EVCin

I hope you all had a great New Year’s Eve celebration. While 2009 saw the amazing growth of social games, looking ahead, I wonder whether 2010 will be the year where:

More complex game mechanics catch on?
Facebook changes continue to take away the institutional learnings from leaders like Zynga, helping to level the playing [...]

As originally published at Games.com and later highlighted by Silicon Alley Insider.
No one questions whether sharing news or photos with friends and family is a fad, and when people get together to socialize, they often play games – from bridge to charades to Trivial Pursuit. As one of the largest social gathering spots on [...]

PetVille gets massive ad campaign to jump grow over 2 million daily active users in a day; Zynga starts promoting some synchronous games; Playfish still seeing DAU traffic down since EA acquisition; Bejeweled Blitz gets some competition for gem-swapping audience.

While the purchase by EA promised to give Playfish more resources, those weren’t apparently being used to drive more advertising into Playfish titles after the first week.

Now that Electronic Arts has purchased Playfish for up to $400 million to help it hasten the transition from retail package dependency to a more digital focus, what can we expect? Looking at the quotes from COO Sebastian de Halleux in the press and today’s EA earnings call might provide some clues:
“I can say [...]