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DeNA subsidiary Ngmoco has purchased Facebook sports game developer Lionside for an undisclosed sum. Lionside is best known for NBA Legend, a mid-level Facebook title which peaked with over a million monthly active users, although that figure has recently fallen to under 300,000. "We are very excited to have Lionside join the Ngmoco and DeNA family," Ngmoco said in a statement issued to Gamasutra. "They are working on new products for the Mobage social gaming platform, bringing their passion and experience to our continuously expanding first party development capabilities." Mobage, the enormously popular Japanese mobile social gaming network, launched on the Android Market in English-speaking countries around the world in July.

The social gaming titan's latest game for Facebook, Adventure World, was revealed last week. Overnight, Zynga got in touch to confirm that the game, which takes no little inspiration from the Indiana Jones films, is now live on Facebook. This is the first game from Zynga's Boston studio, and it claims it's its "most feature-rich" work so far, with a world 40 times the size of FarmVille. "We call this genre social adventure," said Nabeel Hyatt, general manager of Zynga Boston, "where players can explore, discover and team with friends on an adventure of a lifetime. We hope our players have as much fun playing the game as we had building it." Find out for yourself by following the source link below.

EA took its time bringing The Sims to Facebook, a curious move given that it seems such a good fit for social gaming. However, it appears to have paid off, with the game amassing more than 30 million active users since its launch last month.

Unity's expansion continues apace: in June it moved its UK operation to larger premises, last month it opened an office in South Korea, and today comes news of a Tokyo office. Focusing on sales, localisation and support to lay the foundations of further future expansion, Unity Technologies Japan will be led by representative director and chairman Shinobu Toyoda, who said: "The Unity community throughout Japan has grown at an expeditious rate over the last few years. With the opening of our Japan subsidiary, we look forward to offering our customers in the region full support and localisation of the development platform."

The publisher has promoted former VP of business and legal affairs Clinton Foy to chief operating officer, and charged him with leading its continued expansion into mobile and social games. President and CEO Mike Fischer told Gamasutra: "One of the key new responsibilites of the COO role will be to shape and drive more aggressive business development initiatives in free-to-play, social, mobile, browser and emerging platforms. Clinton’s valuable experience makes him uniquely qualified to lead our organisation in these important areas." Square Enix will hold a 30-minute presentation on the first day of the Tokyo Game Show which will focus exclusively on its efforts in the social and mobile sectors.

Zynga announced its latest Facebook game, the Indiana Jones-inspired Adventure World, earlier this week, and has gone into more detail on the title in an interview with Gamasutra. Promising greater emphasis on puzzle-solving and storytelling than in previous Zynga games, lead game designer Seth Sivak said: "We love the action-adventure genre, we love games like The Legend Of Zelda, and we want to find a way to make that for everybody." There will also be reduced emphasis on base-building in Adventure World, to encourage players to spend more time exploring the large game world. No firm release date was set, with Zynga only saying it would launch "in the coming weeks."

Unity Technologies has whittled down "an extensive and stellar list of games" and selected finalists in seven categories: Student, Non-Game, Cross-Platform, Graphics, Gameplay, Grand Prix and Community Choice. The awards will take place during the Unite 11 conference in San Francisco at the end of September. For the full list of finalists, follow the source link below.

The one-day event, organised by the Silicon Valley IGDA, takes place in San Francisco on September 27. Speakers include Douglas Crockford from Yahoo, Ben Savage of Sibblingz, Google's Steve Souders and Lilli Thompsen, and David Herman from Mozilla. It's another sign of the growing importance of HTML5, though we're not sure about the event's tagline: "Javascript is your sword, HTML5 is your shield, and the game is on."

Zynga has partnered with Epay to take its virtual currency cards to 18 new markets: the UK, France, Spain, Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium, Portugal, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Greece, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Croatia.

Activision isn’t ruling out expanding into the social gaming arena, but it appears unlikely to do so aggressively through buyouts. Speaking about the high market value of social game makers, Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg told Bloomberg: “Valuations of some of the companies in that space are out of whack, so that’s an issue when it comes to acquisitions.” The executive went on to say that while Activision may not have made any formal announcements on the subject of bringing its games to social networks, “any new place where people are playing games, at scale, is something that we’re interested in.” He added: “Don’t mistake careful, methodical planning for inaction.”

Edge readers are entitled to 15 per cent off the cost of tickets to the London Social Gaming Summit, being held between November 14 and 15. The event is the second annual conference with sessions and speakers exploring the intersection of gaming, immersive worlds and social networking. To get the discount, you need to quote EDGE15 when booking which you can do by following the source link below.

As part of the Ludum Dare competition over the weekend, Minecraft creator Markus 'Notch' Persson made a game in 48 hours, live streaming the whole process. Prelude Of The Chambered is a six level dungeon crawler that sets the player in search of secrets, loot and upgrades as they gradually explore its torch-lit corridors. Much like Minecraft, you can't reload if disaster strikes, but death in Prelude results in a full restart. As the game takes around 20 to 30 minutes to complete, this makes its patrolling enemies a particularly potent menace. You can play the game by clicking on the source link below.

Inside Social Games reports that Facebook last week updated its Platform Policies to forbid developers cross-promoting games on "any competing social platform." A Facebook spokesperson said: "[We] don't believe it's appropriate to use our site to promote a competitive service whether through ads, platform or any other channel we make available to other thirdparties on Facebook. We've had this policy in place for our advertising platform for some time, and the recent update extended this to Canvas applications on Facebook." While the language used in the new terms - "Apps on Facebook may not integrate, link to, promote, or redirect to any app on any other competing social platform" - suggests promotion of mobile games may also be forbidden, it has been established that this is not the case. As such it seems little coincidence that Facebook chose to update its policy in the week games were added to Google's new social network, Google+.