available now for free on Google Play for Android devices and comes bundled with a home screen widget allowing players to create a new game or view the status of your in-progress games.

 

The game can also be found on the App Store for iPhone and iPod touch.

 

Bringing Scramble With Friends to Android feels right at home. Zynga is dedicated to creating and delivering the best mobile social gaming experience that reflects its players’ lifestyles and provides them with the social experiences they want - at any time and on any device, regardless of platform.

 

*The English version of War and Peace. We didn’t run the math on the French or Russian versions. 

Inside Zynga Platform Partners

Last week we unveiled the Zynga Platform for play, which is built with two very simple goals in mind: bring players more people to play with (say that ten times fast), and give them more ways to play. A major step towards those goals is Zynga.com, our new destination for social games. What I’d like to cover in this post is how third party developers fit into the mix.

I joined Zynga from Sony Computer Entertainment where I led publisher relations for PlayStation and PlayStation Network. I’ll be honest. When I was at Sony, I initially thought social gaming was a fad. I would tell anyone willing to listen that social games weren’t going to catch on. I’d debate whether social games should even be considered games. Well, after taking the leap and coming over to Zynga, I’m happy to admit I was wrong.   

Why did I make the move in the first place? Because with each new game I saw Zynga launch, and subsequently the engagement levels and scale they’re building with players throughout the world, I began to realize that Zynga is in on the ground floor of something big. Nate Bosia, my partner from PlayStation, joined me at Zynga and also works on the Platform partner team. We’re both here because we see a huge opportunity. I’m not talking about an opportunity for Zynga. I’m talking about the opportunity for all game developers. We, the industry, have a chance to bring games to the most people ever in the history of our medium.  

To do this, we need to come together to resolve a few problems. It’s easier than ever to make social games, and a ton of great games are being created by a ton of different studios. The challenge is that once your game is made, it’s often really, really hard to capture and retain an audience.

If you’re lucky enough to catch lightning in a bottle and capture an audience, you hit that technical challenge of scaling your game in a way that the sheer weight of your players doesn’t cause it to collapse. But let’s say you overcome all those challenges and gain an audience at scale, which a lot of developers have, well then you’re faced with solving the riddle of keeping players engaged over the long haul.

We know these challenges, because we’ve been there. Zynga’s DNA is social game development. We’ve learned how to scale games from zero to millions of daily players within days. Over time Zynga was able to build back end infrastructure so front end game designers could unlock their potential.

We want to help third party game developers unlock the same potential by doing a few things. We want to give developers access to the 240 million monthly active players that currently play Zynga games by publishing and promoting their games across the Zynga network. In addition, we’ll soon enable partners to tap into channels and features that increase social engagement, analytics that measure and drive social action, and provide access to back end technology that ensures scalability and availability.

Most importantly, we’re working with developers now to make the Zynga Platform something they want to tap into, and something they can help evolve. We’re humbled to see early interest from some great developers. Last week, we welcomed Row Sham Bow, Mobscience, Sava Transmedia as inaugural Zynga Platform partners.

Today, we’re proud to announce the addition of three more friends: Konami, Playdemic and Rebellion. All six of our partners are great examples of the sheer talent in the games industry today, and we can’t wait to show you what they’re cooking up.

If you’re a developer and interested in the Zynga Platform, we want to hear from you. Head over to our developer page to drop us a line. 

Big Screen, Big Fun – Hanging With Friends HD and Dream Heights HD Now Optimized for the iPad

Good news Zynga players, two of your favorite games are now available on “the large screen” for even bigger fun! Zynga announces the availability of Hanging With Friends and Dream Heights is now optimized in a special HD version for the iPad. So now it’s time to ‘hang’ out, and play with your friends to build really tall buildings and plunge into lava - all on the big screen.

 

Now available on iPad, iPhone, iPod touch and Android devices, Hanging With Friends gives you the opportunity to challenge even more friends and connect with other With Friends players across multiple platforms. Your favorite features will be the same across all platforms, including in-game chat (ahem…sweet talk) and push notifications to let you know when it’s your turn. Hanging With Friends HD for the iPad also comes complete with Missions. Continue on your quest to rescue the Princess and unlock exclusive content from the games you have been playing on your iPhone, iPod touch or Android device.

 

If you’ve been hanging out with the wrong crowd and haven’t heard about Hanging with Friends, listen up! Players choose their avatar from a lineup of delightfully colorful characters and then join their opponents in a competition to stump one another with selected words and ultimately see who can hang on the longest. Hanging on to what? Balloons!  Each player starts with five balloons at the beginning of each game. Guess a word correctly and you survive until the next round - guess wrong, and lose one of your balloons, and risk plummeting to an ego-damaging loss.

 

Hanging With Friends is a part of the With Friends family of games which includes Words With Friends, Scramble With Friends and Chess With Friends.

 

Available on iPad, iPhone and iPod touch, Dream Heights challenges you to outgrow the world’s tallest monuments by building your own tower and operating dozens of stores. Social butterflies will earn hearts and other goods by connecting and serving friends by visiting their towers, and of course your friends can always ‘hang’ in your tower too. The Skybridge enables players to see all of their friends’ towers in one place and lets friends visit your own vertical metropolis. As players progress they will go on a mini world tour, passing landmarks like the Taj Mahal, the Statue of Liberty and The Leaning Tower of Pisa.

 

Dream Heights is a part of the Dream series of games, which includes Dream Zoo and Dream PetHouse.

 

So, get your head in the clouds and stay out of the lava: download the Hanging With Friends HD free version today on the App Store here and download the Dream Heights HD free version today on the App Store here.

 

 

Zynga.com: Early Beta Open for Play

Announced a few days ago as “coming soon,” today we’re proud to cut the ribbon on the early beta of Zynga.com, a new playground for social games. Part of the Zynga Platform, Zynga.com is a destination for social games built with the goal of bringing players more people to play with and more ways to play. Check it out here: www.zynga.com

Why do I need another place to play social games, you ask? Good question*.

For years, we’ve listened to player feedback and found that players want a few simple things: more games to play, more ways to meet and connect with other players who share a love for social games and an ability to progress faster in the games they currently play. The early beta of Zynga.com is meant to deliver all of this and more.

When you visit Zynga.com, you’ll notice a few things. First off, you’ll see five games available today -- CastleVille, Words With Friends, CityVille, Hidden Chronicles and Zynga Poker -- with more coming soon. Zynga.com is completely integrated with Facebook, which means players carry their game progress to Zynga.com, easily play games with their existing friends and find others who love the same games.

Some features in the early beta version of Zynga.com include:

• Make zFriends – Connect and play with more people, beyond your Facebook friends, who love to play as much as you do.
• More Games – In addition to the five games mentioned above, soon you will be able to discover and play more social games by Zynga and third party game developers. We’re really stoked about that last part. We’ve got three great developers already on board and are looking to add more.
• Social Stream – In CityVille, wouldn’t it be cool if you could post to your feed and get help from others without having to leave your game board? Well, guess what, now you can. Get real-time access to items needed to advance faster in games by posting to Zynga’s live social stream without ever leaving your game board.
• Player Profile – A profile that is all about the way you play, highlighting your favorite games, top zFriends, recent activity and your helpfulness score to see how you stack up against friends.
• Live Chat – Without leaving the game board, you can also chat with zFriends in real-time to send gifts, strategize, or just say ‘OMG, look at the size of that beastie!’ Feeling shy? Don’t worry. We’ve got a bunch of privacy controls so you decide who and how to interact on Zynga.com.

Zynga.com is available today in 16 languages, including: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Indonesian, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, Traditional Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Thai.

For those that don’t speak geek, or Greek, beta means that Zynga.com is in its infancy. We’re working around the clock to add more features, and need your feedback to make it even better. Be sure to tell us like it is by clicking on the Feedback button at the bottom of the site while you are playing.

And check out the video below from Reed Shaffner, lead product manager of Zynga.com, to see what’s in store.

*Got more questions? Get more answers at: https://zynga.com/#/FAQ/faq.php

 

  CityVille on Zynga.com:

CastleVille on Zynga.com

Betcha Can’t Play Just Once

We like our snacks like our games: Fun, social (Eating With Friends), Accessible, and Mobile.

 

So, we’re excited to announce a new Zynga promotion, with partners Frito-Lay and Walmart. Beginning March 1, five-million specially Zynga-marked Frito-Lay snack bags, including Lay’s Classic potato chips, Doritos Nacho Cheese flavored tortilla chips, Ruffles Cheddar and Sour Cream flavored potato chips, Cheetos Crunchy cheese flavored snacks and Funyuns onion flavored rings will be available in over 3400 Walmart stores across the country. Customers can purchase any of these chip bags for some cool exclusive in-game virtual items for FarmVille, CastleVille andCityVille.

What does this mean exactly? Well, through this retail partnership we’re effectively tying together the real and virtual worlds. It’s like The Lawn Mower Man, or Total Recall, but less scary and much more delicious.

 

And, if you’re an over-achiever, fans who redeem codes from four different snack bags AND a $15 or $25 Zynga Game Card within one of the three games (choose your favorite – CityVille, CastleVille, or FarmVille) will receive an even-more-exclusive super item. Details for the promotion, which will run through April 12, can be found at www.zynga.com/crunch.

 

Talk about a virtuous, virtual cycle. No, seriously, please talk about it. Spread the word with your friends and we’ll see you in one of the The Villes!

 

Zynga Slings Classic Favorite into Social Gaming with Zynga Slingo

Valentine’s Day might have been yesterday, but love is still in the air here at Zynga. It all started when Zynga met Slingo, and Zynga Slingo was born!

For those of you who were online casual gamers of the 90s, you probably remember the wildly popular Slingo, which launched in 1996. Since then, the game has been played by over 55 million people, 50 million Slingo games have been downloaded, and almost 5 billion games have been played online – now that’s a lot of Slingos!

Zynga took this coveted casual game, kept the core gameplay that made it so popular, and has added some Zynga twists. Zynga Slingo gives players a serendipitous, yet skillful slots game with a Bingo-style game board. Zynga Slingo marks the company’s first licensed partnership.

 We’ve infused some of our own social twists on this contemporary classic, including:

• The Friend Joker: The Joker can be your best friend, literally, Spin up the face of one of your friends on Facebook, and let them make a free match for you. Don’t forget to thank them! 
• Medals of Honor: Collect medals to complete levels and unlock even more Slingo fun and features as you progress through the Slingo Worlds.
• Leaderboards: Track the scores of your friends in real time to see who has lady luck on their side, and who doesn’t.
• Power-Ups: You can also send lady luck packing by using some power-ups.  Fan favorites, including Slingo Vision, will help you find matches and the elusive Instant Slingo will explode for big points.
• Darn Devil: You’ll find lots of tricks up the Slingo Devil’s sleeve when a coin toss comes your way. Land on the Slingo Devil and lose your hard earned points, but if you get the Slingo Cherub, your score will skyrocket to the heavens.
• Play With Friends: Available soon, players can challenge friends and compete to see who can get the highest score in three rounds.

From listening to our players, and seeing the success of other Zynga games, such as Words With Friends, Zynga Poker, Hidden Chronicles, and Scramble With Friends, we realize there’s a desire to bring back classic games so you can play with friends and family anytime, anywhere.  We’re on a journey to bring play into people’s lives and make games that everyone wants to play. Here at Zynga, we all want to bring back those Sunday game nights – from sitting around the kitchen table playing Monopoly to the high-energy game of Taboo, we want to connect people through games – whether they’re sitting around the same kitchen table, or across the country.

Zynga Slingo is available to play on Facebook here:  https://apps.facebook.com/playslingo/.

The game is available in 14 languages, including: English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Turkish, Danish, German, Swedish and Norwegian.

What are you waiting for? Start spinning!