Mafia Wars | Foilball.com

Posts tagged "mafia wars"

Zynga raises almost 1 million for Haiti Relief Fund from FarmVille …

Zynga, the developers of FarmVille and Mafia Wars, has already raised over $900,000 dollars with the help of FarmVille players for the earthquake victims of Haiti. Great work FarmVille Freaks!!!

FarmVille made a special announcement to FarmVille players on Monday night, 01.18.10:

“Wow! We’re humbled by your generosity. Y’all have contributed over $900,000 to the Zynga Haiti Relief Fund! if we can exceed $1 million in donations before 11:59 pm PT Tuesday, we’ll give all Farmers a surprise! It’s your last chance – so head to your farm and purchase some White Corn!” (FarmVille) The purchase of virtual goods that includes White Corn seeds for FarmVille and Haitian drums for Mafia Wars are bought with real cash in which Zynga is donating 100% of proceeds to The World Food Program for the Haiti Relief Fund. Prior to the earthquake in Port a Prince, Haiti, Zynga had already established a special relationship with the country of Haiti when it started the first Sweet Seeds for Haiti campaign on October 1st 2009 by reaching out to FarmVille players and bringing awareness to the poverty in Haiti. over 1.2 million was raised with past contributions. With the recent earthquake disaster in Haiti, many of Zynga’s FarmVille players were hoping that another campaign effort would take place as they were eager to support Haitian relief efforts.

The Sweet Seeds for Haiti – Haiti Relief Fund is represented with White Corn seeds in FarmVille. The seeds have only been available to FarmVille players since Friday, January 15th 2010 and the response has been overwhelming. please consider donating if you already play FarmVille and are interested in helping the people of Haiti. The White Corn seeds will be available to purchase in the FarmVille Market until Friday, January 22nd, one week from their debut.

If you would like to support the Haitian Relief efforts and donate in another way, here are some additional resources:

Using Cellphone & Text Messaging: another reputable organization Yele.org, founded by singer Wyclef Jean, is donating 100% of proceeds to Haiti. You may donate here by using your cellphone to text the word “YELE” to numbers 501501, each text will donate $5 USD.

Link: http://www.yele.org/donation/

For USA and international monetary donations: if you would like to donate money directly and NOT purchase the Sweet Seeds for Haiti with farm cash, you may do so here through Zynga’s campaign with World Food Program :

Link: https://www.wfp.org/donate/zynga

Coinstar & Rixty.com: Do you want to help Haiti but don’t have a Credit Card to buy FV$? FarmVille Freak “DarkFarmer” suggests donating spare change using CoinStar and Rixty.com to purchase farm cash. for Farmville players in the US, all it takes is a handful of coins and a trip to the grocery store. You only need $5 in coins to purchase enough FV$ to donate to Sweet Seeds for Haiti. Here’s how it works:

1. Pack up your coins visit your local grocery store with a Coinstar machine.
2. When choosing how to redeem your coins, be sure and select the egiftcertificate option.
3. choose Rixty.com as your gift certficate choice
4. Redeem your coins for a Rixty code (There’s no coin counting fee with this option!)
5. take your Rixty gift certificate code (On your receipt) and enter it at www.rixty.com
6. go to Farmville, choose add coins & FV cash and select Rixty as your payment option.

This story originally appeared on FarmVille Freak.

Zynga raises almost 1 million for Haiti Relief Fund from FarmVille …

Related Websites

Be the first to comment - What do you think?
Posted by - May 28, 2010 at 8:00 pm

Categories: News and Events Tags: donations, drums, earthquake disaster, earthquake victims, mafia wars

Video games see social networks as growth engine – MarketWatch

Alert Email Print

By Dan Gallagher, MarketWatch

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — For those wondering when the video-game industry will enter its next console cycle, some argue that the new cycle has already started, with social networks as the next big opportunity.

Such was apparent this week at the Game Developers’ Conference in San Francisco, an annual gathering of video-game designers and publishers. while the event saw some big developments among traditional gaming — most notably, Sony’s new motion-control system — a big theme running through the event was the rapid growth of social networking and the related opportunity for game makers.

The opportunity is big indeed. The largest social-network site — Facebook — alone has more than 400 million monthly users. MySpace, its closest rival, has 100 million monthly users. Those numbers are far above the number of people who own traditional video-game consoles.

“We have a new mainstream mass audience,” Gareth Davis, platform manager at Facebook, said during a panel discussion at GDC. “We think this is a lot of opportunity for game developers to tap into.”

Games are becoming hot property for social networks. The soaring popularity of games such as “Mafia Wars” and “FarmVille” over Facebook has attracted the interest of both game makers and investors looking to pump money into the next Big thing.

Such was apparent at GDC this week. Among the crowd of programmers and designers were venture capitalists, financial analysts and private equity funds, sniffing for opportunities in the market.

These investors are not looking to sink money into the next PlayStation or Xbox game; rather, they are looking for the next Zynga — the San Francisco-based company that makes “Mafia Wars,” “FarmVille” and other social-network games. still privately held, Zynga landed $180 million in funding late last year from Digital Sky Technologies, or DST, the Russian outfit that also bought a large stake in Facebook.

Media reports said the investment gave Zynga a market valuation between $1.5 billion and $3 billion. The company reported 100 million unique monthly users in November, and reportedly has about $250 million in annual revenue.

“Amazingly, there are over 200 million people playing games on Facebook each month, out of 400 million total Facebook users, suggesting a 50% penetration rate,” said Todd Greenwald of Signal Hill Capital, who also noted that more than 500,000 gaming apps have been developed to date.

Competing for gamers — and developers

For game makers, the growing interest among social networks provides a new opportunity beyond the industry’s typical channels — which are largely consoles such as the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Wii and associated handheld devices.

These social networks are competing against each other to lure developers — and each offers its own unique set of advantages and disadvantages.

Sony moves toward Wii-like motion

Sony unveiled the details of its new motion-control video game system called PlayStation Move, which is expected to hit the market later this year. MarketWatch’s Dan Gallagher and Walt Mossberg explain why we’re likely to see this technology play a role beyond video games in the near-future.

Facebook offers the largest base of users, by far. Offsetting that is recent developments whereby the social-networking giant will be taking a portion of the revenue generated by games in the form of virtual goods sales. The company has also changed some of its policies that had previously allowed game makers to market their games more aggressively, after several users compared the efforts to spam.

“When you have 400 million people, it’s important to protect the user experience,” Facebook’s Davis said.

MySpace — which runs a distant second to Facebook in terms of market share — is taking a slightly different approach.

Video games see social networks as growth engine – MarketWatch