I'm not a lifelong carpenter and I can tell you what I think of Ikea.

It's not a dumbed-down version of a game: it's a different type of game. And I applaud differences.

"Criticism of FarmVille is basically the art argument turned inside out as "core" gamers become Roger Ebert."



Excellent analogy imho.

Agreed. The reason I don't play Facebook games is the same reason I don't own a television. My free time is valuable to me. I spend it as best I can in art created with love and passion, not in formulaic market driven junk flying out of sweatshops and assembly lines.



One day I was watching a Billy Mays commercial, and thought, cripes, what kind of an idiot exposes themselves to this crap! Zynga is no different.

Some rational point in the middle of all this insanity.

I don't bother playing facebook games, nor even play any kind of MMO since MU Online. Just not worth my time, I don't get any fun and have no interest inplaying such games.

And that's has nothing to say they suck or aren't games.



I look at every kind of game as a developer, thinking about how to make my move, the same way Zinga, Blizzard and Valve did theirs...

I don't entirely believe in luck. Playfish and Playdom were doing similar things (arguably with more innovation), but not with as much success.

Betamax was a better video cassette than VHS

Some would argue that Macs are better computers than PCs



I doubt very much that Zynga were lucky. There were very, very clever.



But I agree they didn't make innovative games. They just made them better, more aggressively and better marketed than everyone else.



So I can understand why everyone is pissed off them. But not at the snobbery aimed at Facebook games.

Zynga didn't make most of their games better, they just used the Mirror Strategy and Copy-N-Paste their way to success in a time were they could exploit the market. They currently still ride in the wave of their early exploitations and scamming.



Zynga was very lucky. Lucky that they had way more opportunity to spam and scam their way to success in a time were these types of games was new. The only thing Zynga did over their larger size competition was to be lower, scummier and more cunning, something not to be admired by any decent person.

Actually what marks the main difference between Zynga and Playdom, Playfish etc is not cloning (they all do it). It was at one point an overuse of so-called viral channels.



But it's not that either now as all those channels have been shut down. It's simply advertising strategy. Zynga advertises on Facebook to an enormous degree. That advertising drives clicks, which drive installs, and in turn capture many more users. The other players in the market do not, or cannot advertise nearly as much as Zynga so they do not see the same effects. It's a simple numbers game.



Zynga don't make better games than any of the other developers on Facebook. That is an assumption that a lot of people in the business community make ("They must be doing SOMETHING right") along the lines of them having a secret sauce that nobody else has. A cursory examination of their games exposes this fiction pretty quickly however.



What they are very smart at is marketing, advertising and a willingness to play ball hard. Facebook is an environment which thrives on attention economy, and what Zynga seems to get is that buying more attention, or virally acquiring it, is what it's all about. This is why they have been going around finding big investment numbers from DST and Google and so on: It fuels the marketing operation which, in turn, fuels the monetisation engine.

Tadhg,



I don't think I agree with you. I believe that Zynga does have a secret sauce. But it's about conversion and ARPU.

If, say, the lifetime value of Zynga user is $10.00, and the lifetime value of a user of the nearest competitor is $9.00, then Zynga can (and should) spend $9.50 on acquiring users - each user is marginally profitable for Zynga, but would be marginally loss-making for its competitors.



My best guess (and it is a guess) is that Zynga's secret is not in its attention; it's in its conversion rates.

Zynga plays in the same pen as every other Facebook developer. That means that they are bound by the same sort of rules, and also the same problems of attracting attention. A lot of the replacement mechanisms like Counters and the Games dashboard, for example, are pretty ineffective in gaining traffic. There are rules over publishing. Notifications are long gone. And so on.



And you yourself have noted that they are in fact copying everyone's games. As indeed are everyone else to them. Don't you think it reasonable that if they had stumbled onto some magic mechanic or levelling structure (which are what drive retention) that every other developer would have copied the hell out of it a long time ago and - as a result - we'd have several equivalently-sized developers in Facebook rather than one dominator and several stunties?



Zynga aren't Wolfram Alpha and they don't have Google-calibre PHDs on staff figuring this stuff out with massive algorithms. They're a quickly-grown company on a streak that know how to market. And they make that streak last by simply finding out as many ways as possible (legit or otherwise) to grab user attention. Facebook's environment obliges them to do this via advertising now, and they do it in spades. It's a basic sales operation with scale and performance metrics.



In short, a "secret sauce" is no kind of answer. You might as well be assigning their success to divination or voodoo. I see this thinking a lot and what it is is irrational exuberance: If company X is doing extremely well over everyone else then there must be a reason. It can't be simple or everyone else would have done it. Therefore it must be magic.



The exact same thing applies to every starry-eyed web company you or I can think of, be it Google, Twitter or Facebook. They don't have magic sauce on their side, what they have is great marketing.



Are you familiar with the story of swapping Yahoo and Google results to look like each other, to assess their impact? It's very revealing. Basically, someone ran a test that presented Google results in a Yahoo frame and Yahoo results in a Google frame and asked users which they liked best. They responded that they liked the "Google" results best, indicating that Google's technology and algorithm (their secret sauce) play very little part in how users actually react to their product. What they actually like is the clean page.



Zynga succeeds by advertising to an enormous degree to overcome the attention problem created by the sparse and Notification-less Facebook home page. That's their only sauce: They spend more.



Everything else they do is quickly co-opted by other developers, and they do likewise with their competitors, so the games are entirely equivalent. In a world where games between developers are literally interchangeable, the business strategy applied by each is the only logical analysis that makes any sense without invoking voodoo.

I'd love to see Facebook games (free-to-play, virtual goods led, light touch, regular check in) spread to consoles.



And I think they will.

And when is it 'playing'?

I understand that, damir. I even made a footnote about it to avoid this criticism. At its height, Farmville had 84 million MAUs. Therefore at the very least, Zynga had 84 million MAUs. Sure, it's flawed, but there is no doubt that more people have played Farmville than pretty well any game since Solitaire.

I think that the point of this article was to say "since a lot of people are playing these games, there is a good chance that they are doing something right about retaining costumers. Maybe we should look into that".

I completely agree that it would be a good idea to spend some time understanding the social mechanics.

I disagree, Daniel. The point of this article is that "elitist" attitude to Zynga sucks. The point is not "we should derive best practices from Zynga's customer acquisition and retention strategies".



The reason why the author is generating such a high amount of comments is because he is basically calling out gamers on their sneering attitude to mass-market so-called social games.



If the point was: "Zynga knows a thing or two about marketing", nobody would give a crap about the article.



Which is why the article is clever in the first place: it stimulates comments. I, for one, happen to feel that I am on the other side of the argument, because I want to encourage game developers to make amazing game experiences, not to apply known recipes so that marketing geniuses can claim they have bravely led a revolution in gaming.



The revolution is not in gaming. The revolution is in business.

But I don't believe that it is all marketing: That only gets the player to land on the page. You still need strong social mechanics to keep players coming back. And I too see it as elitist if you don't acknowledge the value of that type of design.



Also, I think it is increasingly difficult to separate mainstream gaming with business practices. You might not enjoy the development, but then there are indie-developers that cater to your taste. I sometimes prefer art cinema, but that does mean that I criticize Michael Bay for making 'splosion-movies: Different markets, different games.

[sorry, I double-posted and now I can't delete the second reply]

Not true, on two levels.

First (and pedantically), half of WoW's users are in China and pay much less.

Secondly, a number of companies (many of which are not on Facebook, I admit) have made it clear that they make their revenues from a small number of high spenders. It's not about getting 5% to spend $5. It's about getting 0.5% to spend $50 or more (sometimes much more).

See http://www.gamesbrief.com/2010/09/the-future-of-media-in-45-minut
es/ and http://www.slideshare.net/socialgold/virtual-goods-forumukvikasv1
61710

Sure, sure, it's all about finding so-called "whales". A variety of f2p MMOs have the same thinking. It's nowhere near 0.5% of MAU spending that $50 amount however. That's one in every 200 users spending $50 a month on virtual tractors and so forth? No chance. Reasonable estimates suggest that actual numbers of whales is closer to 1 in a 1,000.



The other side of the "whale" business is a bit murkier though which is that a "whale" may well be another word for a compulsive addict. There's a story of how Zynga refused a refund to a woman whose daughter had borrowed/stolen her credit card and charged $1,000 worth of Farmville purchases, for instance.



In otherwords, the ethics of what amounts to feeding compulsive behaviour, as with all forms of entertainment, is something that f2p gaming is beginning to unveil and it's not easily answered. Poker sites are dealing with this exact issue also, because ultimately some people are not capable of making clear choices when it comes to gaming and money.



So the question is whether hunting "whales" is really the right thing to be doing, and it is another reason for the elitism that you're talking about. In the end of the day, the high-brow games business doesn't chase after its customers looking for whales because it would receive a legal drubbing if it did, but the web gaming industry has so far managed to do so unnoticed.



You might find this opinion piece interesting in that regard:

http://gawker.com/5604613/how-an-army-of-junkies-and-kids-enriche
s-tech-titans



(On WOW btw, I took broad account of that. The US subs price of WoW is $15 per month, not $10)

The ethical issue is a very valid one.



But here's the questions. Nine Inch Nails released their last album with two versions on the same day. One was a collector's edition for $300, only 2,500 made, another was free. That is offering something of value to true fans. No one complains.

I believe that F2P games can do exactly the same: allow those people who want to freeload to freeload (and I am a big proponent of supporting and encouraging freeloaders) and allow those who have a stronger attachment to the game to spend more.

You can always quote addict stories (and I can just as easily quote ones about the core games industry). But personally, I am all in favour of ending one-price-fits-all pricing to enable dynamic pricing driven by personal preferences.

You can also add to this the price of concert tickets and exclusive gigs and so on, I know.



Is gaming different? Actually, in some ways it is. Gambling is a recognised addiction and costs some people many thousands of dollars (and their lives, marriages, health, etc) because that dopamine kick that you get from winning or nearly-winning (this is the most compulsive release apparently) is in all ways identical to a drug.



The differences between that and the NiN collector set are:



1. Connection -> The customer is buying into the social network of NiN fans as a part of the experience. At whatever level they're transacting it seems like they are getting more over the long term because of the community and the connection to the artist than the actual money allows for. You see the same effect with game forums (I know you dismissed them in your talk, but I think you're missing out on something here) for companies like Introversion, where their users just want to be close to these cool guys whose work enlightens their lives.



2. Property -> The customer has something treasured. At the end of the day, they have a thing that they will use (the CD) and treasure (the collectables) in some cases for many years or even hand down to their kids. Tangibility in that instance is significant, and it is the same behaviour as those who track down copies of Radiant Silvergun. Contrast that with social network games, where what you're buying are basically chips that let you play. They have a lack of property around them, are mostly expendable, and are constructed to get you to buy more chips eventually.



3. Frequency -> Trent Reznor may well put out a collector's set but he does so irregularly. He's not looking to find fans who want to buy a collector's set every month, nor building his business on finding that 1 in a 1000 fans who is so compulsive that they do that.



The argument I'm making, in short is that not all transactions are the same, and the value that they create is not the same either. The more I swim in the social game waters, the more I realise that many of these companies are really just casinos (in your talk, you mentioned whales and high rollers) and seems focused on mostly extracting value, whereas the business of the "elitist" games industry has often been about creating value.



Each is addictive, but in the extractors case their business model depends on essentially stringing addicts along for as long as possible. It is inherently seedy, like a lapdancing club trying to string customers along and get them to visit their "VIP rooms" to keep spending money.



Trent Reznor may well be an addictive presence also, but at least he's using that attraction for good. That is ultimately why many a "real" games fan dislikes Zynga etc so much.

^ this .... very hard! As I said before. It's a scam on people who don't know better. They take money and give no value back.



WoW for example gives back 24/7 ingame support in over 10 linguages, servers all over the world (low ping for everyone) and a lot of "free" new content every 3 months or so.



WoW works with addiction too, was hooked over 3 years. But at least, people get some hardware and manpower in return for their 15$. If my account gets hacked, I can be sure they can restore it, even years after it happend. Just insane backup times.



Anyway... Farmville = Scam ... because they take money for much less "software/support" then other companies give. They live of stupid people.

@ nicholas



well this argument I can somewhat agree with , I definitely don't understand why all games retail at $60 especially when I feel like some games doom themselves at that price. I would have been more than happy to pay $70 for red dead redemption at release,I would have probably picked up kane and lynch 2 at release for $50. my own perceived vlaue of those two games differs quite a bit. with that said that kind of pricing could also be disastrous. gamers already perceive certain developers and publishers as "greedy ". How much more will they when they see a new game in their favorite series costing $60 and a newer game from a lesser known developer fo $30? even if the quality is drastically different .



Social games work differently in that respect though, nearly all social games are free, if someone doesn't play a social game it will most likely be just because it doesn't appeal to them, I have numerous social games on my myspace account but i never stick with them for over a week except for the case of mafia wars which I was addicted to for 3 months. the perceived value of those games differed heavily and the item of comparison was time, not money like console games. when mafia wars asked for a $1 fee to level up faster I scoffed at the idea, even after 3 months of play.



I just feel like the perceived value between games for social games is not the same as i is for console games.

+1, Frank. +1

I don't know if i agree with you frank, I certainly don't think social gaming is a stepping stone to creating a console/ pc gaming audience . for example my girlfriend is addicted to " sorority life" and my sister is in love with " cafe world" yet neither of them play console games. the motivations are veyr different and I feel like part of what makes social games such an addicting phenomena is that they are linked to a social website such as facebook. without that social factor I doubt many people would play the likes of farmville, not because it's not necessarily a good game but games like that thrive off encouraging players to indoctrinate their friends and colleagues. the rise and fall of social games will be linked to the rise and fall o the social network. Much like many people who have never used a computer except for the day to day work activity have flocked to facebook by the droves the same thing is happening with social gaming.



now I won't argue against it being a good thing because we're all gamers. I would argue if we can put down social games than technically chess player should be able to put down videogames as a whole. but they are very different structural-wise, developement-wise, and especially with the inclusion of social aspects. It will be interesting to see if and how this new type of gaming evolves.

I agree with that, last time I've read it had 50 posts, I am having a hard time figuring where the other 30 went.

Which side of the debate are you not hiring? :)

Ignorance

Good you cleared that up then :)

Well, I was able to turn $20 to $120 playing slots in Vegas a few weeks ago.



I would like to give a shout to the 25 cent Wheel of Fortune machine in "The Orleans" casino/hotel. You gave me some value for my gameplay experience.

lol excellent point about slots and social games Adam, I can just imagine the rave reviews for the "deal or no deal " slot machines .

Actually, those Deal or No Deal slot machines are awesome when they hit. The most fun "side game" in a slot machine I've ever played!

yeah...that was a bad example because deal or no deal is just awesome...my family actually bought the game-dvd thing because we love the show it so much .... bad example.

Unfortunately, I don't agree that the majority of game-players want "better". Nor, for that mater, that enough players will pay you if you strive for game-making excellence.



Sorry, I know it sucks, but I think it's the truth.

Don't drink the Kool-aid Nick, of course there is a huge market for gaming excellence. Case in point: Blizzard, Bungie, Valve, Infinity Ward (past), Naughty Dog, Capcom, Nintendo....the list goes on and on!



It's funny because as much as Zynga doesn't innovate in games, they do innovate very much with their business model. It won't be long before other devs come along to copy that model while also adding quality games to the mix and we will see what the facebook market is really capable of.

And no, not every new gamer that you attract means that the industry as a whole benefits from it. That's just how corporatist visions idealize the world of gaming.