We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference, on J uly 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. You will also be able to unlock features in the Facebook game by playing on the mobile version, and vice versa. Cinicolo said the company will operate CityVille Hometown as a service, rolling out new features periodically. In the coming days, CityVille Hometown will be ready in five languages. The game rolls out as early as this week in Canada and in other iPhone markets across the globe in the coming weeks. Cinicolo said the company has “an impressive content pipeline” of games coming in the future. With somewhere around 2,000 employees, Zynga has lots of development talent available to make more and more games. But it’s also a byproduct of the company’s big acquisition spree, during which it has bought a company a month for the past year. Zynga’s increased pace of introducing new games may be sign that an IPO filing is near. Cinicolo said that the biggest difference between CityVille Hometown and Zynga’s older Mafia Wars game, which Cinicolo managed, is the amount of narrative storytelling in the new game.

That style of using cute characters has become common in recent Zynga games such as Hanging with Friends and Empires & Allies. The characters - Kate, Hilda, and Bert - were created to make players feel welcome even if they aren’t gamers. You use those to stock your businesses, and your friends can visit your town. You build farms and cultivate crops to get supplies. In the game, the mechanics are similar to CityVille’s. It’s more about setting your town apart than getting the biggest town.” “You can share that town with your friends. “It’s all about creating your hometown that represents you,” Cinicolo said. The game is free to play, where players can play for free and pay real money for virtual goods in the game such as cool buildings. Rather, Zynga wants you to build a homey place, where you put your own personal stamp on everything, Cinicolo said. But the game isn’t all about splashy graphics. The game runs as a native application on the iPhone and iPad so that it can take advantage of the graphics of each device and run at the fastest possible speed. “We looked at CityVille on the web and thought about how we can give our players the best possible CityVille experience on mobile,” he said.

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