European Startup King.com Beats Out Electronic Arts On Facebook

by Kyle in Everywhere Else, Featured, Gaming, , UK
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While we admit we are skeptical on the fact that king.com calls themselves a startup, they do so to that end we will as well. Outside of them being a startup though, this little known game development studio in London has overtaken Electronic Arts in terms of daily app users for their Facebook games.

Admittedly, they aren’t anywhere near eclipsing Facebook giant Zynga but they have their sites set on Zynga. According to this report from the Chicago Tribune, king.com’s game Bubble Witch Saga has more daily active players than Zynga’s smash hit Farmville. Impressive.  But not quite the 65 million daily users Zynga has across all of their titles.

King.com’s most recent launch, a game called Candy Crush Saga, has already crossed the half a million daily users threshold. That game just debuted last week.

“Our ultimate ambition is to be the leader in our segment of games for the casual social player, mainly female, social and mobile,” King.com’s Chief Executive and co-founder Riccardo Zacconi said in an interview with Reuters. He continued, “Our target is to reach Zynga.”

Across Facebook and other channels King.com reports that they have 2.5 billion games played per month. Although they started out before Facebook gaming became popular a lot of their game plays comes from Facebook. Zynga has been reportedly looking at options outside of Facebook and King.com says they are looking at other places to host their casual games as well.

King.com lacks in the mobile world and plans to change that this year by introducing their most popular titles to iOS and Android. That’s a space where EA and Zynga have already been successful.

source: ChicagoTribune

And Now Electronic Arts To Lay Off 500

by Kyle in Gaming, Tech
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Electronic Arts was just recently voted the worst company in America by the users at consumerist.com. They actually beat out Bank of America and Walmart. Well there woes haven’t stopped there as Monday it was reported that the gaming giant could lay off as many as 500 people.

Startup Grind’s Derek Anderson is reporting that Electronic Arts could lay off between 500-1000 people as soon as this week.

CNet is reporting that this news may not come as surprising considering EA recently had a horrible Q4 which is a crucial time for video game companies. Q4 includes holiday shopping which is supposed to be the best time of the year for video game sales. 2011, not so much for EA as they reported a $205 million dollar loss in Q4 2011.

Q3 2011 was actually worse as EA saw a $340 million dollar loss.

EA was harshly criticized for the lackluster ending of their game Mass Effect 3. Die hard gamers were expecting much more out of the franchise hit. CNet reports that EA was accused of disrespecting gamers for the horrible ending to Mass Effect 3. In fact it was so bad that EA announced that they would release a free “Extended Cut” for those that bought the original version.

To top all this off EA is under-performing with investors as well. Shares of EA stock are down 21.5% to $16.18  In the past five years EA stock has lost 70 percent of it’s value. They aren’t the super sports franchise company we used to know and love.

source: CNet