Ensemble Studios was an American video game developer. It was founded by Tony Goodman in 1994 and incorporated the following year. It borrowed the name of Ensemble Corporation, a consulting firm founded by Goodman in 1990. It was acquired by Microsoft in 2001 and operated as an internal studio until 2009, when its development capabilities were officially disbanded. Ensemble developed many real-time strategy games, including the Age of Empires game series, Age of Mythology, and Halo Wars. In addition to game development, Ensemble Studios also made the Genie Game Engine used in Age of Empires, Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings, and Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds. The studio sold 20 million games and was worth an estimated $500 million.
Strawdog Studios Ltd. is a video game developer based in Derby, United Kingdom. The studio was established in 2003 and develops games and applications for mobile phone, iOS, Android, PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Wii, PlayStation Portable, and Nintendo DS.
The Meet Group, Inc. owns several mobile social networking services including MeetMe, hi5, LOVOO, Growlr, Skout, and Tagged.
King.com Limited, trading as King and also known as King Digital Entertainment, is a Maltese video game developer and publisher based in St. Julian's, Malta that specialises in social games. King gained fame after releasing the cross-platform title Candy Crush Saga in 2012, considered one of the most financially successful games utilising the freemium model. King was acquired by Activision Blizzard in February 2016 for US$5.9 billion, and operates as its own entity within that company. King is led by Riccardo Zacconi, who has served in the role of chief executive officer since co-founding the company in 2003. Gerhard Florin took over Melvyn Morris's role as chairman in November 2014. As of 2017, King employs 2,000 people.
Zynga Inc. is an American developer running social video game services. It was founded in April 2007, with headquarters in San Francisco. The company primarily focuses on mobile and social networking platforms. Zynga states its mission as "connecting the world through games".
FarmVille is a series of agriculture-simulation social network game developed and published by Zynga in 2009. It is similar to Happy Farm, and Farm Town. Its gameplay involves various aspects of farmland management, such as plowing land, planting, growing, and harvesting crops, harvesting trees and raising livestock. The sequels FarmVille 2 and FarmVille 3 were released in September 2012 and November 2021.
Playdom was an online social network game developer popular on Facebook, Google+ and Myspace. The company was founded in the San Francisco Bay Area by University of California, Berkeley graduates Ling Xiao and Chris Wang and Swarthmore College graduate Dan Yue. In 2009, the market for games played on social networking sites was valued at $300 million, consisting mostly of online sales of virtual goods.
Rock Band is a music video game released for the iOS. It was co-developed by EA Montreal and Harmonix, and was published by Electronic Arts and MTV Games. The game was released as a part of the Rock Band series for download through the App Store in several regions on October 19, 2009. On May 2, 2012, RockBandAide announced that EA intended to discontinue Rock Band with servers being disconnected and support being dropped on May 31, 2012. However, EA stated that the message was "sent in error" and the app would remain available to those who purchased the app. It was later announced that due to an expiring contract with Harmonix the game would be removed from the App Store. This occurred on July 31, 2012, and the game is now currently unavailable; though users who have previously downloaded the game can continue to play it.
Game Center is a service by Apple that allows users to play and challenge friends when playing online multiplayer social gaming network games. Games can now share multiplayer functionality between the Mac and iOS versions of the app.
iAd is a discontinued mobile advertising platform developed by Apple Inc. for its iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad line of mobile devices allowing third-party developers to directly embed advertisements into their applications. iAd is part of Apple's iOS 4. Announced on April 8, 2010, and originally slated for release on June 21, 2010, the actual date was changed to July 1, 2010. iAd was announced at Apple's June 7, 2010 keynote, with an iPad version appearing in the fall. Hosted and sold by Apple, the iAd platform was expected to compete with Google's AdMob mobile advertising service.
iOS 4 is the fourth major release of the iOS mobile operating system developed by Apple Inc., being the successor to iPhone OS 3. It was announced at the Apple Special Event on April 8, 2010, and was released on June 21, 2010. iOS 4 is the first iOS version issued under the "iOS" rebranding, dropping the "iPhone OS" naming convention of previous versions. It was succeeded by iOS 5 on October 12, 2011.
Words with Friends is a multiplayer word game developed by Newtoy. Players take turns building words crossword-puzzle style in a manner similar to the classic board game Scrabble. The rules of the two games are similar, but Words with Friends is not associated with the Scrabble brand. Up to 40 games can be played simultaneously using push notifications to alert players when it is their turn. Players may look up friends either by username or through Facebook, or be randomly assigned an opponent through "Smart Match". Players can also find potential opponents using Community Match.
Chess with Friends is a multiplayer asynchronous chess game developed by Zynga with Friends, which also developed Words with Friends and Hanging with Friends. It was one of the first iPhone games to take an asynchronous approach to multiplayer. Released in November 2008 and published by Zynga, the game is available on iOS and, since 2014, Android.
CityVille Hometown is a defunct social city-building simulation game. Based on CityVille and developed by Zynga, the mobile game was released in June 2011 and is available on iOS.
Word Streak is a word game developed by Zynga with Friends for iOS and Android and released in January 2012. Gameplay is similar to that of Boggle—players try to find as many words as possible in a jumbled 4x4 grid of letters by connecting adjacent letters to form words within a two-minute time frame - though with extra features and a different scoring system. Words may be formed vertically, horizontally, and diagonally. Scramble with Friends is one of the top ranking games in the iOS application store, available as both a free ad-supported version and an ad-less paid version. Scramble with Friends replaced Scramble Challenge at the end of 2011, but did not retain the solitaire option of the latter.
Candy Crush Saga is a free-to-play match-three puzzle video game released by King on April 12, 2012, originally for Facebook; other versions for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Windows 10 followed. It is a variation of their browser game Candy Crush.
Crash Lab is an independent British video game developer. The company was founded in November 2011 by Steve Ellis, Martin Wakeley and Lee Musgrave
Horn is an iOS and Android game by American developer Phosphor Games Studio and published by Zynga on August 16, 2012.
SpellTower is a puzzle video game by Zach Gage in which the player creates words from a jumble of letter tiles to clear the screen before it refills. The game has several game modes and a multiplayer battle mode. The impetus for the game—the concept of combining elements from Tetris and Boggle in what was a prototype of the puzzle video game Puzzlejuice—inspired Gage to create SpellTower. The game released for iOS in November 2011 to generally favorable reviews. Versions for OS X and Android followed over the next two years. In 2017 SpellTower Minutes was released. This browser-based Flash game created special "blitz" like modes not found in the mobile releases. A new iOS version released in 2017 swapped out the unnamed dictionary and began using Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. French and Dutch language specific versions were also released. A 2020 release, SpellTower+, added new game modes, cleaner visuals, and a jazz soundtrack.
Peak Games is a mobile gaming company based in Istanbul, Turkey. The privately-held company was acquired by Zynga in June 2020 for $1.8 billion. The company launched the games Toy Blast in 2015 and Toon Blast in 2017, both collectively have more than 12 million average mobile daily active users as of June 2020.
