Joel Brodie

Playdom acquires yet another social games developer. This time, it's Hive 7, for an undisclosed according to TechCrunch. Hive 7 is best known as the developer of Knighthood, a combat diplomacy game. Acquiring game studios to grow is a good strategy when your valuation is high as Playdom's is now and is also a good way to hire talent. However, it is also a strategy fraught with risk.

HeyZap announced that they have raised $3 million in funding in a round led by Union Square Ventures. This is in to initial funding from Y! Combinator and a $650,000 seed around, again led by Union Square Ventures. HeyZap is an example of a company that starts out with one business model and product and ends up with another as the fast-paced casual games business changes. Have they come up with a new plan that works or will they have to morph yet again in the future?

Frisky Mongoose has a fun little feature they run every Thursday where they put up two seemingly similar Facebook games in a throw-down competition and ask users to decide which game is better. Today's Thursday throw-down: Farm Town v. FarmVille.

Alistar Doulin, a game developer based in Australia, has posted an interesting editorial about casual and Facebook games on Gamasutra. His theory: the reason why Facebook games are slowing in growth now is that they lack game depth. Though I disagree with Mr. Doulin, he does raise interesting points.

Since launching FrontierVille 2 weeks ago, the game has grown to 5 million daily active users (DAU's) making it the fastest growing game this week on Facebook by far. That's the good news for Zynga. The bad news? It's not enough to stem the tide of losses across all Zynga games, which for the first time since last November has dropped below 200 million monthly active users (MAUs).

CrowdStarhas partnered with the National Wildlife Federation to raise money to benefit wildlife affected by the BP Oil Spill. Until July 20, CrowdStar will donate 100% of the net proceeds of special limited-edition items within Zoo Paradise, Happy Aquarium, and Happy Pets to the NWF to help the animals affected by the oil spill.