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GDC Canada: Bill Mooney Outlines Zynga's Methodology For Success
by Brandon Sheffield [PC, Console/PC]
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May 6, 2010
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"More people have played FarmVille than have played Mario", asserts Zynga VP Bill Mooney, discussing the social game market and his company's methodology during GDC Canada.
This is scary to Farmville GM Mooney because a bigger audience means more eyes on you should you fail. But Zynga started small: "Three years ago there were four people," Mooney said. "Two years ago there were 30 people, and now we’re over 900."
The market has grown very quickly, Mooney said as he showed a slide showing that in the last few years, social gaming has grown 324 percent, while more traditional online gaming has grown 7 percent (social games and online games weren't specifically defined).
As has been said many times before, friends represent the main sticky aspect for social games. Zynga tested the number of days players stay in FarmVille versus the number of friends they have –- and people with over 100 friends stay an average of 80 days. Below that number of friends, players spend less time playing.
Mooney laid out Zynga’s methods for game creation (and sustaining), in eight steps.
1: Start Small
"The initial user experience is very small," he said. "They become hardcore, but they start very, very casual." You want to ease the players in. "You start from the smallest possible interesting piece," he continued. "It has to be fun for a single player, but it has to be something your mom can understand the first time."
The social interactions are clearly key. Zynga adds social actions from the very start of the user experience. This is because "when we add these actions, user engagement goes way up," he said. Gifting is an example, which he says "seems simple but it’s not. This is a mechanic we were convinced we understood a year and a half ago. And six months ago. And we’re still learning about it."
2: Go Fast
FarmVille and Mafia Wars both took five weeks to develop and launch, which Mooney says is important, because "you get it out, and you start learning." Zynga has to get new features out weekly, which is “a very different pace. I think a lot of us are used to the 18-24 month cycle.”
But they have to add new features or tweaks in order to retain players. Zynga will put out the simplest version of a feature and see if users like it. "We know that we have to put new stuff out all the time," said Mooney. "It doesn’t mean it needs to be a big feature, but people need new content."
"This is an industry where still 8 people can come out of nowhere," he noted. The game Farm Town was made by eight guys from Florida who came from out of nowhere, with no previous game development experience. The farming space was already crowded in social games, but within 2.5 months Farm Town game got to number one.
3: Test Everything
Testing is the key design element of social games, Mooney noted. "You have to measure stuff. You can argue about it all day long, but you can measure it! You can test it!"
"One of the things the web people brought is the idea of testing" he continued. “Because you can test live, we will run four versions of the same thing. We’ll run things at different prices,” he said, which allows the company to adapt to the market based on actual metrics. The catch is that you have to go fast. “If you can get 80 percent of the result with 20 percent of the effort, you can do it,” he says.
By way of example, Zynga tried to create a simple boss battle in Mafia Wars, “And we knew within 5 minutes it was too hard. We knew because people weren’t getting to step three. And because it was myspace we had 1,000 people telling us we suck. And that’s great.”
4: Create User Delight
“People will just give you good ideas,” he says, because “all of us are smarter than some of us.” Zynga takes ideas from the community, and then asks players to vote on what they want, adding that “people can leave your game really easily, so you’d better satisfy them.”
5: Add Depth
“Be good systems designers,” Mooney advises, saying you want the games to be easy to play, but difficult to master.
“We want to be a web service, not just a great 40 hour experience,” he said. “I loved BioShock, but it’s done, and I would’ve liked to keep going with it.”
6: Empower Users
“We don’t want to make the game for ourselves, but we know we have something good when the team is playing it,” he says, adding that the company’s main test market is the HR group. You have to go where users want you to go.
“We did a game that we spent millions of dollars on, and months and months, and we were like ‘great, this is the Diablo-killer.’ It didn’t work,” he said. User engagement is key. “At the heart of every good games is a slightly embarrassing fantasy,” he says, such as being a big tough guy, or being really smart.
7: The Team
Zynga team members need to have four prime qualities, he says. They must be gamers, analytical, humble, and driven. “It’s hard to teach people to be gamers,” he says. “If you can’t tell if a game is fun, it’s very hard to work in games.”
8: Create Enough for Users
These are live games, and sometimes they go down. “We have to get up and test it,” Mooney says. “And the only way you can handle this load is to hire more people.” You have to trust your people, too, because everything is moving too quickly to micro-manage. You’ll get as much responsibility as you can possibly handle, he says. “There’s a senior vice president who’s 22. And we don’t care.”
“This is a great thing to try,” he concluded. “You will find it fascinating.”
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Your intentions are noble, but there's always something to learn... even if it is from a spam-like social game. I would love to develop a game played by as many people as FarmVille is.
How is that different from playing WoW? in the end it's the same set of social pressures that force you to continue playing.
I think your issue with the Bioshock example is that it is somewhat comparing Apples to Oranges, but if you step away from the story of Bioshock (hard, I know) you will see that perhaps it is the particular feel for the world that he would have liked to have seen more of.
Also, for some people, the inner loop of any of these farming games (till, plant, harvest) is like mario to some people.
but hey, as an indie developer you can make what you want to make and the player be damned (I know, what's with these game players being finicky about what they play?). You have the freedom to starve.
P.S: Something not mentioned in this article that was in the talk: For every successful feature or game they have had 4-5 others that failed. They only develop what people play.
Farmville is a clone of Farm Town. Mafia wars is a clone of Mob Wars. Cafe world is a clone of restaurant city.
Is this a respectable company? Is this a proper model for making videogames?
Well, people should decide if this is right or not, but please, say it like it is.
Whether we feel Zynga make games or not, they make a product which is "played" by millions of people DAILY, a product which they have developed and honed based on player feedback and by paying attention to what the players want, need, their behaviour, and they have been incredibly succesful doing so.
As game developers maybe taking a leaf from their book in those terms would not be such a bad thing, instead of making games WE want to make, maybe we should be making games people want to play... thats at least how we see it... but we only have a small game with a few thousand players.. what do we know :)
I'm sorry but people that play these 'games' aren't gamers and I don't think they will 'graduate' to become a hardcore gamer.
Maybe not the best examples of each, but I think it's a far cry from actual "work".
The way I see it: Mooney > The Whiners
'nuff said
When anyone here creates a game played by 8xs the number of people who play WoW then they may have a leg to stand on...
Till then, I dub thee - Whiners.
The distinction that's a bit more subtle, and arguably, harder to define is what do you "feel" at the end of the experience, and what did you have to do to feel that way? Did the experience enrich you somehow? Were the activities you engaged in meaningful and captivating based on the merits of the game's stories and characters alone? Of course, this is different for everyone, and for some people, FarmVille *really is* that meaningful and 'time well spent'. For others it isn't. It's the same how other actions such as texting, seeing a visual status indicator go from a red "pending" to a green "approved", can provide the right level of positive feedback/endorphin release that give someone the same pleasure as hearing a coin be collected in Mario.
It gets very subjective, but in any case, there's always the question of what you're actually doing. I can write a game front-end for just about any social or commercial activity. I could slap a 3D game engine front-end on paying your taxes at IRS.gov by using some CURL-based API. At the end of the day, you're still paying your taxes, just like at the end of the day, you're still paying Zynga or its sponsors for services. These actions aren't intrinsically "bad" or "good" — but they are semantically different from actions which are solely confined to the realm of the game world and game story, which is what most traditional "games" (in the video games sense) have been up to now. Again, not saying that this is all games CAN be, but this is the evolution of the concept of a "game" that FarmVille illustrates.
Who knows — paying taxes while jumping from rooftop to rooftop a la Assassin's Creed may be far more engaging than navigating a shoddy HTML form at IRS.gov :)
If number of people playing your games is what you're going for then that's your choice. I don't dislike Zynga or it's players, but not all of us are going for statistics (or possibly money).
I always try to tackle the question:
Do I want to make three people laugh or a thousand people chuckle?
Not that I have the answers, but I certainly haven't resigned to Zynga's 8 principles of designing a really big statistic.