Recent News of Interest to Social Gaming geeks

Playfish gets a million dollar bridge loan from Accel Partners. I'm assuming they want to expand faster than they had initially planned. That brings their total funding to 4 million.

Hi5 buys app developer, PixVerse. First I've heard of a socnet buying an app developer. It's interesting, because I assume Hi5 is going to integrate features from PixVerse apps directly into their site. It's a reverse on the old saw I keep hearing about how developing for Facebook is risky because if the feature is any good, Facebook will just copy it. In this case, developing good features led to an acquisition. Maybe, Facebook will acquire Slide. Kidding.

In similar news, a Chinese game development company, Giant, buys a stake in China's biggest social network, 51.com. The article compares it to EA buying a stake in Facebook. With the enormous success of games on Facebook, and the success of QQ Games on the Tencent QQ IM platform, it's a brilliant move for a games company to get access to a social networking platform.
Guaranteed CPMs for Facebook devs! Potentially, $0.40 CPM. Perhaps Packrat should finally start running banners on those hundreds of millions of pageviews they get every month.

Neopets founders creating a casual MMO. The creative muscle behind Neopets in its early years, Adam Powell and Donna Williams, started a company called Meteor Games to build a non-Flash based MMO. Here's the description:

Meteor will likely have a free version to entice gamers and charge $5 to $10 a month for access to the full world. The company will likely also create a virtual goods model where it can charge for certain items. Williams said the world will combine an MMO, casual game play, and social networking.

Yes, not Flash-based. I hope they don't opt for a downloadable client, for their sakes.