Now, Zynga fans across the Pacific can beat the living crap out of each other over Facebook. Zynga Japan has successfully translated the social game giant's Empires & Allies into Japanese, its 13th available language. However, according to Serkan Toto, the Facebook games isn't so hot in Japan. Japanese Facebook users amount to just 6 million--some of Facebook's biggest games double that number in daily players.Based on what we can gather from the announcement (thank heaven for Google Translate), nothing has been changed in E&A for Japanese audiences. The same was not the case for Japanese Zynga releases like FarmVille, which had its name changed to FarmVillage upon release. Many chalk up Zynga's wild success to capitalizing on its existing player base, but we're launching in several languages helps quite a bit, too.
However, Serkan Toto reports that Zynga Japan isn't doing so well. On Mixi, a Japanese mobile social network that's far more popular than Facebook, the Zynga satellite studio closed two of the global company's largest properties: FarmVillage and Treasure Isle. It's unfortunate events like this that are proof that not even social games are universal in appeal. We're not sure there are too many mega popular strategy games in Japan, so whether E&A will float there is up in the air.
Why do you think some of Zynga's most popular games have failed in Japan? Will the social game giant ever find similar success there? Sound off in the comments. Add Comment.