Since announcing that organizational update on April 25, EA has sacked 10 percent of its workforce, CFO Blake Jorgensen confirmed. The company had about 9,000 employees at 2012’s end, so some 900 of them lost their jobs as a result of the cuts.

The headcount reduction, which EA hopes will push it further toward its goal of achieving a 20 percent operating margin, increased the company’s operating expenses for the quarter by about $15 million. According to EA, that was largely due to severance, and the company says that following this spike, its OpEx will begin going down.

“We’ve taken a hard look at the organization,” said EA Chairman Larry Probst. “We have really focused the product portfolio. We’ve made some adjustments in terms of headcount and operating expenses. My job is to make sure that we’re growing the top line and the bottom line and rationalizing headcount and cost in conjunction with revenue. I think we’ve done a really good job of that in nailing down our fiscal ’14 plan.”

If that’s the case, EA should be well positioned for growth in the year ahead, particularly now that it has secured a long-term licensing deal with Disney to make games based on the “Star Wars” franchise.

Mr. Riccitiello sent a memo to EA chairman Larry Probst, in which he said EA ”will come in at the low end of, or slightly below, the financial guidance we issued in January, and we have fallen short of the internal operating plan we set one year ago.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Frisina founded and formerly headed up EA Partners, which co-publishes games from outside of Electronic Arts. Now, he’s launching an independent company that will do almost exactly the same thing. “Almost,” because all the indie games Frisina’s new company, Tilting Point, partners with and invests in will be mobile.

Tilting Point says it will put $40 million into phone and tablet games over the next three years, backed up by mentorship and lots and lots of data-driven marketing.

“We’ve seen plenty of great games with solid development budgets this year fail because of a lackluster monetization plan or nonexistent marketing,” Frisina said.

Joining him at Tilting Point are three other EA veterans: Partnership expert Dan Sherman, development director Steve Coallier and lawyer Jim Hsu, who also added Zynga to his resume before joining Frisina’s team.

Beyond founding and managing EAP for more than a decade, Frisina’s biggest coup was probably bringing EA into the picture on both Medal of Honor in 1999, and Battlefield 1942 in the early 2000s.

More recently, EA Partners’ hits have included Crysis and its sequels, the Rock Band series and Valve’s Orange Box (a.k.a. the three-pack of Team Fortress 2, Half-Life 2 and the first Portal game). The division also handled the retail publishing of Portal 2, but by that point, Valve had already established its online store, Steam, which currently rivals EA’s store, Origin.

Those are all big games that require at least decent console or PC hardware, spanning multiple platforms. There’s still an audience and a future for those sorts of titles, but Tilting Point looks smart to focus on just the simpler mobile devices that are reaching much broader gaming audiences.

That focus clearly distinguishes the new company from both EA Partners and other publishers of games not developed in-house.

However, sources at both Tilting Point and EA stressed that Frisina’s new venture is neither a rejection of his old team nor a nose-thumbing “look, EA, this is what you should be doing!” statement.

That’s partly because Frisina, while important to EA Partners’ growth in the 2000s, hasn’t run EAP since way back in early 2007 — before the iPhone launched, and years before the iPad, so before mobile and tablet gaming hit a mass audience. He left his full-time job at the company in March of 2010. He’s still on the board of EA International, and is an academic consultant to the company by way of a position at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts that EA underwrites.

Sherman, Coallier and Hsu also all left EA in 2009 and 2010.

“Everyone [on my team] left for different reasons,” Frisina said. “Personally, I have the utmost respect for EA senior management and staff, and remain very proud of my current relationship and to have been given such great opportunities over my 13 years.”

EA’s corporate communications SVP, Jeff Brown, praised Frisina’s skills and said Tilting Point will have a “good team” at the reins.

Here’s the main section of the official announcement, which Tilting Point will release later today:

Tilting Point Created To Champion Premier Independent Video
Game Developers
Fostering talent, funding development, fueling discovery

New York, NY — March 14, 2013 – A contingent of seasoned game industry veterans, including lifelong video game and tech entrepreneur Tom Frisina, pulled back the curtain today on Tilting Point Media, a company built to address the growing needs of independent developers in the rapidly growing but capricious mobile and tablet video game markets. Evolving beyond the traditional definition of a digital publisher, Tilting Point aligns itself with top independent development talent and offers the funding, support, and resources to give carefully selected games mainstream success. The company is investing $40 million in the next three years to fund the development and marketing of mobile and tablet games while executing groundbreaking marketing campaigns and providing unbiased, data-driven advice to game creators through a number of strategic partnerships.

“Our view is that independent developers own the future of games,” said Tom Frisina, Executive Chairman of Tilting Point. “However, a studio’s potential can be severely hindered without a partner they can trust to help navigate the challenges of discoverability and monetization. We will nurture the best teams, positioning them for independent success over the long term. We’re taking the expertise and resourcefulness gained from our combined backgrounds and applying them to a new publishing model, where development talent gains the tools to control their own destiny.”

Over the past year, Tilting Point has signed agreements with several of the world’s most successful game makers, including Signal Mobile, Housemarque, and 1337 Game Design & Senri, with more high profile deals in negotiation. The company will release its first titles in 2013 while continuing to grow its assemblage of elite development partners.

“We’d describe Tilting Point as our co-pilot,” said D.R. Albright III, President and Creative Director at Signal Mobile. “They are facilitating us reaching our goals without taking over our intellectual property. Signal is excited to be working with Tilting Point and I look forward to releasing our first game together in 2013.”

The Tilting Point team will be at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco from March 25-29. Contact information is available on www.tiltingpoint.com, and regular updates will be available on www.facebook.com/tiltingpoint and on Twitter @tiltingpoint.

In recent years, game sales have declined dramatically, with software and hardware making up only half of industry spending, according to NPD Group. The other half now goes toward downloadable content and microtransactions — in other words, digital content for consoles, smartphones and Facebook.

Because of this seismic shift in gamer behavior, many industry veterans are banking on the release of the new PlayStation, and a new Xbox coming later this year from Microsoft, to provide a jolt in traditional game sales.

On Wednesday, Sony is hosting an event in New York, where it is expected to unveil the PlayStation 4, as it has been nicknamed. Sony’s machine is expected to come in time for the holidays, along with the Xbox, although Microsoft declines to comment on its plans.

The good news is, that in the past, new hardware has always led to more software sales; as consumers bought one, they bought more of the other. But after a lackluster launch of the Wii U by Nintendo this holiday season, some wonder if a living-room-driven gaming experience has as much firepower as it once did.

“I feel like consumers are happy, and I’m not sure if there will ever be the right time to release a console again,” said Jerry Holkins, co-founder of Penny Arcade, a company that produces provides commentary on the industry through Web comics. “I think the spend is elsewhere. I don’t think they are waiting for the next generation; they are happy with where they are playing today.”

Electronic Arts’ John Riccitiello is more optimistic about the prospects of the next-generation devices. But then, as one of the industry’s biggest publishers, he has to be. During the company’s last conference call, he said that the December quarter was disappointing, but “that often happens when the consumer carries the expectation of a console transition.”

In January, Nintendo slashed its sales outlook after holiday sales of the Wii U failed to hit expectations. The poor turnout does not provide a lot of support for the theory that consumers were just holding back spending for the release of the new hardware.

The Japanese game company was hoping to rekindle consumer excitement by launching the Wii U with a controller that had a six-inch touchscreen display and acted much like Apple’s iPad. It also enabled consumers to interact with their TVs, by allowing owners to comment on programming within a closed social network. But the console was mostly trying to extend the life of the traditional videogame business, which relies on selling packaged software at $60 apiece.

Again, Riccitiello is hopeful that Nintendo’s performance is not an indication of the other two launches.

“I wouldn’t say that we see much correlation between the results that Nintendo has shown with their console debut of the Wii U, and what we see coming,” he said. “We see a pretty sharp distinction and, unfortunately, I am unable to go any further than that.”

But there’s no way to discount what has happened in the games industry since the last generation of devices launched. Social and mobile platforms have led to the rise of the 99-cent game and the free-to-play business model. Gamers have grown to enjoy playing a game without having to pay a dime. Then, if they want to, they can invest as much as they want.

If Sony or Microsoft are to be successful, adopting new business models may be the key.

There are already some signs of Sony’s willingness to change. According to The Wall Street Journal, Sony will provide a new streaming game service that will allow users to play games delivered over the Internet. The service is designed to use current PlayStation 3 titles on the new console. While cloud gaming hasn’t really taken off on other platforms, the technology does enable other pricing models, like subscriptions.

Another development since the last generation of consoles hit store shelves is how much the definition of a gamer has changed. With the massive popularity of Rovio’s Angry Birds and Zynga’s FarmVille, gamers aren’t just “hard-core” players but also housewives and touchscreen-savvy children.

To be sure, Microsoft has been aggressive in reaching out to a broader audience. Last week, it said that 38 percent of Xbox users are women, and more than 51 percent of owners are people who have kids. Overall, it said non-gaming usage has soared by 57 percent year over year.

Despite interest in other platforms, many also believe that there’s still a time and a place for the highest-fidelity experience possible. The console, with its high computing power, is often the perfect delivery mechanism for a gunshot to the face, or a perfectly depicted battle scenes — a fact that Activision proves year after year with its title Call of Duty, which defies industry trends. This year, for instance, the title under the name of Black Ops 2 crossed $1 billion in sales in just 15 days.

Anil Dharni, an SVP of Gree, has focused on publishing hard-core titles like Crime City for tablets, but still believes that consoles “serve an audience, who wants a high-fidelity experience that mobile devices can’t deliver today.” He thinks the traditional gaming market will decline, “but it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.”

Penny Arcade’s Holkins says he will continue buying consoles even if that makes him look old. “I liked having a console,” he said. “I enjoyed that, and I’ll still do that.”

According to a filing in the U.S. District Court of Northern California, the entire case was dismissed with prejudice. Both companies issued identical statements on the subject: “EA and Zynga have resolved their respective claims and have reached a settlement of their litigation in the Northern District of California.”

If you don’t recall, EA filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Zynga in August, charging that Zynga’s social game The Ville was an “unmistakable copy” of EA’s The Sims Social. The complaint was seeking injunctive relief and damages.

The following month, Zynga filed a pair of motions to rebut Electronic Arts’ claims, arguing that The Ville on Facebook is not similar to EA’s The Sims Social. And, in a third filing, it countersued, alleging that EA participated in unlawful actions, including anti-competitive business practices, when it came to recruiting employees.

All of the cases have now been dismissed. The terms of the settlement are confidential, so exactly how the two companies worked out their differences is not known.

But in some respects, the issues EA had surrounding The Ville should no longer be a concern.

In October, Zynga said it was “significantly reducing” its investment in The Ville as part of a restructuring plan that is designed to return the company to profitability. The Ville was just one of more than a dozen games being phased out.

Electronic Arts Vs. Zynga

As most know, the San Francisco gaming company has struggled to find the right balance as consumer behavior has shifted from playing social games on Facebook to playing games on their phones.

In the third quarter, 60 million people played Zynga’s games on a daily basis, up 11 percent from the year-ago period. But those gains were only possible due to mobile offsetting declines on Facebook. The worry of Wall Street investors over the situation is apparent in the price of its stock, now at $2.66, which remains 72 percent below its initial public offering price at the end of 2011.

But Zynga management believes it knows how to turn things around, including expanding beyond its classic Ville-style titles, like FarmVille, to more genres that appeal to a wider audience, including casino and more hardcore titles.

In a story earlier today, I wrote about the three executives that CEO Mark Pincus has appointed to help turn things around. One of them is Steve Chiang, the company’s new president of games.

Here are some highlights from an interview I recently did with Chiang:

Tell me a little bit about your background.

Chiang: I got into computers early, when I was six or seven, and I was really into videogames and playing games on my computer. And then I got into programming. First, I got into the industry when I graduated from school as a programmer, by creating games for Super Nintendo. That’s when making a game included one programmer and two artists, or two programmers and five artists, so they were really small teams, so you really had to know all aspects of game development.

And then, in 1994, myself and some guys I went to high school with, and John Schappert, started Tiburon. We started making Super Nintendo games, and then we started working on Madden when the contract came up after the other company didn’t ship the game on time. It was the best-selling game on PlayStation that year, which led to the acquisition by [Electronic Arts].

I stopped programming in 1998 or 1999. When I left EA, I was overseeing all sports development for Peter Moore, who was heading up the sports label, and I headed up development across Vancouver and Orlando.

What was the attraction to Zynga?

Chiang: In 2009, when I was thinking of joining Zynga, we had FIFA Ultimate Team, which was a card-based microtransaction mode. It was a $10 mode you paid for, and then you had $1.50 card packs. We quickly saw the microtransaction part of it surpass the $10 for the mode. So you reduce the $10 to free to reduce the friction.

Microtransactions and free-to-play seemed like the future, for sure. The second aspect was time. Having an hour to sit down and play a game is not easy to come by when you have a family, so, as a person who loves games, the idea of playing games for five to 10 minutes with friends was really appealing. I saw myself reconnecting with people from high school, and I saw my parents playing with my kids. The only game my ex-wife will play is Words With Friends, except for SingStar, a karaoke game on PlayStation.

When you are creating a place where women, children and older parents are all playing, it’s an incredible feeling and experience. It’s like the first time I saw “Star Wars” in the movie theatre — that’s what we are creating for people. That’s what we are trying to create on a day-in and day-out basis.

I’ve spoken to people before about the initial draw of Zynga being that so many people end up playing your game, unlike a console title that has a limited audience.

Chiang: Absolutely, in entertainment, you want to make hits. When you are working on sports games year after year, it’s not super appealing. But the idea you get to work on a game played by millions of people? That’s great.

I mean, I always tell people, you spend the same amount of time on a game that gets canceled as one that is seen by millions of people.

Do you believe the definition of a social game is changing?

I do. It’s a moniker, like casual gaming. We label stuff, but essentially the business model is free-to-play, and gaming has always been social. I look at us as doing free-to-play games on multiplatform.

For a while, social equaled Facebook.

Yeah, that’s how I interpreted it, as well. But when you look at Words With Friends, that’s what a social game looks like, where you are interacting with a friend on a daily basis.

Zynga and Facebook just changed their contract language, which is less restrictive and will free you up to do more things, right?

Chiang: I think Facebook is a really valuable partner. We struck a new agreement, which enhances our partnership in some ways, and allows you to invest more in our platform and mobile.

Everyone talks about gaming as a hits-driven business. Is it possible to sustain that over the long term?

Chiang: I think we’ve seen companies like EA and Activision be able to sustain [that]. There’s aways peaks and valleys.

With social, it’s more about gaming as a service — it’s a TV model, if you will. We continue to put out new content every week, and on Facebook every single day. That keeps our players engaged. There’s games like Poker that have been around forever. There are certainly franchises. It’s not that different from a Call of Duty or a Madden Football, which has been going on for 15 years now. We have some of the same characteristics in Poker and Words With Friends.

Tell me about the story arc for Zynga’s Villes. How come some are not as successful as the ones in the past?

What we’ve seen is a few different things. We are seeing consumer tastes changing, and there’s a player movement toward mobile gaming. If you look at just a single platform, you’ll see a peak or a leveling-off of gaming on Facebook. But we are seeing growth on mobile. As we go multiplatform, we may have peaks and valleys on a single platform, but we’ll see overall growth.

That seems to be a platform issue, but is there something about Villes in particular that is no longer popular?

Chiang: When I look at FarmVille 2, it’s reengaging a lot of players, and is off to a great start. There’s an aspect of something new, and so players are saying, “Let’s try that.”

A game like Pokemon peaked at a $1 billion business, but over time, it’s still a big business and it has sustained. Traditionally, you’ll see a massive pop and then it will sustain. It’s a great business, and when we put out great content like FarmVille 2, our players respond and they engage.

Let’s go back to the cross-platform approach. Zynga is going after both Facebook and mobile, and has restructured its leadership team around that. How has your job changed?

Chiang: I took over all of the games business, so I have every game on mobile and Web, and just recently I reorganized around our players and genres.

We have some great leaders, and some of the most experienced in social gaming in the western world. We are going to run our “Invest and Express,” which are our Ville games. We have a new group in PVP (player versus player), which is focused on men 18 to 34.

Then we have our casino group, which is poker and male-skewing, and we have slots and bingo, which is focused on women. And then we have our mobile casual group, which is focused around some of our big franchises, like Draw Something and Words With Friends.

Some critics say that Zynga’s games are not fun. What do you say to that?

Chiang: I think when you look at a game like FarmVille 2 or Elite Slots, we are driving new innovation, and we are continuing to push innovation. At the same time, if we change too much, players complain. We saw it in sports games, and you see it in social gaming, you want a consistent feel and familiarity. You don’t want to redo everything.

Zynga is such a data-driven company, I’m curious what metrics do you look at every day, and which ones are most important?

Chiang: We look at the net promoter score, where we ask players to rate the game from one to 10. A nine to 10 is a promoter, and below a six is a detractor. We certainly look at overall how many people are playing and what our retention is, especially after launch, to check out retention after seven days to see which way it’s headed.

Why didn’t The Ville do well? Zynga announced it was cutting back on it as soon as it went live.

Chiang: I think with The Ville, the team made a great effort. But we did not deliver.

Our players didn’t respond to it as we would have expected. We hit a high DAU (daily active user), but they did not retain as well as some of our other games. We looked at all of that, and applied that to our future games. When you are going for hits, we’ll also have some failures.

Do you have a mantra, or a way to rally the troops right now that makes everyone believe you can create another hit? Something to inspire them? How do you manage the turnaround process?

For us, it’s about focus and getting back to basics. Our team across the board has delivered hits. We’ve had a number of great game makers who have been tied up with games, and now they are focused on new projects. We are reducing the number of games we are making, and focusing on a fewer with the highest potential in Invest and Express, player versus player and casino.

With many departures over the past few months, does Zynga still have the talent to make good games?

Chiang: Absolutely. We had a lot of people joining before the IPO, and some of those folks have opted out, but the bench is still really deep. We are also still attracting a lot of folks. Social is not for everyone, so some people came here to try something, but the future is really bright. We have a strong network of players on Facebook and mobile, and a number of great games in the pipeline that should be — and we’ll see how they do — but are going to be really fun and social.

Is there a message that you’d like to get out to people on Zynga’s game creation? Do you think there is an impression people have that you’d like to correct?

Chiang: I never thought about that. I firmly believe that we have a huge bright future and have the best position for talent, and in terms of our network and in terms of mobile and Facebook players to drive the biggest and best entertainment in the world. We are well-positioned that way, and hopefully you’ll see things in the future that will surprise and delight a lot of people.

Was it only just over a year ago that Zynga was the hottest game company on the planet?

Today — after seemingly endless executive departures (among the missing in action are the COO, CMO, CFO and the chief creative officer), a falloff in the popularity of its many games on the important Facebook platform, and a perpetually moribund stock price from a $9 billion valuation at its IPO in December of 2011 to $2 billion today — such a moment of glory seems but a very distant memory.

Now, in the wake of the crash, Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus is betting his dwindling chips on a trio of lieutenants to make things right: Steve Chiang, who is now president of games; David Ko, Zynga’s former chief mobile officer, who has been promoted to COO; and Barry Cottle, who was named chief revenue officer.

Establishing the three executives’ credibility and skill sets will be instrumental in regaining Wall Street’s confidence in the San Francisco gaming company, and perhaps reestablishing it as a growing and thriving concern.

So, can they do it? To find out, AllThingsD interviewed all three, as well as more than a dozen current and former co-workers of the managers, to get a handle on who they are and what roles they are playing in the company’s turnaround process.

Steve Chiang, president of games:

Chiang, 41, who is now leading all game development, has one of the toughest jobs at the company.

Zynga operates a hits-driven business, and must continue to make compelling games to draw in large audiences, something it has of late struggled to do.

One problem is that it has persisted in churning out its once powerful Ville-style games — FarmVille, CityVille, et al — while its competitors moved on to other genres, such as casino games and action-packed games aimed at males.

Those two new categories, as well as its original Ville genre, which it calls “Invest and Express,” will be at the top of the company’s priority list, in addition to developing across social and mobile.

In this, Chiang’s efforts are critical. But what has made this executive’s path at Zynga unusual was his rise, then fall —  and then rise again — within the corporate ranks.

Ahead of the IPO, Zynga was relentless in its efforts to build out a strong bench of C-level executives. One impressive hire was John Schappert, who came on board as chief operating officer to lead the company’s game strategy.

Schappert hailed from Electronic Arts, where he knew Chiang better than anyone else. Together, Chiang and Schappert co-founded Tiburon Entertainment, which was acquired by Electronic Arts in 1998, and continues to be responsible for hit games such as Madden NFL.

Chiang arrived at Zynga first, in March 2010, as EVP of Games. But when Schappert joined Zynga in April 2011, Chiang’s responsibilities naturally decreased as less work was left to go around.

Zynga’s former chief creative officer, Mike Verdu, who worked closely with Chiang, recalled the transition. “There was certainly a period, especially as other executives came in, that the weight of influence shifted away from Steve,” he said. “All of our roles changed a bit when John was there. He had a very different way of doing things, and when he left, there was a realignment of the organization.”

Schappert stepped down in August of 2012, one of the company’s highest-profile departures.

Because Schappert was the front man in the company’s IPO, the shy Chiang is not as well-known, despite having worked there for three years. His resume at the company includes releasing CityVille, which became the biggest game at the time. He also grew the company into a worldwide organization, adding studios across the U.S. and internationally. He pushed the company into new categories, such as arcade-style gaming and hidden objects. Recent credits include the launch of FarmVille 2, the company’s most recent hit.

Chiang spoke briefly and without a lot of actual detail about his time working with Schappert at Zynga. “He’s a personal friend of mine, and he brought a lot to the company, and we made some internal changes and he decided to move on,” he said.

Now, with the reins in Chiang’s hands, he says he will focus on developing games that appeal to a wide audience. To free up talent to work on new projects, the company is sunsetting 13 of its games, including PetVille, Mafia Wars 2 and Indiana Jones Adventure World.

“We’ve had a number of great game makers who have been tied up and now they are focused on new projects,” Chiang said. “We are reducing the number of games we are making, and focusing on fewer with the highest potential in Invest and Express, player versus player, and casino.”

Whether Chiang can pull it off remains to be seen. But one of Chiang’s direct reports — who declined to be named — said: “We aren’t all driven by money or fame. A lot of people are driven by pride. Steve internalizes that. He’s a champion for the game makers, but ultimately, for the players themselves.”

For more on Chiang, click here for an exclusive Q&A interview.

David Ko, chief operations officer:

There’s a long list of reasons why David Ko, 41, earned the promotion to chief operations officer. Over the past two years as chief mobile officer, the former Yahoo exec has overseen the release of 30 mobile games and closed two of Zynga’s largest acquisitions.

The first acquisition was Newtoy, which is known for the very popular Words With Friends mobile game. The second acquisition, of OMGPOP, was less successful. Immediately after Zynga purchased the company for $180 million in cash, its hit product, Draw Something, fell dramatically in the rankings, although it still accounts for the bulk of the company’s mobile users today.

That said, if mobile is critically important to the company’s future, then having Ko as the second in command was a clear message of its importance.

Ko is now second in command, with purview over 3,000 employees, as well as being the public face for the media and Wall Street. On Tuesday, in fact, he will make his first appearance on the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call.

He has a lot to learn, which is why Ko asked everyone to stand up and introduce themselves at a recent meeting of 130 managers. “It was interesting to go around the room and hear from people who had been there for four to five years, or for two months,” he said. “It was a great diversity of talent, and they came from all different backgrounds.”

Ko’s more inclusive management style is likely to be welcomed by employees, especially since Pincus is known for valuing data over people. “Mark [Pincus] misses that stuff at times,” one former employee said. “It’s a mercenary culture; he looked at people as fungible.”

But Ko’s fast ascent to COO is not sudden as it may look, say insiders.

“In spite of the fact that he looks like he is 12, he’s the adult in the room,” said a former co-worker of Ko’s, who knew him from his days at Yahoo. “That’s the irony.”

Prior to Zynga, Ko worked at Yahoo for a decade starting in 2000. He was based initially in Asia, where he ran the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s mobile business. In 2009, Ko then returned Yahoo’s headquarters as the SVP of mobile, but was quickly promoted amid much executive turmoil to be the North American audience head.

Ko said his non-gaming background is a plus, because he has extensive experience monetizing content.

“We have lots of people with all kinds of backgrounds in social or gaming, but what the company needs is about making sure the content is available to everyone and can be monetized in different ways, whether it’s advertising or user pay.” he said. “I have a lot of experience with this. Advertising is becoming a bigger piece of monetizing, and that’s one of my core competencies.”

In his first three months as COO, Ko said, he has made three priorities at the company: To create a sense of discipline, to make the company’s strategies clear and to have fun doing it.

The reality of it all, Ko said, is that he has spent most of his time on the first two: “I have to remind myself at times, we are still a games company. We do have to do some fun things.”

One time the whole company has fun is for an hour every Wednesday when Zynga staffers drop everything they are doing to play a game under development. It was a practice that the company used to do in the early days, and Pincus asked Ko to bring back. After the employees play, they then provide feedback on what they liked and didn’t like about the game.

“Ultimately, we are a games company, and we have to make sure that people find the games fun that we are going to launch,” Ko said.

Barry Cottle, chief revenue officer:

Barry Cottle, 51, is the newest to Zynga of the three top execs, having joined the company in January 2012 as EVP of corporate and business development.

Previously, he was head of EA Interactive, where he oversaw a group the size of Zynga, including the company’s social and mobile gaming divisions and its PopCap unit. As such, his departure was a particularly big blow to EA.

As chief revenue officer at Zynga, Cottle is now responsible for securing partnerships and advertising, plus he is responsible for sales operations and the company’s real-money gaming initiatives.

And also the care and maintenance of Zynga’s most significant relationship — with Facebook.

In November, Zynga and Facebook announced that the two companies had renegotiated their contract, which will make their partnership less complicated. It also provided some benefits to Zynga, such as the ability to launch games first for mobile. Cottle worked directly with Facebook’s Dan Rose on the new terms, unlike the original contract, which was negotiated directly between the two Marks: Mark Zuckerberg and Mark Pincus.

He also moved quickly on the company’s online gambling efforts by setting up a partnership with Bwin in the U.K., which will go live early this year, and also kicked off the years-long process of getting a real-money gaming license in the U.S., starting with Nevada.

The deals are a demonstration of just how eager Cottle is to drum up new revenue wherever he can.

In Cottle’s previous jobs, he had to be equally scrappy. He joined EA in 2007 to manage the company’s roughly $700 million acquisition of Jamdat, a mobile games company. At the time, mobile gaming consisted of developers making Java and Brew games.

But when the iPhone came out, Cottle took on the job of convincing his superiors that smartphones were the future.

One of his former reports at EA recalled that as soon as Cottle made the decision to develop five games for the iPhone’s App Store, “We were in the war room the next day and were moving resources to the iPhone.”

Prior to EA, Cottle co-founded a company called Mobile Digital Media. (The company, which was later renamed Quickoffice, was acquired by Google last year.) The entrepreneurial effort was a spinoff from Cottle’s days at Palm, where he was part of the executive team that took the company public. Earlier in his career, he was a Disney executive for 10 years, working on the company’s TV and Internet services.

In many ways, Cottle’s job at Zynga is similar to the one at EA. But instead of managing the move from feature phone to smartphone, this time he’s transitioning the company from social gaming to mobile gaming.

As part of that, one of Cottle’s biggest challenges will be finding a way for Zynga’s games to be discovered on mobile.

With Facebook, Zynga leveraged virality — friends invited friends to play, or discovered games through their news feeds. But mobile does not have the same dynamics, making distribution much more challenging. Last year, Cottle inked a deal directly with T-Mobile USA, which preloads some of Zynga’s games on to smartphones, and which is actually a throwback to when games were best distributed through the carriers.

Recognizing the pace at which the business is moving, Cottle said, “You have to be able to move fast and adapt and ensure that you bring your consumers with you. They’ll move from platform to platform; we just need to bring our franchises along with them.”

To accomplish this, Cottle has one key strength in his corner: A reputation for working as hard as it takes.

Zynga’s general counsel, Reggie Davis, who has known Cottle since they both worked at Hallmark Cards in Kansas City 25 years ago, said: “He’s Midwest like me. We got taught to show up early and to clean up afterwards — and if you do, you might get asked back. That’s totally Barry.”

“The quarter was tougher than we thought,” said EA’s CFO Blake Jorgensen. “There was a big slowdown in the console business industrywide.”

In addition to a general industry slump, EA also said its Medal of Honor game performed poorly in the third quarter. “When we saw the weakness in the title, we wound back expenses in the quarter,” said Jorgensen, who cut marketing expenses and redeployed headcount to other departments as needed.

The company said console gaming revenue fell 20 percent in 2012 compared to the prior year, but that the drop has been partially offset by its digital platforms. Smartphones, tablets and additional content for existing console titles continue to perform well, unlike the console business, which is at the tail end of its lifecycle.

For the quarter, the company’s non-GAAP net revenue totaled $1.18 billion, which was below its guidance of $1.25 billion to $1.35 billion. Analysts were expecting revenue of $1.29 billion. The company’s non-GAAP profit totaled 57 cents a share to beat the midpoint of its guidance of 50 cents to 60 cents, and to beat analyst expectations of 56 cents.

Overall, the results did not surprise investors. The company’s stock is down 28 cents, or 1.9 percent, in after-hours trading, to $14.80 a share.

Some examples of digital titles that performed well during the third quarter include Battlefield 3 subscriptions, which have generated more than $108 million in sales in the first three quarters of the company’s fiscal year. FIFA 13 digital net revenue topped $100 million in the third quarter alone. On mobile, the company’s free-to-play game, The Simpsons: Tapped Out, generated $23 million on iOS.

Overall smartphone and tablet sales generated $79 million during the quarter, increasing 36 percent year over year.

In the fourth quarter, EA will be closely watching the performance of Dead Space 3, the Sci-Fi title launching next week. So far, based on pre-sales, it is outperforming last year’s release, but the soft market worries Jorgensen.

“In Q4, our caution is continuing. In the industry, no major title has shipped yet, so right now, we are staring into the unknown,” he said.

The social games maker, which started losing ground earlier last year, had previously earmarked 13 undisclosed games for closure. Last week, TechCrunch identified 11 games which were either already shut down or close to it.

Some of the titles include PetVille, Mafia Wars 2, ForestVille, Vampire Wars and Indiana Jones Adventure World. A Zynga spokeswoman declined to comment, but when you try to visit the games on Facebook, there’s a message redirecting players to check out some of Zynga’s other games, like CastleVille, ChefVille, FarmVille 2, Mafia Wars and YoVille.

There’s a reason why these games eventually must be put to sleep.

The mechanics simply don’t work anymore if a lot of people aren’t playing them — after all, they are social games. If friends aren’t around to tend to your crops or visit your pet when you are away for too long, the games simply break down.

Having a large enough base of players to continue momentum is a problem that extends to other game publishers, too.

For instance, Electronic Arts has a Web page where it lists a running tally of games and services it has either shut down or plans to close. Some Facebook games that have already been cut include World Series Superstars, as of Dec. 31; EA Sports PGA Tour Golf Challenge, on Oct. 25; and others, like Monopoly Millionaires and Age of Immortals.

But as more games become services and are played against other people, instead of computers, other services are being shut down on game consoles, mobile phones and the PC. In January, EA said, it plans to shut down a myriad of services, like FIFA Soccer 11 Ultimate Team for PlayStation 3 and Xbox, and Madden NFL 11 for all three major consoles.

On Zynga’s chopping block, the most popular game is PetVille, which continues to attract a million users every month and 60,000 users daily.

The others are significantly less popular, such as Mafia Wars 2, which has as few as 200,000 monthly and 10,000 daily visitors, according to App Data. Compared to its top-performing titles, like FarmVille 2, which gets 43.5 million monthly and 8.1 million daily users, that’s clearly not very many well-loved pets.

At least two more games are to be discontinued, and that likely doesn’t include other titles that are flagged as underperformers. For instance, Zynga also said that it was no longer investing in The Ville, which performed poorly shortly after the game’s launch in June.

As part of the cost-cutting measures, the San Francisco company also reduced headcount by 5 percent, including some of the developers in Austin who were working on The Ville.

The company’s stock did not respond favorably to the plan, and continues to trade at $2.36 a share, down from a high of nearly $16 over the past year.

Perhaps it’s because investors don’t just want to see how it can cut costs, but how it can generate new streams of revenue. In other words, can Zynga can innovate in new areas that span beyond the ’Ville genre and Facebook? A new hit is what the company has been sorely lacking for the better part of 2012.

By freeing up resources, it at least has a chance.

About halfway through 2012, Zynga started prioritizing new game categories, like mid-core gaming and the casino genre. For instance, in mid-December, it launched Elite Slots on Facebook.

Electronic Arts is also clearly deciding where best to spend its resources, and Facebook is not a favorite. As part of its earnings call in October, it disclosed that the number of people actively playing its games on Facebook dropped by more than half in the past year. Therefore, it was reducing the number of Facebook games it was building this year.

Today, AllThingsD has learned of another appointment: Zynga has promoted Tim LeTourneau to the position of Chief Creative Officer, replacing Mike Verdu, who left the company in August to start his own game company.

Previously, LeTourneau was Zynga’s VP of games in charge of FarmVille 2, the company’s most successful game launch over the past few months. As part of his new role, he’ll be stepping away from the day-to-day job operations of FarmVille 2 to spend more time on game design across the board. LeTourneau will report to Steve Chiang, president of games, and Maureen Fan will become FarmVille 2’s new general manager.

Zynga confirmed the two appointments took place earlier this month at a quarterly all-hands meeting.

The company is essentially playing a game of musical chairs, plugging each hole with talent from another part of the company. At the same all-hands meeting, for instance, 680 people were recognized for taking on bigger roles within the roughly 3,000-employee organization. Additionally, David Ko and Barry Cottle were recently promoted to chief operations officer and chief revenue officer, respectively. They are filling vacancies created when other managers stepped down over the summer, including John Schappert and Jeff Karp.

LeTourneau joined Zynga almost two years ago after working at Electronic Arts since 1990. During his two decades at EA, he spent most of his time working on the longstanding and popular Sims franchise.

In the second quarter, the games company said, digital revenue increased 40 percent year over year, but social gaming had slowed significantly. It clocked only 42 million monthly active users, down from 101 million in the same period a year earlier.

“It’s slow versus the hype, but it’s not dead,” said EA’s John Riccitiello during the company’s conference call. Accordingly, Riccitiello said, EA has reduced its social gaming slate for the year, but maintained that it’s still an important part of the mix. “It continues to be very useful and positive for us,” he said.

EA’s comments come at a time when social gaming is clearly in a lull. Zynga, the largest social gaming company, is struggling to produce a new hit. Facebook has also recently acknowledged the slowdown, saying that payment revenue is declining as fewer people spend money on virtual goods inside of social games. But Riccitiello says that no one should have ever expected the platform to continue such a rapid growth — logically, it was going to plateau.

The company’s next social game is Madden NFL 13 Social, set to launch soon across both Facebook and iOS. In the game, players take turns in an offense-only shootout. The Facebook version of the game offers a 2-D game simulation experience, while the mobile version is 3-D and offers live game play. The two games are fully synced so players can play the Facebook version at their desk and continue on the go from the phone.

EA’s approach to social has been to leverage the franchises that have been very popular on other platforms and adding the ability to play with friends — on Facebook or on other platforms. In the company’s earnings release, it said Madden NFL 13 for the console was one of the top-selling titles in September, so extending the brand to mobile and social makes a lot of sense, especially since players are already tapping into the game’s digital experiences. Madden NFL 13 on the console logged record fan engagement, with a nearly 30 percent year-over-year increase in online game sessions.

In the second quarter, the company said digital revenue totaled $324 million, up from $234 million in the year-ago period. The increase was fueled by downloadable content for consoles and mobile games, but probably not Facebook games.

EA doesn’t break out revenue from Facebook, but you can guess they didn’t do so well given that it reported 42 million monthly active users during the period, down from 101 million in the second quarter last year. Meanwhile, it says mobile revenue has increased 60 percent since the same period last year; full-game downloads were up more than 40 percent.

Overall, the company reported non-GAAP revenue of $1.08 billion during the quarter, which was in line with its guidance of up to $1.05 billion. Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share of 15 cents a share was above its guidance of up to 12 cents a share.

The company attributed the higher than expected revenue was primarily due to digital growth. Specifically, it said record numbers of players are engaging in online features and content downloads for its Battlefield and FIFA soccer games. FIFA generated more than $115 million in the first half of 2013 in digital revenue; and Battlefield 3’s premium service has sold more than two million subscriptions to date. Additionally, the company’s Simpsons game called Tapped Out on iOS has been the top grossing game for the past four weeks.

EA’s CFO Blake Jorgensen said the company believes social will be key for games going forward, but not necessarily as an individual platform. “I would say that overall, digital is growing the fastest, and within digital, it’s the mobile business that’s growing the fastest,” he said. “Clearly, mobile is up dramatically, and it’s no surprise — it’s driven by smartphones, tablets.”

The digital revenue more than offset the drop EA is seeing from packaged good sales. However, its guidance for the current quarter, which includes the holidays, is missing analyst expectations. It expects earnings per share of 50 cents to 60 cents, well below consensus estimates of 71 cents (excluding some items). For non-GAAP revenue, it guided $1.25 billion to $1.35 billion, which was lower than the consensus estimate of $1.38 billion.

Game maker Electronic Arts says that social gaming is evolving, not dying.

Speaking at a conference Friday, CEO John Riccitiello said that the boom of social gaming was overhyped, but its decline is being overplayed, as well. Companies such as Zynga weren’t as brilliant as they were made out to be a few months ago, but things aren’t as bad as current headlines would have one believe.

“The companies that are now suffering will have another day,” Riccitiello said.

There are some lessons that all game makers can take away from the current challenges of social gaming. First and foremost, Riccitiello said, “consumers won’t pay for crap.”

Great gaming, he said, starts with truly good entertainment, not viral marketing involving spamming your friends to get a shovel.

Riccitiello said that there are some truly great free-to-play social games out there, including some from rivals. He pointed to a competitor’s game — Dragonvale — as well as to EA’s own Simpsons-themed Tapped Out game.

To highlight his point, he called on a truly unbiased reviewer, showing a video clip of Homer Simpson tapping away on a tablet.

“This game is life-ruiningly fun,” Homer says.

Over the past year, Relan stepped up from his position on the board to work with Tseng on moving the company from publishing social games to making games for smartphones. Now that the pivot has been completed, Relan says he again will become executive chairman.

Founded in 2008, the Burlingame, Calif., company was one of the first to feed off of Facebook’s social graph, by developing such hits as Happy Aquarium. But after Facebook shut down its viral channels, which had made it easy to get new users, CrowdStar had a difficult time keeping up with other social game leaders, like Zynga, Electronic Arts, Wooga and King.

Today, it is focused on creating mobile games like Top Girl for teenage girls.

In a statement, Relan said, “Jeffrey was instrumental in the company’s successful pivot to mobile social gaming. His four years at CrowdStar building free-to-play games, combined with his prior background at Sega building AAA games like Iron Man, make him the ideal choice for the next phase of the company’s growth in mobile.”

Long-time gaming executive Bing Gordon offers one plausible reason: Facebook is suffering from a cyclical process currently found in the games industry, with peaks and valleys driven by new hardware releases.

“The Facebook platform right now feels like it has a life cycle,” Gordon said. “Right now, it feels like PlayStation.”

About every six years, a new Xbox, PlayStation or Nintendo comes out, driving new sales for the entire industry. At first, he says, there’s a feeding frenzy, but as the systems age, the frenzy slows down. Near the end, prices drop to keep the platform going.

While Facebook can’t relate to the hardware comparison, it still finds itself at a similar point, where its novelty factor is fading and the number of people playing games on its network is leveling off. The first to really notice this trend was Zynga, the largest game maker on the platform, which missed second-quarter expectations by a long shot. “Right now, it’s kind of flat, and whether it takes another jump up or goes down remains to be seen,” Gordon said. “Is there something else to be done? Sure, maybe it’s mobile.”

As an investment partner at Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, Gordon is focused on consumer and gaming technologies; he has a good vantage point of the market from sitting on the boards of both Amazon and Zynga. Before joining Kleiner, he was a longtime executive at Electronic Arts. And since he’s dabbled in theater, including a stint on Broadway, he eagerly agreed to appear in a video (posted below).

Despite what some may consider a dire situation — Zynga and Facebook trading so far below their IPO prices — Gordon takes a longer view of the market. He remembers working at EA when its stock fell more than 70 percent in one week, and points to the way Amazon has recovered after once trading at $2 a share.

Gordon wouldn’t go into specifics on either company’s strategy, but before the camera started rolling, he chatted about Facebook’s ability to maintain its growth as a social games platform — and how it closely affects Zynga, the creator of some of the biggest social games, like FarmVille, CityVille and, more recently, ChefVille.

Gordon said that, thanks to Facebook, gaming is more social today than it has ever been, and he expects that trend to continue. But he does question whether the dominant access point will always be Facebook — or if it will eventually shift to mobile.

If that’s the case, can Zynga succeed somewhere other than Facebook?

“I think so, but it’s not provable,” he said. “Zynga has more talent than any company I’ve ever seen — way more talent than EA had at its peak.” But that, too, is changing. Over the past few months, Zynga has seen a half-dozen high-level departures. So, can that still be true? Gordon confidently and simply responded: “Oh, yeah.”

More from Gordon in the video:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120926/facebook-fatigue-kleiners-gordon-sees-console-like-cycles-in-social-gaming/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120925/no-need-for-tickets-two-hobbit-games-coming-to-a-device-near-you-for-free/ http://allthingsd.com/20120925/no-need-for-tickets-two-hobbit-games-coming-to-a-device-near-you-for-free/#comments Tue, 25 Sep 2012 13:00:14 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=253721 Kabam, a San Francisco game maker, is publishing two games inspired by the upcoming release of Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit” movie trilogy — and better yet, both will be free.

Under the deal, Kabam will develop and operate The Hobbit: Kingdoms of Middle-earth for mobile, and The Hobbit: Armies of the Third Age for the Web. The games are expected to come out this fall, ahead of the first movie — “An Unexpected Journey” — on Dec. 14.

The deal is a big win for Kabam, which has been working hard over the past year to diversify beyond the Facebook platform. Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment is co-publishing the two titles.

In an interview, Kevin Chou, Kabam’s CEO, emphasized that this is not a traditional licensing deal, where Kabam agrees to pay a huge upfront fee for the games’ rights and then bears all of the risk. Likewise, he said the games aren’t solely a marketing push to promote the movies.

“We are aligned, in terms of how we are building and operating the games,” Chou said. “We aren’t in the business of getting paid $1 million to $2 million to do a marketing promo for a movie. Last year, we did $100 million in revenue, and this year we are growing well over 50 percent. … We are thinking about how do we entertain fans between the movie releases, and tie in the free-to-play game context with massive audiences.”

Chou declined to say which platforms the games will be launching on, but if Kabam’s recent moves are any guide, it could easily play across a number of devices. Last year at this time, 100 percent of Kabam’s revenue was coming from Facebook. Today, 70 percent of its revenue is from other platforms, such as iOS, Android, and distribution services on the PC, like Steam and Kongregate. Both games will be monetized through virtual goods.

Kabam is known for creating “mid-core” games, meaning that they require more involvement by the players than many social games. Chou said that its style is in line with the movies, which are dark and gritty. The mobile game will have an empire-building component seen in previous Kabam games, and the Web game will have real-time combat sequences, he said.

This is not Kabam’s first licensing deal. It worked previously on The Godfather: Five Families, a big-budget social game for Facebook. While it may not have gone as well as some may have hoped — and was possibly hurt by the fact that “The Godfather” series had no new films coming out — it may have helped establish Kabam’s ability to work content creators. In the case of “The Godfather,” it was Paramount Digital Entertainment.

Free is probably the right call for the games, even if Tolkien fans are willing to flock to theaters and pay to watch the movie on the big screen. For context, eight months after Electronic Arts released the ambitious multiplayer game, Star Wars: The Old Republic, it made it free to anyone who wanted to play.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120925/no-need-for-tickets-two-hobbit-games-coming-to-a-device-near-you-for-free/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120924/eas-popcap-to-close-dublin-game-studio-lay-off-96/ http://allthingsd.com/20120924/eas-popcap-to-close-dublin-game-studio-lay-off-96/#comments Mon, 24 Sep 2012 17:51:39 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=253511 Electronic Arts-owned PopCap has decided to close its game studio in Dublin after completing a monthlong evaluation period, according to a spokesperson; 96 jobs will be cut in the process. EA will continue to employ about 400 people in its European Customer Experience Center in Galway, Ireland. The layoffs were part of a recent broader restructuring that included 50 layoffs at PopCap’s Seattle headquarters.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120924/eas-popcap-to-close-dublin-game-studio-lay-off-96/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120920/former-zynga-executive-jeff-karp-lands-at-gsn-digital/ http://allthingsd.com/20120920/former-zynga-executive-jeff-karp-lands-at-gsn-digital/#comments Thu, 20 Sep 2012 16:21:40 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=252525 After stepping down as Zynga’s chief marketing officer 10 days ago, Jeff Karp is joining GSN as EVP of Mobile & Social Games. When he starts on Monday, Karp will be in charge of GSN Digital’s virtual currency business across its mobile, social and online gaming platforms. Karp was one of a handful of recent executives who left Zynga after a restructuring. Prior to Zynga, Karp was EVP of Electronic Arts’ Play label, where he oversaw The Sims, SimCity and Harry Potter.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120920/former-zynga-executive-jeff-karp-lands-at-gsn-digital/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120905/farmville-sequel-gets-a-facelift-with-3-d-graphics-and-all-new-game-play/ http://allthingsd.com/20120905/farmville-sequel-gets-a-facelift-with-3-d-graphics-and-all-new-game-play/#comments Wed, 05 Sep 2012 19:00:36 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=247467 It’s time for FarmVille to get a makeover.

FarmVille deserves recognition for its role in social gaming history. The three-year-old game, which has been played by 100 million people, was one of the first social games on Facebook to capture a mass audience.

Amazingly, after all this time, FarmVille continues to attract more than 18 million players a month, making it Zynga’s sixth-most-popular game. It also brings in more revenue than any other Zynga title, accounting for 29 percent of the company’s revenue in the second quarter.

As such an important brand to the company, it makes sense to experiment with creating sequels — which have become the lifeblood of the traditional videogame market. But for the same reasons stated above, it will also be a delicate balancing act. One false move may irritate a legion of players, who have invested thousands of hours and significant amounts of money in the original game.

What’s more, Zynga desperately needs to prove right now that it can turn its past successes into franchises that will continue attracting players for many years to come.

Based on what I’ve seen in a brief online demo provided to me by the creative director and Zynga’s VP of games, the new game has a shot.

FarmVille 2 looks and behaves differently from the original.

In the first iteration, users were motivated to return to harvest crops before they wither. Zynga’s CEO Mark Pincus has famously talked about how its players were so passionate they’d set their alarm clocks to wake up in the middle of the night in order to plow their fields. But in the sequel, withering will not be a central theme.

In the sequel, there are much more realistic scenarios, including classic resource-management challenges. Players must make sure to have enough water to keep their crops alive, and must get fertilizer from the cows to make crops grow. To get eggs, you must feed your chickens; and to get milk, you must care for the cows.

The resources, including the eggs, milk, wheat and fruit from the trees, are then used in your farmhouse kitchen to make scones and other tasty treats that can be sold at your own roadside stand.

Instead of acting out some of these scenarios in solitude as in the original game, in FarmVille 2, the relationships on the farm are symbiotic — without one, the other is not possible.

“We wanted this very tactile and touchable experience,” said Tim LeTourneau, Zynga’s VP of Games. “We are embracing the technical advancements to make the screen come to life. The animals are fully animated and respond to your touch. You have a world that comes to life at your finger.”

In other words, coins don’t just fall out of the sky, LeTourneau said; you have to sell things in the market in order to earn them.

The game is also Zynga’s first developed entirely in 3-D, thanks to Adobe Flash 11.

For instance, shirts and pants are pinned to a clothesline, where they sway in the wind; a rocking chair actually rocks; a campfire crackles and wind chimes jingle in the breeze. Navigation is also vastly improved, making the game far less tedious to play. Instead of having to click on each individual parcel of land to plant new seeds or water, users can click and drag the mouse around on the screen. The movement, which Zynga calls “painting,” looks like a motion borrowed from a touchscreen, not a PC game. Additionally, to move different elements around on the board, far fewer actions are required. Now players must only right-click and drag.

The combination of better graphics and navigation results in much more active and fun game play. When relocating a cow from one side of the farm to another, the beast’s eyes bulge in surprise while the animal is suspended in the air, like a several-ton animal undoubtedly would.

“They don’t hate it, but they don’t love it either,” said Mike McCarthy, FarmVille 2’s creative director.

But the game is not mind-blowingly different — it’s still a game about a farm, as it should be.

Many of the tasks are the same in the two games, and even some of the colors and textures will be familiar. Still, the updates represent many positive changes that should attract some of the 100 million original FarmVille players — who have since retired their work gloves — back to the game.

Zynga is also sensitive to its original players, who are still playing the first FarmVille.

A year ago, it rolled out Mafia Wars 2, which pretty much put an end to the once very popular franchise. Original players of the game felt snubbed when the new version came out and it didn’t live up to expectations. All the time they’d spent on the previous version ended up being a total waste.

LeTourneau, who joined Zynga from Electronic Arts where he worked on the long-standing Sims franchise, said they took that experience into account when developing FarmVille 2. ”Although it’s a sequel, it’s not intended to replace FarmVille,” he said. “It’s not a continuation; it’s a reimagining of FarmVille. We are taking advantage of all the things we’ve learned about social games, and using the technology that’s available to create a new and different farming experience.”

For original FarmVille fans, there will be no way to transfer your accomplishments from one game into the next. Instead, Zynga will keep that version alive by continuing to create content updates for the players who still like it.

One very noticeable difference between the two games is that while the original was about creating a sprawling farm, this one is about the attention to detail. In other words, bigger is not necessarily better. Instead of creating vast spaces to mass-produce more crops, this one is about nurturing each and every tomato and pumpkin. Mini-competitions within the game challenge players to see who can grow the largest crops, like the exhibits you see at county fairs. In this game, strawberries can hit 12 pounds, so imagine how big pumpkins can get.

But just when you may find that too tedious or claustrophobic, players can zoom out and see the countryside. There’s a village off in the distance that’s not available today, but promises additional subplots where you can meet friends, trade goods and visit carnivals and county fairs.

Lastly, this is still a social game, so if you are looking for something different in that regard, you won’t find it here. There are still plenty of ties to your friends on Facebook. You can visit other friends’ farms, where you can potentially find a final ingredient you may need to complete a recipe. Friends are also allowed to visit your farm, where they can be “Farm Helpers.” Each action performed by a farm helper accelerates progress on the farm, including harvesting crops and feeding animals.

But most fun of all, it seems Zynga has learned a mechanic or two from more traditional videogames. At the end of each level, all of the players’ crops grow instantly — with a big “pop,” everything blooms. Not only is it a visually stimulating moment, it’s one that players can strategize around to make sure everything is watered and planted to get the biggest bang possible.

“All of these games are about progression, and feeling the reward and success of that progress,” LeTourneau said. “We want the level-up moment in the game to feel exciting.”

FarmVille 2 is live today on both Facebook and Zynga.com, and will be available in 16 languages, unlike the original, which only launched in English. There are no immediate plans for a mobile version, but with painting motions included in the game play, it only seems like a matter of time before it rolls out on phones and tablets.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120905/farmville-sequel-gets-a-facelift-with-3-d-graphics-and-all-new-game-play/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120830/eas-madden-nfl-13-rushes-to-record-sales-on-day-one/ http://allthingsd.com/20120830/eas-madden-nfl-13-rushes-to-record-sales-on-day-one/#comments Thu, 30 Aug 2012 16:54:05 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=246580 Electronic Arts has sold 900,000 units of Madden NFL 13 in its first 24 hours, equivalent to about 13 Super Bowl stadiums’ worth of fans.

The huge first day marked the best start ever for the franchise on this generation of hardware, with sales up 7 percent compared to last year. EA said the franchise also set a day-one online record, with a 28 percent jump in the number of users logging in to play simultaneously.

At launch, the game was available in North America for four systems: Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, PlayStation Vita and PlayStation 3, for $40 to $60.

Critics are raving about the new technical innovations that allow tackles and other movements to look more realistic — and more painful. The game received high rankings on Metacritic.com, including a score of 82 out of 100 on the Xbox and a score of 85 on the PlayStation 3.

Of course, the hilarious YouTube videos that EA is using to market the game probably helped, too. The clips feature Paul Rudd, perhaps better known as the brother-in-law from “Knocked Up,” and Ray Lewis, the 240-pound linebacker for the Baltimore Ravens, pretending to be best friends and poking fun at each other while playing Madden.

Those viral efforts among others probably helped to generate the estimated 665,464 social interactions on Facebook and Twitter combined during the launch.

For kicks and tackles, here’s the video of Rudd dancing to Wiz Khalifa’s “Black and Yellow” in Lewis’s face to honor the Ravens’ big rival, the Steelers.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120830/eas-madden-nfl-13-rushes-to-record-sales-on-day-one/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120828/eas-madden-13-looks-to-score-with-more-physical-play/ http://allthingsd.com/20120828/eas-madden-13-looks-to-score-with-more-physical-play/#comments Tue, 28 Aug 2012 20:24:19 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=245708

How could Electronic Arts make Madden 13 different from all the rest?

First, it’s got pretty good marketing.

In a series of YouTube videos, Paul Rudd, perhaps better known as the brother-in-law from “Knocked Up,” and Ray Lewis, the 240-pound linebacker for the Baltimore Ravens, pretend to be best friends and poke fun at each other while playing Madden on the largest TV I’ve ever seen.

In one clip, Rudd recounts how he taught Lewis his end-zone dance, a.k.a “The Squirrel,” and, in another, Rudd dances to Wiz Khalifa’s “Black and Yellow” in Lewis’s face, honoring the Ravens’ big rival, the Steelers. Burn.

But second, this year’s model is different because it uses all-new technology that makes tackles look even more realistic.

EA released the sequel at midnight last night, with thousands of fans reportedly waiting in line to get their hands on a copy. No word yet on how many copies were preordered, but the latest edition is bringing it to a whole new level — which isn’t that easy to do. Madden has always gotten high marks for its ability to replicate the NFL and is even known for influencing game play on the field.

In a video with one of EA’s game producers, the company breaks down how it used a new animation engine, called the Infinity Engine, to reflect real-life physics. Based on footage, tackles look like they hurt more when players weigh more; legs and arms also get tangled when contact is made, rather than just passing through the animations.

Most reviews so far have been positive about the change:

IGN’s Greg Miller writes: “In past Maddens, there were only so many tackle animations and ways a player could go down. After a while, it was easy to feel like you had seen it all. The Infinity Engine makes every hit a little bit different. Angles, weight and more matter. Watching a halfback break free of a shoddy tackle or a wideout come down just in bounds before stumbling over really amplifies how the game looks and feels. Sure, there are still wonky tackles and handoff animations, but the good outweighs the bad by a long shot.”

From an Amazon.com reviewer, who gives it five stars: “The new player animations are amazing; players for the first time literally get crushed. Backs bend backwards, heads tilt, fumbles look like fumbles instead of floating balls that magically appear outside of player’s hands. The attention to detail is very impressive and marks the first time this generation has gotten a football game worthy of this generation’s consoles.”

But you can’t please everyone. In a one-star Amazon review, the graphics are commended, but the reviewer argues that the game is a step backward for other reasons, including interface and control changes.

Either way, the game will set you back $60, so you’ll have to decide if the graphics update is worth it.

Here’s one of the funnier clips between Lewis and Rudd:

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