Earlier this week Zynga launched their newest game Frontierville – it already has 1.3m monthly actives and 450k fans. While Frontierville’s gameplay inherits many of the best practices of its siblings, its domain behavior doesn’t. …

Tonight Dogpatch Labs is hosting Wild Pocket’s Bay Area Game Jam Workshop. Wild Pockets is one of the several new Dogpatch Labs residents moving in on May 1. Tonight’s workshop is being streamed live via …

Thanks to the success of Foursquare, Booyah / MyTown and Zynga, “game mechanics”, “badges” and “leaderboards” have become cornerstones of any web marketer’s dialect and user-acquisition strategy.
What these three companies have done so well is …

There are two camps in the world of social gaming:
- One side thinks that it has been won outright by Zynga
- The other side believes that we are in the early innings of a nine-inning …

I encourage you to read Eric Eldon’s piece on InsideFacebook about how Facebook’s most popular game, Farmville, now defaults to Facebook Credits and Payments.
As location and geo dominate the blog headlines (Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla), …

Earlier this week, MyTown released version 2.1 of their wildly popular mobile gaming app (unfortunately there is still no level 41). In addition to some very slick UI enhancements and clever game mechanics (such as …

It was a big week for Facebook Credits:
- Facebook Apps that Exclusively Use Credits Now Featured on Games Dashboard (Friday)
- Facebook’s Increasing Focus on Credits Prompts Developer Speculation (Thursday)
- PayPal Integration Shows Facebook Wants to …

My recent ‘strategy guide’ on Booyah’s wildly popular mobile game MyTown is strangely one of my most popular blog posts. Like the 1,000,000 other users who are actively using MyTown, I am addicted and believe …

In a recent New York Times article, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus said that all employees need to “be a CEO of something.” Its a terrific mantra and speaks to the importance of ownerships, responsibility and …

Two excellent posts on the current status of geo-location companies by Robert Scoble and Hunter Walk (both bloggers are great and their blogs are must reads). Scoble argues that industry-first Foursquare is being squeezed by …

A week ago, I wrote that only three of Apple’s top twenty grossing iPhone Apps feature in-app purchases. I wondered whether developers have determined that direct sales were more dependable and profitable than relying on …

I am late the Settlers of Catan rage, which according to the Wall Street Journal, swept Silicon Valley in December. But I uploaded a photo of Catan to Facebook (shown below) and got a great …