FarmVille Juggernaut Zynga Might Leave Facebook Soon | Hacker News Reader

FarmVille Juggernaut Zynga Might Leave Facebook Soon

kokugamer.com

26 pointsFlemlord29 comments

Leaving FB near the height of their popularity is a bold and smart move. Obviously they're going to do their own social gaming site. Why support their new competitor? A dumber company might have tried to hedge their bet which would have doomed their own project from the start. Doing it quick & painless might cost them some users but probably not enough to matter in the long run. They're a clever bunch. I bet they attribute the switch to growing Facebook privacy concerns to trash the competition on the way out.

For some reason, I'm reading this post with a lot of sarcasm, though upon re-reading I agree with everything said.

Bold but risky.

"Bold" implies "risky", as in the old adage, "there are bold pilots and there are old pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots".

They need iPhone/iPad versions of their main games. Only reason my parents are on FB is because of Farmville. They cannot play Farmville on iPad yet. My parents don't much care for FB as much as they care about Farmville. Once Zynga makes these games available as Apple apps, lot of people will use them on a more frequent basis. They'll probably want to share game info via FB but the game play could be on a phone or iPad.

Zynga could have FarmVille installed on 100% of iPads and they wouldn't even notice the user number move. 1 million iPads have been sold ever. 25 million people will play FarmVille on Monday. The scale is completely different.

Now, if iPad users monetize better or they can be more spammy than Facebook users, then we might be talking. But you still have to deal with keeping two separate codebases in sync while releasing new features nearly every day.

I'm sure it'd be more about keeping people engaged in the game while they're away from their computers. Dealing with two separate codebases is nothing new to Zynga.

iPads are at the bottom of a multi-year growth cycle. FarmVille is near the top of its growth cycle. It may not be important today but it will probably matter to Zynga in the 2-5 year timeframe whether they stick with Flash or create mobile apps for touchscreen devices.

Interesting. Is it common that older people join FB because of games? According to Inside Facebook, after the earlier trend of older women joining FB, older men are now joining http://www.insidefacebook.com/2010/05/03/facebook’s-april-20... If this is explained by games, and not by "FB as a social service", it's really interesting news.

I haven't heard stories about parents joining FB because of games here in Finland, that's why I'm curious to learn more.

while visiting my mom for mother's day, she just told me that zynga and facebook are having disagreements. shocked that she knew this, i let her keep talking without interrupting her. (she's the type who doesn't know what a browser is, so i had no idea how she knew about this tech company relationship. i wondered if zynga was telling their users.)

she explained how her and her farmville friends have been protesting facebook. she was happy because once they "got facebook to change something by a certain deadline." (not sure what facebook change this was, but obviously it was a coincidence.) then she explained why -- "it's so annoying when you go to facebook and it's all of these things about people being friends with friends. who cares? i have to click something like 'see related stories' to see all my farmville notifications. it's a total mess with all that stuff about friends in there."

basically, my mom doesn't think anything of facebook's core product. it gets in her way. ("some of the people in our farmville/mafia wars groups have left facebook because of how annoying it is!") she doesn't know that friends are supposed to be people that you know, or that it's a site about keeping up to date with people. she just knows that it's a place to play farmville and mafia wars, and the rest is the fluff.

You don't need Facebook to play, Farmville.com. Although since its written in flash,it is unlikely that it will ever be on i{Pod/Phone/Pad} systems.

Their competitors will be very happy

They're bluffing.

Zynga is absolutely not bluffing.

I think they are. They would lose a massive percentage of their revenue overnight. They could survive separated from Facebook, but they'd be significantly smaller. Their company probably can't afford to shrink that quickly.

They should diversify, but I seriously doubt they'd be stupid enough to do it overnight. Facebook can safely call their bluff.

I don't know about their other games, but a lot of people are addicted to Farmville. Addicts are loyal.

Facebook is planning to tax them 30%. If they leave and lose less than 30% of their customers, they will make money. Do you really think that 1 in 3 paying FV players will leave because they have to type in a new URL to play? They're already willing to type in their credit card information, and that process is much longer.

I do. I think a lot of people play Farmville because it's "just there". The same way people will watch whatever is on TV, regardless of its quality. Some people are addicted. Many are merely entertained.

I'm quite certain they will instantly see a drop of more than 30% of their traffic. Probably significantly more.

They're bluffing the way Google was bluffing when they threatened to release their own browser to get around browser manufacturers controlling the default search, the way Google was bluffing when they threatened to release their own mobile OS and phone to get around phone manufacturers controlling the default search, maps, and other applications on phones, and the way Google is now bluffing when they threaten to become their own top tier ISP to get around ISPs controlling access to search or other applications.

So that's a semi-bluff, if we want to be technical. ;)

I don't see how those are similar to Zynga pulling out of Facebook and switching to "Zynga Live" which doesn't yet exist.

Google didn't "pull out" of offering their services through the established browsers when they released their own. They didn't stop offering Google apps on the iPhone when they released Android.

Farmville piggybacked on FaceBook to get popular. I think such a move will hurt both, because

* not every Farmville on FaceBook user will follow Zynga

* a lot of Farmville players only visit FaceBook for the game

On the other hand: a commission of 30% seems pretty steep.

I don't understand why this is "Very surprising news". Why would Zynga want to be locked to someone else's system instead of their own?

FarmVille would be "a just another one of the million stupid flash game nobody know about" without facebook.

btw, there is no market for flash-based games, but very big one of upcoming WebGL standard.

There are several of us on HN who make our living from flash games. Please can you expand on why there is no market?

1. http://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?s=AAPL 2. Android.

> btw, there is no market for flash-based games, but very big one of upcoming WebGL standard.

MochiMedia (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1046942) and Kongregate would disagree with your statement. Heck, the Internet would disagree with your statement.

Please, let them leave. Zynga needs to die a horrible, horrible death. Preferably, in a fire.

What, people here seriously love Zynga? After their CEO admitted he used scam "monthly text message plan" marketers to get most of their revenue? After he flat out admitted that they rip off their customers any way possible to make a quick buck?

Why should we reward such a terrible business model with success. Zynga uses marketing partners that have more in common with organized crime than reputable businesses.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com