Despite facing strong competition from other younger games companies recently, Zynga has decided to go back to the drawing board under the leadership of new CEO Don Mattrick and rerelease three of its biggest games.
The company are revealing their revamped versions of Words With Friends, Zynga Poker and a new mobile version of FarmVille – FarmVille 2: Country Escape. These will begin rolling out to iOS and Android operated phones and tablets in select undisclosed markets before officially launching at the end of June.
In 2011, Zynga went public with nine of their games commanding the top ten games on Facebook. They didn’t however invest their time in the world of mobile gaming, and are said to have missed a trick with younger rival companies such as Finland’s Supercell pulling ahead of them.
FarmVille was Zynga’s most popular game with more than 400 million people playing it over time, but the majority of these were on a PC. The FarmVille 2: Country Escape game will be the first time that it has come to mobile as a standalone game; in the past, Zynga launched a companion mobile app that allowed Facebook users to access Farmville to water their crops, but nothing more. Farmville 2 has been described as a 3D game with up to 60 frames per second on an iPad air. In addition to a seaside farm, winery, mine and airport, there will be a trading stand where players can interact and trade with friends. Jonathan Knight, Vice President of games at Zynga stated:
“We are reimagining social gaming for mobile. We want to do it in the right way, working on mobile first. It is connected to the web game and is a logical extension of it. It’s a big deal for us. It doesn’t require you to play with friends, but it is better if you play with friends. Farmville your way. That’s our tagline. It is designed for your lifestyle.”
Zynga Poker, the company’s top money-maker, has also been reimagined for mobile platforms, with the redheaded character cut out and the colour scheme resembling real life casinos with reds and golds.
Words With Friends was bought by Zynga in 2010 in a deal to purchase Texas studio Newtoy for $53.3 million. Features such as a dictionary and vanity metrics will appear on people’s profiles to show highly scoring words and stats on average word strength. This mobile version will be more simplified, as the original was, with no ads on the paid version, and a free advertising supported version too.
Image courtesy of Idlepines.
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