Game maker Zynga launched FarmVille 3 on iOS and Android Thursday. It’s the newest version in the strategy simulation game series, which first broke out as a hit on Facebook in 2009 with FarmVille and then expanded with mobile FarmVille 2 versions in 2016 and 2018.
If you’ve ever wanted to own a garage full of incredible super cars from the likes of Ferrari and McLaren, then you’re in luck. Virtually, at least.
NaturalMotion’s CSR Racing 2, the sequel to 2012’s hit drag racing game CSR Racing (an iTunes App Store Essential game), is headed to iOS devices soon and wow is it a tour de force of graphical fidelity. The light in the game’s garage caresses every curve of these hot automobiles, shining back the deviotion the development team obviously put into each and every loving shot.
“CSR2 lets players experience the thrill of attaining not just one, but a whole garage of the most desirable cars on the planet,” writes Torsten Reil, CEO of NaturalMotion, “and it feels as close as possible to the real thing. That’s because each car, down the stitching on the seats, is built without compromise to its real-world beauty, integrity and authenticity.”
Check out the gorgeous teaser trailer below.
If you’re one of those word game fiends that has a list of Words With Friends games as long as your arm, you now can actually use that long arm to wear your games on your wrist.
Zynga just updated its hugely popular Words With Friends app to include Apple Watch features, so you never have to go another second without knowing when it’s your turn to spell “ZA” or “MUZJIKS” for the win.
For the company behind Candy Crush, developer King Digital don’t exactly seem to be crushing it in their public market debut on the New York Stock Exchange.
Shares in the popular developer — which grossed $1.88 billion last year — were valued at $22.50 on Tuesday. They then debuted at $20.50 on Wednesday, before quickly dipping to $19.06.
You’ve got to admire a game that matches its own intent so perfectly that you suddenly can’t visualize how else the genre should be done. That’s certainly the case here with Zynga’s Solstice Arena. It’s currently my favorite MOBA game on any platform, which is great, since it plays well on both iOS and the Mac. I’m reviewing the Mac version here, but assume that–aside from touch controls–the game plays exactly the same on iOS. This is a good thing.
As a genre, the action real-time strategy (ARTS), or multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA), has a history reaching back to modified RTS game maps for Starcraft and Warcraft. Recently, League of Legends from Riot Games has taken on the mantle as the most well-known game of its type, moving into the lucrative world of eSports, as well.
Zynga may be more known for Farmville and other Facebook games, but the San Francisco games publisher has delivered a much more midcore game than I expected. Developer A Bit Lucky has created a streamlined, compelling take on the ARTS genre, and while the game may not surpass more traditional entries in the field, Solstice Arena still engages players of all levels without sacrificing too much of the strategic depth of the game type.
Calling it the “first Speed MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena),” Zynga released Solstice Arena to the iOS App Store this past June. The game garnered many awards and some fairly good reviews from around the web.
Tuesday, Zynga announced that Solstice Arena was available in the Mac App Store, bringing the streamlined real-time action battle arena game to OS X.
Remember Draw Something? It was this wonderful, flash-in-the-pan game by the utterly charming developer OMGPOP, and had the misfortune of being such a success that it caught the evil overlord attentions of Zynga, who promptly bought the company, killed a game an ex-OMGPOP had privately made for his wife, and then ran the company into the ground, laying off the vast majority of the team.
OMGPOP’s practically dead now, and the only purpose the shell of the company serves is as a cautionary tale not to let Zynga touch anything good or wholesome, ever. There’s still more OMGPOP assets Zynga can kill, though: next up on the chopping block, Zynga plans to behad OMGPOP’s popular gaming portal website.
Do you like to Bang With Friends? The Facebook app, I mean, which lets you arrange hookups with your Facebook friends if both of you are anonymously up for banging. One rarely bangs with enemies, and even then, only under a “keep your enemies closer” mantra.
Well, if you do, bad news, chum. Zynga — the avatar of all that is unholy about mobile gaming — is suing Bang With Friends. Why? Because the “With Friends” part is similar to many of their game app titles, like Chess With Friends and Words With Friends.
Zynga has reportedly closed down Draw Something studio OMGPOP and laid off all of its staff just 14 months after it was acquired in a $180 million deal. OMGPOP released its Draw Something sequel back in April, but it appears it wasn’t the success the company hoped it would be.
It’s almost been five weeks since OMGPOP CEO Dan Porter teased the release of Draw Something 2, and had Ryan Seacrest advertise the title on Twitter. But it’s finally time to dust off your sketching fingers, because the sequel to one of 2012’s most popular social games is now available to download on iPhone.
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.