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Comment by cblconfederate | Hacker News Reader

> The real innovation of FarmVille was in making games accessible to busy adults, giving them a place to invest and express themselves and be seen by people in their lives as creative

Zynga was ripping off games that were popular in places like china, they had zero innovation, not even in their slimy tactics to recruit users. They used to have those "invite 10 friends to be able to play" that everyone had back then. they abused every possible channel to the maximum degree, that's their only 'innovation'. They were the reason that facebook created rules that ban those shady tactics, even though they had a special agreement with facebook (basically so they can spam more than indies and competitors). And a lot of more shady antics i can't even remember, they were all discussed in facebook's old developer forum which has been shut down long ago.

Zynga was not "the first" in anything

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Remember wandering up to the Zynga booth at LeWeb years ago - perhaps 2010 - and asking them if employees at Zynga ever wondered if what the were doing might be evil or if the games were actually any good. It was unfair as the booth was actually manned by people from Dextrose AG who Zynga had just bought.

To cap it off I made them watch this FarmVille parody which they were awkwardly amused by https://youtu.be/odBDAcOEKuI

In retrospect I was being a righteous prick but I couldn’t stand Zynga - their games or their addiction based business model.

I did something similar to a Google employee once at a conference. Sorry to that person, I was also a righteous prick. Definitely not the right way to go about it.

Don't be too hard on yourself. Given that these companies are structured to keep criticism from reaching the people profiting from the bad decisions, there aren't a lot of good options. Giving an earful to somebody paid to be their buffer isn't great, but neither is just accepting the awfulness.

Not sure why the parent comment to this is downvoted - orgs use layers to shield management the world over.

I think making people uncomfortable can be good for them, I am a xoogler and I share my shame with them.

I see the heavy influence from Powerthirst in that video.

I also did something kinda similar at a conference years ago. The Microsoft stand were proudly demoing a new security feature of the latest Windows (Vista?). Their demo basically boiled down to: no one reads the security warning dialog boxes when opening an application, so we added another dialog box.

I pointed out the obvious flaw in this (won’t they just not read the second dialog either?). They looked a little peeved and said they’d take my comment back to Redmond.

I still feel a bit bad about that, they we ok people and it wasn’t their fault.

lol that’s actually a great point though, valid criticism should be celebrated.

I actually had coffee with one guy who started and was acquired along with Farmville by Zynga. Can't remember his name, but I do remember I considered how useful a time machine would have been to go back to stop them from stealing so much of so many people's lives.

Isn't Farmville a rip off of Harvest Moon? I assume any Chinese mobile game they ripped off was itself a rip off from Natsume's Super Nintendo game.

Farmville and Harvest Moon share a theme and maybe even an aesthetic but are in different genres. Harvest Moon is a single player sim game. Farmville is an async multiplayer invest/express. Zynga popularized the genre.

The closest "rip off" to Harvest Moon would be Stardew Valley, but no one ever refers to it that way because rip off is not a useful term for conveying taxonomy. Rip off is only useful for displaying derision towards genres the writer doesn't enjoy.

I remember Farmville best as the answer to the quiz question, close to the height of its popularity:

"What's the second most popular farming simulator game on Facebook?"

These articles exist to rewrite history for the winners. Total bs.

It's all about monitization bro.

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