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February 5, 2014 03:18 am GMT

YoVille Creator Seeks To Avoid The Games Death By Buying It Back From Zynga

yovilleZynga broke a lot of hearts when it announced it would be shutting down YoVille, a virtual world online game that’s been running since 2008. The game’s players have been building their simulated communities for many years now, but they only have until March to say goodbye. Unless, that is, YoVille’s original creator and his new game studio have their way. Big Viking Games, which is headquartered in Toronto and counts Albert Lai as its other co-founder, is looking to acquire the YoVille property from Zynga to help it avoid an early grave. That’s something the community definitely seems to support. Right after the announcement, a petition popped up from YoVillians threatening to boycott all Zynga titles if the closure went through (the Facebook group currently has over 15,000 members) and there have been some surprisingly emotional responses to the decision posted not only on Facebook, but to YouTube as well. There’s a good reason why Zynga was looking to shut down the property, however: It has only around 500,000 active users per month at this point, which is off tremendously from its roughly 20 million actives during its peak popularity. Zynga said that it made the decision based on a need to redirect time and energy to new games, rather than to maintaining some of its older ones. Still, Big Viking sees a lot of value left in the property. Lai explained to me in an interview that the company is in advanced talks with Zynga to take over the game. “YoVille’s a massive virtual world not unlike Second Life (but not “adult” in any way) that at its peak was one of Zynga’s top-3 money-makers, andfar, far bigger than Second Life ever was in user base,” he said. “Mark Pincus is involved in getting it back to us at Big Viking.” Pincus of course is a Zynga co-founder, and was the company’s CEO from its inception until July 2013, when Microsoft exec Don Mattrick took over the role. Pincus remains at Zynga as Chairman of its Board of Directors, however, and as Chief Product Officer of the gaming company. His support isn’t the only sign that Zynga prefers this outcome: Lai says the company has been “amazingly good” throughout the purchase discussion process. “We’re in dialog with them right now and ironing out technical and legal issues,” he said about the state of negotiations. “We are hoping it

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