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Zynga: FarmVille Attracts 11 Million Players Daily
by Kris Graft [PC, Console/PC]
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August 27, 2009
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Social game developer Zynga said this week that its Facebook-based virtual farming game FarmVille attracts over 11 million daily active users, making it today's "largest and fastest growing social game."
The game is relatively new, having launched on June 19. Players create and manage virtual farms, with connectivity to friends through the Facebook social network. They can also purchase virtual items such as plants, animals, and buildings. Zynga said the game has attracted over 1 million new daily active users per week on average.
One way that Zynga has been able to expand the reach of FarmVille is through viral methods. When a cow wanders onto your virtual farm, for instance, you aren’t allowed to keep it yourself, but can send it to a friend to get them started on FarmVille.
Zynga CEO Mark Pincus dubbed FarmVille a "cultural phenomenon." He claimed the game is "the biggest online game in North America and quickly becoming the biggest online game in the world."
Zynga is also the company behind the social game Mafia Wars. In July, the company said that game is attracting 4 million daily users. Zynga said in August that overall, it attracts 20 million daily active users and 68 million monthly active users across all of its games.
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They're probably one of the smartest companies I've seen in regards to using cheap, easy, and fun games to overwhelm a market saturated by graphic intensive monthly subscription games. The fact that's it's browser-based allows for more users to be able to play it. And it's easy to learn interface opens the door even more.
While I am ethically opposed to such addictive games, I can not help but applaud Zynga in mastering a market and making alot of enjoyable games for all ages.
It also is much less invasive than a lot of the social games. Sure, there is a need to make your games spread so having invitation requirements to level up your character makes good business sense, but the whole animal adoption makes it less like spam... you just put it on your wall, and whoever is interested in it clicks it. No need to spam all your friends with notifications, just the ones who want to play will find it. Plus, since only the person who clicks it first and since it only happens from time to time, it actually is something rare to get one of the pets, something people actually want.
The only advantage to having friends playing FV is that you can get a bigger farm, and that caps out at about 20 friends playing it. You can go to their farms and see what they are doing, send them gifts, and post messages to each other, but someone with 50 farmville friends isn't going to have any significant advantage over someone with 5. Just more space... and since the only real objective of FV is to build a cool farm that is aesthetically appealing, it is perfectly possible to have a more attractive farm in a smaller space. In games like Mafia Wars... nobody really has 501 friends playing mafia wars. And since having more people in your mafia gives a significant combat bonus in a competitive game, casual players who dont want to friend random people just to help their mafia score really get shut out.
The ribbons are a nice touch, too. Gotta get those achievements, man, gotta get em.
This copycat kind of thing is fairly common on facebook, but I won't give Zynga points for originality on this one.
A small percentage of players use the option to buy ingame-currency. With this they can buy ingame-stuff. Which either takes long to get when playing free -or- isnt available at all to free players. (It is advisable though to have most items available free, too.)
The percentage of players paying is not that high, but sums up nicely. I would guess that FV perhaps has a ratio of around 1-2% - "standalone" browsergames (outside of FB, etc...) are said to be around 5-10%. For client based (i.e. download before play) it is said to be even higher.
In FV you can i.e. buy 240 FarmCash for 40US$. A country-flag costs 16 FC, a fancy scarecrow costs you 15 FC. 1 fuel refill for you tractor is 3 FC.
There are always a few people who spend way more per month than a subscription for i.e. WOW would cost them. There are anecdotes going around of people spending several hundred dollars per month on these games - but thos are only very few. If you estimate that 1% of the active users are paying (given that thhe published numbers of zynga are not pimped) and you suppose each paying user spends 3$ per month on average that would still be ~3$ M per month.