Zynga’s FrontierVille To Hype Premiere of Johnny Depp’s New Film

Rango, the Johnny Depp-voiced chameleon whose self-titled movie is set to hit theaters this weekend, will have a cameo role in Zynga’s FrontierVille to help encourage the release.

Starting at the moment, FrontierVille players will be challenged to find Rango, ask their associates for 10 water buckets and outlook the trailer for the film. If they complete that mission, players get a Rango statue to add to their homestead on FrontierVille.

The encouragement is the first time Zynga has worked with Paramount Pictures, but the group has used its games to publicize movie openings before. currently, Zynga’s Mafia Wars plugged Sony Pictures’s The Green Hornet by offering collectibles within the game. Zynga also promoted DreamWorks Animation’s Megamind on FarmVille with Mega-Farm, a themed attraction within the game.

Manny Anekal, Zynga’s global director of brand advertising for Zynga, says that while there are no figures linking activity on those games to bigger box office take, some 19 million people are active FrontierVille users and 9 million interacted with the Megamind promo.

This is the latest promo to offer a prize for watching a trailer on Facebook. Last week, NBC offered a buy-one-get-one-free deal from Chiptotle for watching a preview for America’s Next Great Restaurant, a new reality show.

While such promos are efficient at getting users to click play, it’s unclear if they’re actually watching the video or if they’re more apt to watch the advertised belongings. Chris Thilk, who runs the blog Movie Marketing Madness, says that while it’s hard to tell if the promos actually increase audience, gameplayers at least don’t seem to mind. “The promotions add functionality to game play,” he says. “As long as it’s not just an ad, I think the audience will be more forgiving.”

Step Aside FarmVille, CityVille Now Facebook's Biggest Game

Less than a month after its launch, Zynga's CityVille has become the world's most popular game. According to AppData, CityVille just reached 61.7 million monthly active users, and with that, the game nabs the number one spot from Zynga's other social gaming phenom, FarmVille.

This gives Zynga a total of 261 million monthly active users - clearly nothing to scoff at. However, despite dominating social gaming this year, the challenge for Zynga has been to continue to build on the massive success of Farmville and to show that the game wasn't simply a one-hit wonder. To complicate things, this spring Facebook changed the way game notifications worked - an effort to cut down on spam notifications. But as game developers protested, this move also cut down on social games' potential virality too.

his change hasn't seemed to stop CityVille at all, which launched Dec. 2 to what has clearly been a phenomenal rate of adoption. The game is a SimCity-like, well, city simulation. As with other games of this sort, CityVille is very social - you can build stores and operate franchises in your friends' towns. And as with many social games, this sort of interaction and obligation can be quite "addictive."

Like all of Zynga's games, CityVille is free-to-play, but users can spend real money on virtual goods to enhance gameplay. Industry estimates say that Zynga has brought in between $500 million to $700 million in revenue this year from the sale of virtual goods. 

Time named Mark Zuckerberg "Person of the Year" and ReadWriteWeb named Facebook "Best BigCo of 2010." But the CityVille news seems to warrant a tip-of-the-hat to Zynga, whose games fueled much of the time people spent on the social networking site this year.

Via : readwriteweb.com