According to TechCrunch, Google has secretly invested $100 million in Zynga. (Congratulations to Michael Arrington for that scoop.) TechCrunch says: “The investment was made by Google itself, not Google Ventures, say our sources, and it’s a highly...

As games become a more prevalent part of the Facebook experience, games are changing the way that users see Facebook. For many gamers, their “gaming” friends on Xbox Live, Xfire or WoW are not real-world friends: they...

Zynga’s fabulous growth story at Farmville is not all about virality. Earlier this month, ComScore released figures for advertising on social networks. Zynga spends 97% of its advertising budget on social networks (not surprisingly, given that it...

InsideSocialGames has released their statistics for the top Facebook games in June 2009. I last looked at the top Facebook games in March, so we’re three months down the line. There have been some interesting changes:

Powered by GamerDNA, tweetmygaming.com shows you what games are *currently* being talked about on Twitter. The technology monitors the stream in real-time. Anytime it recognises a gaming title, it clocks it up in the counter to measure...

Is the beginning of the end of the closed platform? In all the hype of E3, I missed the announcement that Nintendo will be implementing Facebook Connect into the DSi this summer. Microsoft has announced the same...

As I talk more and more to developers about self-publishing, I am becoming more convinced that tapping into user’s existing social networks is a powerful, cost-effective and viral marketing tool for many games. I’ve tended to focus...