The Social Gaming weekly roundup: FarmVille, THQ, PetVille and more

Welcome to this week's instalment of the social games roundup, and what an exciting week it was in terms of what's around the corner.

It seems like everyone and his cat wants a piece of the very lucrative Facebook pie, which means we'll potentially be able to enjoy a lot of new games over the coming months.

These are definitely interesting times, from both a player's and developer's perspective. Facebook opens up the possibility of inexpensively reviving old franchises as Atari displayed last week, and could provide extra marketing and content for big releases on other gaming platforms.

I'm still hedging a bet on The Sims coming to Facebook. It's almost too perfect a match.

With that in mind, let the show begin.

FarmVille

Christmas is officially here in FarmVille, so there are plenty of festive items to send your friends, including reindeer. You can also adopt a reindeer with flashing Christmas lights attached to its antlers. The RSPCA would have a field day at a typical FarmVille farm, hey.

If you have the FarmVille cash to splash then you may be interested in the rather ugly green mess that is the Santa's Grotto item, the highly impractical Gingerbread Home, the gum drop trees, coloured ornaments, candy fencing, Santa and Mrs Santa Gnomes, a gift mountain, and a lot more. No sign of Tiny Tim, though.

A new seed has been added, as well, called Poinsettia. It only has a month, so get planting. It looks like a good Christmas for the 69 million players that apparently now play FarmVille.

To wrap things up, you can plant a holiday tree and place presents you receive from friends underneath it. How festive.

PetVille Zynga is looking to compete with Playfish's Pet Society in its latest game. Don't expect anything exciting - it'll probably look very much like every other Zynga offering, but if looking after a pet and sending people gifts appeals to you then prepare to be excited.

Check out the video below to see it in action.

MyBrute Apparently, due to the sheer popularity of MyBrute it underwent some temporary glitches recently, but its now back up and running. Shame we're still as terrible at it as we were in the beginning.

THQ According to Reuters, the CEO of THQ Brian Farrell has confirmed that three titles are being worked on for Facebook. He also said that the barriers into social gaming are low enough for THQ to not need to buy its way in like EA did with Playfish.

Makes sense. Most of these social games are hardly using the latest Unreal engine. “In our view what they [EA] got was they got a user base, and then we can debate for the next several hours about is that worth $275, $400 million,” Farrell at the Reuters Media Summit.

“Putting some branded games there where you use the intellectual property properly, we can think of some really good ideas of things that could work in that space, where familiarity of the brand does make sense to drive traffic to your particular game," he went on to say.

No word on what games to expect.

Good Gaming Productions

Industry veteran Grantley Day is spearheading a new company dedicated to the creation of MMOs on the iPhone and Facebook, known as Good Game Productions.

Grantley Day has been involved on many big names, like Neverwinter Nights 2, Warhammer Mage Knight, and Hellgate: London, so there's potential for some exciting titles.

"Facebook is changing the way we look at our friends and the people we play games with and I believe the iPhone is the platform of the future".

In Other News

• Zynga allegedly could be valued at a billion if it went public according to a story on Business Week.
• Take-Two will release the Facebook version of Civilisation in 2010.