San Francisco — Google+, after recently opening its gates wide-open to the public, is now quickly becoming a nice home of Adobe Flash-based games. Zynga’s most hottest game on Facebook invades Google+, the search engine giant’s new social media networking outfit. Zynga on Monday unleashed its most idolized title “CityVille” to games that can be played at the Google’s new social-gaming platform, unveiled recently in a challenge to Facebook.
Zynga’s City-building simulation game CityVille is the latest flash-based game to join a couple of other high-profile games to become available on the new social network Google+. CityVille+ now mingles with 17 other popular casual games including Angry Birds, Bejeweled Blitz, and Soduku Puzzles.
“CityVille grew to become our largest game on Facebook, so naturally we wanted to ‘build’ a presence for it on Google+. Ultimately, we want to make our games accessible to everyone, everywhere–no matter where they play or what platform they play on,” the company wrote in a blog post.
CityVille goes to Google+ (Credit: Zynga)
In August, Google+ opened a gaming zone at its speedily emerging social network vying with Facebook to be the hub for people’s online lives. The two companies have been partners from the beginning of Google+ Games.
In fact, CityVille has attracted a lot more traffic to Facebook than Zynga’s poker game. The former has more than 70 million unique players every month, while the latter has about 30 million, according to AppData.
Google is an investor in Zynga, and when the gaming platform launched in August, one of its first 16 game titles was Zynga Poker. “It is no secret we are big fans of Google+ here at Zynga,” the San Francisco-based startup said in a blog post.
“Last month we announced that we associated with Google to bring Zynga Poker to Google+, and today we are excited to add CityVille+ to the new game platform,” the message continued.
CityVille is a social-centric city game where you play as the mayor of a town. The objective is simple, make your city the best, and your rivals are your friends. Speaking of friends, the game requires a lot of friends just because you need them in achieving some of the quests, and making your city more profitable like securing trade connections, additional “energy” each visit, etc.
Aside from the CityVille, Google+ also offers some other global game sensations like Angry Birds, the initial array of offerings available at Google+ included Bejeweled Blitz, Zynga Poker, and Dragon Age Legends and a dozen more. According to Google, the list of games will expand gradually, so it looks like Zynga’s CityVille is just the start, and more quality games from Facebook or a brand new game exclusive for Google+ will arrive soon.
Moreover, the complimentary online game is a Chinese version of “CityVille,” which was playable in French, German, Italian, Spanish, and English when it was released in December. Besides, while playing the game, players can construct dream cities complete with businesses, homes, park and landmarks and then invite friends to take up virtual residence in the form of animated characters that run shops, enforce laws, and more.
CityVille coming to Google+ is a pretty big deal for Google. Embarking onto the gaming world in a big way with popular titles should help drive engagement on its budding social network. As much as some people like to bash social gaming on platforms like Facebook and Google+, there is a giant user base that truly loves these games.
For instance, Zynga’s games on Facebook boasts more than 232 million active monthly users, while CityVille alone sees over 14 million daily active users. And just this month, Zynga Poker hit 50 million fans.
The four-year-old Zynga flourished with the popularity of its free-to-play games at social media networking humongous Facebook.