Google Secretly Invested In Zynga, Preparing To Launch Google Games | Hacker News Reader

Google Secretly Invested In Zynga, Preparing To Launch Google Games

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171 pointsdaniel_levine116 comments

Can you imagine working on Farmville? I mean, it would be like going into work every day to refine the equivilent of the Fisher Price moo farm toy [1] except a) for adults and b) relatively juvenile. Imagine the meetings, mostly run by marketing idiots.

"Okay, we need the new chewy coco grove coconut tree special item out by next Monday. So that means everyone's coming in on saturday."

But how can you argue with 85 million users and a billion in revenue? Google sure can't.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ek_qxoGDyAw

How is this different than the rest of the game industry?

Replace moo moo with desert eagle.

People have an easier time taking themselves seriously when guns and demons are involved.

Cf. comic books, authors, goth teenagers

You can also get a large mix of both. My brother works for a studio that, until recently, only developed racing games for the DS. So they might be working on the next Need for Speed and Barbie racing at the same time.

With the right engine, that should be a matter of theming.

Exactly right.

I present on game development to local user groups in New Zealand and I always get a good response when citing "It's fun to write games - wouldn't you much rather be writing a class called SuperLaserWeapon than MembershipIdentityProvider" :-)

Maybe we should just rename the "MembershipIdentityProvider" method to "SuperLaserWeapon"?

I haven't gone into SuperLaserWeapon territory, but I try to have a little (appropriate) fun with naming.

I'd never go back to the game industry. Low pay, long hours, and a pervasively juvenile mentality that just keeps getting more annoying with every birthday after 17.

If you like doing bare-metal high performance coding it's one of your best chances to test your skills though, unless you're doing lolgames.

I hadn't heard of the term "lolgames" before, it is quite apt.

You have to play farmville, first of all. It isn't a game. It's just as I described it--"cow goes moo" and that's the extent of it.

I'm quite willing to believe this. But then, I played Animal Crossing for a while and that involved mooing, as well (... if I recall correctly). I'm willing to believe a game can be made out of mooing, however I would assert that a Japanese game about mooing is almost certainly better than one owned by shady Russian investors, or whatever Zynga is.

I hate to say it for fear of giving aid and comfort to my Gender Studies professors, but I think a major portion of the reason why Blizzard et al get geek cred and FarmVille does not is because FarmVille is played by women.

I'd expect Mafia Wars to have mostly male players, and I'd put it in the same category as Farmville, i.e. time sinks with virtually no skill or strategy components.

I think that's only true in the sense that people always give more cred to products that they, personally, use. It's the same reason that Google = sexy while enterprise software = not sexy. Almost everybody uses Google, but very few people use any given enterprise software package (and when they do, they usually hate it).

If it were just a male/female thing, you'd expect games like SimCity and Civilization to not get geek cred, since their appeal straddles gender lines.

That's hardly the reason as The Sims which is also played by many women get's lots of cred.

The reason seems more to be that it's not blazing fast OpenGL 3D supernaturalistic advanced strategy/fps type of game.

A lot of people (including me) criticize WoW for being repetitive and mind numbing (grinding), too. I don't think it has anything to do with gender. Also there seem to be actually a lot of women who play WoW?

Do you know anyone who works at Zynga? From this comment, I'd bet you don't.

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann...

Or maybe it'd be fun because you'd be making something that people can relax and enjoy and that adds a little extra social interaction to their everyday experience, often with people that they don't have another "reason" to be in contact with.

No, actually, it is just a stupid waste of everyone's time.

Other than you not liking it, how is it fundamentally different from any other game?

The games are designed to be addictive, not fun in the long term. You could argue the same about WoW but at least in that case there is a lot to do over a long period before you truly get into the addictive repetition phase. Something like farmville is pretty much that from the start.

The games are designed to be addictive, not fun in the long term.

Sorry, but I think you're pulling that out of your ass. All (good) games are addictive to some degree, precisely because they're fun, and I bet if you surveyed all the people who play Farmville, virtually all of them would say they enjoy it and are having fun.

Don't confuse "I don't enjoy it" with "No one enjoys it."

i wouldn't deny intravenous drug users enjoy their highs

I wouldn't agree with that, initial fun is important but over the longer term I think addictiveness can take over fun, to the point where the person feels obligated to continue playing the game to continue progressing even though each gaming session is in a sense almost dreaded.

I played farmville for about a month because some friends were, by the end of that I felt like I was wasting my time, the progression was for the sake of progression, the achievements were arbitrarily chosen to take more and more time and being better than your friends had a lot more to do with time invested then any form of strategy used. I had friends who admitted they were sick of the game and it frustrated them but continued playing just to finish off achievements.

Sure I'm not speaking for everyone but I do think it is a trend in Zynga games, they are build around user engagement and seek to maximise that for as long as possible.

These pop psychology articles prove you wrong. Gaming companies strive deliberately to make their games addicting. And by addicting I mean addicting, not fun.

http://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5-creepy-ways-video-gam... + http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3085/behavioral_game_d...

The techniques that I'll discuss in this article generally fall under the heading of behavioral psychology. Best known for the work done on animals in the field, behavioral psychology focuses on experiments and observable actions. One hallmark of behavioral research is that most of the major experimental discoveries are species-independent and can be found in anything from birds to fish to humans. What behavioral psychologists look for (and what will be our focus here) are general "rules" for learning and for how minds respond to their environment.

Seems awfully presumptuous to say that tens of millions of people aren't actually enjoying themselves and that you know better than they do what's "fun" for them. Would you call knitting merely addictive repetition? In a sense it is, but who cares: many people need and want things to enjoy and help them pass the time.

I would say that making a game addictive is the holy grail of gaming, no?

From the perspective of the people making money off the players? Yes.

When I'm actually playing a game myself, though, and recognizing that these two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, I prefer fun over addictive.

I'd say the holy grail is to improve people's lives, potentially even make the world a better place.

Why the downvote? For me the games I enjoy achieve this. And for whatever job I take on, I actually hope for the same (not just in game development).

reminds me of jane mcgonigal's ted talk:

http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_be...

Reflective games aren't a waste of a time (that allows you think and reflect on a situation thereby improving the way you learn things) but games that put you on an expert(or relax)-mode definitely are a waste of time--imho. I mean this is true when talking about games but probably in true in other situations e.g. you wouldn't like a Pilot who wants to reflect on a situation when plane and 400 passengers are in danger (taken from a Psychology book whose name I cannot recall) :)

I didn't claim that it was but let's assume I did for a minute.

1) no fine motor control involved

2) no complex puzzle solving

3) no storytelling

Those are just a few off the top of my head. I don't really play video games but it is pretty obvious that FarmVille is much different than games you'd play on your television.

And of course motivations differ, too. FarmVille makes more money by consuming your time and taking advantage of your impulses and desire for short-term rewards than most traditional games do.

Zynga isn't really a game company. They don't care about video games as an art form or even as an entertainment medium, they just care about behavior games and milking people out of money with as little effort as possible. It is like a casino that never pays out.

That's how I felt, as a guy who feels pretty "meh" about lolcats, when I was working at Cheezburger Network.

Even now, I know that software that I wrote is helping to make literally millions of people happy every day. That feels a hell of a lot better than helping a big cable company with video DRM, that's for sure.

Cheezburger Network is an honorable career. Nothing makes me as primally delighted as seeing a really cute lolcat. To be able to do that for tens of millions of people is more than most people accomplish in their lives.

That reminds me of "provide liquidity"

Presumably Fisher Price itself employs people who go to work every day to refine their moo farm and other toys. I doubt most of them see the nature of their jobs as particularly embarrassing or degrading.

that's because they make moo farms for kids...

Some people really like designing toys. And at least IEEE thinks it's a cool job: http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/gadgets/shanno...

I gotta agree with your comment about marketing idiots

Hey now, don't talk smack about the Fisher Price moo farm. Memories right there.

You get to run experiments on a huge number of users. Do a split test and get a significant result in an hour. Figure out a way to make it just 1% stickier and suddenly you created value worth millions to the company. It sounds fascinating and I could easily imagine working there.

Yeah, you'd think that, wouldn't you? The more users you get though, the more conservative you become. "But if this drops conversion by 0.1%, that will cost us $100k/week." Gets old fast and stifles change.

Do you work there? Just curious.

No, just relating a similar situation.

just like any big company

On the other hand I think it would be a blast to work on pixel art and be paid for it.

I know the guy in charge of in game economics, he used to work for Upper Deck Entertainment as lead on a few of their games. He's a smart guy. When we talked he was hesitant to discuss Zynga too much because he knows that people are not fond of the brand, but his job sounded interesting.

The people at Zynga are many things, "idiots" would not be one of them.

"Okay, we need the new chewy coco grove coconut tree special item out by next Monday. So that means everyone's coming in on saturday."

Surprisingly accurate portrayal of actual meetings here though.

Just throwing this out there: I consider it unethical to invest in Zynga.

Edit: They are essentially using psychology, social and otherwise, to ultimately trick people out of their money. A classic on the topic: http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/31/scamville-the-social-gaming...

Care to expand? I'm not especially familiar with them other than they make some casual games.

A while ago they were involved in a scandal, when it became clear that most of their money came from ads for scams. Don't have a link for you, but should be easy to find. (Edit: "Scamville" might be a good keyword to try).

not disagreeing with you, but you could say the same thing about gilt groupe, groupon, etc.

one man's "scam" could very well be another man's "deal."

Keeping someones attention is almost the winning or losing factor in startupa

And when did corporations start having morals or even ethics? Google is just interested in the $$$.

Does this mean we can finally abandon the idea that Google's mission is "to organize the world's information"?

Not if the article's argument is correct and this is really about the social graph.

There's tons of money to be made off social games alone.

And to the extent that it's about "the social graph", it's about making money off the social graph. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but as Google becomes increasingly involved with owning, controlling, and/or providing content, as opposed to just "organizing" it (indexing the web, organizing email, etc.), their mission statement becomes more PR fluff than truth.

With Search and Gmail, their ability to obtain user data at least hinged upon Google's superior ability to index web and email information and make it "universally accessible and useful." Obtaining social graph data through an existing social games developer isn't like that at all.

I don't think so. Games are a gateway into the living room, which plays into the other half of their mission: making that information universally accessible and useful.

They've been off that course since at least 2005 or so. Notice how now they're putting money into social when things like Book Search are relatively stagnant.

Their real mission is something like "exploit cloud computing".

It is still organizing the world's information. They've just learned that there is a prioritization people see in that organization: information from people they know trumps information gleaned from Page Rank.

In my opinion Google is all over the place, everywhere at the same time which could lead to overextension of resources and finances. This could ruin Google at some point in the future, they are losing focus.

Yes , they are all over the place, but some see it as trying to optimize and defend the whole value chain of their main products. sort of vertical integration , in the unique form it shows on the internet.

Big tech companies should be all over the place. If they focus too much, they will die, because ability to change is a survival strategy in tech sector.

And this particular case seems to very strategic for Google. It's believed (inside Google too) that Facebook could be the major thread to Google, if people start searching in Facebook first and go to Google only as a second option. Thus, attacking Facebook directly is very strategic move.

And it seems to fit nicely to Android strategy too.

You can have a mission, but you also need to make money. Business.

I think Google's worry about Facebook (partly justified, partly not) is starting to cause them to make pointless (and time wasting) decisions.

If I had 5mins with Sergei and Larry, I would say (after taking a long sip from the free organic drink I just got from the snack bar we're standing next to)

"Look, the real enemy is not FB but Apple (and sometimes your own engineering hubris, e.g. Buzz), so focus all your troops on this front. Don't dilute your strengths with topsy-turvy fads like Farmville. Remember the last time you tried that route when you tried to copy Second Life's act, does anyone even remember them now? Concentrate on (i) getting an Android tablet out, and (ii) get a $99 Google TV box running on Atom with cool software (not the sorry thing you showed at the I/O) to beat Apple to the punch.

It's that simple."

They have a pretty disappointing track record when it comes to consumer hardware. I bet it is not in their DNA.

I think that their hiring and internal quality-control process excludes it, actually.

For building Google's search engine, you need people who know search and sorting algorithms backwards, forwards, inside-out, and upside down. You need hardcore A/B testing based on statistical significance, and rigorous respect of the data you collect.

To make the iPhone and the iPad, you need neither of those.

You need one guy who will walk around like an idiot for months pretending that a deck of cards is his telephone, and writing down every observation and thought that he has on usability. You need a master craftsman who can direct the entire experience, without losing his head in the tech specs.

Google doesn't hire people like that. Decisions are made by committee, backed by data and research, which gives them their edge in technical excellence, but also cripples them in hardware and marketing.

It kills me. I really want Google to succeed here; Apple has effectively zero competition in the smartphone and tablet market other than Google.

Ok, what follows is a bit of a rant. :)

Personally, the first thing I'd do with Android is revamp the market and distribution model to standardize the OS across platforms and vendors, so that an Android works the same no matter where you got it. Vendors can add in custom content (wallpapers, extra apps, ringtones, etc), but the interface (icons, look-and-feel) needs to be the same.

The vendors will go with this. They're getting their asses handed to them by Apple, and Google is their lifeline, because they're saving a ton on development costs.

Second, I'd market the hell out of the areas that Apple cant match, but that matter to the consumer, namely voice search, and maybe being able to hold the phone in the human hand without losing reception.

And whatever you do, don't play the celebrity card. Apple's iPhone and iPad ads make it look like you're using the device. Google could steal a page from that, but with Android devices being used in the real world, not in the Apple cleanroom.

Excellent points. As to your first action point, Google is actually going the opposite way! By Gingerbread (Android 3.0) they intend to squeeze out all vendor-specific add ons, like Motorola Blur or HTC Sense. This is a big mistake that will end in a lose-lose situation.

Another area that AFAIK Apple can't currently match is turn by turn navigation, I no longer use my GPS device in my car but rely completely on my Droid.

How is

"By Gingerbread (Android 3.0) they intend to squeeze out all vendor-specific add ons, like Motorola Blur or HTC Sense. This is a big mistake that will end in a lose-lose situation."

the opposite of

"Personally, the first thing I'd do with Android is revamp the market and distribution model to standardize the OS across platforms and vendors, so that an Android works the same no matter where you got it. Vendors can add in custom content (wallpapers, extra apps, ringtones, etc), but the interface (icons, look-and-feel) needs to be the same." ?

Even then they're still screwed- you're talking about two features, Apple is marketing an experience.

"We let you root your phone" is not a marketing strategy, and that's the base of Android so far. They let you customize, Apple gives you something kick ass that just works.

That's exactly my point. Google isn't making any effort to make Android an 'experience', but if they do, they can't just copy Apple.

Note that I said nothing about being able to install Linux on your phone, or about the open development platform.

If Google grows a marketing brain and decides to create an experience, they need to do one based around their core strength -- finding stuff. Which is where leveraging their voice-search technology would be a good start.

Especially because vocal interfaces are socially inclusive. If I want to find a Thai restaurant on an iPhone, I usually sit there in silence and poke at it a bit. If I want to do it on a Droid, I can just ask it. Which one of these fits more naturally into a social setting without breaking the flow?

That's not all, obviously, but it's a good start towards framing Google/Android as the 'personal robot butler' to Apple's 'computer for the rest of us'.

The Nexus One was pretty well received wasn't it?

Competing on price is the one fool-proof way to always defeat Apple. Google must hammer Apple on price! Besides, is sheer craziness to just let Apple rule the smart phone market and let them have 40% profit margins!

Just as hardware and marketing is not in Google's DNA, so to the race to the bottom commodity pricing is not in Apple's DNA. Apple simply cannot compete on price.

We geeks get caught up in the tech side of things and don't even blink at paying upwards $2,500 for the total cost of a contract-locked smart phone for two years. But give the average non-tech person a choice between a $2500 iPhone, or a $200 unlocked Android that they can use on any carrier. It's obvious which choice the majority of consumers will make.

>Look, the real enemy is not FB but Apple

The first thing I thought of when I read this news was precisely that it was targeted at matching Apple. All of a sudden Apple has come out of nowhere as a gaming force, threatening even Nintendo's portable gaming systems. Google investing in gaming looks like a move to reinforce their offerings in this department.

And the funny thing is, Apple doesn't give a shit about gaming.

iPod touch?

And I like to think they'd respond,

"Look Jun8, in 12 years we've built a company worth upwards of 150 billion dollars, and you've amassed roughly 844 karma points."

Well, how much karma has Larry Page racked up on HN??

It's good to know that companies worth billions never make mistakes that drive that value down. Certainly never down to nothing.

LOL, I've collected that much karma in less than a year. Given 12 years, God knows where I'll go!

Seriously, I'd like to think that your comment was a joke. Because if a company cannot learn from foot soldiers in the domain and gets cocky, stagnation and eventually death is close at hand. I hope Google is not at that point (like Microsoft)

Apple would be a hard battle, I think. On the other hand facebook has the potential to actually enroach onto googles main revenue stream.

I see what you are trying to say but zynga are much more than a fad - at least for now. They have big profits and, more importantly for google, an instant social graph.

Google desperately wants to be your login provider and social graph. Really desperately.

Well, I don't know you but many people around me are living their lifes deep into Facebook.Facebook is an Internet inside Internet and that's very dangerous.

Google needs to be concerned about Apple, but FB threatens their main revenue stream. As more and more people get on FB and put all their information on FB, those same people have less incentive to go to Google to do any searching and instead will just search FB.

It's interesting how the internet exploded and had content popping up all over the place and now the content has ended up self aggregating to a few sites like FB and youtube.

I know it seems retarded, but things like copying second life cost the company pretty little. Ten or twenty people's work for two years, thrown out and discarded. We're looking at a couple million down the drain. A lot for you or me, but not worth worrying about for them.

Sure, those things might be somewhat embarrassing, but I doubt they have a significant effect in the long term. (Except, that is, when they turn out to be a good idea and succeed.)

Also, for Apple to be a real competitor to Google, they would have to threaten Google's core money-maker, online ads, especially search ads. It's possible iAds will end up being such a competitor, and were I Google, I'd be concerned. But I'd be much more worried that for many people, "the internet" would become "facebook," and thus I wouldn't be able to show them ads.

Oh Google. The sharks are circling and you're strapping on your waterskis.

It's strategic for both parties. Google wants to get Facebook users onto their own network and Zynga needs to reduce their sole dependence on Facebook.

Is it just me, or is Zynga raising an absolutely obnoxious amount of money?

They've been profitable since their very first quarter and, according to the TC article, they will likely make as much in profit next year as they've raised in the last three years.

The fundraising is almost exclusively used for acquisition, so what's the obnoxious part?

I don't quite understand how this fits into the grand scheme of Google. Now I think Google is just buying stuff to buy stuff. Though I could see acquiring user-interaction data being useful, especially in the casual space.

Google is freaking out over Facebook. This gives them both a chance to build out their own social graph (say as a launch partner for Google Me), and access to a copy of most of Facebook's.

This data is important for search, but critical for ads.

This is great news for China. While the Silicon Valley gets rotten from inside, making this useless stuff, they will be buying bankrupt US chip companies and making their own microprocessors.

You consider Zynga, a company with a ridiculous amount of attention from users, and expected to hit $1Bn revenues next year, useless?

Interesting. Both Google and Zynga are very much data driven companies.

Remember story about Google choosing shade of blue by testing 41 variants?

That's how Zynga designs its (extremely successful) games. Everything is measured and analyzed. They are basically conducting one massive experimental psychology study of what makes people (s)tick.

Farmville is evil; Zynga makes Farmville; Google invested in Zynga.

Q.E.D.

;-)

Google bought DoubleClick. They were tainted from then on, as far as I'm concerned. DoubleClick had a known shady history, and executives from DC moved into positions of influence within Google.

Just curious, what terrible things has DoubleClick done since being bought by Google? If anything, I'd say Google 'tainted' them and not the other way around.

It's not that DoubleClick has done the terrible things, it's that Google has done them. The naked attempt to monetize wikipedia's eyeballs that was Knol. The careless lack of attention to privacy that was the Buzz launch. The very existence of Buzz, a me-too product that does nothing different to the existing competition. It's hard to imagine the Google of 2004 launching those products.

Of course, it's not all bad -- Chrome is very much an old-Google product, pouring innovation into a category that was content to slowly iterate. Android is another example of good-for-Google, good-for-everyone innovation. But those examples are getting fewer and further between, while copycat products are getting more common.

Well, good luck to Google. Given that the public donated $175k to a group of inexperienced, unknown programmers who did little more than say they were out to replace Facebook, I'd say the market is ready for an alternative.

Every day I go to 7-11 for coffee. And cringe at the zynga branding everywhere.

Is it possible to buy 7-11 coffee with points from zynga games?

Really? I miss the good old days when Jedis and Jabba were on 7-11 glasses, in that case.

We don't have 7-11 here.... Let it be known that I pine for Super Nachos.

Zynga games will tie into the GoogleMe ecosystem nicely.

Google -> Google!

Ouch

maximum recursion depth exceeded in line 1

Wasn't Zynga threatening to leave Facebook or start a (long) legal battle? This is ideal for Google of course since they have been struggling to get their social networks to really take off. Getting Zynga to move to Google exclusively could be the boost they have been waiting for so long.

I think it would be suicide for Zynga to abandon Facebook completely, afaik, they make games which can easily duplicated and hence alternatives would pop up on Facebook soon.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/07/zynga-gunning-up-and-lawyer...

and soon after, they released their standalone ipad farmville app

This sounds like TechCrunch editorializing and trying to make a story out of nothing.

I don't think Google cares about this.

The article says something about social graph but that doesn't make sense. Gmail basically rules the world when it comes to email so they already have a lot of social graph information just from email correspondences. There must be some other strategy they are pursuing.

In terms of userbase, GMail is still third behind Hotmail and Yahoo. I would bet that current Farmville users overlap less with GMail than other email services too.

The potential of this is astounding, across Google web, Android, and Chromium.

Anyone has heard of "Google Games" before? It seems to be a social gaming platform which will be available on Android as well. Couldn't find any info about it though.

Isn't TechCrunch a terribly unreliable source? I thought after the last.fm debacle that you shouldn't exactly trust them.

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