Hot on the heels of their much-publicized emancipation from the Facebook platform, and self-proclaimed conversion to the church of mobile, social gaming mainstay CrowdStar is ready to take their show on the road, expanding a couple of their most popular franchises into the (ironically named) Wild West of mobile gaming: Southeast Asia. How will they make it out there? With the a little help from their friends, of course.
Zynga has announced that it has partnered with Tencent, the largest Chinese games company, to launch Zynga City in China. Let the race for Western game companies to enter the Chinese social games market begin!
OK, so it's not "casual" games news, but what does that mean that team "casual" mean days anyway? In big news that could have a huge impact on the entire games industry, Tencent has acquired Riot Games for $400 million. Riot Games is the creator of the popular browser-based, online fantasy fighting game League of Legends, boasting more than 1 million active players and logging more than 500 million minutes of game play a month. The company was formed in 2008 to create "session-based" online games. So what's the big deal, you ask? One word: Tencent. Tencent isn't just the largest Internet company in China. It's the third largest publicly-held company in the world.