FarmVille farmers go head-to-head against real farmers

Mashable's FarmVille versus real farms
While tending to everyone's favorite farm, ever wonder what the real farming life is like? Mashable has provided you curious virtual farmers with some stats on how your crops stack up to the real deal in one of the longest infographics we've ever seen.

Here's a scary fact: agriculture makes up a mere five percent of the Gross World Product, while Zynga, with the help of FarmVille, pulled in a mind-blowing 200 percent more net profit than Facebook itself, according to Mashable.

There are 930 million acres of farmland in the U.S., according to Mashable's sources, which dwarf in comparison to the fact that 500 million acres of farmland were harvested in just the first 15 months of FarmVille's existence. With 60 million FarmVille players harvesting what now could be billions of acres compared to just two million farmers in the U.S., it's clear folks are far more comfortable with their digital strawberries.

Does FarmVille pique your interest in farming? With games like FarmVille being so gripping, could digital crop gathering overtake actual farming in terms of GDP? Do you know anyone that farms both in and outside of Facebook?

Facebook and Zynga's relationship: Just how shady is it?

Last month we talked about some of the details of an exclusive relationship between Zynga and Facebook that was revealed in their S-1 IPO filings. Some of these things were more obvious and less ominous, such as the requirement for Zynga to keep certain games on Facebook exclusively and not port them to other social networks or platforms. However, there was one little line in there that left behind a lot of uncertainty for social game developers:

    The parties further acknowledge that Zynga is making a significant commitment to the Facebook Platform (i.e., using Facebook as the exclusive Social Platform on the Zynga Properties and granting FB certain title exclusivities to Zynga games on the Facebook Platform). In exchange for such commitment, the parties have committed to set certain growth targets for monthly unique users of Covered Zynga Games.

No one is exactly sure what this means, but one thing is for certain -- Zynga's Empires & Allies monthly active users graph looks particularly suspicious. In the line graph shown above, you can see the Empires and Allies peaked in traffic on July 9. From there, you can see that the game started to dramatically decline in numbers, which you will see in almost every Facebook game ever released. Social games on Facebook have an exciting climb up to their peak and then fall in numbers, spiking only with the release of new features.

However, you can see that starting on July 18, the monthly active user numbers have remained almost exactly flat. No growth, only a tiny decline that is the difference of thousands, not millions. Never before has the graph of a game looked like this. I'll go ahead and say it -- this is that Zynga/Facebook relationship at work. Facebook are doing something to help Empires & Allies remain at 45 million MAU.

It wouldn't be possible for Zynga to buy ads to keep their numbers exactly this flat. With the delayed reporting on Facebook ads, you can't buy daily ads with the intention of getting an exact number of users per day. You can't even really come all that close - especially when you're dealing with traffic numbers in the 45 million range. Especially when the daily active usage of the game looks like this:


In addition, Empires & Allies isn't retaining players well. The game is hovering between 15-17% of their monthly users coming back each day. With this kind of churn and this much fluctuation in terms of their daily playerbase, it's obvious that Facebook is pumping traffic in some fashion to the game to keep the numbers flat. They could be tweaking the ad algorithm, or doing a number of things to help Zynga maintain this number in Empires & Allies. Perhaps they are doing this until Zynga's IPO; no one can really be sure.

Other social game studios have every reason to be angry about this deal. Facebook is essentially helping the titan maintain its prowess over all the other studios, giving smaller developers little chance to make up ground. Sure, a lot of Zynga's success is compounded on their previous success -- no one is denying that Zynga are the leaders in the space. However, Facebook's special treatment feels malicious to me. It's hard enough to compete with the Zyngas and EAs of the space without having to deal with Facebook siding with a developer.

Disney-branded Facebook games coming in 2012, Playdom head says

Can we all just say, “finally?” During a panel named “The Rise of Social Games” at the f8 Facebook Developers Conference in San Francisco, Disney Interactive and Playdom head John Pleasants revealed that two to four Facebook games surrounding Disney xd brands will hit Facebook in 2012. The general topic of the panel was the fact that branded social games are taking off.

Pleasants was joined on the panel by Kabam CEO Kevin Chou, EA Interactive head Barry Cottle and Zynga CBO Owen Van Natta. Facebook director of games partnerships Sean Ryan moderated the panel with the preface that branded games will take over the Facebook platform. And he might be right: EA just released The Sims Social, Zynga will soon re-brand its new Adventure World with Indiana Jones and Kabam recently announced The Godfather: Five Families.

Playdom, which Disney acquired in July 2010 for a whopping $740 million, is ahead of the pack with two branded games on Facebook: ESPNU College Town and ESPN Sports Bar & Grill. Both games performed well, thanks to advertising through the ESPN TV network. While Disney owns the ESPN brand, notice how neither of those actually involve the insanely popular Disney characters we’ve come to love.

Honestly, we’re surprised this didn’t happen sooner. Consider this: Disney has its own cable TV channel through which it could, in theory, advertise whatever it wants. Pleasants didn’t get into why it’s taken this long for disney channel games to throw its cast of characters into Facebook games, but did reveal the power of the Disney name.

Gnome Town, which Playdom launched in the summer–and we enjoyed quite a bit–peaked at 530,000 daily players. But just plopping the Disney logo on top of the existing one made users more likely to spend in the game just through trust of the company’s name, according to Pleasants. “We think it’s an advantage, if you put game play first,” Pleasants said.

It’s comforting to hear this emphasized by these developers. (Kabam’s Chou shared the same sentiment.) Branded games on Facebook are OK in my book, but the last thing anyone wants to see is the genre become a branding machine.

Disney-branded Facebook games coming in 2012, Playdom head says

Can we all just say, “finally?” During a panel named “The Rise of Social Games” at the f8 Facebook Developers Conference in San Francisco, Disney Interactive and Playdom head John Pleasants revealed that two to four Facebook games surrounding Disney xd brands will hit Facebook in 2012. The general topic of the panel was the fact that branded social games are taking off.

Pleasants was joined on the panel by Kabam CEO Kevin Chou, EA Interactive head Barry Cottle and Zynga CBO Owen Van Natta. Facebook director of games partnerships Sean Ryan moderated the panel with the preface that branded games will take over the Facebook platform. And he might be right: EA just released The Sims Social, Zynga will soon re-brand its new Adventure World with Indiana Jones and Kabam recently announced The Godfather: Five Families.

Playdom, which Disney acquired in July 2010 for a whopping $740 million, is ahead of the pack with two branded games on Facebook: ESPNU College Town and ESPN Sports Bar & Grill. Both games performed well, thanks to advertising through the ESPN TV network. While Disney owns the ESPN brand, notice how neither of those actually involve the insanely popular Disney characters we’ve come to love.

Honestly, we’re surprised this didn’t happen sooner. Consider this: Disney has its own cable TV channel through which it could, in theory, advertise whatever it wants. Pleasants didn’t get into why it’s taken this long for disney channel games to throw its cast of characters into Facebook games, but did reveal the power of the Disney name.

Gnome Town, which Playdom launched in the summer–and we enjoyed quite a bit–peaked at 530,000 daily players. But just plopping the Disney logo on top of the existing one made users more likely to spend in the game just through trust of the company’s name, according to Pleasants. “We think it’s an advantage, if you put game play first,” Pleasants said.

It’s comforting to hear this emphasized by these developers. (Kabam’s Chou shared the same sentiment.) Branded games on Facebook are OK in my book, but the last thing anyone wants to see is the genre become a branding machine.