King.com击溃Zynga

    Zynga在Facebook平台的长期统治可能快要结束了，这家一度炙手可热的社交游戏开发商正因竞争对手的迅速崛起而黯然失色，该竞争对手有一个应景的名字——King.com。

    市场研究公司AppDate的数据显示，King.com的热门游戏《糖果粉碎传奇》（Candy Crush Saga）已经取代Zynga的《农场小镇2》（Farmville 2）成为Facebook平台最受欢迎的游戏。前者的日活跃玩家为970万，后者的数字是880万。总部设在欧洲的King.com目前拥有365名员工，该公司在伦敦、旧金山和欧洲各地都设有办事处。

    尽管《糖果粉碎传奇》可能在日活跃玩家这项指标上取得领先，但《农场小镇2》仍然位居月活跃玩家数量的首位，两款游戏的这项数据分别为2,580万和4,180万。不过，考虑到King.com直到2011年4月才在Facebook平台推出第一款游戏——尽管King.com创立于2003年——该公司的增长非常引人注目。《糖果粉碎传奇》出现的时间则更晚，直到去年4月才在Facebook上线。

    “在不到18个月时间里，King.com已经凭借7,000万月活跃玩家成为Facebook平台的第二大游戏开发商，”Facebook欧洲市场游戏合作负责人朱利安•科多尼尔在一份新闻稿中称。“全球只有少数几家科技公司能够如此迅速地获得这么多的用户。”

    King.com的联合创始人兼首席执行官里卡尔多•扎科尼表示，大部分增长来自于游戏日益强大的跨平台能力以及同步功能，即玩家可以在一款设备上（比如平板电脑）开始游戏，然后在另一款设备上（比如智能手机或传统的台式电脑）结束游戏。“我们将广受欢迎的游戏移植到移动平台，并让游戏实现跨平台的无缝对接和同步，这种转变立刻激发了休闲游戏玩家的兴趣，”扎科尼在一份声明中称。“我们在社交游戏和移动游戏两个领域都取得巨大的增长。”

    跟《农场小镇》相比，《糖果粉碎传奇》的游戏理念简单至极，它被归入“瓷块匹配”游戏的大类：用户只要将3块颜色相同、位置相邻的糖果排成一线，就能使之消失并得分。King.com开发的大多数游戏都被归入这一类，人们都说这类休闲游戏容易上手、不占用大量时间，但要成为高手并不容易。

    尽管传统游戏玩家长久以来一直看不上瓷块匹配游戏——因为太简单，而且谈不上益智——但这类游戏随着智能手机和平板电脑的崛起已经卷土重来。“英国有80%的人会经常在手机上玩游戏，他们寻求的是便捷，”King.com的首席营销官亚历克斯•戴尔说。“他们想要的是在工作休息时间、回家的列车上或是在沙发上休息时能够玩的游戏。”

    Zynga's long reign over Facebook may be coming to an end. The once-hot social game maker risks being eclipsed by the dramatic rise of a competitor, the aptly named King.com.

    Figures from AppData show that King.com's hit game Candy Crush Sagahas overtaken Zynga's (ZNGA)Farmville 2 to become the top game on Facebook (FB), with 9.7 million daily players compared to Farmville's 8.8 million. The Europe-based King.com currently has 365 employees with offices in London, San Francisco and across Europe.

    While Candy Crush Saga might lead the daily user figures, Farmville 2 is still ahead when it comes to monthly active users, with 41.8 million to Candy Crush Saga's 25.8 million. Still, the growth has been remarkable considering King.com only launched its first game on Facebook in April 2011, even though the company has been around since 2003. Candy Crush Saga is even more recent, launching on Facebook in April last year.

    "In less than 18 months King.com has become the second largest game developer on the Facebook platform with 70 million monthly active users," said Julien Codorniou, head of European gaming partnerships at Facebook in a press release. "Only a few technology companies in the world have reached so many people so quickly."

    King.com CEO and co-founder Riccardo Zacconi says much of the growth came from the games' growing availability across multiple platforms and the synchronization feature, where a game may be started on one device such as a tablet and finished on another, like a smartphone or traditional desktop. "The transition to moving our popular games to mobile and making the playability both seamless and synchronized across multiple platforms has generated immediate interest from casual games players," said Zacconi in a statement. "We've seen tremendous growth across both social and mobile games charts."

    Compared to Farmville, Candy Crush Saga is based on an extremely simple concept. It falls under the "tile-matching" game category: users win points for lining up three candies of the same color next to each other so that they disappear. Most of King.com's games fall into this category of casual games, described as titles that are easy to learn, don't take a lot of time to complete but can be difficult to master.

    While traditional gamers have long looked down on tile-matching games for being too simple and not intellectually stimulating, the category is making a comeback along with the rise of smartphones and tablets. "Eighty percent of people in the U.K. play games on their phone regularly, what they're looking for is convenience," says Alex Dale, chief marketing officer at King.com. "They want something they can play in between breaks at work, coming home on the train or while relaxing on a sofa."