![]() The grown soon became exponential, with 26 million users playing CityVille by day 12. The timing was good, since the decline of FarmVille meant that Zynga’s numbers had fallen to an overall 193.8 million monthly active users, compared to 260 million monthly active users in the spring of 2010. They had built more than 2.7 million homes and created 500,000 bakeries. After five days, Zynga had 6.5 million players. That was Zynga’s best launch ever, much higher than FrontierVille, which had 116,000 players on day one. In its first 24 hours, more than 290,000 people played the game. At 1:22 am that day, the game launched and the staff drank champagne. But CityVille wasn’t quite ready to let CityVille out. 17, 2010, saying it would be available in four languages at launch, the first time Zynga had localized a game for different regions at launch. But Zynga’s game was simple and suited for Facebook, which didn’t allow a great deal of interactivity. On the surface, it looked like SimCity or rival social game Social City. It included the FrontierVille social features that allowed players to progress by helping their friends, and it allowed users to buy Facebook Credits to advance faster. And it had a guided tutorial to teach new people how to play. the game was also rendered with 3D polygons that allowed the city to be rotated and viewed from different angles. ![]() It had animations and the icons of friends moving around on a city map, creating the illusion that it was a real-time game. They created a city simulation game called CityVille, which included something new for a Zynga game. The result was a lightweight city simulation that can be played in a matter of minutes - but which players feel compelled to return to on a daily basis. Then it focused on what would be fun to do in a city game. The team started with established play practices that had been successful in other Zynga games, such as picking up rewards, or loot, upon achieving something. Skaggs, who had worked on FarmVille and was a former Electronic Arts designer, estimated that 95 percent of the people on the team had never worked on a game before. ![]() Zynga created the CityVille team from scratch in 2010. Skaggs had established a pattern of creating a big game and then handing it over to others to run while he moved on to something new. So the company put a lot of its effort behind the next game that was spearheaded by veteran game designer Mark Skaggs. FrontierVille had all the right elements for that, but the game never hit the same mass market as the farm game. Zynga had been looking for a sequel to FarmVille for a while. There was no guarantee that its big position in Facebook games would help Zynga at all in mobile games. Of course, Zynga had to figure out how to deal with a big problem. Now it makes sense for us to spread our games everywhere.” “We have a good understanding of the web. “He is more willing to do things like mobile where we know it will take some time before it becomes as successful as the web business,” Cinicolo said. In the fall of 2010, he said in an interview that Pincus had more patience now for the mobile market to come into its own. Justin Cinicolo, the former Mafia Wars producer, assumed a leadership role in Zynga’s push into mobile. Mobile was yet another way to diversify beyond Facebook. At that point, Newtoy added a mere 23 employees to Zynga’s tally of 1,300. That was the most that Zynga paid for a company, but the price was low relative to other kinds of gaming deals. Zynga didn’t announce it at the time, but the company paid a hefty $53.3 million for Newtoy, which was started by brothers Paul and David Bettner. The acquisition was Zynga’s seventh deal in seven months, but it showed it was serious about mobile. In December 2010, Zynga made its biggest move into mobile with the acquisition of Newtoy, the McKinney, Texas-based creator of Words With Friends, a Scrabble-like word game on the iPhone that had become a huge hit with 12 million downloads. Zynga brought aboard former Yahoo executive David Ko as a senior vice president for mobile in October 2010. And they would be more than happy to trample over Zynga. While Zynga had been fighting with Playfish and Playdom (and later EA and Disney), it now had to realize that DeNA and Japan’s mobile gaming social network Gree were also gunning for a worldwide mobile social gaming empire. The acquisition set up an interesting competition.
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