Hasbro, a multinational toy and board game company with the rights to the official Scrabble game, is teaming up with Zynga, a social network game developer with a number of popular titles under its belt, including Words with Friends, an online knockoff of Scrabble. The partnership gives Hasbro the rights to produce a wide range of toys and games based on Zynga's online games and brands, the two companies announced today.
The app developers behind the mobile iOS game Tiny Tower recently 
Brothers and business partners David Marsh and Ian Marsh put out a mobile iOS game called Tiny Tower. Perhaps you've heard of it. Apple named it the best iPhone game of 2011, and it currently has a 4.5/5 star rating on iTunes based on more than 98,000 rating submissions. Zynga liked it so much that it released (in Canada) what appears to be a blatant rip off of the free game, and is charging for it.
The company responsible for Farmville, Mafia Wars, and several other popular social games is finding out that nothing's guaranteed in the second coming of the dot-com bubble. Zynga shares began trading today, and at first, it looked as though Zynga would follow in the footsteps of Groupon, LinkedIn, and other social sites that have gone public and exploded on the stock market.
Zynga, the social gaming company that's made a fortune on casual titles like FarmVille and Mafia Wars, is looking to raise $1 billion or more with its stock price between $8.50 and $10 a share. The plan is to sell 100 million shares, with another 15 million earmarked just in case demand goes over the top, which it probably will considering the past success of social Web-based IPOs.
A new report details some seriously shady practices at FarmVille maker Zynga last year. Apparently the firm was using large batches of stock to entice the hottest talent in silicon valley to join up. This is fairly common in tech start-ups. However, in the process for planning it’s impending IPO, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus became worried they had given out too much stock. His solution was simple: force employees to give it back.
After Freddy Got Fingered, we really shouldn't be surprised at the junk Hollywood will cast on the silver screen. Yet somehow we're still a little shocked that Farmville is making the move from Facebook to the local cinema, or at least that's what IGN was able to extrapolate from a recent interview with Toy Story writers Alec Sokolow and Joel Cohen.
Zynga was founded in 2007, and then proceeded to sap as much productivity from Facebook users as was possible. The maker of games like Farmville and Cityville filed for an IPO back in June, but reports are claiming that the company is now backing off, and could delay the offering until November or later.
There's big bucks in farming (Farmville), whacking the competition (Mafia Wars), exploring the wild west (Frontierville), raising pets and dressing them up (Petville), exploring islands (Treasure Isle), and, well, hopefully by now you get the idea. Zynga's various 'villes and other social games have turned the San Francisco game company into a multi-billion juggernaut, according to an amended SEC filing, CNet reports.
Zynga and Facebook go together like peanut butter and jelly or beans and franks: it's hard to imagine one without the other. Who doesn't like to enjoy a quick game of Mafia Wars or Farmville when they're done checking in on their friends? But Zynga wants to point out that its an apple to Facebook's orange in one crucial way: privacy. Zynga suffers when users shun Facebook due to privacy concerns, so the company just released a new game called PrivacyVille to walk users through their privacy policies in an interactive way.Connect with MaximumPC
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