Hasbro acquires Zynga license for board games
Wednesday, August 8th, 2012 by Pixel Dan
I don’t talk about board games often. But this story caught my attention, and I felt like sharing my thoughts.
Hasbro has announced a deal to bring many popular online games by Zynga to the home in the form of board games.
If you have a smart phone or are on Facebook, chances are you’ve at least heard of one of the games by Zynga. Their library includes popular games such as FarmVille and Words with Friends.
The idea of bringing a video game to board game form is always a fun idea to me. Sure, I prefer the more retro themed video game board games like Pac-Man or Donkey Kong. But seeing some of the new games coming out for these Zynga games actually have me a bit interested.
The standout has to be the FarmVille Hungry Hungry Herd game. As if you couldn’t tell by the title alone, Hasbro has just re-purposed the classic Hungry Hungry Hippos game for FarmVille, replacing those famous Hippos with livestock. I’m a sucker for old vintage games like this, so even though I’ve never played FarmVille I think this looks awesome.
Words with Friends is a game I have played. Like many folks with a smart phone in their pocket, this game occupied a lot of my time for a while. Eventually, like most of these types of games, I lost interest and now I only pick it up every once in a while. But a board game transition seems only natural. Right? Well, except for the fact that this is basically just Scrabble. I’m sure there are a few differences in rules. But come on…it’s Scrabble.
Still, these look like fun and no doubt will sell pretty well. If you’re interested in checking them out, it looks like these will begin hitting HasbroToyShop.com this October.
Hey Dan, you might remember me for being persistent on the RetrowareTV forums 🙂
Anyway, this looks like a godsend for Zynga, who's been losing market share and money every month to competitors, and has been assaulted with consecutive bad press lately. This is going to help give Zynga's games a sense of legitimacy, and they could use that help in their branding.
Whether these sell well or not, though, Zynga's going to have to come up with something new to entice people to keep playing. Hasbro has no lack of toys and franchises to fall back on.
Well if I will go to the internet to just play a board game, I will just buy the real board and play this with my friends.