Hacker News Reader

Comment by chime | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com