EMPIRES AND ALLIES NEW IN FACEBOOK
A spokeswoman for Zynga said the game will go live at 11am PT.
If you never understood the appeal of Facebook games like "FarmVille" or "Mafia Wars," social game maker Zynga is launching a new combat game aimed squarely at you."Empires & Allies" is Zynga's first strategy combat game that the company describes as a "CityVille Meets Risk." The combat element departs from Zynga's bread and butter games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars, which are mostly played by women aged 25 to 44, a Zynga executive said recently.
In Empires & Allies, evil enemy forces have invaded a thriving, multi-island world. Your mission is to build army units, recruit or invade friends (prepare for a bombardment of Facebook status updates), and derive clues from allies and villains. Fund your armies by collecting rent on huts and cottages, and choose your battleground: air, land, or sea.
Empires & Allies debuts on Wednesday in 12 languages: Malay, Korean, and Norwegian (for the first time), English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Indonesian, Turkish and traditional Chinese.
Zynga's timing seems rather poignant to us. The San Francisco-based company is rumored to be filing for an IPO this week at the latest, according to a report from All Things D.
It's certainly had a busy year in its effort to become the "Google of online entertainment" as CEO Mark Pincus told the New York Times last year.
Zynga has more than doubled its workforce to 1,500 through at least 12 game studios or talent acquisitions around the world: Beijing's XPD, Austin's Challenge Games, San Francisco's FooBrew, Tokyo's Unoh Games, Boston's Conduit Labs and Floodgate Entertainment, Frankfurt's Dextrose AG, Dallas' Bonfire Studios, McKinney's (Texas) Newtoy Inc., Redwood City's Flock, New York City's Area/Code, and team members from Dallas' MarketZero. The company boasts 250 million active users a month.
