Adding another feather in the long-running, “Where is all the talent going?” cap over at EA, former Playfish executive Xavier Louis will be joining the MXP4 team in the role of Vice President of Product Marketing. With Playfish, he served as Product Marketing Director. With MXP4, Louis is expected to drive adoption of and monetization of the company’s interactive social-music gaming technology.
“We are elated to have an industry expert like Xavier join MXP4,” commented Albin Serviant, CEO of MXP4. “With his extensive social gaming experience, he is an obvious choice to spearhead the continued development of our interactive music games.”
If you’re not already familiar with MXP4’s program, they’re turning music into casual games. The goal is to pull passive music listeners (i.e., all of us) and convert them into active users who are inclined to share (read: distribute) their music preferences, and ultimately make more music purchases. Through this mechanism MXP4 offers value to both artists and marketers, all the while, providing a fun and engaging experience for end users. You might remember the company’s beta launch, featuring PUMP IT!, a Facebook game revolving around hit artist David Guetta’s single “Who’s that Chick.” The title garnered over half a million visits to the application, with users playing the game for more than 15 minutes per track. Of these 500,000 or so users, 50 percent of them ended up sharing this music and competing against social network friends, with some users player more than 500 times in a chance to win a meet-n-greet with Guetta himself.
“I am looking forward to applying my years of experience in social gaming to help forge the future of the nascent ‘social music gaming’ genre,” commented Xavier Louis. “MXP4’s mission is truly unique, and I am excited to join such a visionary team.”
Since the arrival and death of music based games, i.e. Guitar Hero, we’ve yet to see a hard look at games and music, and how they can be capitalized upon in the massive social gaming market. It appears as though MXP4 is staring straight down the barrel of this loaded gun, and taking aim. The tech looks good, and I’d wager with a few more key promotions such as the Guetta deal, MXP4 could be the breakout story of 2011. Let’s see if Louis can work his former Playfish magic with MXP4. If so…hold on to your hats, as there’s a lot of tunes-based play ahead.
While Zynga has no short term plans to go public (at least that we know about), industry analysts Jay Gould, Lou Kerner, and Bill Auslander estimate that if Zynga were to go public tomorrow, shares would trade around the $15.75 per share mark. This estimate is determined based on a multitude of factors, one of which being the price that current Zynga employees could fetch on the secondary market by selling their stock options.
“OpenFeint X is by far our most ambitious and transformative effort,” said Jason Citron, Founder and CEO of Aurora Feint Inc. “We know that there is tremendous interest in creating the next Zynga, CrowdStar, and PlayFish of the iPhone. We also know that developers who aspire to these ambitions want the platform on which they can build these kinds of lucrative businesses. OpenFeint X is exactly that platform.”
The social gaming company of the year award might land with Playfish, as their acquisition by traditional gaming giant logged over $300 million. In second place, at least in the revenues department, Zynga, with their recent $180 million from Russian investor Digital Sky Technologies alone puts them in second place. Not to be outdone, Playdom’s $50 million places them strongly in third place.
If you’ve not been keeping score, and admittedly in this blister paced market, it can be quite a challenge, Zynga is currently the king of social gaming on Facebook. They’re the makers of FarmVille, arguably the one that started the farming craze, which launced in June and counts 72.9 million active monthly users. And while this number alone is enough to make any investor sit up and take notice, Zynga also stables Mafia Wars, FishVille, YoVille, Café World, and Texas HoldEm Poker. Combined, Zynga’s active monthly usage amounts to a massive 232 million. To put that in perspective, there are only three countries on the planet (China, India, and the United States) that are larger.
What makes the statement remarkable, is that Riccitiello sits as the man in charge of the world’s largest video game developer – a firm that’s traditionally focused on pricey, glossy boxed, console focused games. However, Riccitiello took the interview time to point out that projects have been afoot at EA for a while now, almost predicting the coming tide.
Currently the largest independent ad network in the social media field, with more than 213 million monthly unique visitors, the company logs over 15 billion monthly impressions. Since it’s inception in November 2005, 
