Facebook and Zynga Enter Into Long-Term Relationship | Hacker News Reader

Facebook and Zynga Enter Into Long-Term Relationship

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60 pointsjsm38634 comments

Facebook really annihilated any meaning in their mission statement, and all the passive language indicates the leadership doesn't really embrace the new statement or take any ownership over it. Since when is Facebook about open and connected? Facebook connects me with my friends across the globe, in a private forum.

Facebook's mission statement should honestly read "anything for another billion bucks," but instead some marketing stooge wrote this:

Founded in February 2004, Facebook's mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.

I too am somewhat put off by the various statements from the CEO that his mission is to 'change the world'. I can think of another 2-3 rather manipulative, drive, self-oriented business founders who insist this about themselves, too. "Anything for another billion bucks" would be a much more honest assessment of their personal motivations.

That's a lot of words for saying "Facebook and Zynga entered a 5-year agreement on using Facebook credits in Zynga games, but details of that are not disclosed".

Reading all those press releases, I'm wondering who is the target audience for them?

* Surely it's not an average Facebook user - she does not read press releases.

* Surely it's not a journalist or a technical person - they don't need all the marketing mumbo-jumbo.

* Surely it's not an (educated) investor, for the same reason.

My question is, who?

My conspiracy theory is that bigger firms are expected to have PR departments, and people working in PR departments are expected to write longer paragraphs to justify their existence.

Sounds like a regular non-conspiracy theory that is probably spot-on.

Having worked in PR, there are no length requirements or even people valuing wordiness.

What does exist is a stifling press release style that everyone loves to write and no one loves to read. It doesn't mater how long each thing is, but you need "about this company" and "about that company." You need garbage quotes from the execs (written by the PR guy of course), and you need everyone's statement of business in the first paragraph.

So, with all that crap, you already have a page of nonsense. Then, add in a few paragraphs on the actual announcement, and that is how the sausage is made. Some press release writers are better than others, but no one can write good press release.

Personally, I don't write press releases anymore. I write casual blog posts.

I pretty much assumed it's for the small/medium journalists on a deadline who can use some of the mumbo-jumbo as filler so they have a full article without having to do more than a little bit of their own research.

Speaking as a tech blogger who has seen thousands of these, I really don't know who they are written for. The trick is to simply skip over anything that's a quote (which often make up around half of the words). Those quotes are rarely actually said/written by the person they're attributed to, and if a journalist includes them in their article it's usually just filler.

As someone who develops things in the arena of Facebook, this makes me feel better about the long-term viability of the platform. Smaller developers don't want to see the biggest developers threaten to (attempt to) pull the rug out from underneath the platform.

Other platform developers who are nervous about the changes. The highly-publicized (and probably highly-exaggerated) blowup between Zynga and Facebook has been of little interest to anyone else.

Sounds like Zynga got a discount on Facebook credits in return for staying committed to the FB platform. Of course, I could be horribly wrong

Seems more likely that any discounts would go the other way. Facebook provides Zynga with a massive installed and networked user base. What does Zynga offer Facebook that couldn't be replaced?

If I were Zynga, my biggest fear would be that Facebook would decide to compete with me. So I'm guessing this agreement prevents that from happening, at least for five years, and in return Facebook gets a bigger chunk of Zynga's revenue stream.

Disclaimer: I don't pay a ton of attention to this stuff, so let me know if I'm off base.

Much of recent FB growth, especially international, has been driven by gaming. FB has users, but Zynga has over 200M players. FB couldn't compete with Zynga in games without giving shady preferential platform features to their own games - even the other big, successful game companies aren't competing with Zynga.

Yep, I think people severely underestimate how much gaming is a contributor to technology adoption. Mac OSX could have gained a lot more market share had Steve not been so stubborn. Case in point, iPhone app popularity is heavily skewed toward games.

My wife created her Facebook account to play some Zynga game a colleague was playing. Later on I had to make a Facebook account in order to be a neighbor to this Zynga game.

At least 3 other people in our circle use Facebook only for and due to Zynga. The social issue becomes just a side issue.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. I remember hearing all those rumors about Zynga being really unhappy with Facebook and how they were taking their games to their own website and leaving Facebook behind in the future. It's amazing how quickly things can change.

I'm a little disappointed... I was looking forward to an epic showdown. Also, this means fewer opportunities for the smaller app developers.

Not true. Zynga adopting FB credits for all of its games is very much a good thing for smaller developers on the FB platform. Having Zynga on board is a big step to having FB currency used as a standard for all FB games, which levels the playing field for small developers who can't build huge payment systems themselves.

Unless Zynga has 10% fees (my guess) and everybody else the usual 30%. I think they wouldn't sign the agreement otherwise.

There's no problem with using SocialGold, Spare Change (Playspan), Gwallet, TrialPay, Offerpal, SuperRewards or many other payment/offer systems that are easy to integrate into Facebook apps.

There was once a time where the phrase 'innovative' had been used so much, you pretty much knew from the get go a company that touted it's success on being 'innovative' or 'forward' to be guilty of exactly the opposite. Same thing with the word 'proactive'. I learned the hard way that a supervisor who interviews you and makes it an explicit point to say 'I'm not a micromanager' is exactly that.

In 2010, the buzzword became 'open' and the theme was 'transparency'. I'm starting to learn that a company that calls itself 'open' and 'transparent' is either exactly the opposite, or has decided to redefine what 'open' and 'transparent' mean in order to fit their own archetype of rhetoric.

Oligarchies by way of Nielsen's Law.

I've come to the opinion that "if you have to say so, you aren't." If the tofu were really yummy and tasty, you wouldn't have to say so on the package. (I like tofu, btw)

Terms of the agreement between Facebook and Zynga were not disclosed.

Any guesses as to the terms? = ) I'm thinking ~0.00% instead of 30% fees for the credits.

Edit: I meant that I suspect it's much less than 30%, not really 0.00%

15%. I think that's what Zynga was expecting internally.

I don't think it's 0%. That would imply that Facebook has no negotiations power in this dispute. But I think quite the opposite is true: Zynga cannot really afford leaving Facebook platform right now, so they don't have any credible threat, other than creating more bad publicity for Facebook.

Based on how things are evolving recently, it doesn't look like Facebook is paying too much attention to it.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/18/central-to-the-facebook-zyn...

Facebook’s VP of communications Larry Yu tells us that the 30 percent fee has remained the same for this deal.

I guess they negotiated most of that 30% facebook credit cut to themselves.

5 years is a long time on the internet. Who is to say it either Zynga or FB be relevant by then.

Even if it's in writing it doesn't mean the bigger party can't screw the smaller party.

So by strategic relationship, would that be a less than 30% cut?

re: Zanga My impression is that they are making use of the user data they are able to collect when people start using the app. Is ther any evidence that they are selling that data or otherwise doing something uncouth with it?

I'm not sure how much you think "user data" is worth. I can assure you that Zynga makes more money playing virtual Monsanto than they ever would selling user data.

so Farmville and Fishville are the High Fructose Corn Syrup of the internet? :)

Ok. I didn't really understand that they were charging so much for playing the game. I'm happy to be wrong.

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