Playfish Launches Hotel City, Zynga Researching Social City

By Chris Sherman On March 18, 2010 · Leave a Comment

This week sees Playfish launch a new social game, Hotel City. After successfully igniting a fad for city-building games on Facebook in the past few months with Social City, Hotel City seems to have its roots in the already-popular hotel management casual game genre.

In Hotel City, players design their own hotels, decorate the rooms, and hire friends to act as staff. Decorations influence your hotel's star rating. The game will monetize by selling users virtual goods using both a time-based virtual currency and the Playfish Cash cash-based virtual currency.

Zynga has followed in Playfish's footsteps before, with Cafe World releasing within months of Playfish's Restaurant City. Now Zynga appears to be conducting a market research survey about social game design that includes explicit questions about how much players surveyed enjoy Social City and how often they play.

Users who take the full Zynga 30-minute survey earn $75, so this data is clearly of great interest to the company. While Zynga hasn't trademarked any new names recently, it seems likely that the company is either developing or plans to develop some sort of city-building game.