My Empire, a Facebook game developed by Playfish, seems to not being too well. According to AllFacebook.com, My Empire went from 1.4 monthly active users on January 15th to 1.1 million on February 14th. Why is that?
Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews. 
Would you believe that if all the Playfish gamers lived in one country it would have a population bigger than England? It’s true, along with a ton of other surprising facts illustrated on the ‘Playfish In Numbers’ infographic.
MXP4 is the Dr. Frankenstein of social media, gleefully combining music and gaming into a brand new form of internet entertainment. With the recent hiring of Xavier Louis, former Product Marketing Director for EA’s Playfish, the company looks to expand its ventures with the help of a proven talent in social marketing. Now the only question that remains is whether or not Louis, now MXP4′s VP of Product Marketing, is backing a worthwhile endeavour.
I recently had a chance to chat with several leading executives from top social gaming companies for my first Social Times Pro report, “Virtual Goods in Social Games: What Sells Best, Who Buys Most, and How Your Company Can Profit”. This is a must read if you’re in the industry.
As the World Cup continues to wow viewers from around the world and betting pools are set up wherever they can be, EA Sports and Playfish have decided to introduce the World Cup Predictions game into their FIFA Superstars Facebook game. The game asks you to predict who will win upcoming games and by what score to win prizes that help you play the FIFA Superstars game. The presentation is excellent and it’s a lot of fun to make predictions.
This week we posted a video interview with Mike Sego from Gaia Online, saw Zynga acquire Challenge Games while also losing 10% of its userbase, saw Playdom make strides with its Bola soccer title but face new competition with Fox Sports and Watercooler’s new soccer game and saw TLC join up with foursquare for a unique offering. Our writers also did a series of industry analyses regarding location based gaming, social gaming and more. Read on for more.
A recent report by Lou Kerner analyzing Facebook traffic across all the major social game publishers’ games shows that almost every social games company experienced losses in traffic for the month of May… all except Playdom. The catalyst for the loss of users was undoubtedly Facebook’s decisions to turn off two key viral Facebook features: notifications and requests. Are we about to see a shake up in the leadership of social gaming, and will Playdom begin to encroach on Zynga’s turf?
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This week we saw Yahoo! and Zynga partner up to distribute social games across the Yahoo! network, American Idol announce their own Facebook game, EA Sports and Playfish launch FIFA Superstars just in time for the World Cup, Nexon (makers of Maplestory) revenues rise to over $500 million and more. We also wrote an examination of in-game advertising and looked at some of the best social features in today’s social games. Read more after the jump!
The buzz has been growing and growing, and just in time for the World Cup of Soccer, Playfish and FIFA have launched their new FIFA Superstars game on Facebook, and it’s good. The game is a soccer management game, and doesn’t have any live gameplay yet, but the simulation mode looks fantastic and the game uses the FIFA license to include every real soccer player and team you can imagine. If you enjoy soccer, you’ve got to give this one a shot.
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At this year’s Social Gaming Summit, Playfish Co-Founder Sebastien de Halleux discussed how virtual goods sales are affected by holidays, the importance of imbuing games with emotion and more. We caught these clips of his impassioned speeches at the show and decided to post them here. Emotions in games was one of the biggest themes of this year’s Social Gaming Summit, and it was great to see so many pundits so enthused about the potential to tie social to emotional. See the video after the jump.
