Joel Brodie

When Disney acquired Playdom earlier this year for a mix of $500 - $700 million (depending on how well Playdom does), they not only bought Playdom's traffic, games, and mix of acquired studios. They also bought John Pleasants, Playdom's charismatic and let's just say it, handsome CEO (yes, I feel quite comfortable saying that). Two months after the acquisition, the love affair between Disney and Mr. Pleasants has not yet turned sour. On the contrary, as reported by Inside Social Games, Disney has named Mr. Pleasants as President for all of Disney Interactive.

The US economy is doing "so-so" these days manufacturing real goods, but we're rocking on virtual items. According to a report released by Inside Network today, the virtual items business in the US will grow to $2.1 billion in 2011, up from an estimated $1.6 billion in 2010.

Techcrunch Disrupt opened today with roundtable discussion with Mark Pincus (CEO, Zynga) and Bing Gordon (Advisor and Investor, Zynga) being interviewed by John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins, who is… an investor in Zynga. As you can imagine, this was about the most non hard-hitting panel of all time. Nonetheless, anytime you get these three gentlemen on a panel together, some new data is bound to come out.

Playdom has just released a new game on Facebook, ESPNU College Town, in time for the start of school. The game, though, is less about academics and more about building and designing your very own university campus. READ MORE for the details (hint: though ESPN is in the title, it's more a strategy than a sports game) and be first to play ESPNU College Town.

It's a well-known fact that Zynga is the number one social games company on Facebook by a long shot. A far more interesting fact to track is who is number 2? For the longest time, the #2 and #3 positions have been dominated by Playfish and Playdom. But, now, CrowdStar is officially the number 2 social games company on Facebook based on Appdata. And, in the words of the Carpenters, they've only just begun.

Oh, Zynga, it has been almost 30 days since your last acquisition. Surely, you could not let the month of September go by without an acquisition. And the answer is, of course not! As reported by Inside Social Games, Zynga has acquired German company Dextrose for an undisclosed sum. Dextrose AG sounds like it is related to an artificial sweetener product, but they actually have released a development platform called Aves which is an HTML 5 game engine for 2D and 2.5 D graphics.

6Waves is one of the most successful social game companies you may never have heard of, with over 40 - 50 million monthly average users (MAU's) and hit social games such as Mall World, Critter Island, and Kingdoms of Camelot. We spoke to Jim Ying of 6Waves about their unique publishing model, global gaming trends, and the future of social games.

Yes, I know I am posting this story about Facebook's changes to its games platform two days late. But, in my defense, I was hiking a glacier in Patagonia and there was no Wi-Fi. Facebook's changes will make it easier to play games you are already enjoying on Facebook but make it more difficult to discover new games to play. There is hope for the future though.