Joel Brodie

Zynga continues its march eastward by reportedly purchasing Unoh, a Tokyo-based games developer. According to Techcrunch, the purchase price was equivalent to $11.6 billion. This move marks Zynga's second foray in the Land of the Rising Sun in the past few weeks. Zynga recently announced a $150 million investment by Softbank (huge Japanese technology and media company) earlier this year to build a joint venture to bring social games to Japan.

Just when you thought the buying spree of social game and app companies with diminishing traffic and valuation numbers by large companies hoping to buy into the market ended when Disney bought Playdom last week, think again! Techcrunch and Inside Social Games are reporting that Google is buying Slide for $182 million.

Attention all Julius Caesar wanna-be's. Legacy of Rome has quietly launched on Facebook. This new Roman-themed strategy game is the latest release by developer innoWate and title published by 6Waves (one of the largest social game companies around you may not have heard about…yet). You can be among the first to play Legacy of Rome in beta here (note, it's beta so it's not 100% done) and go to our Legacy of Rome product page to be notified for game updates. Our big coverage comes soon.

Watercooler, Inc., has changed it's name to Kabam, and the world of social games have changed very little as a result. The company is known its relatively well-received games, Kingdom of Camelot and Epic Goal.

After months of falling traffic, many of your favorite Facebook games experienced huge gains this past weekend. According to Inside Social Games (the web site that analyzes the Facebook statistics that I just report on, thank you Inside Social Games for doing the hard work!), top games such as Mafia Wars, Zoo World, and Restaurant City experienced huge usage gains over the past few days. There is no rhythm or reason to these huge upticks in game traffic after months of huge drops. We can easily explain game traffic drops. Facebook changed game notifications and the result was less virality and drops of game traffic of up to 25% per game. What then accounts for this huge gain, much of it over a 3-day period?

Another one bites the dust. Playdom has announced that they have signed a 5-year exclusive deal to use Facebook Credits as virtual currency, according to Inside Social Games. What's significant about this news is that it is even news itself. When Facebook announced the existence of Facebook Credits last year, it was inevitable that it would become the standard virtual currency for social games.

Laurent Courtines of Games.com Blog has written an excellent analysis of what the Disney acquisition of Playdom means to the world of social games. Rather than just link to my friend Laurent, I am going to offer my point versus count-point analysis. The debate is on!