Zynga just launched their newest title, Poker Blitz for Facebook, and from our early looks it seems to be Texas Hold ‘Em meets Farmville.  The game is a simplified version of texas hold’ em poker with cutesy graphics and powerups that affect gameplay.  The game seems to be inviting new demographics to enjoy the game of poker, and my first impressions say that they’ve succeeded.
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Dr Robert Zubek of Zynga gave a fascinating talk, “Engineering Scalable Social Games,” at GDC 2010 Game Developers Conference about how Zynga has scaled up their computing resources to handle an increase number of players as well as increased usage. While the talk was fairly technical, here is the gist.

The primary problem: Social games by their very nature will attract increasingingly more players, and your servers have to be able to cope. A few reasons for growth:
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At the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2010 this year, Amitt Mahajan, a lead developer of Farmville, revealed that the entire development of Farmville took five weeks, that Zynga has a clear understanding of their userbase, and that they are integrating developers into the design process.  These achievements are not common practice to the console gaming industry and gaming world at large, and it seems as if console game makers should start applying some of these lessons to their own games and development.
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Rumors have been circulating about Farmville supposedly introducing a subscription fee into the game, but CNET is reporting that they will not be charging any subscription fee. The game has been in BETA since launch, and while the upgrade to the full version will likely involve some important changes, it’s doubtful that Zynga would use the occasion to alienate the majority of users on their largest game.
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A new report by Global Silicon Valley Partner’s NeXt Up Research states that Zynga, the world’s top Facebook Application developer, may have a valuation of more than $3.3 billion. This is based on 35% growth over the next four years to expand this year’s revenue projection of $460 million to $1.1 billion in 2014. In addition to the valuation, the report’s analysis includes some interesting facts about their sources of revenue and user behavior.
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Zynga, the leading social games developer, has opened up a new office in Bangalore, India. According to Zynga, the new “operation will focus on game and large-scale infrastructure development”. One can interpret this to suggest that the India office will be focused on ensuring games have solid networking and scalability backend components.
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Kwedit, a Mountain View – California based startup, wants to simplify the purchase of virtual goods for teens. The company plans to allow teens to buy virtual goods on Facebook games such as “FarmVille” and “Café World”, if they commit to pay later at 7-Eleven stores or send in money via mail.
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As the Facebook gaming wars continue to heat up, analysts seek as many ways as possible to measure each companies’ gaming success.  Monthly Active Users (MAUs), Daily Active Users (DAUs), Page Views, Monetization… the list goes on.  There are as many ways to measure an application’s success as there are applications in the Facebook directory.  That said, the dimension of user loyalty has always been interesting to me, and the concept of the users-to-fans ratio for a given application does a good job of indicating what percentage of users play the game and publicly demonstrate their affinity by signing up as a fan.
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Virtual Goods gold rush is in its early stages, however, the nascent market is showing promise to one day become a major revenue source for Social Networks and Social Games. Engage Digital Media, a market research firm with specialization in virtual goods research, is reporting that more than $1.38 billion were invested in 87 virtual goods related companies in 2009.
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Yelp, the local business search and review site, is said to be in talks to raise additional financing instead of getting acquired or having a go at the IPO. According to reports Yelp is in talks with Elevation Partners – a major investor in Palm Inc., for the new round of funding. What’s significant about the round is the fact that it may include an option for employees and investors to sell their shares to the investors.
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