Mr.Farmville

Zynga to Offer New Payment Options in India — Social developer Zynga is looking to employ new payment options for its social games in India during the first half of 2011, according to mydigitalfc.com. Possible options include game cards, internet banking, and premium SMS. Zynga is quiet on further details.

Wild Needle Raising $3 Million in Funding — A new startup by the name of Wild Needle is set to enter the social mobile gaming space in the near future. The company is raising $3 million in funding, according to TechCrunch, but a separate SEC filing says that $2.5 million has already been secured.

A CityVille Breakdown — With Zynga’s CityVille having passed FarmVille as the top game on Facebook, Tadhg Kelly on What Games Are has created a lengthy, but interesting breakdown of just how this success came to be, discussing features like visibility, retention, and monetization.

Virtual Goods in 2010 — A guest post on TechCrunch from Rixty CEO Ted Sorom highlights some virtual goods highlights from the past year, including our own projection of $2.1 billion for the US market in 2011 and many more stats.

Virtual Goods Denied After Divorce — In an interesting divorce piece from the China Daily (originally reported in the Beijing Morning Post), a Chinese judge has denied a woman’s claim to half of all the virtual assets acquired during her marriage. The couple had apparently merged their online game accounts under the husband’s name, and when the pair split — each blaming the other for being too lazy to keep the house clean — the wife was denied the claim. The court stated that the law only applied to virtual items that had been given value with real currency.

Source: Inside Social Games