Daily Wrap: Zynga Buys GoPets; MySpace CEO Gets Game

After a long weekend filled with enough treats to kill Willie Wonka, action games are best suited to all the Skittles, M&Ms and peanut butter cups fueled bloodstreams that are a common remnant of Halloween's yearly celebration. So take a break, sit back, grab another chocolate and read up on what happened in the world of social gaming today.

- Zynga, best known for its gaming creations FarmVille and Cafe World, is adding GoPets to its gaming zoo as the company announced on Monday that it had purchased the South Korean developer. The purchase comes as strangely ironic since free-to-play games were first established in Asia and Zynga's relatively new to the gaming world compared to the four year old GoPets. Good news for Zynga fans though, GoPets is a 3D game, which might be the reason why San Francisco-based Zynga purchased it. Terms regarding the purchase did not reveal if GoPets was purchased with Cafe Cash, Reward Points or real-world dollars. Mafia Wars 3D please! (Virtual Games News)

- MySpace totally dead? While MySpace used to be the hottest place to be, the online social networking service has since gone into its own ice age. Apparently the services former CEO, Chris DeWolfe, is coming back and instead of creating a service for musicians and celebrites to hock their goods, he's creating a company that will buy smaller social game companies in order to take on the big boys like Zynga. (CNET News)

- Michael Arrington, founder of technology site TechCrunch, BBQ-ed Zynga last week about deals that it was offering to players of the game, especially after revealing that a third of its revenue is generated through offers (Netflix, Blockbuster, etc.) that it makes available on its pay for play pages that convert offers to in-game cash. Some of those deals Arrington calls "scams." Apparently Zynga CEO Mark Pincus was listening and today wrote back... and agreed. He even got his company to remove several of the offers that Arrington question. Now that's power.

- Battleship, Connect 4 and Monopoly Classic ready to play on iPhone/iPod Touch. Yes, the gaming deal between toymaker Hasbro and video game maker EA continues to bear fruit. Now the duo are planning to launch three new games via the EA Mobile brand. Sadly, still no Risk. (Joystiq)

- Just how young is too young to allow a child to have their own Facebook account. CNN broached such an issue in a recent piece, "Social networks and kids: How young is too young?" where 38% of 12-14 year olders saying that they have at least one profile on a social network site. Since Facebook and MySpace require a user to be at least 13, that's a shocking number. It isn't all bad since they're usually communicating with their peers with poor language, just as their parents do. But with the growing concern over Internet Addiction, social network games may soon become a big target with parents of younger digital denizens. (CNN)

G'night, time to go back and redesign my Roller Coaster Kingdom.