Zynga Unveils CityVille, First International Launch

FarmVille and FrontierVille developer Zynga has announced CityVille, the company's first title to receive an international launch, which will become available with a public beta "in the coming weeks". CityVille has been internationalized for five different languages: English, German, Italian, Spanish and French. Though Zynga has studios all over the world, the developer has so far localized one title, Zynga Texas Poker, a version of its popular Texas Holdem Poker game made available in traditional Chinese. Zynga says this newly announced title features its most sprawling and interactive game board yet, and presents the company's first 3D-rendered buildings and characters. The city-building sim invites players to create a metropolis, balance their citizens' needs, run restaurants and business, and harvest crops. Players can interact with their Facebook friends who are playing CityVille in a variety of ways, such as visiting friends' cities, helping them secure energy/decorations/etc., accelerating their crop growth/shipping times/building construction, sending gifts, trading goods, and even running businesses in their cities. Zynga operates several of the most popular social games on Facebook -- FarmVille has 54.3 million monthly users, more than any other app on the social network. FrontierVille, which launched in June, amassed one of the site's biggest audiences in just a few months and now has 28.3 million monthly users, according to AppData. "CityVille is where Monopoly meets Main Street," says CityVille general manager Sean Kelly. "We are thrilled to bring the world our most social game to date -- building on the best-of-breed gameplay that Zynga fine-tuned with FarmVille and FrontierVille." Kelly continues, "Instead of harvesting crops you're harvesting your neighborhood, instead of clearing your friend's frontier you're working on a friend's franchise. We hope players from around the world have as much fun playing CityVille as we had building it."