Playdek launches President’s Day Weekend sale – Mobile game developer Playdek is hosting a sale for the long weekend. iOS players can pick up Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer for $2.99, and the in-app expansions Return of the Fallen and Storm of Souls for $1.99 and $2.99, respectively; Nightfall for $.99; Penny Arcade the Game: Gamers vs Evil for $2.99; and the “Everything Bundle” in-app purchase within Summoner Wars for $4.99.

Mother and son launch Facebook game SqueeDogs – Game developer Pirate Epstein, at the urging of his mother Cerise Jacobs, has launched a 3D Facebook pet sim called SqueeDogs using $10,000 in Kickstarter funds. As Wicked Local’s Brookline blog reports, the project got off the ground because Jacobs wanted a game that starred her rescue dog, Mencius.

Zynga Valentine’s Day poll reveals that With Friends players flirt with chat – An annual Zynga survey of players reveals that people sometimes flirt in social/mobile games. Highlights from the survey include: 30 percent of players flirt with their opponent through the chat feature; 23 percent try to play higher-scoring words against someone to whom they are attracted; 24 percent are more competitive when playing against somebody they have romantic feelings for; 53 percent report being more attracted to players with a good vocabulary; and 26 percent of married players play with their spouse.

Teen creates social network for cancer patients that love video games – Polygon reports that cancer survivor Steven Gonzalez is creating a social network for teens with cancer that want to play video games together. The not-for-profit network, Survivor Games, will function like a virtual arcade where players can chat, game together or spectate other games.

Why Sony couldn’t get PlayStation Portable games to work on smartphones – Two years since launching an unsuccessful campaign to bring PlayStation Portable games to Android devices like the Sony Xperia tablets and phones, Sony’s Chris Mahoney explained to the audience at the Appsworld conference in San Francisco why the company had to rejigger its approach to mobile games: “What people were saying is not that we have to fit these games into the device, but fit these games into how people use it. People are using games during these little bursts of time. So we thought, what is a console game? A console game is ten 30-60-minute levels. Mobile games are like hundreds of levels that are three to six minutes, sometimes even less. What if we take the higher quality graphics, and the narratives that everyone is asking for, and we put it on a mobile phone and fit it into these little bursts of time. We took that back to consumers, and they said ‘Yes, that’s it exactly, that’s what we want.’” Read the rest on GamesIndustry International.

[Launch] PerBlue brings Boardtastic to Android – Parallel Kingdoms developer PerBlue brings free-to-play 3D skateboarding sim Boardtastic for Android this week. The game offers a competitive multiplayer mode, a set of five tricks to master and new abilities to unlock as the player progresses and clothing customization that offers player bonuses.

[Press Release] Investment group App Fund seeking mobile game submissions – The App Fund, an investment group dedicated to supporting mobile apps across a broad range of categories is seeking mobile game submissions. Interested parties can apply here and check out the press release detailing the App Fund’s approach here.

[Press Release] EA to launch Tetris Blitz on iPhone, Android – This spring, EA will bring a new flavor of Tetris to mobile devices with Tetris Blitz. The game challenges players to reach a high score in a fixed amount of time and the touch interface offers a new control scheme.

Inside Social Games has learned that Zynga and Electronic Arts have reached a settlement and are moving to dismiss the lawsuit that was filed last summer surrounding The Ville. The decision is now in the court’s hands.

At the moment, details are scarce about the settlement.

Zynga released the following statement this morning: “EA and Zynga have resolved their respective claims and have reached a settlement of their litigation in the Northern District of California.”

The lawsuit was originally filed against Zynga by EA in August 2012. Earlier that summer, Zynga launched its lifestyle sim game, The Ville, and garnered criticism from across the internet over the game’s similarities to EA’s own The Sims Social. At the time, EA claimed it was “standing up for the industry” with its lawsuit. We had a different take on the lawsuit.

Shortly afterward, Zynga countersued EA. The counter-suit alleged EA violated anti-trust laws and claimed the company had copied the visual style of CityVille with SimCity Social and actively tried to prevent Zynga from hiring employees away from EA. EA, for its part, called Zynga’s filing “a subterfuge aimed at diverting attention from Zynga’s persistent plagiarism of other artists and studios.”

Neither The Ville nor SimCity Social really paid off for their developers. Although The Ville saw high traffic levels when it launched, the numbers dropped dramatically in the months following its launch.

The game was no longer appearing on either of our lists of Top 25 Facebook games by December (though it dropped off the Top 25 Facebook games by DAU in October). SimCity Social, meanwhile, only appeared on the Top 25 Facebook games list in August before it also started to lose users, likely due to a lack of content after completing the main chapter-spanning quest surrounding a UFO crash.

The lawsuit has held the attention of both the press and game developers, primarily because it surrounded two of the biggest players in the games industry. Prior to this, there had been a similar lawsuit between SpryFox and 6waves (formerly 6waves Lolapps), where SpryFox accused 6waves of cloning its popular social game Triple Town with its own game, Yeti Town. That suit was settled in October after a judge denied 6waves’ request to dismiss the case, with SpryFox receiving ownership of the Yeti Town IP. Both of these cases would have set precedent when it came to video game law and what it could mean when a developer cloned (or “fast followed”) titles from other companies.

Developing.

CoasterVille launched in early December and started to seriously climb the charts towards the end of the month. Two months later, the game has taken over the No. 1 spot among Facebook games by MAU and can be played both on Facebook and Zynga’s own platform.

We’ve been playing CoasterVille since it launched, logging into the game a couple of times on a near daily basis. As is the case with our deep dives, we’ve made a point of playing CoasterVille without actually monetizing so we can provide an informed analysis about what the experience is like for free players.

Just how far can you get without paying?

So how far can users advance in CoasterVille before starting to feel pressure to monetize? For us, it was around level 25 that progress notably slowed down. In the three weeks since that point it’s become much more difficult to complete quests in the game without buying and spending the game’s hard currency, Park Cash. Since then, our progress has slowed and we’ve only moved up to level 28. As you can see in the above screenshot, there are a number of open missions we haven’t completed because we’ve been trying to play through the game without spending any money. We currently have four buildings requiring speciality items, at least one of these has been stuck at this stage for three weeks.

The game’s friend system is a huge boon for early player progress. While any Facebook Friends are added to the list of “neighbors”, the game continues to add other users in the game to this group, too. Players are encouraged to visit their neighbor’s parks to assist with tasks in exchange for the Inspiration resources, which are necessary for construction and expansion. During early stages of a park’s existence, these neighbors make it much easier to advance through the game without being forced to buy Park Cash.

As opposed to other social games, CoasterVille’s been rather stingy when it comes to handing out hard currency, even when players level up. Likewise, more and more of the buildings one needs to build in order to achieve milestones require special items that can’t be earned by searching/boosting existing structures or crafted. Players instead have the option to ask their friends for these items as in-game gifts, but these requests don’t go out as in-game messages to users’ neighbors (as opposed to requests for less crucial items). Instead, they’re posted to one’s Timeline, where the request isn’t likely to be spotted. While it’s certainly possible to ask for the help and then follow up/nag your friends, the faster and less frustrating option is just to buy some Park Cash and acquire the items you need.

Looking at our list of in-game friends —which includes but isn’t limited to our Facebook friends playing the game— it seems players looking to experience CoasterVille for free seem to be stuck around the same level point we are. A quick tour of their parks reveals similar problems completing structures that require premium items. Some of our neighbors are continuing to advance at a steady rate, and their parks are substantially larger and full of hard-to-construct buildings (pictured below). Unfortunately, we couldn’t message any of these people since they’re outside our Facebook network, but it looks like they’ve been spending money on a somewhat regular basis in order to acquire new territory and premium building items.

If we’re correct and free players are hitting this progress wall, then they may be leaving the game around this point. Assuming that’s the case, it would would certainly explain the game’s loss in DAU traffic we recently noted.

The game’s performance so far, plus what’s coming

According Zynga’s General Manager Hans Yang, custom coasters have proven to be the best-monetizing items in the game. Aside from sometimes requiring premium items to add expansions, players can also change the coaster track features by placing unique features like banks, loops and covered sections. Although some of these custom sections can be added via in-game gold, the showier customizations require Park Cash in order to be placed.

Yang also tells us the game is currently monetizing as expected, with themed content (attractions tied to seasons and holidays) performing especially well over December and January. “We ended up leaving [the winter content] on longer than expected because, even well into January, players were still interested in winter stuff,” he says. Yang also notes Zynga was very pleased with the winter content because it was rolled out during the game’s soft-launch period. At the time we chatted, Zynga was about to launch its Valentine’s Day-themed content, which is running for another 19 days.

Zynga’s also gearing up to start rolling out the game’s post-launch content. Yang says there are three themes coming, but the development team isn’t rolling them out all at once; instead, the release times will be balanced so as not to overwhelm player demand. He explains the point of the updates is to “fill out a theme park with everything a player would expect to see there.” These updates will include things like mascots (who will wander around parks), tour busses, and railroads with custom train types to wind around one’s park.

Zynga’s also planning to add more depth to to the game’s guest theme simulator. This controls guest behavior, driving them to seek out things like food, restrooms and first aid facilities. “We want to build on that more and more. We know a lot of players look at this as their ant farm, they view those guests as people they want to please. When they see guests are unhappy, they work to make them happy. We want to keep expanding on that and adding depth so the ‘ants’ will keep getting smarter and smarter , which means you’ll get smarter and smarter as a park manager as well.

Brand placement is likely to continue being a noticeable presence in CoasterVille. Late in January, Progressive Insurance partnered up with Zynga to customize the centerpiece carousel that appears in players’ parks; Yang tells us this kind of in-game branding will likely continue, but doesn’t go into specifics.”A theme park game is pretty fitting for those custom ad products because you expect to see them there. If you go into Disneyland, you see Kodak photo spots and Coca-Cola vending stations.

One thing that won’t change, Yang tells us, is how the game stays accessible to free players. ”In the short run, you could say ‘oh, well, I should chase the money and pinch our players right off the bat and not give them enough of the things so they have to pay for them,’” he explains. “But that wasn’t our philosophy for this game. We want players to invest time in their parks and love them. We realize not every player wants to spend money on these games and we want to make it a delightful experience for everyone.”

Zynga’s FarmVille 2 has been dominating the charts since it launched in October, but it looks like February 2013 is going to be the month known for the game losing its top spot among Facebook apps, both by daily and monthly active users.

During this time frame, FarmVille 2 managed to be the No. 1 spot by DAU (until this month, when it was surpassed by Candy Crush Saga) and was still holding the No. 1 spot by MAU at the time of Zynga’s earnings report last week. Looking at our traffic-tracking service AppData reveals this is no longer the case, as CoasterVille is now the No. 1 app by MAU on Facebook. While we can no longer get an exact user number under Facebook’s revised ranking system, both CoasterVille and FarmVille 2 still have far more than 10 million MAU.

Interestingly, the game’s performance by DAU doesn’t mirror the MAU increase. While CoasterVille still sits in the 1 million DAU tier, it’s apparently dropped 11 spots over the past week. As a result, it now ranks lower than longstanding apps like Social Point’s Dragon City, Wooga’s Diamond Dash and King.com’s Bubble Witch Saga. FarmVille 2, meanwhile, is continuing to perform strongly in terms of DAU, but it has yet to retake the No. 1 spot from King.com’s Candy Crush Saga.

FarmVille coming to TV— A FarmVille animated series is in the works, and director Brett Ratner has signed on to be the series’ executive producer. According to Deadline, Ratner described FarmVille as “one of the most exciting brands out there today.” As hard as that statement may be to swallow, the good news is that a FarmVille TV show will probably still be better than Tower Heist or X-Men: The Last Stand.

Scarecrow arrives in Oz— Spooky Cool Labs’ The Wizard of Oz is bringing the Scarecrow to the Yellow Brick Road. The developer is bringing Scarecrow’s Farm to the game, allowing players to harvest new crops and hire munchkins to bring in the harvests.

Robo5 comes to Android [Launch]— Animoca’s just announced it launched its puzzle game Robo5 for Android exclusively through Amazon’s Appstore. The game first launched on iOS and was well-received by critics.

Feast or Famine arrives on iOS [Launch]— X4 Games’ new action-platformer Feast or Famine launched on iOS this week. The game is set in the Netolithic era and has players hunting animals, while designed to look like a cave painting. An Android version of the game is expected to launch soon.

gamesGRABR goes live— gamesGRABR, a new social network dedicated to both casual and core gamers, went into open beta this week. The network allows users to utilize a pinboard-like UI with instant play/buy capabilities. According to gamesGRABR CEO and co-founder Tony Pearce, the network will let gamers purchase just about anything they “grab.”

AppGratis surpasses 10 million users— App discovery firm AppGratis announced this week it’s secured over 10 million users worldwide, 3 million of which connect every day. The service regularly drives apps to receive between 500,000 and 1 million downloads, often sending apps into the top five positions on the iTunes App Store.

Disney Mobile gets in on the Valentine’s Day spirit— Disney Mobile is feeling the love, adding Valentine’s Day content to Where’s My Holiday? The free update gives players 12 limited-time levels filled with hearts to play.

As part of its new “disciplined” management of its game portfolio, Zynga CFO Mark Vranesh revealed Zynga would be shutting down three titles it recently launched: CityVille 2, The Friend Game, and Party Place.

“CityVille 2 missed our expectations despite pushing the envelope in 3D gaming and both The Friend Game and Party Place failed to achieve the mass market appeal Zynga franchise are known for,” Vranesh said during today’s earnings call.

CityVille 2 launched in November 2012, but its user numbers drastically fell off during the month of December. We noticed the change at the end of December and reached out to Zynga for comment, but never heard back about what was going on with the game. This marks an even shorter lifecycle than The Ville, which also saw a massive loss in users following its launch, but is still playable on Facebook.

The shutdown follows the recent departure of Brian Reynolds from Zynga, whose game studio handled CityVille 2′s development. Although it wasn’t publicly addressed during the call, it would make sense to assume that Reynolds leaving Zynga and CityVille 2′s closure are somehow connected.

As a cost-cutting measure, Zynga’s become much less willing to keep underperforming games in operation. Last quarter, the company announced it was shutting down a total of 13 titles, both on the web and mobile platforms.

Today, Zynga reported it made $311,165 in revenue, with $261,269 million in bookings for Q4 2012. In terms of revenue, that’s flat year-over-year while bookings were down by 15 percent year-over-year (but up 2 percent from Q3 2012).

Zynga’s earnings report shows it had a net income loss of $48,561 million; up from Q4 2011′s loss of $435 million (though the company could really go up from there), which was due to a $510 million stock-based compensation charge tied to its IPO in December 2011. As a result, Zynga’s Q4 2012 was decidedly up from the $52.7 million loss in Q3 2012. The diluted net loss per share was ($0.06).

Zynga’s GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) results show the company ended the year with a net loss of ($209.4) million. Diluted net loss per share for the year was ($0.28). This loss included $282 million stock-based expense and $49.9 million of income tax expense.

Following last quarter’s lowered 2012 guidance, the company was able to actually beat its projected estimated bookings between $1 to $1.1 billion (though this amount was already $500 million less than original projections for the year). The company’s total net revenue for 2012 was $1.28 billion, while bookings managed to reach $1.15 billion.

Zynga’s outlook for Q1 2013 projects revenue to be between $255 million and $265 million, with a net loss of between ($32) million and ($12) million. As a result, it predicts EPS will be in the range of $(0.04) to ($0.02). Bookings are projected to be in the range of $200 million to $210 million.

In this afternoon’s earnings call, CEO Mark Pincus spoke about the company’s renewed focus on creating mobile games, both with original IP and adapting mobile titles from established web games. Pincus went on to say the company’s “number one focus” will be on mobile development. That said, Zynga’s established web games are still making money; the biggest example was the news that FarmVille had passed the $1 billion mark in terms of total user in-app purchases.

Pincus also said 2013 would see a major push from Zynga into the mid-core markets, based on how profitable the genre’s proven to be.

Leading up to today, analysts have been split with their predictions for how Zynga’s earnings would go. The ongoing success of FarmVille 2 (which was recently dethroned as the No. 1 game in terms of daily active users but still reigns supreme with monthly active users) and CoasterVille’s recent surges in traffic are certainly feathers in the company’s cap, but things like Zynga shutting down a number of underperforming titles and the disappearance of high-profile sequel CityVille 2 from the charts (the performance likely recreating a sense of deja vú for anyone who watched The Ville flounder) were considered warning flags.

Outside factors fueled some analysts’ wary outlooks. EA’s lackluster earnings report last week, which eschewed any mention of social titles in favor of mobile development, has been taken by some analysts as a sign of the continuing decline of social games. Additionally, Facebook revealed on Friday that Zynga’s impact on the social network’s revenue was continuing to shrink.

As has been the case in past quarters, Zynga still has a lot of cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities on hand. Currently, the company has $1.65 billion in these, down from the $1.92 billion it had in Q4 2012. Zynga also doesn’t have any short term or long term debt, according to Bloomberg. Cash flow from operations in Q4 2012 was ($114.3), or $119.4 million excluding the purchase of the company’s headquarters in San Francisco.

Zynga’s partner publishing program has begun picking up steam, but its effects still haven’t really started to make much of an impact on the company’s bottom line. Although some of the early partners have games now playable on Zynga.com’s platform and/or Facebook, Zynga hasn’t turned on the full effect of its cross-promotion power to benefit these titles (many of which seek to tap into the lucrative core gamer market).

Over the past quarter, Zynga had three major releases to help FarmVille 2 bring home the bacon: CityVille 2, CoasterVille and Bubble Safari Ocean. It didn’t take long for CityVille 2′s traffic to nosedive (it only appeared on our Top 25 Facebook games lists before it completely disappeared from them), but CoasterVille and Bubble Safari Ocean are still sitting fairly high up on the list of top-performing Facebook apps. CoasterVille currently holds the No. 2 spot among facebook apps in the 10 million MAU tier and the No. 11 placing in the 1 million DAU tier. Bubble Safari Ocean also sits in the 10 Million MAU tier with the No. 24 spot and the 1 million DAU tier at No. 61.

According to Zynga, its number of daily active users shrank 6 percent from 60 million in Q3 2012 to 56 million, though that is up from Q4 2011 when the company had 54 million DAU. Monthly active users also increased year-over-year from 240 million in Q4 2011 to 298 million in Q4 2012. However, MAU was down 4 percent from Q3 2012, when the company had 311 million MAU. Monthly Unique users were also down from last quarter, dropping from 177 million to 167 million, though this is still up from Q4 2011 with 153 million.

Zynga will present at Goldman Sachs tech conference: Zynga today announced CFO Mark Vranesh and COO David Ko are going to present at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet conference. The presentation will take place on Tuesday, Feb. 12 at 4 p.m. PST. A live audio webcast will stream to Zynga’s investor site.

Actua Sports (hopefully) resurrected for Facebook: Long dormant franchise Actual Sports is being brought back for a new generation of players and platforms, starting with Facebook. Ian Stewart, creator of Actua, is using Kickstarter to fund this resurrection and is hoping to raise £30,000 so he can developer and release Actua Poker for Facebook first and other platforms to follow.

myVEGAS gets Jules Verne update: Playsino’s social casino/citybuilder just launched a new slot game, “Around the World in 80 Plays”. The game is inspired by Jules Verne’s classic novel, Around the World in 80 Days, and is myVEGAS’s 8th game.  myVEGAS is allowing players to collect online clues over the next week and on Feb. 8 (Verne’s birthday) eight players will have a chance to win 1 million free chips in the game.

Where’s My Water? gets in on the photo game: Disney Interactive’s mobile hit Where’s My Water launched its new “Photo Finish” feature this week. The new feature lets players record their level-beating strategies in the game and share the screenshot with friends on Facebook and Twitter.

FarmVille 2 spreads some love for Valentine’s Day: FarmVille 2 has rolled out its newest (“and dreamiest”) character, Gus. From now through Feb. 19, all FarmVille 2 players level 7 and up will be able to have Gus on the farm; while Gus helps out on the farm, players have to unite him with his crush while adding Valentine’s Day decorations to their property.

Tito’s Shell comes to iOS [Launch]: Mobile developer 99Games launched its new physics puzzler, Tito’s Shell, this week. The game uses elements like weights, levers and ropes to help the titular turtle be reunited with his missing shell. Tito’s Shell is on the App Store for $0.99.

Magneto is the first playable villain in Avenger’s Alliance: The Master of Magnetism is now a playable character in Marvel: Avengers Alliance. Players can unlock him as the reward for completing the game’s newest Special Operation, “Cry Havok” (incidentally, the X-Men Havok is the ultimate reward for finishing the Special Operation). New collectable rewards called Lockboxes are doled out; opening 10 at once guarantees a classic Marvel comic book cover, and players who turn in eight of those will earn Magneto as a character.

Just in time for the end of the week, it’s time to look at the Top 25 Facebook games for February 2013.

With the recent changes to Facebook’s reporting, we’ve had to modify how the Top 25 charts looks. Starting next month, we’ll be able to look back at the previous month and begin incorporating data like chart position changes and tier changes. Aside from the basic ranks listed in each of these charts is another set of rankings referencing the position a game holds amongst all of Facebook’s apps. We’ve also noted which tier of user traffic each of these games sits in, as the monthly active user list includes titles from two different tiers.

Both of February’s lists saw some notable changes, including Zynga being knocked out of the top position of the daily active users charts and new titles appearing on both lists. (more…)

Brian Reynolds is the latest Zynga officer to leave the company. Prior to leaving, Reynolds served as Chief Game Designer at Zynga.

Polygon initially broke the story, confirming Reynolds’ departure with three different sources, though an official on Zynga’s end originally denied the story. Since then, a company official has confirmed Reynolds is leaving, but didn’t disclose details like if he’s already gone or when his last day would be. In fact, Reynolds himself actually confirmed the story on Twitter.

Yes I’m officially leaving Zynga after 3 3/4 great years. Back soon… need to think of a new Twitter handle though! venturebeat.com/2013/01/29/zyn…

— Brian Reynolds (@TheGameChief) January 30, 2013

Reynolds is an established industry veteran, having served as CEO and creative director of Big Huge Games. When the strategy game developer was acquired by 38 Studios, Reynolds left and came to Zynga in 2009; he was initially heading up Zynga East (based in Baltimore) where he worked on games like FrontierVille and CityVille 2.

Zynga President of Games Steve Chiang released a statement, saying “Brian has a long history in the game industry and has been a great partner to the creative leaders at Zynga. I want to thank him for his leadership of the Zynga Baltimore studio in the design and development of FrontierVille, which brought many innovations to social gaming.  We appreciate Brian’s contribution and we’re proud of the deep bench of creative leaders who are leading the next wave of game innovation at Zynga. We wish Brian the best in his next chapter.”