Sega looking in-house for social gaming development

With companies from EA to Disney spending millions of dollars to acquire hot social and casual gaming companies, it might seem like a gold rush mentality has set in amongst the established mega-publishers. Well, the mentality has yet to reach long-lived publisher Sega, it seems. In a recent GamesIndustry.biz interview, Sega West president Mike Hayes says the company is hesitant to buy its way into the social gaming market at this point.

Hayes compares the social gaming market today to the mobile gaming market of five years ago, when heavily-hyped-but-unprofitable startups sold for inflated prices. "I'm not saying that about social gaming, but the value of what is current - you could argue is actually too high," Hayes said. "If you look at a lot of famous companies, I won't mention any names, but look at their balance books and they are not making any money."

That's not to say Sega isn't interested in the social and casual gaming markets -- they'll just be focusing on those markets through their newly established San Francisco digital division, rather than by scooping up an existing company. The key, Hayes says, is taking the time to come up with new ideas and models for sustainability, rather than throwing money at a quick cash-in. "Controlled profitable growth in digital is key," he said. "It's nothing we have to rush into and use a lot of money on. It's something some company's need to get into quickly but carefully, and that's exactly the way we're going to approach it."

Zynga pulls Farmville from MSN Games

Well that didn't last long. Only six months after Zynga brought its hit farming simulation Farmville to MSN Games, the company has apparently decided to pull the game from Microsoft's portal.

As Inside Social Games notes, it seems like an odd move for Zynga, which has lately been trying to decrease its dependence on mega-network Facebook. Then again, it's not the first time Zynga has decided to pull its games from a social network -- see the company's canceled relationship with relatively minor network Tagged.

While having access to MSN's millions of users surely didn't hurt Farmville, Zynga likely decided their resources were better spent focusing on other markets, such as Japanese mobile phone networks, for instance. As we saw with Zynga's canceled Facebook game Street Racing, sometimes the opportunity cost of the status quo outweighs the benefit of leaving things as they are.

We've reached out to Zynga for a comment on the move and will let you know if and when we hear back.

Square Enix brings freemium RPG to Japanese social network

RPG-maker Square Enix's "exploration" of the social game space seems to be continuing apace -- in Japan, at least. SiliconEra reports that the company has released classical RPG Knights of the Crystal on Japanese social network GREE.

With a look reminiscent of the company's popular Final Fantasy series (thanks to Final Fantasy Tactics A2 artist Ryoma Ito), the game is reportedly a standard turn-based RPG in the Square Enix mold. One major difference from most Square Enix RPGs, though, is that the game is being offered as a free-to-play game on browsers and mobile phones, with money generated from in-game item sales.

This isn't the first time Square Enix has dabbled in Japanese social gaming -- previous titles on GREE include historical tactics game Sengoku Ixa and farming adventure game Chocobo's Crystal Tower. The company hasn't been nearly as active (or, um, active at all) in the American social gaming scene, but they've given every indication that they're interested in breaking in.

Quote of the Moment: Social gaming 'tailor-made' for Disney

"It became pretty clear to us that game-playing on social networks is real, here to stay. There are obviously a multitude of people that are already playing. There are about a half a billion people who are members of Facebook already, about 40 percent of those people participate in game playing.
"I mentioned in my remarks that the customer base is pretty diverse, from 18 to post-50. It's dual gender, meaning it's not - it doesn't skew just in the men's direction, which we know a lot of other games do.

"It seemed tailor-made for not only Disney-branded games, but Marvel and ESPN, and we really like the opportunity. The other thing that was really interesting to us is that we now have over 50 million people who are members of various Disney, ESPN and ABC groups on Facebook. So we begin with a very, very solid base of people to market to and when you add to that the over 40 million people who are playing Playdom games already, that seemed pretty compelling to us."

-Disney CEO Bob Iger explains the reasoning behind the company's recent purchase of social gaming company Playdom in a an investor's conference call