Zynga CEO: "Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers."
sfweekly.com
sfweekly.com
It's a very cynical view of how to spend time with people. When the leading social games company is led by a guy like Pincus, what more can you expect?
The fact that they're not fun is part of why they are successful. You're just kind of trivially there, so you don't feel dorky and you don't feel like you're wasting too much time, only a moment.
All online multi-player video games are "social" games, but most of them aren't hyper-casual and can't be bolted on as a distraction to Facebook. Therefore, they feel a little dorky, a little like wasting time, and way more fun.
Scrabble, for example, lends itself perfectly to asynchronous, light, casual play (cf Scrabulous, Words with Friends). But it's legitimately fun at the same time. You're rewarded for imaginative approaches to solving problems. You can play with no skill or lots, but either way, you'll always find ways to get better.
Most important: You're genuinely spending time with your friends. Sharing an experience that creates a memory.
This is a big deal. This is missing from almost every other pseudo-social game.
True story: I was job hunting, someone gave me a lead at Slide. Awesome guy, gave me good advice. But as soon as I found out I had to be conversant on the subject of a "game" called "SuperPoke Pets!" I vomited a little in my mouth and moved on to other options.
Social game companies: Stop making horseshit, start building something fun. It's possible. It's just a little bit harder.
There may be a baseline pseudo-fun available in the current crop of social games. Most social games, though, are more interested in bare metal compulsion than truly meritorious, universally recognizable fun.
You're really willing to sit there and tell me that you're comfortable with social game evolution stopping right now? This stuff really is sufficiently fun for you?
There's pandering to flyover country and then there's making something good. One will get you Oprah and Zynga. The other gets you Inception and Mad Men. One is quick cash, the other is integrity.
I'd rather take a smaller payday from people I like and respect than make crap.
As a sincere answer... not really. All it makes me is better for me. And people who have a concurring viewpoint are also better for me inasmuch as we have shared values and my idealism (my self-righteousness?) makes values important to me.
You seem to have a great vision for what social games could be. I cannot urge this enough - please go build that vision now. The industry needs innovation badly. There are huge profits to the person who can pull this off, and I hope that person is you.
But my message is this - Build Stuff People Want. Many people have fallen into this trap, myself included. I thought I could buck the trend, out-innovate Zynga, and make a truly fun game. But in the end I failed because I spent too much time in an ivory tower making the perfect game, and no time making an enjoyable product.
A great analogy is engineering brilliant software, but failing to build something people want to buy.
Inception was a success because Christopher Nolan is able to carefully balance the things that make a great movie with the things that make great ticket sales. It wasn't the best movie ever, and it wasn't the best selling movie ever. But a careful blend of both lead to success.
No one in social games today can do this. I want that to change.
To think that one can simply "made something good" is a fallacious line of thinking along the lines of "build it, and they will come". Fundamental understanding of what your audience wants is so critical.
I'm not saying Zynga makes good games. I'm not saying you should follow in Zynga's footsteps. I'm saying you need to understand what Zynga does right if you want to beat them. And if you think all Zynga does is "be evil" and "buy ads", you haven't been paying close enough attention.
First off, there's the semantics. What is a social game? Is it something running in Facebook? If so, you're not going to see it evolve too much too soon. That's because of the way the platform incentives are structured, the mindset of the average person who is on Facebook at the moment (more often than not at work, multitasking, able to devote only infrequent, short bursts of attention) and the inherent technical limitations of the Flash platform. If you ever saw the traffic graphs of a successful game, you'd understand immediately why casual is winning. It has a high bounce rate and peaks on weekday mornings.
If you define "social gaming" more broadly, which I think you should, then World of Warcraft, League of Legends, and many other very innovative games are social games. In that case you're already seeing social games evolve. My little cousins play Call of Duty over Xbox live with each other from their homes 50 miles apart every day. That's social gaming if you ask me, and they at least think it's fun.
There's certainly no accounting for taste. It's just plain snobbish to say the games you like are "universally recognized as fun" and the games you don't like aren't. I'd rather jam a ballpoint pen into my eye than play an asynchronous game of Scrabble. You'd sooner catch me playing Farmville.
For the purposes of a thread about Zynga, it's reasonable to assume a social game in this context is, indeed, a Facebook-flavored game.
Realtime multiplayer has enjoyed a lot of evolution since you had to bind curses and status reports to your F-keys in Quake. Definitely share your enthusiasm for where it is going right now.
Asynch casual multiplayer is in a dreadful rut. The big beef I have with it is that so little of it is skill based that you can't enjoy improvement over time, except with more and more swipes of the credit card (edit: or pointless grinding). I don't think the games I like are universally recognized as fun. What I said, if you'll read my post, is that asynch casual games are relying more on ill-concealed compulsion loops than on anything an observer would look at and think "boy, that looks fun to play."
Until asynch casual multiplayer, as your semantic nitpicking requires I call it, leverages gameplay that lets players feel themselves grow more skilled, we're just not talking about anything of lasting value. Personal growth is a huge component of enjoyable gameplay and you can't just add a row to a spreadsheet game to simulate that.
It's social, casual, skill based, and fun.
To answer a likely question, it's social be use I want to beat my friends scores each week
It could use more depth but match three as a game style has some compelling play.
Scott Adams wrote a very good article about the illusion of skill this week. Skill is mostly the result of a compulsion loop. I play Scrabble, I improve, so I play more Scrabble. It's not much different than harvest crop, get money, build another crop.
If I play Scrabble more than you, I will probably beat you when you and I play Scrabble. If I play Farmville more than you, I will have a bigger and better farm. Both of those are generalities (it is of course quite possible to play both games sub-optimally, though easier with the former).
Also that's not the only thing anyone considers fun. A lot of people look at a virtual farm full of crops and chickens and barns and think "boy that looks fun to play". Millions. There's more to it than compulsion loops, they don't keep players around for very long.
Very thought provoking. What a great conversation.
I wish I had a clearer vision on the next step for social games. I honestly do. Sadly I think it'll be a long, iterative process before that industry sorts out exactly how to make a genuinely compelling experience that fits into the very real confines and perceptions you described. Bits and pieces will shake out as true fun but it'll take time to see it cobbled together into a comprehensively non-crappy game.
My lack of imagination doesn't stop me thinking there's a better way, though.
It sounds like you really took a whack at this. I hope you find a way to do something with everything you learned. It's a tough problem that can touch a lot of people.
Right now the marketplace is too young to appreciate quality. The masterpieces are overlooked and the winners are whichever games are the loudest and most accessible.
That's how it will be until the public as a whole gets more experience in this area and develops a certain level of taste.
There was no equivalent to HBO or Mad Men back when TV was new. It took a long time for quality shows to make money - and even now The Wire was considered only a modest financial success.
Great art often makes no money. The better an artist you are, the more likely you are to die before your works are appreciated.
Farmville is The Sims: Farm Life pared down to work in Flash on old computers. It is popular for the same reasons The Sims was popular and it appeals to the same demographic, but it is even more popular because Facebook has become a vector to involve _real-life_ friends and to allow people to get sucked into the game and play for a few minutes at a time.
It's a pretty simple formula, nothing really ground-breaking there. Some classic RPG elements + interior decoration + cooperation with friends + negligible chunks of time commitment to accomplish things = high appeal to certain groups. I find Farmville really annoying and don't play it (or any other Facebook games) but almost all females I spend time around do play it. It's more hit-and-miss with guys.
But is there something inherently immoral or wrong about this pattern? I don't see what it is. It's just a silly game; you might not find it fun to arrange animals and barns on virtual farmland, but that doesn't mean that there's something nefarious or bad about it.
Except in the article it read:
"Gameplay in FarmVille, FishVille, or Café World is based almost exclusively on what social-game designers call a "compulsion loop." Players perform basic tasks — clicking on crops to harvest them, clicking on stoves in restaurants, clicking on fish to feed them — earn fake money, enhance their farm or restaurant or aquarium, and repeat. In Zynga's hands, the art of snaring users with such gimmickry has become, quite literally, a science: Pincus told Time magazine last year that Zynga employs a behavioral psychologist."
I think the absence of something in addition to the compulsion loop is what people are objecting to here. The loop itself is not value, it's exploitation.
I'm in Seattle, I guess you would fly over here if you were going from Boise, ID to Forks, WA.
For what it's worth, that's exactly what I'm planning on doing :)
Believe it or not, a lot of people actually think Farmville is fun. I'm not one either, but I've met many who are. It's so ridiculous to assume that because you think it isn't fun, nobody does, and therefore it has no value.
The fact that your comment has 42 karma right now is the main thing wrong with this site.
There's more than strict compulsion, though compulsion is present in every fun game as well. Compulsion is simply operant conditioning, and this happens as surely in golf, chess, or Scrabble as it does Farmville.
It is important to distinguish between Facebook games and social games. Social games are massive, innovative, and at least one is orders of magnitude more successful than Farmville.
Facebook games have severe technological limitations (web and Flash are still, right now, quite limiting, making something as immersive as WoW far from possible). They have clear-cut incentives both coming down from Facebook (API, platform rules) and coming up from customers (as you mentioned, their attention span is low, largely because they're at work).
Morally? Well, what's morality in business if you're not using child labor, robbing a nation of its natural resources or engaging in otherwise clearly reprehensible activities? I don't make any claims about morality. It's just out-and-out dumb to blame companies for seeking money-makers for its investors (or parent company, for their investors).
However, what Zynga has done has shown exactly how stupid the game-playing public is, en masse, and how ripe they are for exploitation for just a little bit of time-wasting. One can almost hear the boardroom discussions:
"Look, developers, just take Zynga's model for 'game development,' scale it up for us and keep doing it until we have their numbers."
Irony or coincidence? I keep getting the two confused.
The blatant art rip-off is evil, but the methodology of "taking something proven, and making it better" is not.
Apple does this all the time, and I don't fault them for it.
For the HN crowd who "can't find an idea for a startup", maybe this is a really good method of finding one. Look at what's successful out there, and emulate to make it better.
edit: I remembered that I have heard another version, with a different take: "In a street where there are several bakeries, next business that will open up will be a bakery" - I actually like that one more.
But, I highly suggest you listen to the whole episode (hour long).
Now, if you, the new kid on the block, enter this highly competitive market, you need to be extremely clever to be competing while not loosing money and, if so you manage to compete, they would probably copy you before they die themselves.
If however you decide to take a little bit more time upfront and invest more effort to find a place where your service is needed and there is little competition, you'll be making healthy profits. That is why copying does not win in the long term and even the company in question has now had to start to make their own products.
If there's a secret hidden market somewhere well the hard part isn't starting a business there, it's finding it!
Then you find that people go to "bakery street" instead as there's a choice. The 3 stores share the whole market and you get none.
Last time I was in downtown Seattle, Westlake Center (a small shopping mall) had three. Upstairs, downstairs, and a standalone building, all within a couple minutes' walk of each other.
It's probably for the best they've seen the need to close some stores, but I almost wish they weren't, just for the absurdity of it.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/new-starbucks-opens-in-rest...
I always thought it was a clever way to avoid paying for market research by piggybacking on someone else's.
But did Zynga initially improve upon Farm Town or simply attract more users through a multimillion pound ad budget? For the consumer market "copy what the cool kids are doing and market the hell out of it" is arguably an even more successful strategy than "take something proven and make it better"
The entire interface was identical, right down to the little people that depicted your sex, everything was identical, the layout, the images, the user interface, everything.
I will give them a grudging credit for being able to copy everything with more style, but I have to say as a user it was very confusing to see a game, pitched as a NEW game, that was identical in every respect to the competitor.
I have NEVER seen such blatant copying, and it was the same with many other games, they weren't "inspired by", they were image for image, ui for ui replicas.
I did play Farmville for a while, but they just don't know how to make these games compelling, and I lost interest.
I don't think that there is anything wrong with taking an idea and making it your own, but to take someone's work and copy it almost verbatim, that seems pretty low to me.
I've often thought of all of the slow-moving entrenched companies that could just have everything taken out from under them by a good hungry team using modern tools and techniques. As long as you're not actively producing new legacy code, you should be able to catch up in terms of product sophistication pretty quickly.
That's not to say one could build FarmVille in a regular weekend, it would have to be a 3-day weekend.
The author of the article mistakenly assumes that Zynga's value is in Farmville/Fishville/Poker. It's not.
Pincus once said that if he could re-do tribe, he would instead build "a platform for testing ideas about how to make social networks," or something. With Zynga, Pincus has buildt an entire company mechanism for figuring out how to make money from FB games, I assume revolving around everything from what he calls "ghetto testing" to a/b tests et cetera.
Yes, Zynga obviously copied the ideas being a lot of its games. So did 300 other companies. The value in Zynga is that it beat those 300 other companies. This article gives us no way of understanding why it beat all those other companies. My guess it that it's because Zynga's value is in its "platform for figuring out how to get people to pay money for games" rather than in the games themselves.
So really it's not so much about getting people to pay - it's about getting people to play. FarmVille is famous because 84 million people play it.
World of Warcraft still makes more money than FarmVille, but World of Warcraft has nowhere near that userbase.
That's Zynga's value to Zynga. Not Zynga's value to anyone else.
True, we don't know what other people want, but they don't know it either (long-term).
If we always give people what they want (and nothing more), we eventually end up at the big red orgasm button, and humanity dies.
Also, I would totally play the big red orgasm button game and much like someone addicted to a TASP, die from it.
His high minded spiel then seems contrarian to the report here, and I'm tempted to believe the report. Makes me less inclined to see what else he has to say.
If it's true, I'm guessing eventually, he'll lose developer and gamer mindshare in that people won't want to work for Zynga. Then, would it be on its way to an internet treasure?
"The former employee, who requested anonymity in order to speak candidly about his experience at Zynga, said this wasn't just bluster. Indeed, interviews conducted by SF Weekly with several former Zynga workers indicate that the practice of stealing other companies' game ideas — and then using Zynga's market clout to crowd out the games' originators — was business as usual."
No surprises there...
I wonder how long can they run with it though. It's like where you have an ultra strong brand for games and you innovate by pushing various forms of gameplay scenarios (think of mario in various games not related to original genre mechanics). Farmville is just like the opposite, brand is the mechanics and framework.
Seasonal stuff they put in is the only innovation over original concept they snitched from Harvest Moon and alike. So I guess farmvilles ultimate fate likes where genre-locked games go - e.g. fighting games (street fighter, mk...) where original fad fades away and leaves in core player group. If they're lucky - and with so many users, they'd have to screw up pretty badly to lose all of their gaming audience.
FarmVille is a well-oiled machine designed for virality, keeping people playing through social obligation and fear of loss, and monetization. It has its own peculiar kind of beauty to it. You're a 40 year old woman and your aunt, who you always keep meaning to talk with but never find the time to do, needs help with her cow. Not helping her with her cow says you don't love her. That is genius. Evil genius, but genius.
Harvest Moon, on the other hand, is a fully single person game with a story which optimizes for good reviews in magazines, because that drives box sales and that is where they make their money. It can afford to take twenty minutes until you get any control of your character, because you've already bought the game and can be assumed to wait it out. Any designer proposing that at Zynga would probably be shot, thrown out of a window, or shot after they were thrown out of a window, because it would kill the viral coefficient.
I don't think Zynga should be viewed as non innovative evil place as the article suggests though. Farmville is a good game in its genre. Because if it weren't, people would not play it. And I admire their driver for constant updates, which do take a lot of effort to think about and make. Tournaments, hunting for truffles with your pigs, honeybees for your bee hives, seasonal items like wedding gazebos etc...
And it's engaging mechanics works on multiple levels. There's that icebreaker level that facebook inherently drives which you've mentioned with aunt example. There's also a point based competing drive: "come on, that girl can't be a level over mine"...
Then there is show of level (sort of a competing) which I regard as most genius of all. It's geared towards women population. Where they show of new items acquired on their meticulously crafted farm designs which are more of a home+backyard than a farm. This happens in real life too, but this is more streamlined and on display to everyone you know that plays farmville. Genius.
Also, they produce lots of pixel art for their game - which is dear to my heart. So, I respect Zynga regarding farmville, a lot.
Zynga's already done the innovative part in figuring out marketing/distribution. Now they need to reduce other risks. Copying competitors who have good game ideas but weak marketing/distribution is a great idea.
Are they into socializing? Or are they just into a pleasant distraction that fires off addicting dopamine patterns that they can also share with their peers?
Wall street investors will value this company very differently if it appears to be a fad that will have momentary glory (and revenue). That said, wall street tries to value a company's current AND future revenues (with an appropriate discount for risk and earnings out in the future) -- so Pincus is trying to get them to believe it is building the bedrock of a company that will last a hundred years.
Right now Zynga is a revenue rocketship (even if you don't like the product, people, or business) that will make Pincus and all their employees wealthy. Pretty easy to get people to work there with those prospects. The sustainable business will be the work of the next generation of employees after first 1000 have vested and moved on.
I wish them the best, but wouldn't count on them being a great stable business in 5 years. Tastes change and the best employees will have long since have cashed out.
We do see number 2 like Bing, Yahoo etc because they are not startups. Bing is funded by Microsoft and Yahoo was number 1 sometime in the past and has enough money to self-sustain for a while. How long Yahoo will survive?
When it comes to social networking, network effects normally result in one or two highly visible giants and a long tail of smaller, likely specialized networks. These can still be profitable, and of course there's more to the web and startups than stuff that is social in nature.
The difference between those copies and the Zynga business model? The former actually have differences.
I keep encountering folks with this attitude, and sadly it seems to be working for them, very very well. No surprises that this is deliberately disseminated at Zynga
these quotes say it all, what I love from Zynga (put aside the ethical thing) is that they obsessively focus on "action" and "execution", and not "thinking". it matters because action makes the real things HAPPEN, here's why: when someone come and blame them and their whole evil philosophy they can just say that "it just happens. we just happened to build it, users just happened to use it and the company just happened to make revenue. get over it"
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/08/03/down-with-innovation-up...
Well turns out this article wasn't submitted (I hope). http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1676407
All they seem to be doing is simply find a game that has gone viral and copy it and add money so the viral effect can be much faster.
Point to note: When you have something viral garner more investment to get it even bigger, quicker.