Zynga May Be Readying a City-Building Game
Zynga has been in the news twice already this week, between the acquisition of Conduit Labs and a Chinese-language version of Texas Hold’em Poker. There’s another, unofficial item, though: the company’s next game may be called CityVille, according to a new forum spotted on Zynga’s website by Games.com.
There’s nothing except the name of the forum so far, but it doesn’t take a great imaginative leap to figure out that it could be the name of a city-building game like Social City or My Empire. Earlier this year, Zynga also ran player surveys asking if they’d like to see a city-builder.
One might also take Zynga’s past history into account. Although the days of cloning another game’s look or mechanics are long past, Zynga has still paid close attention to trends that work with its releases this year. Treasure Isle may have been modeled on an earlier game called Treasure Madness, while FrontierVille combines FarmVille with a dash of city (or homestead) building and a Western theme, which has been prominent in other media.
We called the nascent city building trend in February, and Social City proved it could draw the crowds when it hit its peak of 12.6 million monthly active users in April and May. Zynga has had longer development cycles this year, so the timing looks about right too.
Zynga declined to comment, so we’ll have to wait and see.
August 19th, 2010 at 5:32 am
“Although the days of cloning another game’s look or mechanics are long past, Zynga has still paid close attention to trends that work with its releases this year.”
Uhm, what? Seriously? Zynga’s hasn’t put out an original idea ever. Cloning is what they do with perhaps some minor adjustments here and there. What Zynga has over it’s competitors is a giant bank account to spend on all kinds of marketing.
Sorry, let me correct myself, YoVille was original but they bought that game, it wasn’t conceptualized at Zynga.
August 19th, 2010 at 7:46 am
[...] with Facebook game Social City, which cleared over 12 million users per month earlier this year according to Inside Social Games. So there definitely appears to be a market. Hell, I might even try it out–I'm a SimCity [...]
August 19th, 2010 at 4:15 pm
FrontierVille was not a clone, Ryan. It will take a long time for the reputation of being a copycat to die, but I suspect Zynga’s releases will look relatively differentiated from now on.
If I’m wrong, you’ll have ample chance to taunt me in our CityVille review.
August 20th, 2010 at 9:36 am
Chris, You are correct in the fact it will take them a while to get over that. I will continue to think of Zynga as a clone company until I see some original ideas. My business partner and I have written a couple game concepts that have never been done before. Unfortunately, life has kept us from having the time to fully develop them. This tells me there are original ideas that can be thought up of, Zynga still sticks to clones. CityVille is the same thing. Although they may change the game play some, it is still a concept copy. My only hope is that they make it better than the other ones out there and it is more like SimCity.
August 20th, 2010 at 7:05 pm
Thanks Chris — I think you’re getting at the next point of contention, i.e. what constitutes originality. Identical renditions of farming games could obviously be called clones, but is a particular take on the city building genre also a clone?
I don’t think so, personally — or at least, it’s no more cloning than the practices widely accepted in the traditional game industry, in which you might call, for example, Dante’s Inferno a clone of God of War.
November 2nd, 2010 at 10:11 am
sütü içmez. Bilgisayar oyunları da benzer bir etkiye neden oluyor, b”irlikte