RockYou to lay off 100 staff, will not publish John Romero's CloudForest Expedition on Facebook

Hard times have come to Facebook game developer RockYou, as the company has announced that it will lose 100 of its staff, leaving it with about 90 employees in all. As told to TechCrunch, CEO Lisa Marina says that this move will allow for the company to become profitable. "Last year was about finding a business model. This year, it's about making the company healthy and profitable," Marino says. With that profitability comes sacrifices, one of which will be the Playdemic studio that RockYou acquired back in January.

Playdemic will be sold back to its original owners for an undisclosed amount of money, and the Facebook game Gourmet Ranch, along with around 40 employees will go with it. As for what remains (after RockYou itself loses 56 employees), Marino has stated that RockYou will not be publishing CloudForest Expedition, the John Romero game we brought you a preview of earlier this year.

While Marino didn't give an exact reason for why Cloudforest Expedition is being shuttered (we could assume the worst - that RockYou no longer contains the manpower to develop it), she did state that perhaps RockYou had been a bit too creative in its past endeavors. "We went too far down the creative path and lost our way in terms of being a profitable organization."

Needless to say, it's disappointing that profits have been chosen over creativity in this case; however, it's not impossible that CloudForest Expedition will still see the light of day. A long shot? Sure, but if someone else were to suddenly jump in and take the reigns, we may be able to explore the jungle landscapes of CloudForest after all.

Keep the little ones off of Facebook: MokoFarm is FarmVille for kids

You love them to tears, but your kids want shut the heck up about FarmVille. And what (good) parent wants their toddler on Facebook? MokoMomo Interactive has released MokoFarm for the iPad for $1.99 on the App Store. This game is said to give kids the FarmVille experience and might teach them a thing or two in the process. And near everything in the game is touchable.

And we all know your kids like to touch things--you put those plastic things on the outlets around the house for a reason. MokoFarm doesn't look like it's limited by the boundaries of normal social games like energy or lengthy time constraints. However, kids can also share their farm creations through their parents' Facebook accounts. According to MokoMomo, the game is narrated to help the younger folks learn new words.


Of course, the common FarmVille-like tropes are all present like buying animals, crops and new buildings to deck out the farm. That said, nearly every piece of content, including the animals, appear to be interactive. Kids can tap the windmills to make them spin, touch trees to shake their leaves and tap critters to make them run. Your tike can even take pictures of his/her farm to send to you. Sure, it's no FarmVille, but for what it's worth it looks pretty darn close.

Click here to download MokoFarm on iPad Now >

[Via E27]

Does your kid(s) bug you about playing FarmVille? Do you wish Facebook games were more kid-friendly?

Disney-branded Facebook games coming in 2012, Playdom head says

Can we all just say, “finally?” During a panel named “The Rise of Social Games” at the f8 Facebook Developers Conference in San Francisco, Disney Interactive and Playdom head John Pleasants revealed that two to four Facebook games surrounding Disney xd brands will hit Facebook in 2012. The general topic of the panel was the fact that branded social games are taking off.

Pleasants was joined on the panel by Kabam CEO Kevin Chou, EA Interactive head Barry Cottle and Zynga CBO Owen Van Natta. Facebook director of games partnerships Sean Ryan moderated the panel with the preface that branded games will take over the Facebook platform. And he might be right: EA just released The Sims Social, Zynga will soon re-brand its new Adventure World with Indiana Jones and Kabam recently announced The Godfather: Five Families.

Playdom, which Disney acquired in July 2010 for a whopping $740 million, is ahead of the pack with two branded games on Facebook: ESPNU College Town and ESPN Sports Bar & Grill. Both games performed well, thanks to advertising through the ESPN TV network. While Disney owns the ESPN brand, notice how neither of those actually involve the insanely popular Disney characters we’ve come to love.

Honestly, we’re surprised this didn’t happen sooner. Consider this: Disney has its own cable TV channel through which it could, in theory, advertise whatever it wants. Pleasants didn’t get into why it’s taken this long for disney channel games to throw its cast of characters into Facebook games, but did reveal the power of the Disney name.

Gnome Town, which Playdom launched in the summer–and we enjoyed quite a bit–peaked at 530,000 daily players. But just plopping the Disney logo on top of the existing one made users more likely to spend in the game just through trust of the company’s name, according to Pleasants. “We think it’s an advantage, if you put game play first,” Pleasants said.

It’s comforting to hear this emphasized by these developers. (Kabam’s Chou shared the same sentiment.) Branded games on Facebook are OK in my book, but the last thing anyone wants to see is the genre become a branding machine.

Disney-branded Facebook games coming in 2012, Playdom head says

Can we all just say, “finally?” During a panel named “The Rise of Social Games” at the f8 Facebook Developers Conference in San Francisco, Disney Interactive and Playdom head John Pleasants revealed that two to four Facebook games surrounding Disney xd brands will hit Facebook in 2012. The general topic of the panel was the fact that branded social games are taking off.

Pleasants was joined on the panel by Kabam CEO Kevin Chou, EA Interactive head Barry Cottle and Zynga CBO Owen Van Natta. Facebook director of games partnerships Sean Ryan moderated the panel with the preface that branded games will take over the Facebook platform. And he might be right: EA just released The Sims Social, Zynga will soon re-brand its new Adventure World with Indiana Jones and Kabam recently announced The Godfather: Five Families.

Playdom, which Disney acquired in July 2010 for a whopping $740 million, is ahead of the pack with two branded games on Facebook: ESPNU College Town and ESPN Sports Bar & Grill. Both games performed well, thanks to advertising through the ESPN TV network. While Disney owns the ESPN brand, notice how neither of those actually involve the insanely popular Disney characters we’ve come to love.

Honestly, we’re surprised this didn’t happen sooner. Consider this: Disney has its own cable TV channel through which it could, in theory, advertise whatever it wants. Pleasants didn’t get into why it’s taken this long for disney channel games to throw its cast of characters into Facebook games, but did reveal the power of the Disney name.

Gnome Town, which Playdom launched in the summer–and we enjoyed quite a bit–peaked at 530,000 daily players. But just plopping the Disney logo on top of the existing one made users more likely to spend in the game just through trust of the company’s name, according to Pleasants. “We think it’s an advantage, if you put game play first,” Pleasants said.

It’s comforting to hear this emphasized by these developers. (Kabam’s Chou shared the same sentiment.) Branded games on Facebook are OK in my book, but the last thing anyone wants to see is the genre become a branding machine.