Zynga May Be Readying a City-Building Game
Zynga has been in the news twice already this week, between the acquisition of Conduit Labs and a Chinese-language version of Texas Hold’em Poker. There’s another, unofficial item, though: the company’s next game may be called CityVille, according to a new forum spotted on Zynga’s website by Games.com.
There’s nothing except the name of the forum so far, but it doesn’t take a great imaginative leap to figure out that it could be the name of a city-building game like Social City or My Empire. Earlier this year, Zynga also ran player surveys asking if they’d like to see a city-builder.
One might also take Zynga’s past history into account. Although the days of cloning another game’s look or mechanics are long past, Zynga has still paid close attention to trends that work with its releases this year. Treasure Isle may have been modeled on an earlier game called Treasure Madness, while FrontierVille combines FarmVille with a dash of city (or homestead) building and a Western theme, which has been prominent in other media.
We called the nascent city building trend in February, and Social City proved it could draw the crowds when it hit its peak of 12.6 million monthly active users in April and May. Zynga has had longer development cycles this year, so the timing looks about right too.
Zynga declined to comment, so we’ll have to wait and see.
