Games | featured news

A year ago, OMGPOP CEO Dan Porter sold the games-maker to Zynga for $180 million-plus, and became the head of the company's New York outpost. Now he’s out. Porter’s departure isn’t a huge surprise, given both his timing (presumably long enough to hit certain employment and/or earn-out goals) and the fact that Zynga ended up writing off at least half of its OMGPOP deal a few months after it closed.

The Scottie dog has a new nemesis in Monopoly after fans voted in an online contest to add a cat token to the property trading game, replacing the iron, toy maker Hasbro Inc. announced Wednesday.

Zynga reports a sharp drop in its losses in the last three months of 2012, as revenues at the designer of games including Farmville stabilised.

The gig is almost up for one of the eight Monopoly tokens. But which will it be? Iron? Thimble? Top Hat? Or another of their board game buddies? Hasbro is holding a Facebook contest to eliminate one of the eight tokens that identify the players and introduce a new one. Possible new tokens include a cat, diamond ring, guitar, toy robot and helicopter.

Many businesses are using gamification to get people hooked on their products and services — and it is working, thanks to smartphones and the Internet.

Facebook Inc. and Zynga Inc. are changing the rules of their relationship. In a bid to become less reliant on Facebook, Zynga disclosed in a filing on Thursday that it has amended the terms of its relationship with the world's largest social network so that it can now host its Web games outside of Facebook's platform, among other things. The new agreement also leaves the door open for Facebook to produce its own games and become a direct competitor to Zynga.

Zynga is trying to provide some answers for its controversial acquisition of "Draw Something," a mobile game that was released only six weeks earlier and has since lost popularity.

Feeling besieged by pesky little problems today? You might want to be careful with your Google searches.

Kazuo Hirai said he would focus Sony’s resources away from its unprofitable television business and more toward mobile devices, cameras and games.

We're going to feel a little guilty if this news gets you fired. But you can now play "Angry Birds" on Facebook.