OMGPOP CEO Dan Porter has confirmed that a sequel to the smash hit drawing game Draw Something is “coming soon.” The first screenshot of the new title was posted to Twitter by none other than TV host Ryan Seacrest shortly before Porter made the news official.
“I somehow convinced them to give me #DrawSomething2 first,” Seacrest wrote.
Zynga has announced that it will kill off 11 of its social games as part of a new cost-reduction plan that aims to improve its profitability. Many of the titles have already been closed and removed from app stores, while others will be shuttered in the coming weeks and months. PetVille, FishVille, and Mafia Wars 2 are three of the titles on the hit list.
When you combine all the titles in Apple’s App Store with those in Google Play, you have a catalog of more than 1.4 million apps from hundreds of thousands of developers. But incredibly, more than 50% of the revenue made by these stores in the United States goes to just 25 app developers.
It’s been nearly three years since Rovio’s first Angry Birds game made its debut on iOS devices, and you might have thought that interest in the series may have died down a little in that time. But you’d be very wrong indeed. According to the Finnish firm, Angry Birds games still see more than 200 million active users every single month.
Developer Phosphor Games knocks it out of the park with a new, beautiful iOS game named after protagonist, Horn. The game uses the Unreal Engine and multitouch-based gestures to a third-person action adventure game. While the technology, visual style and swipe-based combat in Horn bring to mind Infinity Blade, it’s clear from the start that this is something different.
From the App description:
The uber-popular social drawing app Draw Something, appears to be drawing less attention ever since Zynga bought out the game’s creators OMGPOP for $200 million. According to Atlantic Wire magazine, the month after Zynga’s purchase, the app saw a 5 million user drop in daily usage. That’s a pretty significant drop, whether directly related remains unknown, but it’s either that, or people have simply lost interest in the game.
Just six months after announcing that developers must stop accessing a device’s unique device identifier (UDID) within their iOS apps, Apple put its rule into practice last week amid increasing privacy concerns surrounding mobile apps. Any app submitted for App Store approval will soon be rejected if its attempts to access a UDID, and developers need an alternative.
That alternative could come from AppRedeem, a mobile advertising platform for app discovery, branding and monetization, which has developed a system called Organizational Specific Device Identifier, or “ODID,” already being used by Groupon.
Zynga — the publisher of some of your favorites games on iOS and Facebook — is a pretty scummy company, well known for ripping off other companies’ games wholesale and then having their own employees vote it up in the rankings. Sleazy!
So when they purchased OMGPOP, the company behind the wildly addictive and stupendously successful iOS and Android game Draw Something, eyebrows arched all over the blogosphere. Surely it was only a matter of time before Draw Something transformed from a good-natured game of remote Pictionary into something that makes babies’ brains into slurpees. How long until evil struck OMGPOP? Less than a week!
Zynga’s latest iOS game Dream Heights received a lot of stick when it was first announced, and there’s no denying that it was all deserved. After all, it is a blatant clone of Tiny Tower, the App Store’s best game of 2011, from a small team of independent developers called NimbleBit.
The title is now available to download from the U.S. App Store, and according to the reviews it’s already received, Zynga employees love it.
Zynga Games is a company that has made most of its many millions on games “inspired” by other titles. And by “inspired,” we mean “shamelessly ripped-off.” Mafia Wars was a rip-off of Mob Wars. Words With Friends is a rip-off of Scrabble. Cafe World is a rip-off of Restaurant City. And so on.
So when Zynga came knocking and wanted to buy up NimbleBits, developers of Tiny Tower (which Apple recently named one of their games of the year), it didn’t take a genius to figure out that if the deal didn’t go through, Zynga would rip-off NimbleBit’s games anyway. And — shocker — it turns out that’s just what happened.
