Technology, Farmville | featured news

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.

Not long ago, online games company Zynga looked on pace to unseat much bigger, well-established rivals as it rode the popularity of "FarmVille," the clicking game of virtual cows and real money.

Zynga, the creator of FarmVille, Words With Friends and Mafia Wars, announced a new gaming platform on Thursday that will match up players who do not know each other.

Zynga Inc., the largest maker of games for Facebook, declined in its first day of trading after raising $1 billion in an initial public offering that gave it a greater valuation than rival Electronic Arts Inc. The shares, listed on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the symbol ZNGA, fell 5 percent to $9.50. The developer of games such as “CityVille,” “FarmVille” and “Mafia Wars” sold 100 million shares for $10 each, the top end of a proposed range.

Zynga is close to raising as much as $500 million from a group of investors in a round of financing that could value the maker of CityVille, FarmVille and other popular Facebook games as high as $10 billion.

This is a historic moment for social games. “FarmVille,” the hit Facebook game among all hit Facebook games, is no longer the top app on the social network. For the first time since claiming the top spot more than a year ago in August 2009, FarmVille has fallen to second place in terms of monthly active users on Facebook, according to AppData.com. Coming in at no. 1 now is the app “Phrases.”

A 22-year-old mother from Jacksonville, Florida, has pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for shaking her 3-month-old son to death after his crying interrupted her FarmVille game.

Ready your virtual cattle and the Microsoft branding iron. Zynga announced today that its hit social game FarmVille on Facebook has now launched on Microsoft's MSN Games portal.