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.

The decision was made as part of a significant restructuring plan that is designed to return the company to profitability. The company said it would be phasing out 13 games and laying off about 170 employees.

This afternoon, Mark Pincus, the co-founder and CEO, will talk more about the changes during the company’s quarterly conference call, but in the meantime, here’s an explanation for why The Ville’s life is being cut short.

As detailed in the chart below, compiled by Sterne Agee, you can see that the company’s newest titles have not performed as well as some of its original titles — and that Zynga really hasn’t had a true hit in a while. FarmVille 2 has done the best among Zynga’s latest crop of games, but both The Ville and ChefVille are already starting to decline just months after launch.

A lot has changed since Zynga’s early days. As many already know, Facebook no longer gives game makers unlimited access to its viral channels. That keeps people from unknowingly posting random notes on their friends’ walls, but also makes it harder for people to learn about new games. Since that has been the case for some time, however, there must be greater forces at play.

Even though Zynga’s new games have better graphics and some new mechanics, they are largely variations of the original. It’s a formula that the company has been repeating for the past four-plus years, and now there’s evidence it has run its course.

When The Ville was announced in June, I wrote, “Much like other ’Ville games, which challenged users to build a farm, a city or an imaginary fantasy land, the point of The Ville is to create a character and build a home, complete with swimming pools, workout rooms and state-of-the-art kitchen appliances.” Zynga calls the ’Ville series of games “invest and express,” because the games allow players to invest time — and hopefully money — in their game board.

Initially, the category of games appealed to people who obsessed with owning every item available in the game. Other players enjoyed the decorating aspects of the genre, spending their time and money on making their virtual home something special. It’s a genre other game companies used, and now Facebook is saturated with hundreds of variations and copycats. (In fact, Electronic Arts has filed a lawsuit against Zynga, accusing it of infringing on its game The Sims Social).

Pincus acknowledged the problem earlier this month after revising the company’s full-year guidance: “The challenges we faced in our Web business in Q2 continued in Q3 and while many of our games achieved plan, we still experienced overall weakness in the invest and express category. To address this we’re further investing in other genres like casino where we already lead with Zynga Poker and blue PVP, a category we pioneered with Mafia Wars, and now have the opportunity to reinvent with the industry’s best talent here at Zynga.”

Stay tuned for a much more detailed explanation during the company’s earnings call today at 2 pm PT. For now, here’s the chart:

“We don’t take these decisions lightly as we recognize the impact to our colleagues and friends who have been on this journey with us. We appreciate their amazing contributions and will miss them,” he told employees in a letter.

More details will be provided on the earnings call tomorrow, but the high-level takeaway is that the troubled social games maker will be “sunsetting” 13 games, which seems like a lot, and closing the Boston office. It is also proposing closures of the Zynga Japan and U.K. studios.

As previously reported, it confirmed it was reducing staffing levels at its Austin studio, where The Ville was developed.

With as many as 3,400 on its payroll, a 5 percent layoff works out to about 170 employees being let go.

And on what was already a rough day, it didn’t help that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg pointed to Zynga’s struggles as one of the drags on his payments business.

Here’s the note that was provided by a Zynga spokesperson:

Team,

Earlier today we initiated a number of changes to streamline our operations, focus our resources on our most strategic opportunities, and invest in our future. We waited to share this news with all of you until we had first spoken with the groups impacted.

As part of these changes, we’ve had to make some tough decisions around products, teams and people. I want to fill you in on what’s happened and address any concerns you may have.

Here are the most important details.

We are sunsetting 13 older games and we’re also significantly reducing our investment in The Ville.

We are closing the Zynga Boston studio and proposing closures of the Zynga Japan and UK studios. Additionally, we are reducing staffing levels in our Austin studio. All of these represent terrific entrepreneurial teams, which make this decision so difficult.

In addition to these studios, we are also making a small number of partner team reductions.

In all, we will unfortunately be parting ways with approximately 5% of our full time workforce. We don’t take these decisions lightly as we recognize the impact to our colleagues and friends who have been on this journey with us. We appreciate their amazing contributions and will miss them.

This is the most painful part of an overall cost reduction plan that also includes significant cuts in spending on data hosting, advertising and outside services, primarily contractors.

These reductions, along with our ongoing efforts to implement more stringent budget and resource allocation around new games and partner projects, will improve our profitability and allow us to reinvest in great games and our Zynga network on web and mobile.

Zynga made social gaming and play a worldwide phenomenon, and we remain the industry leader. Our success has come from our dedication to a simple and powerful proposition – that play is not just something people do to pass time, it’s a core need for every person and culture.

We will all be discussing these difficult changes more with our teams and as a company. Tomorrow, Dave and I will be hosting a post-earnings webcast (details to follow) and next week we will be discussing our broader vision and strategy during our quarterly all-hands meeting. I’m confident this puts us on the right path to deliver on the promise of social gaming and make Zynga into an internet treasure.

If you have any immediate questions, I hope you will talk directly with your manager, Colleen, or me.

I look forward to talking with you tomorrow.

Mark

Zynga filed a pair of motions to rebut Electronic Arts’ claims in the original filing, arguing that The Ville on Facebook is not a carbon copy of 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.

“Today we responded to EA’s claims, which we believe have no merit,” said Reggie Davis, Zynga’s general counsel, in a statement. “We also filed a counterclaim which addresses actions by EA we believe to be anticompetitive and unlawful business practices, including legal threats and demands for no-hire agreements.”

The three documents, embedded below, provide a behind-the-scenes look at the companies’ intense competition.

Despite EA’s dominance in the industry, Zynga has easily remained the top social games company on Facebook and has recruited away many of EA’s top managers. At the same time, EA has spent billions of dollars trying to gain traction in the social space — with mixed results.

In the original suit, filed by EA in U.S. District Court in San Francisco in August, EA charged that Zynga’s The Ville is an “unmistakable copy” of EA’s The Sims Social. “When The Ville was introduced in June 2012, the infringement of The Sims Social was unmistakable to those of us at Maxis as well as to players and the industry at large,” said Lucy Bradshaw, general manager of EA’s Maxis label.

In Zynga’s response, it asks the court to strike several references in the lawsuit that it believes are not pertinent. Zynga also denies EA’s allegations, claiming that both The Ville and EA’s The Sims Social belong to “a longstanding and well-developed genre known as ‘life simulation’ games,” and “no one, including EA, may lay claim to the exclusive right to develop and release games in that genre.”

The counterclaim gets more juicy.

Zynga says that EA knows that none of the former EA executives named in its lawsuit transmitted any confidential information to Zynga “because EA itself was involved in, and approved of, the exhaustive measures undertaken to ensure that did not happen.” What’s more, Zynga claims that EA tried to restrict its employees from going to work at a competitor, which is against California law.

In the filing, Zynga writes: “Zynga was told by EA’s legal team that Mr. Riccitiello had instructed them to obtain a no-hire agreement from Zynga that prohibited Zynga’s future hiring of EA employees. Absent such agreement, Mr. Riccitiello would direct a lawsuit to be filed against Zynga ‘knowing there was no basis and even though he loses.’”

The lawsuit goes on to claim that Riccitiello made other similar statements.

EA spokesman John Reseburg responded quickly to the allegations in a written statement that mocked the tone of the lawsuit: “This is a predictable subterfuge aimed at diverting attention from Zynga’s persistent plagiarism of other artists and studios. Zynga would be better served trying to hold onto the shrinking number of employees they’ve got, rather than suing to acquire more.”

Here are the filings:

Part 1 Zynga’s Motion to Strike

Part 2 Zynga’s Answer and Demand for Jury Trial

Part 3 Counterclaim _Public_

Yes, indeed, if morale at the San Francisco-based social games company continues to sink as quickly as its stock has been dropping.

It’s the unfortunate flip side of a company that has stressed that its employees should be their own CEO and “move at Zynga speed.” It’s a culture driven by analytics, where every move is recorded, measured and evaluated.

Now it appears that the long hours and taxing work environment are causing the inevitable — some are deciding to leave, especially as shares trade 70 percent lower than the company’s public offering.

Several sources at other companies say they’ve started seeing a “flood of resumes” in recent weeks from Zynga developers looking for jobs or trying to raise capital.

On the inside, employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, described morale as “grim,” while another characterized the feeling as “anxious.”

To be sure, at times, it can also be business as usual. During the company’s 16th all-hands quarterly meeting today, CEO Mark Pincus reportedly talked about the company’s future, and fielded tough questions from the crowd as he usually does, according to a Zynga spokesperson, who declined to elaborate on the state of morale.

But if an employee hasn’t bought into the company’s mission by now, the past three weeks haven’t helped.

On Wednesday, Zynga’s COO John Schappert resigned, after only 15 months on the job.

And two weeks ago, Zynga reported a second-quarter earnings flop that led to its stock sliding by 40 percent. It has remained relatively stable at these depressed levels ever since, and closed today at $3.01 a share.

In addition, the company has also been hounded by at least two lawsuits — one targeting its management team, and the other, its games.

Employees at Zynga’s headquarters gather around the atrium at its 2012 Unleashed event.

The first suit is alleging that executives made false and misleading statements in order to liquidate their personal holdings at elevated prices four months after the IPO. In the suit, filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court of Northern California, it named Zynga and a dozen of its executives and board members as defendants. In the company’s secondary offering, Pincus sold about $200 million in shares; Schappert sold $3.9 million; and CTO Cadir Lee sold $13.6 million.

But low-level employees were prohibited from participating in the sale, which also isn’t helping with morale, according to numerous staffers.

The second legal blow was a copyright-infringement lawsuit filed by Electronic Arts, which alleges that Zynga is making an “unmistakable copy” of its game, The Sims Social.

In some respects, Zynga has made it fairly far without a talent drain. In comparison, it took only three months for there to be at least three notable departures from Facebook, the social network that it works with very closely, and which is also suffering from post-IPO stock woes.

Another point that employees can celebrate is that most have been awarded stock grants, and not options. The benefit of grants is they can’t ever be underwater.

That said, for employees who are heavily compensated by stock, it may not mean much, as they’ve watched their net worth on paper drop by 70 percent over the past few months. At those rates, it’s the difference between being able to afford a nice house and buying a nice car.

For a majority of the 3,000-plus employees, many are also short-timers, which creates another issue.

Without a long history at the company, it may be hard for some to feel nostalgic about staying during difficult times. According to a document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Zynga said 80 percent of the staff has been there less than two years. In fact, many employees have joined the company through a dozen or more acquisitions. This short tenure could potentially represent an ongoing challenge for Zynga to manage, as it tries to figure out how to create a sense of dedication among its employees.

Otherwise, Zynga can be like many other Silicon Valley companies offering free lunch and other perks. But now, some employees think it might be the time to pull out the checkbook and spend some of the $1 billion it raised in its IPO on retention bonuses.

In a statement, Pincus said that Schappert’s departure was amicable and had nothing to do with the company’s operations — in other words, it was Schappert’s decision to resign.

But if Zynga doesn’t find a catalyst to get its stock moving in the right direction, it’s not a risky bet that investors could see other such “voluntary” departures in the near future.

Earlier this week, Zynga missed analyst estimates and slashed its 2012 guidance. The company’s excuse? It saw softness among its core games, delayed the launch of The Ville and witnessed an extreme dropoff in Draw Something players.

The bad news sent the newly public company’s stock into a tailspin. Today, it continues trading 70 percent below its offering price, at $3.12 a share.

The series of events also sent the company’s executives into a frenzy, trying to come up with the words that would reassure investors that Zynga has not lost the game — at least not yet.

In the interview Wednesday, Schappert, who left Electronic Arts to join Zynga, emphasized the opportunities lying ahead.

• On the immediate horizon, he said, the company will get a boost from big Facebook titles coming later this year, including ChefVille, FarmVille 2 and another unannounced ’Ville game. Another near-term project focuses on branching out from the company’s core female demographic, by making “mid-core” game titles.
• A bit further out, he said, the company has the opportunity to expand beyond Facebook into mobile. While its user base grew 50 percent to 33 million daily active users during the quarter, it has yet to develop games that encourage users to pay to play.
• And in the long term, he said, the company has an opportunity in real-money gaming. While the prospect of gambling tends to get investors excited, it’s still limited for now to Europe. Plans include launching internationally in the first half of 2013, subject to licensing approval. The company is also working on publishing third-party titles for the Web and mobile.

More from Schappert on those subjects and more:

Mid-core gaming: We saw some success around Empires Vs. Allies with player vs. player. It’s a category that intrigues us, absolutely. It’s a different demographic. We’ll make it social, free and accessible, just like we’ve done with Casino and Arcade. This is a category for male-oriented games, and yes, it will be equal [to Casino and Arcade]. It’s a big emphasis. We haven’t announced timing, but we are actively working on games in that genre.

Villes on mobile: Going forward, the emphasis in mobile is on creating games in higher monetizing genres, like Ville-style games. Casino monetizes well, and you see us doing slots on mobile, but there will also be more Ville-style games coming to mobile. … We do know that Ville-style works well on Web and mobile, and we are actively developing Ville-style games on mobile.

Draw Something’s Q2 dropoff: The game is incredibly successful and is close to 90 million installs. It was a very large contributor in the second quarter, and while the DAUs (daily active users) came down, there’s still a strong connection with its players. A third of the players have played in the past month, and it’s still contributing in a meaningful way, but it didn’t hit expectations and revenue projections.

Now that’s over, and founder and CEO Mark Pincus has been on roll. In June, he appeared at the D: All Things Digital conference. Later the same month, he hosted a press event at Zynga’s San Francisco headquarters, and earlier this week he was the keynote speaker at the GamesBeat conference.

In an interview with AllThingsD, Pincus explained why he’s got so much to say. ”We are happy to be able to talk now, and excited to share our message,” he said.

As the largest social games company, Zynga has a lot going for it, but without clarity on how it will achieve its next phase of growth, investors are playing it safe.

Yesterday, Zynga’s shares plunged in early trading to $4.78 a share, representing an all-time low. Earlier that morning, Pacific Crest analyst Evan Wilson cut his second-quarter estimates, saying he believes fewer people are playing Zynga’s games than he had originally anticipated. By the end of the day, the stock regained some ground to close at $5.02 a share, which is still down 50 percent from its IPO price in December.

But now with no restrictions in place, Pincus is excited to talk about the company’s upcoming slate of games on Facebook, including two new Ville franchises, and how Zynga will continue targeting a very large audience of people who have never considered themselves gamers.

He’s also bullish on mobile, which he says is just starting to reach the scale that Zynga looks for in a platform. He defines sufficient scale as the ability to reach 10 million users in the first 90 days. And, finally, Pincus is eager to gab about the huge opportunity for Zynga to open up its platform and make its internal tools and infrastructure available to third-party game developers.

Here’s an edited version of our conversation:

Growing the gaming pie:

Our goal is to convince people who have never played games before to play because it’s social, easy and free. It’s not about going after a mature market, or people who are hardcore gamers. We will know we’ve gotten our games right when we help to grow the market. CityVille grew the market — the entire ecosystem – by 18 percent [according to daily active users tracked by AppData.] We hope Bubble Safari, The Ville and ChefVille bring in new people, too.

On opening up its network to other developers:

Pincus: We are optimists about the future, and believe there is a bigger opportunity if we all work together rather than being isolationists and not interconnecting. We use a term called ”social liquidity.” It’s when you come to our game, or the next great Angry Birds, and you find it’s really easy to get your friends playing the game, too. We are fundamentally a growth company. Our vision is to have a billion people playing games together. [Based on the most recent numbers available, Zynga reaches 292 million people.]

On leveraging Zynga’s investments in infrastructure:

We do see an opportunity to provide infrastructure that we’ve developed to the rest of the industry, but not in a commodity-like way, like hosting and scalablity. Amazon’s AWS does that. I don’t want to underemphasize our infrastructure, though — it has led us to scale much more efficiently through a combination of data centers and software. We have been able to reduce the servers required by 90 percent. Bubble Safari would have taken 2,000 servers a year ago, and we use 200 servers today. That is real innovation that dramatically reduced, not just our capital and operating expenses, but also the amount of server engineering. It cuts the amount of engineering in half.

We’ve also created some important technology that we can make available to the industry, but beyond that, the games that are on our platform can be more social. All of our analytics are geared toward helping a product manager and engineer figure out what features drive more social. We track Active Social Network, or ASN, which is the number of people who you interact with during a given period of time.

That’s been the most important metric as we make our games more social. As we move it [ASN], our retention and revenues go up.

On becoming a publisher for third-party titles:

I think that if we can interconnect our games and audiences with each other then we have a massive opportunity as an industry to drive more network effects at much bigger scale for combined players. And through that drive, we can increase game discovery and create higher retention and revenues, especially as I look at mobile. My view — unlike other companies, like Gree, which see this as a winner-take-all situation — I don’t believe that’s how mobile is going to evolve.

I believe mobile will be much broader and fragmented and open than that. I think that there’s potential for networks to emerge for developers that will drive discovery and engagement and player experiences. Mobile is going to play out much more, and will be more about the industry collaborating and connecting than a single player owning an opportunity. We want to be an important part of that.

On why it is not winner-take-all:

Everything about mobile is fragmented, like the desktop used to be. Mobile games today and apps spread more by word of mouth offline than online. I think that when you think about the mobile user experience from the end-user point of view, it’s a throwback to the desktop experience. It’s a mission-oriented and destination-oriented experience. You aren’t starting with an open search bar, or even an App Store, normally. You are starting by looking at your desktop, and you are going into one of the apps. It’s a decentralized experience. Maybe Apple, Facebook or Google will centralize that experience, but it’s looking like it will continue to evolve as a decentralized experience, which is much more fragmented.

On why developers will want to work with Zynga, which is also a competitor:

I think that any large consumer app or network has an opportunity to open up its APIs to curate or publish great work. The developers will decide if: a) they see short-term value, or b) it is a long-term valuable relationship. Over time, you’ll have to deliver a win-win that’s consistent, valuable, transparent and reliable. We want to do that. We aren’t the first game network to have third-party developers. We aren’t in it for the next four quarters. We are in it for the next four decades. We want to get it right and be in the market soon, but we want to figure out how to help the ecosystem and be a reliable partner.

But with the U.S. audience for casual social games estimated to hit 77.9 million people this year, up from 57.4 million in 2010, and with two well-known brands bringing new games to Facebook in the past two weeks, I decided it was finally time to dive into these highly addictive diversions.

Last week, I started playing SimCity Social, the latest game in Electronic Arts’ Sim franchise, and The Ville, Zynga’s new social game. Both games involve building digital environments that simulate real life — cities and houses — with players advancing by developing these domains and creating strong social ties within the games.

After just a week of game play, I, too had been sucked into the world of social games, to the point where I was spending actual money on virtual goods, and proposing make-out sessions with avatars on digital couches. I would likely continue to play them, and spend my own dollars on virtual goods on occasion.

Both games offer a variety of fun content and incentives to keep you playing. Personally, I found decorating a virtual home in The Ville to be more fun, and I thought Zynga really nailed the social element of the game by keeping it entertaining. But casual gamers might also really like the combination of city-building with social networking in SimCity Social.

Some hardcore fans of previous SimCity games, however, might find this Facebook version to be stripped down.

I started with SimCity Social, which is free to play. SimCity has been available for 23 years as a PC game, and more recently on Nintendo consoles, but now it has found a new home on Facebook.

After giving the app all kinds of permissions via Facebook, and getting a tutorial from a bespectacled cartoon blonde named Kristy, I was ready to build, which began with hitting the “Build” button in the bottom right-hand corner of the game page.

As Mayor of GoodeVille, I could lay down roads and build houses and businesses. I could also check my inventory to see what tools and materials I might already have. The goal was to build up my city enough to advance to the next mayor level. Getting “XP” — experience points — by completing tasks in my city would propel me to the next level.

A few of my Facebook friends were also playing SimCity Social, enabling me to exchange gifts with them, visit their cities and perform jobs for them. For example, a friend sent me a balloon, and I returned the favor by sending him an energy bolt. When a UFO crashed into his city, he hired me as a “UFOlogist.” You can only send each friend one gift per day. Generally, my friends at more advance levels would ask me to send them land permits, so they could expand their cities.

Visiting other people’s cities gives you energy, which you need to keep building your own city. Also, attracting more friends to your city gives you more resources to boost businesses, and therefore, raise property values.

For currency, SimCity Social uses “simoleans,” which are the free in-game currency, and diamonds, which you purchase for real money. Simoleans are used to purchase buildings — a hundred simoleans will get you a house — while diamonds buy premium content, like upgrades to buildings. For five dollars, I could buy 12 diamonds, to put towards building a cupcake factory in GoodeVille.

Seasoned SimCity players will notice differences between the earlier versions of the game and this one. SimCity mayors are usually responsible for running electricity throughout their cities, but in SimCity Social, players don’t have to worry about utilities. EA says this is so users can focus on city building and socializing. SimCity users in the past have also been able to build things like airports and power plants, but in my test of the Facebook version of the game those weren’t options.

And in earlier versions, city residents would pay taxes. In my experience with SimCity Social, I never paid a tax.

This SimCity also has crafty in-game promotions, like the ability to send Dunkin’ Donuts as gifts (in addition to the giant Dunkin’ Donuts ad that pops up every time you refresh the game). Once you’ve advanced to a higher level of mayorship, a billboard for Mercedes becomes a build option.

Like SimCity Social, The Ville is only accessible through Facebook. After personalizing my Ville avatar right down to hair color and skin tone, I was given a starter house. The Ville’s “ensemble” — a handful of characters created by Zynga — wandered throughout my neighborhood and appeared on the side of the page to set up initial quests for me to complete.

Most of the quests were simple, like watering the plants, hanging up wall decorations, building an addition and inviting some friends over. I bought home goods and even food from the virtual market, accessible through the menu bar at the bottom of the screen.

Like SimCity social, The Ville has different forms of currency. Coins are the free in-game currency. Then there’s Ville Cash, which you purchase with real money, and is used to buy bigger-ticket items. There are experience, or XP, stars; and there’s happiness, a measure of your personal fulfillment.

I was more inclined to spend real money in The Ville than I was in SimCity Social. If it came down to getting a free twin-sized bed or upgrading to a bigger bed, I’d pay to upgrade.

I really liked socializing in The Ville. When a visitor entered my home, I had the option to shake hands, tell a joke, gossip, cuddle on the couch, make out, and play Words With Friends with them. When this happened, my avatar and a friend’s avatar would convulse near each other in this odd but endearing form of socializing. After some interaction, I could choose to deepen my relationships. In some cases, it might even turn into romance.

The game goes to nine levels of romance, ranging from “dating” to “infatuated” to “soul mate.” At a certain level, players can participate in something called — wait for it — “whoopee,” which just shows a bed full of hearts. Unless you are making whoopee with a member of The Ville ensemble cast, your partner in crime is a real-life Facebook friend.

It does take multiple game sessions and agreement from both participants to take it this far — I’m comfortable saying I never made whoopee — but some parents might also want to keep this in mind if their teens are playing casual games on Facebook. There are currently no controls for keeping Facebook players out of certain activities in the game.

Visiting friends’ houses earned me happiness, coins and experience. But, I learned pretty quickly that playing with a friend’s guitars and jumping on his trampolines would drain my avatar’s energy, forcing me to take a nap on my (twin) bed.

Oddly, everyone in The Ville speaks Romanian. Zynga said this is because the game company wanted to use one language across all versions of the game, and Romanian didn’t sound too foreign. Regardless, if you don’t speak Romanian, it’s pretty funny to hear your avatar conversing with neighbors in that language.

Neither of these games currently have mobile apps. EA says it’s developing a SimCity mobile app, and while Zynga generally doesn’t comment on its upcoming plans for games, the game maker in the past has introduced mobile apps for some of its popular Web games.

However, these mobile apps likely won’t connect with the Web versions of the games, so you won’t be pick up where you left off when you using the mobile app.

Which means more virtual cities, and more virtual homes, on the go — just what gaming addicts need, right?

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120709/building-houses-and-cities-online-with-a-social-twist/feed/ 6 http://allthingsd.com/20120626/zynga-taking-on-eas-sims-social-with-its-next-game-called-the-ville/ http://allthingsd.com/20120626/zynga-taking-on-eas-sims-social-with-its-next-game-called-the-ville/#comments Tue, 26 Jun 2012 18:54:32 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=224285 Zynga is unveiling the fifth title in its popular ’Ville game franchise — this time, it’s simply calling it “The Ville.”

The announcement was made onstage today at the company’s Unleashed event at its San Francisco headquarters by Mark Skaggs, Zynga’s SVP of product development.

The game launches tomorrow on Facebook for free, and will be monetized through virtual goods for sale.

Much like other ’Ville games, which challenged users to build a farm, a city, or an imaginary fantasy land, the point of The Ville is to create a character and build a home, complete with swimming pools, workout rooms and state-of-the-art kitchen appliances.

After getting a good glance at the game during an embargoed briefing with Skaggs, it looks shockingly similar to Electronic Arts’ The Sims Social, and frankly, at times, it is hard to tell the two apart.

The Ville Dream Home

When asked about the resemblance between the two games, Skaggs compared it to the company’s first ’Ville game launched four years ago called YoVille.

“We call it the house and people genre,” he said. “We wanted to take the fun we saw in YoVille and pull it forward and update it and create a new game in the genre.”

When pressed further about the similarities between it and The Sims Social, he said, “I’m not an expert on that game, but what I tried to do here is to create fun things to do with your friends.”

The Sims Social

To jog everyone’s memory, after Electronic Arts launched The Sims Social in August, it immediately threatened to overtake some of Zynga’s most popular games, including FarmVille and CityVille. But shortly after, as EA will admit, the game dropped in the rankings.

Today, it no longer ranks in the top 25, and EA has turned its attention to a city-building game based on SimCity, which recently launched in beta.

Both The Ville and Sims Social are considered simulation games, meaning that players mimic real life by building homes, dressing up avatars and conducting everyday experiences, like cooking, eating, dancing and sleeping. Both games have wacky life-like elements that could wreak havoc on real-life relationships.

For instance, EA’s Sims Social lets players have pillow fights and take showers with crushes. Likewise, Zynga’s The Ville allows players to make “whoopie” by lying down in a bed together — or baking and sharing a pie.

The real innovation in The Ville appears to be the way players can communicate with one another. Here are three ways:

• Through a new messaging system called “ZTalk,” players will be able to leave comments on a friend’s game board. The technology could be brought to other games in the future.
• Zynga will allow you to check status updates for your friends inside of the game. Therefore, if you see your friend is having a bad day, you can bake her a cake, or try to cheer him up in the virtual world.
• Players will be able to take photos of their game boards and post them to their Facebook timeline to share them with friends.

Here’s a preview of the game:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120626/zynga-taking-on-eas-sims-social-with-its-next-game-called-the-ville/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120626/zynga-to-launch-cross-platform-gaming-network-zynga-with-friends/ http://allthingsd.com/20120626/zynga-to-launch-cross-platform-gaming-network-zynga-with-friends/#comments Tue, 26 Jun 2012 18:22:19 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=224535 Zynga’s game playing network is massive — more than 290 million people play the company’s games each month. The problem is, Zynga says, those players are scattered across multiple devices and platforms and can’t always sync up to play the same games.

Zynga aims to change this. At the company’s second annual Zynga Unleashed event in San Francisco on Tuesday, Zynga unveiled a unified platform to bring players together across portals such as the Web, Android and iOS, Facebook and Google+.

“The social engagement across our network is industry leading, but it’s also fragmented,” said Manuel Bronstein, Zynga general manager.

The idea is centered around the Zynga message center — the hub found on Facebook and Zynga.com that contains a player’s friends list, an activity feed of friends’ gaming statuses and a list of gaming suggestions based on what games you and your friends are already playing.

Also, with the newly launched Zynga API, third-party developers can beef up their games with widgets previously available only on Zynga.com, like group chat, a live social activity stream, and a zFriends list. More social, the philosophy goes, means increased engagement — exactly what Zynga and partner developers want.

Players can also connect using the newly launched real-time multiplayer feature which, just like it sounds, allows multiple players across separate devices to play with — or against — one another simultaneously. That’s a far cry from the typical turn-based gaming that Zynga offers, like those games in the “With Friends” franchise.

What’s unclear at this point, however, is how the new network will affect Zynga’s relationship with Facebook. If multiple players aren’t forced to play the same games through the same platform, that means players have the option to disperse across multiple mediums — mobile devices, Facebook and Zynga.com. And that also means revenues could potentially be more evenly distributed.

Of course, a bolstered internal social platform still has the capacity to increase engagement inside existing Facebook-hosted Zynga games, so it’s not necessarily an entirely bad thing for Facebook. It’ll be interesting to see how players end up using the platform as the new initiative launches.

The platform will roll out sometime in the near future (TBA), on Zynga.com, Facebook and mobile devices.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120626/zynga-to-launch-cross-platform-gaming-network-zynga-with-friends/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120626/zyngas-unleashed-live-at-the-dog-house/ http://allthingsd.com/20120626/zyngas-unleashed-live-at-the-dog-house/#comments Tue, 26 Jun 2012 17:14:19 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=224281 Zynga is known for developing some of the most-played games of the decade.

Join us live at Zynga’s headquarters in San Francisco to hear about how it intends to keep that crown.

The event, dubbed “Unleashed,” kicks off at 10:30 am PT with potential announcements regarding mobile, social and its own game platform called Zynga.com.

10:16 am: All right, my colleague Mike Issac and I are on the scene and ready for action.

Mike noticed that the man sitting a few seats down from us is the guy from “Reading Rainbow.” I wonder what LeVar Burton is doing here, but his badge lists him as a “friend” of Zynga.

Eight months ago, in October, I was here for Zynga’s first Unleashed event.

Expectations for this event will be slightly higher. The company is now public, having raised $1 billion in December.

A great showing today would do wonders for its struggling stock price — which, by the way, is up 3 percent right now, to trade at $6.25 a share.

If you haven’t seen photos of the company’s offices before, they are fairly impressive. The press event today is taking place in the atrium area of the building, where lunch is served. Four floors of balconies are looking down on us.

Just heard the first dog bark! While press were encouraged to bring their pooches, I decided to leave Fletch at home today. Less distracting for everyone!

10:28 am: T minus two minutes. We’re getting close. Employees have packed the balconies in anticipation, and Zynga’s CEO Mark Pincus is off to the side of the stage — ready to go.

10:32 am: Showtime! We’re kicking off with a montage, of course. Pincus takes the stage, announcing “Zynga’s in the house!”

Today, the second-ever Unleashed event will be streamed to all of the company’s employees.

Pincus is giving props to all the employees in the building.

Pincus: We are coming up on our fifth birthday.

A few milestones: The first game was launched in July 2007, and that was Poker. On March 7, 2008, it was the first time a consumer in the Western markets purchased a virtual good. In November 2008, Zynga launched the first mobile social game. In June 2009, FarmVille was launched; and in March 2010, Angry Birds was the poster child taking mobile gaming to the masses. In 2011, Zynga passed $1 billion in revenues.

And finally, in 2012, a game like Words With Friends is a household name.

10:37 am: Even more stats for you to consider: 72 percent of Americans now play games, Pincus says, a staggering number compared to what they thought was possible.

Pincus steps back for a minute and wants to share the company’s original vision. Remember, Pincus named the company after his dog Zinga, whom he is recalling now.

He’s saying that somewhere between childhood and adulthood, gaming became too complicated. He set out to create free, social and accessible games that would bring gaming back to his family and friends.

He said their games are now snackable, and compete with email and text messaging. Something he calls “a poke with a purpose.”

“The coolest part for me is that gaming has come back to my family and friends,” he said. “For our whole generation, we’ve seen search, shop, share become the most important things we do online or offline, and we think play is one of the treasured activities.”

10:44 am: He’s promising news is coming! Just like I said yesterday, he said an update is coming on Zynga’s own game platform, and he will be announcing new mobile and Web-based games.

Here we go: First, we’ll hear about the company’s infrastructure and network.

Pincus welcomes Kostadis Roussos, chief engineer, onstage to talk about their platform and the techy stuff behind it.

Roussos says he doesn’t get to see his cousins very often because they are living in Greece, so they connect through CityVille and Hidden Chronicles.

He said it takes serious engineering and technology. Games used to ship in plastic boxes and sit on shelves. “We ship live services; our daily users [number] is roughly the equivalent of everyone in Paris playing games at the exact same time,” he said.

So how do they do it?

“In order to operate games as a live service, our entire culture needs to be about speed. Most companies provide a couple of updates every day; we release about 100 updates across all of our games each day, and upward of 1,000 features per week.”

But, he says, it’s dwarfed by the amount of content that their users make. It adds up to one million activities per second.

Because of that, he said, they had to create their own infrastructure, made up of hardware and services.

“We call it ZCloud,” and it’s the largest private-public cloud. “In one day, 2.8 million people started playing CastleVille — which holds the record for fastest-growing game — and it was scaled completely on ZCloud.”

He says that a big component of social games is analytics, to find out what players want. “After releasing a new feature, we can find out within minutes if players enjoyed it, and then our developers can release more features just like that.”

This is obviously one of the big benefits that Zynga has — it’s data-driven and not gut-driven. It’s also what gives Zynga a bad reputation in the game community — it’s somehow less creative or fun because it’s data-driven and not more spontaneous.

Roussos is now talking about how this back-end technology drives better game experiences.

Roussos is a pretty entertaining speaker — and speaks fast! That’s typically hard to do when you are talking about a bunch of servers.

He’s now announcing Zynga API. It’s a central, more efficient way for game teams to make their games more fun and social, he says.

For example, Zynga Slots on iOS is accessing the API. He says, “We’ll be opening it up to third-party developers, so they can do that, too.” No more details were immediately announced on this and what it will cost for developers to access these efficiencies.

10:58 am: Now, Manuel Bronstein, a Zynga general manager, is onstage to announce Zynga With Friends, a new social games network. The goal of the network is to allow people to play with games on a single platform, no matter what device they are playing on, and still have access to the same friends group.

Zynga.com, which was the company’s social network on the Web, is a sandbox, he explains, letting them try out new things. The new social features that are built on Zynga.com will be rolled out more broadly, including to third-party partners.

11:04 am: Now some updates on Zynga.com, the company’s Web-based social game network. Players can go there with the sole intention of playing games with their friends, rather than going to Facebook, where games are just one feature.

New features include: Social stream, chat, profiles and fast loading (so games load more quickly). The big new update is Zynga multiplayer, which will go live starting today on Bubble Safari.

Four players come onstage to demonstrate a multiplayer session of Bubble Safari. The four participants look ready to go, and as they shoot down bubbles from the top of the game, scores update on the left-hand column. If one player gets ahead, the game will pause so the players can chat and talk trash. Helen wins the game!

11:10 am: Multiplayer is an example of the kind of innovation Zynga can do now that they have Zynga.com. The feature will be available to the company’s own games and to Zynga’s partners.

In March, Zynga.com was first announced. At the time, it said it would be opening up the platform to third-party game developers. It now has about a dozen partners, including 50 Cubes, Konami, Playdemic and Sava.

Sava takes the stage to talk about the game, Rubber Tacos, which will be launching on the Zynga platform. The game looks a little like Cut the Rope on mobile.

The executive from Sava says that beyond the free food that you can eat when you visit Zynga (he’s joking), what makes the company so great is the passion it has for games.

No specifics on when Zynga.com will be opening up to third-party developers, but it will be “soon.”

11:17 am: Bronstein is back onstage to talk about Zynga With Friends, which they are talking about as a game lobby.

On Zynga.com, there is the Zynga Message Center — the inbox is clicked on three-quarters of a billion times everyday.

Zynga With Friends will be the “social lobby,” he says, whether you are on the Web or mobile. He said it will be where you can send messages and gifts to friends, and see what your friends are playing. It will also make friend and game recommendations to players.

“Today, ‘with friends’ is an incredibly powerful brand,” he said. “Consumers know they are going to play with their friends.”

“We look forward to rolling it out soon,” both on the Web and on mobile. No exact dates disclosed.

It’s a little unclear exactly how Zynga envisions the network evolving in the future, but clearly it is a multiplatform approach to social gaming, crossing both mobile and the Web.

Off the top of my head, I’d compare it to what Gree is doing in mobile. There seems to be a need for a single community that layers on top of multiple networks. Logically, that would be Facebook’s role, but this network is going to be gaming first. In this world, gaming updates can’t annoy or put off people, because that’s what they have come to do.

11:28 am: Zynga’s head of mobile, David Ko, is now onstage to announce, “We are now the largest mobile gaming company in the world.” Not sure by what measure, or if he’s just eating the company’s dog food.

He announces the new title in the very important “With Friends” franchise, “Matching With Friends.” He says that the casino genre is also doing extraordinarily well on mobile.

Another game — Draw Something — which the company recently acquired, is still off to the races. Despite dropping engagement, he said that the game is on the cusp of hitting its 10 billionth drawing in the next couple of days.

Overall, the company has 22 million daily active users on mobile.

Ko is also announcing that it is opening its doors for third-party developers.

Today’s announcements for Zynga seem to be all about how it can be a publishing platform for third-party developers. By opening up its networks, it will be able to help fuel its growth while also reducing the amount of pressure for creating all of the hits in-house, which is extremely hard to do. At the same time, third-party developers will be attracted to Zynga’s gigantic user base.

Ko exits the stage, adding that interested developers should visit developers.zynga.com.

11:35 am: Next onstage is Jesse Janosov, the VP and GM of Zynga Casino.

Casino represents a giant opportunity for Zynga, not only because the casual casino gaming experience is expected to double over the next year, but also because the laws regarding real-money gaming are slowly changing in the U.S.

Obviously, Zynga has a huge opportunity because of Zynga Poker’s huge success on Facebook. Some of the figures: It has 35 million players a month, 55 million hands are played a day, and 16 trillion chips a day change hands. What’s more, Zynga Poker has received 60 million “Likes” on Facebook, which is more than any other company, other than Facebook itself.

Janosov is now unveiling “Zynga Elite Slots,” which he is calling the most fun and social slots ever created.

Just like the coin-based game in casinos, you pull the handle to spin the reels to line up five apples in a row. The genre, while sounding very simplistic — especially since you have no chance of winning — is surprisingly successful and has generated several multimillion blockbuster game exits.

11:42 am: Next up is updates for Zynga arcade, which is one of Zynga’s three major genres of gaming. The guy chosen to provide the update is Jim Veevaert, who was recently named the GM of Zynga’s Seattle office.

One of the recent game launches is Zynga Slingo, in which players have earned 2.2 trillion coins. More big numbers about Bubble Safari: Since launching last month, players have popped 115 billion bubbles.

“Given my propensity for explosives,” Veevaert said, he wants to end with mentioning Ruby Blast. The game is the first out of the Seattle office, and was developed in conjunction with the company’s China office.

This casual genre is a lot like Tetris, but with better graphics, animation and audio.

“We had a really high fun score for Ruby Blast. They love it so much that we aren’t holding it only to the Web. It’s coming to phones and tablets later this year,” he said.

11:50 am: Introducing Mark Skaggs, SVP of product development, who is a father of many of Zynga’s ’Villes, like FarmVille. “Let’s talk about the ’Ville genre. We create mini virtual worlds to have fun with your family and friends.”

Expecting the announcement of a new ’Ville or two!

Skaggs is walking us through the evolution of the ’Villes, from YoVille to FarmVille to CityVille and CastleVille. And up next is “The Ville,” the company’s new game that looks shockingly similar to The Sims Social, developed by EA.

I got a closer look at the game under embargo here.

Nice, players in the game get to do things together like watch TV, play instruments, bake a pie or make “whoopie.”

The Ville launches tomorrow on Facebook for free.

12:00 pm: Wow, two new ’Villes! Next up is ChefVille. At what point do all of these games start cannibalizing each other?

But yup, as you might be able to guess, ChefVille is all about running a restaurant. This totally reminds me of the game made for feature phones back in the day, where you had to make customers happy by delivering their food on time.

BUT in this version, you also decorate the kitchen and restaurant. It can look like a ’50s diner, or a Tuscan or country kitchen.

In ChefVille, players will make food for their friends, and the big social feature will allow players to borrow a cup of sugar, just like in real life.

There are pretty fun animations for cooking in a wok, or baking pizza in a pizza oven.

Here’s a real-world component: More than 50 real recipes can be earned in the game that you can use to make meals in real life. And, an in-person bonus: Lunch for the press today is based on all the recipes in ChefVille.

12:06 pm: Pincus is back onstage for closing remarks. But wait, one more thing!

It’s one more game announcement, and here’s a teaser for it. So far, it looks a little bit like FarmVille, with apples and wheat growing in the field. The plants are watered with rain, little piglets are bottle-fed, and there are great animations of big farm animals like cows and goats getting picked up and placed elsewhere on the gameboard.

That’s right, folks, it’s FarmVille 2.

Okay, that concludes the formal presentations for the day.

As you’ve seen, Zynga has presented not only a strong slate of games, but is also stressing a platform approach that will allow Zynga to make the tools and infrastructure that it has created internally available to other third-party game developers.

I’ll leave you with this final image of FarmVille 2. Thanks for reading!

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