What's Hot:

• Botanicula
• Ice Age Village
• Bubble Safari
• Marvel Avengers Alliance

It’s no secret that Zynga has spent the year trying to diversify their portfolio a little farther than games with the word “Ville” in them. Whether it’s dropping a fine $200 million to acquire OMGPOP and Draw Something, jumping into the popular bubble-popping genre to make Bubble Safari, or putting one of its purchased entities to use to use with the brand-new announcement of Zombie Swipeout, it’s clear that Zynga is trying to branch out.

Crowdfunding sounds easy (just put up a page on Kickstarter and watch the bucks roll in for your new video game project), and on the surface, it may very well be so – at least in principle. But successful crowdfunding generally doesn’t happen by accident. If you look at triumphant gaming projects across the Web, you’ll find that many share several attributes in common, including one or more of the following building blocks:

Crowdfunding seems like a dream to many video game developers – just post up a pitch for an unfinished gaming project, and watch the pledges and donations roll in. But as veteran crowd funders will tell you, the actual process can be something of a nightmare, and success is far from certain. Certainly, crowdfunding can be a powerful too for launching and marketing any new business or startup. But before diving in, make sure you understand the benefits and risks associated with the practice.

Well that certainly didn’t take long! Hot on the heels of yesterday’s speculation that mobile giant Rovio was looking to purchase the rights to indie physics-puzzler Casey’s Contraptions, the transaction was confirmed by the big bird itself. Goodbye, slingshots and pigs, hello scissors and balloons!

1 billion is a might large number. So large, in fact, that I actually had to stop to think about how many zeros were in it. It’s nine. I think. Rovio doesn’t have to guess, though – because today they announced that the Angry Birds franchise has seen 1 billion downloads. That’s one download for every 7 people walking the Earth.

While they might be made by little teams, indie games have proven to be big business over the last few years. Shirking the traditional publisher/developer relationship, where games are made in 1000 person teams, indie developers are small groups of people (or in some cases, just one person) making games because it’s what they love to do – and Indie Game: The Movie is a celebration of that.

We cover plenty of new games here at Gamezebo every week, but the number of games we’ve already covered that show up on new platforms? It’s staggering. Starting this Wednesday and continuing every week, we’ll be rounding up the games that aren’t quite new, but might be new to you depending on your platform of choice.

Crime pays for Funzio. Crime City that is.

GREE, in its attempt to expand its mobile gaming empire from Japan to North America, has acquired Funzio for $210 million. Funzio is the developer of Crime City, Modern War, and Kingdom Age, which have a total of 20 million downloads across iPhone and Android devices.

Do April showers really bring May flowers? I have no idea. But I do know this: April releases bring great games! As usual, a metric ton of great games were released in the last 30 days, and we reviewed plenty of them. But which were the best? The very tippity-top of the charts? Read on to find out!

According to the rumor in a Bloomberg video report this morning, South Korean free-to-play giant Nexon made a bid to purchase North American game developer, Electronic Arts. While this news in itself is pretty unexpected, the fallout so far has been equally surprising.

As the old saying goes, the best things in life are free. Why empty your bank account for a new videogame when some of the best around don’t cost a dime? According to Flurry, the average iOS user owns 65 apps, and you can bet that a big chunk of that consists of glorious, “costless” apps.

It looks like the Year of the Dragon is upon us in full force! We’ve seen new stages in Angry Birds Seasons, new items in Hidden Chronicles, new dragons in Dragonvale, and now Kabam’s Dragons of Atlantis is joining the party with a major update of its own.