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Zynga, maker of popular Facebook games like Farmville and Mafia Wars, has announced today that CityVille will be its first social building game on Google Plus. Zynga Poker launched with the rest of the Google Plus game platform in August, but this is Zynga's first Google game in the mold of their virally successful Facebook titles.

Zynga has over 146 million users of its social games, but they're almost entirely on Facebook. But as we reported in July 2010, Google quietly invested over $100 million in the gaming company, ensuring that major Zynga titles on the Google platform were only a matter of time.

Everybody wants to make their own tablet these days. Heads turned last year when BlackBerry announced it would be making the PlayBook. Then Hewlett-Packard got in on the act with the TouchPad. Samsung has three lines of tablets in the pipe. HTC already has two with more coming. Asus, Acer, LG, Lenovo and even (gasp) Microsoft are working out tablet strategies. Hey, TechCrunch once had a tablet in the works. So, why not video game retailer GameStop?

GameStop announced this morning through industry site GameIndustry.biz (login required) that it is in the process of picking an existing Android tablet to ship as a "GameStop certified gaming platform." While this seems like an odd move, there are a variety of reasons that this might actually be a really smart move by GameStop.

It's common knowledge that gaming is one of the most popular activities on the Web, but we often don't have a good sense of what type of person a modern gamer is. A new research report from Latitude set out to answer the question: who is today's gamer?

As one participant in Latitude's study noted, traditionally gamers have been thought of as the "stereotypical, petulant and portly adult playing a viscerally violent game in his parents' basement." According to the report findings, that stereotype of the anti-social, immature gamer is outdated. Today's gamer is "social, tech-savvy, goal-oriented" and is much more social than they're usually given credit for. For example, 84% of the study participants use social media "at least several times per week."

Ansca Mobile, in partnership with InMobi and PapayaMobile, has today announced LaunchPad, a suite of marketing and analytics services targeted towards mobile application developers using Ansca Mobile's Corona SDK. The services will allow developers to better market their apps, increase distribution, improve monetization and better understand their audience, the companies say.

According to a new report from analytics firm Distimo, the average selling price for iPhone games has declined by 28% over the last year. However, the revenue generated by the most successful freemium games has increased by a factor of 10. The increase is due to the popularity of in-app purchases, which are now used in 35% of the 300 most popular games in the iPhone App Store.

The Humble Bundle is set to launch its latest package deal today, continuing its successful "pay-what-you-want" business model with the release of a new bundle containing 5 indie games.

This bundle includes: Crayon Physics Deluxe, Cogs, VVVVVV, Hammerfight, and And Yet It Moves. As with the previous Humble Bundles, these games are all available cross platform (several of which are making their Mac and Linux debuts with this offer) and are DRM-free.

From games-on-demand company Extent, there comes a new distribution platform called GameTanium, the first unlimited subscription gaming offering on Android. With GameTanium, users can play all the games from participating developers for just $4.99 per month. By year-end, Extent says that there will be over 200 games on its network.

The stereotypical video game player: he is young (under 20) and male; he plays for hours on his console, all from his parents' basement. But that stereotype is becoming increasingly difficult to justify as study after study has shown that gaming population to be comprised of a very different demographic.

Indeed, video gameplay is not restricted to one age group or gender. Rather, game playing is ubiquitous, with 72% of households in America saying that they play some form. Just 18% of gamers are under age 18, while 53% are between the ages of 18 and 49. That means almost a full third - 29% - of gamers are over 50. The gaming population is skewed slightly more male than female: 58% to 42%. But it's important to note that women over age 18 represent a significantly greater proportion of this population (37%) than do boys age 17 or younger (13%).

Looking at these statistics, it's clear that the explosive growth of mobile and casual gaming has challenged what's long been seen as the traditional gaming market. Sales of game software is declining, but social gaming is booming.

So has the industry adjusted to account for gamers that don't fit that old stereotype?

App monetization and distribution service provider Tapjoy has just announced the launch of a $5 million fund to help iOS developers port their existing applications to Android. The news comes on the heels of Apple's policy change, which affected all apps that used Tapjoy's pay-per-install advertisements. Apple's decision, said Tapjoy at the time, "is destroying the user experience and threatening the entire freemium model."

Now, the company has a workaround: move to Android.

This week, game network WildTanget announced it will soon be testing out a subscription game rental service on T-Mobile's Android phones and tablets. Instead purchasing a game to keep, users will be offered the opportunity to rent a game for the day, for as little as 25 cents. If they end up liking the game and decide to buy, they'll be able to apply the rental fee towards the full purchase price of the mobile application.

Will this encourage Android's notoriously penny-pinching users to open up their wallets? Or is a mistake to think that pricing alone is what's keeping Android users from buying apps in large numbers? Let us know what you think in this week's ReadWriteMobile poll.