Timonium game studio designed hit, FrontierVille, for Facebook

In Mafia Wars, you recruit your friends into a virtual world of organized crime. In FarmVille, you and your friends help each other tend virtual animals and plots of land. And in FrontierVille, you endeavor to build a frontier town in the Wild West.

For Baltimore County, where video-gaming expertise has clustered in companies in Timonium and Hunt Valley, Zynga's presence serves to solidify the region's standing as a top destination for video game designers. Zynga East has already outgrown its office and is planning to move soon to a nearby space that's triple the size, at 9,000 square feet.

The computer gaming sector in Maryland is part of the state's $5.5 billion digital media industry, which has grown rapidly in recent decades, according to a recent study commissioned by the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development and the state Film Office.

Driving the growth is Facebook, which has become an online juggernaut, amassing more than 500 million users across the world. Online social games by Zynga have been embraced by Facebook users, millions of whom spend hours each day playing the company's games.

According to a report by Inside Network, the sale of virtual goods is expected be a $1.6 billion industry this year in the United States.

But in the past few years, online games on popular social-networking websites such as Facebook have attracted droves of casual gamers. To some extent, social games have poached players from other types of games.

Online social games typically aren't as complicated or visually stunning as their computer or console counterparts, but they enable people to play for free with friends and not just with strangers online, as is often the case with other games. That'sa key feature, industry experts said.

"It's just a new way to reach people who maybe don't like running around blowing things up or don't like the long-term time commitment" of computer or console games, Olano added.

He had worked at MicroProse, one of the first gaming companies in the Baltimore area in the early 1980s. Later, he co-founded two other local game studios: Firaxis and Big Huge Games.

He sees some big differences between online social games and the games he used to design for traditional computer players. In the newer social gaming world, companies have to use Internet technologies to build and support their games. The development window is shorter, a year or less for online social games, compared with two to five years in PC and console games.

(A small percentage of users pay to enhance their game play — the primary source of revenue for Zynga — while the vast majority play for free, according to the company.)

The challenge for Zynga and others is to design a game that becomes a viral hit with online users. Zynga faces competition from other big social gaming companies, such as Playfish and Playdom, and there is speculation that Google might launch an online gaming network.

Over the years, Zynga has introduced more than 40 online games, and has discontinued about a third of them.

Reynolds said he wants to see the Baltimore area's game development industry get more heavily into online social gaming.

"For some of us, for Brian and myself, it's almost like a return to the good old days, where we did a game in three to six months rather than two years," Meier said. "It's fun to make games for a new platform. It adds new opportunities. It's a really positive development."

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FrontierVille: 34.9 million users (launched June 2010)

Mafia Wars: 22.4 million users (launched early 2009)

Source: Zynga Game Network Inc.

Original Story: http://www.baltimoresun.com/business/bs-bz-zynga-baltimore-gaming-201009...