Today in Social

Zynga isn’t the only social gaming company that’s struggling. It’s a tough business. Electronic Arts, that is managing its evolution into digital distribution and extension into social/casual games at least as well as any of the big videogame companies, had to whack some heads at its PopCap unit. And Goko, that was crowing about creating a network of HTML5 games, took itself back into beta after finding it couldn’t scale. For all the hype, social gaming hasn’t really opened up a new market. Casual gaming has worked for 25 percent of the online adult population since the dawn of the consumer web. PopCap runs Bejeweled, remember? Mobile gaming is also pretty well established, though Goko faces the additional hurdle of reaching a critical mass of users before its game cross-promotion will be effective.