The initial beta will be limited to the Philippines and this looks to be the strategy for all of Zynga’s games as they prefer to test in the Philippines. A similar thing happened with FarmVille 2; they also tested it exclusively there, but they named it Big Harvest. It was released in September with name FarmVille 2. Maybe they just wanted to make their beta hidden with fake name, but looks like they won’t be hiding anything in new the CityVille tests. This announcement comes after a few rough days for Zynga. They faced a revenue outlook cut for 2012 and a big drop in share price.

Zynga plans to recover with more games similar to the genre that already proved to be profitable for them. Zynga CEO mark Pincus said that they will be “further investing in other genres like casino where we already lead with Zynga Poker and blue PVP, a category we pioneered with Mafia Wars.” CityVille is their #1 game, which it took over from FarmVille back in 2010. It was one of the top Facebook games with 2.2 million daily and 16.8 million monthly active users.

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